Fortune’s Weave Returns to the Series’ Best-Ever Era

Fire Emblem: Fortune’s Weave might have all the trappings of a modern Fire Emblem, with its Engage-like personal skills and the social elements of Three Houses. But behind those Kurahana-illustrated eyes is the soul of a classic Fire Emblem game. The latest installment of the series shows Intelligent Systems at its most confident, having finally found a way to harmonize its classic systems with modern expectations.

You could’ve told me Fortune’s Weave was Intelligent Systems’ Fire Emblem anniversary project, and I’d believe it. It’s crammed with little homages pulled from throughout the series, but tweaked to function more like an evolution, proof of how far the series has come in 30 years. The biggest one is how characters relate to each other. Gone are the days where every character has to have a dozen support conversation partners and romance interests. Not that it was always bad. Fates and Three Houses had quite a few excellent pairings. A lot of them felt forced, though, like Intelligent Systems was overcompensating for how dull and limited Radiant Dawn‘s supports were back in 2006.

Fortune’s Weave calls to mind the Game Boy Advance era of Fire Emblem. Every character has a handful of support conversations with people who truly matter to them — colleagues, family members, rivals, occasionally a random clash of two big personalities. Romance is a thing, but it, and the making of time-traveling baby warriors, aren’t the only thing. It even does my favorite thing from that early ‘00s period of Fire Emblem, where a handful of random, mysterious outlier characters sport excellent stats and great designs that make you want to know more about them (like Legault or Farina), but have maybe five conversation partners if you’re lucky. Relationships feel more intimate and meaningful this way, not like lore dumps. You don’t have to tell me everything about every character’s life! Just the bits that mean something to their story, please. And the payoff is worth it. Even Nuzzuo, who has one support chat with one person, benefits from the depth it brings to him, which you wouldn’t otherwise get from the brief moment he appears in Cai’s path.

The underworld plot deserves a special shout-out, too. Undead monsters and evil underworld lords are hardly new to Fire Emblem, but I was always disappointed how impersonal they often felt. 2004’s Sacred Stones was the only game that wove personality in with the netherworld stuff. Fortune’s Weave does it too, turning it into a twisted family drama that traces itself all the way back to Sothis’ arrival centuries before. It elevates the plot so much more. And giving undead enemies special powers adds a sense of challenge you were supposed to feel going up against skeleton armies in Sacred Stones, but only really got when the giant zombie dragons showed up.

Then there’s fog of war (limited vision). Three Houses and Engage had it, to an extent, but the maps that featured it were a far cry from the memorable likes of Blazing Blade‘s “Battle before Dawn” or some of Radiant Dawn‘s more challenging maps. The tension just wasn’t there. The fog maps in Fortune’s Weave carry a sense of danger, even the smaller skirmish-type maps. Enemies behave in such a brutal fashion, seeking out targets they’re effective against and surrounding them, that not knowing where they are or what they’re packing feels like a serious threat.

There’s a blessing to mitigate restricted vision, if you’re finding it makes things too hard, but more importantly, there’s a small network of other interactions that makes these low-vis maps even more interesting than the earlier ones that inspired them. Discovering an enemy makes them confused for a turn, which means they can’t counterattack. There’s also a set of accessories that grants you extra buffs when you attack confused enemies, so you can invoke the blessing, expand your vision, confuse a whole mob of enemies, then sweep in and demolish them.

In the same vein, doing away with the weapon triangle and durability issues may look like concessions to modernity, but I see it more as a long-overdue improvement. Building functions into weapons instead of classes — like axes always hitting hard at the cost of accuracy or swords being stronger with follow-ups — leaves more room for strategic flexibility. The result is the same, essentially. You’re thinking about which character’s skills work best with your chosen weapons and who needs to be there to support them. But you have so many more options for what that looks like instead of using the same swordmasters, knights, and paladins the same way every time. After years of experiments like weapon wear and adding debuffs to strong weapons in Fates, it plays like Intelligent Systems finally figured out how to make its classic systems work in a modern setting.