Fire Emblem Awakening saved Nintendo’s strategy game series 14 years ago, but it also laid a curse on it. Since then, no Fire Emblem has managed to pull off a good story and good combat. Awakening had bland maps and a good story. One branch of 2015’s Fates had excellent maps, but they all had terrible stories (and one lets you marry your sister, but let’s not talk about that). The pattern repeated with 2019’s Three Houses and 2023’s Engage. But after playing 10 hours of Fire Emblem: Fortune’s Weave, it looks like Intelligent Systems might’ve figured out how to break the curse and make a Fire Emblem with all the good parts and none of the old problems.
Ten hours means I’ve cleared the prologue and five chapters in one of the four story paths, which is approximately one round of the Heroic Games out of I-still-don’t-know-how-many. It’s a massive game, or it gives every appearance of being one at this point, but thankfully it’s not a slow one. Intelligent Systems frontloaded Fortune’s Weave with new changes to the combat system and some story developments that, even with the recent Nintendo Direct’s protagonist reveal, have been very well-guarded. You learn the biggest changes in the prologue and Fortune’s Weave expects you to put them into practice immediately, rather than forcing you through dozens of tutorial-style missions designed to make sure you know how a sword works and how to move characters. Fortune’s Weave isn’t dissing newcomers, though. It still has difficulty options and a rewind system, and casual mode keeps characters from dying permanently. Intelligent Systems was, it seems, just confident enough to get to the point quickly and trust its audience will keep up.
The Heroic Games take center stage after the prologue. The gist of it is that the stand-in emperor of Dagda, Solel, is hosting these games in Dagsion, the nation’s capital, long before Three Houses takes place and with a special prize on offer. Whoever wins the games gets their dearest wish granted, a feat made possible by the fact that Solel is a god. All the other deities of Dagda’s pantheon (or most of them, anyway) walk among the people in the city, too. In the nice parts of the city, to be clear. They don’t slum it with the peasants. Dietrich, Leda, Kai, and Theodora, the four heroes of Fortune’s Weave, end up in Dagsion and need to take part in the games for their own reasons.
There’s a lot going on in Dagda, and I feel like I only have the tiniest grasp of it. That’s partly because I’ve stuck with one character so far, Dietrich. He’s a murder machine from Fodlan, the setting of Three Houses, and his story’s early chapters primarily concern themselves with the obscure religious pasts of Fodland and Dagda. But I also just have very little idea where any of this is going. Fortune’s Weave does much with its early hours, teasing revelations, hinting at narrative connections, and always just giving you an enticing taste of a bigger story. It leaves the slow build-up of Three Houses behind and isn’t afraid to just go completely off the rails sometimes, in a good way. My impression so far is that Intelligent Systems is doing what it thinks is cool, not what’s trendy or what it hopes you think is cool.
Even without a clear idea of the story’s direction, Fortune’s Weave‘s cast of bizarre characters already has me fully invested. Intelligent Systems always happily rolls out the fully-laden trope trolley for Fire Emblem, and Fortune’s Weave is no different. There’s a spoony bard and no shortage of devoted retainers; a villain with pointy teeth; a homicidal maniac who talks to stuffed animals; drunk monks and plucky, bright-eyed kids — all the usual stuff. But, so far, Fortune’s Weave sees Intelligent Systems’ writing team and Nintendo’s localization staff at their best. Extreme quirks and unexpected relationships mingle with familiar characterization patterns to create deeper, more believable — or, if nothing else, more entertaining — personalities. What’s more, this character-driven storytelling is nested in a much bigger, more ambitious plot in a way Intelligent Systems hasn’t always managed to pull off.
The only irritation here is an odd insistence of ensuring you know the men of Fortune’s Weave like women. When you view the character info panel for recruitable characters, most of the men have “women/womanizing/beautiful women/flirting with women” or some variation thereof on the list of things they like. Fire Emblem has always been somewhat regressive when it comes to acknowledging queer people, but this is just silly. It’s like walking into a room full of men, and 60% of them immediately start saying “no homo” the second they look at you. Take a deep breath, guys. It’ll all be okay.
Once your chosen party arrives in Dagsion, Fortune’s Weave settles into a routine. You have dozens of turns of free time between main story missions, and you can spend it in all the ways you could in Three Houses — training, bonding, acts of service, and so on — but you also have a world map that spans the entirety of Dagda to explore. Moving around is a tiny bit like a tabletop game. You can move a set number of spaces per turn, and some locations have special events to check out. Others are standard RPG fare — battles, dungeons, villages with helpful chatterboxes or a store stocked with rare goods. How you spend your time is up to you, but if you end the chapter with regrets, you can always restart from the beginning of that chapter and do better next time. It seems like far too much freedom initially, but Fortune’s Weave gently nudges you into a loose rhythm of completing once-a-week tasks like training, going out to explore or do side quests, then returning when weekly tasks reset. It’s flexible enough that you feel like your choices matter in these open-ended segments, but not so much that choice paralysis sets in.
If you played 2017’s Fire Emblem Echoes: Shadows of Valentia, you’ll know how Fortune’s Weave dungeons work. They’re essentially the same — large, open areas filled with loot and enemies — but with one very big difference. Fortune’s Weave has skirmish battles that more closely resemble traditional turn-based combat. It’s a handy way to throw some tense clashes into story scenarios that aren’t conducive to tactical battles, and it’s what you get in every dungeon as well. The party shares HP and magic uses in these skirmishes, along with “link points” for special combo attacks or healing. You have a rotation of enemy targets and can’t select which foe to attack, so if you’re up against a bunch of heavily armored enemies and only brought fistfighters to the dungeon, you’re not gonna have a good time.
I’ve yet to encounter a dungeon that seemed properly challenging even on hard mode, though a few came close. I can see how lengthier dungeons or skirmishes with different enemy types could eventually pose a bigger threat, but for now, when they get repetitive, I just press the skip button and complete them automatically. Fortune’s Weave really is dedicated to getting rid of all its predecessors’ tedium. HP and magic only replenish at rest points in a dungeon or on the world map, so you have limits to what you can achieve without regrouping and making a new plan. It’s a welcome boundary to what seems like an overwhelming amount of free time.
In traditional tactical combat, Intelligent Systems chucked Fire Emblem’s weapon triangle out the window again and instituted a new set of rules that has greater strategic potential.
- Axes always do more damage and have lower accuracy (basically taking Fighter class stats and applying them to the whole weapon range)
- Swords do more damage during follow-up attacks
- Lances are… just lances, but they always do more damage to cavalry units. No need to use a Horsekiller anymore
- Fists are the same as in Three Houses — lower damage, higher attack speed for more hits
- Guns are checks notes also fists
That last point is meme fodder, but it also gives certain unit types more combat options regardless of whether they’re skilled with magic. More options seems like the driving philosophy behind Fortune’s Weave‘s combat. Classes and weapons have more special skills than in previous installments, mastery of which potentially leads to some powerful combinations. Most classes can use more weapon types, too. The hunter, for example, wields bows and swords, making it more versatile than your standard archer, while the gladiator has swords, fists, and axes. These are all starting classes, not advanced ones, and while there seems like potential for redundancy via overlap — why choose a mid-tier rogue when they do the same as a low-tier hunter? — I suspect the more mastery skills I unlock, the more worthwhile each class will seem.
There’s plenty of room to test these skills, and quickly. Fortune’s Weave combines both types of map design from past Fire Emblem games, the complex kind with challenging objectives and the straightforward “just kill everything” ones. The latter are typically what you get on the world map, but they’re less boring than they sound. These function well as training grounds for testing new classes or quick ways to bump up character experience and support levels, and “quick” is the key here. Everything moves at double speed compared to Three Houses — combat animations are faster, the transitions to combat and back to the map are so much quicker, and units move fast across the map. These standard battles are necessary, but repetitive, so Intelligent Systems gives you the tools to get what you want from them as efficiently as possible.
Most of the story-critical maps so far remind me of old Fire Emblem with their complexity and varied objectives, and the first Heroic Games qualifier was pure spectacle. Chariots filled the arena and alternated between charging at my squads and attacking from afar, and I could either manipulate the arena’s structure to block their paths — which also created bottlenecks that I, or my opponent, could take advantage of — or deal with the threat and keep as much space to maneuver as possible. The next map, outside of Dagsion, had me moving across a large space and achieving an objective within a time limit, luring invincible enemies away from vulnerable allies, before it entered a second phase where I had to take down three of those formerly invincible foes. Unlucky chance meant that, by that point, they’d converged in the middle of the map and had to be dealt with as a group. In Dietrich’s path at least, Fortune’s Weave expects you to make use of every tool available to you, or else. It’s the kind of high-risk, high-reward tactics Fire Emblem has shied away from since 2007’s Radiant Dawn, and it’s great to see it return here.
Trite as it may seem, I really have just barely scratched Fortune’s Weave‘s surface. There’s so much left to do, and three other stories to unfold. But after such a promising start, I’m eager to see where all this leads to.
Fire Emblem: Fortune’s Weave launches for Nintendo Switch 2 on Sep. 17.
