Fire Emblem: Fortune's Weave Review

I come to Fire Emblem for the Tactics. In Fortune’s Weave -- the new entry in the series for Nintendo Switch 2 -- I know exactly when the tactics hooked me. My forces were outnumbered, mostly overpowered, and under constant assault in a dense forest battlefield. I was able to survive by hiding my weaker forces in the woods and sending my more powerful units up through a hidden path to get behind the enemies. As those units inched closer to the opposing general, the enemy continually spawned war elephants. I was only able to avoid losing units by putting Leda, one of the four main characters of Fortune’s Weave, out in front to take on the elephants by herself. As she heroically took them down one after the other with her arrows, my crew of sneaky ninjas pulled up on the boss and put him down for the win. 

This was 40 hours into my time with Fortune’s Weave.

Weave’s greatest strength is also one of its weaknesses: It is so massive that you can often feel far away from the stuff you like the most. What’s most impressive about the game, however, is how much of it actually does work. It has an impressive flow. But it’s also overwhelming because it almost never stops giving you new verbs and ways of interacting with the world. 

Fortune’s Weave opens with you building a character who you will mostly not see until many hours later. You then quickly transition into a “tournament arc.” Here you select one of the four main characters and control them throughout their journey to the championship. 

This is when the game is at its most overwhelming. Fortune’s Weave doesn’t go but a few minutes without introducing a new idea. And that’s because you’re not simply going from point to point on a map to load up the next battle. Instead, you have a calendar system that counts down days between your tournament fights. “Days” work like a currency of sorts. When you leave Dagsion (the main city that acts as the equivalent of the monastery from Fire Emblem: Three Houses), you enter a world map and “spend” those days moving from node to node. 

Between Dagsion and the world map you have so much to do at any one point. Let me take a deep breath an describe just some of what is on offer:

As Leda, you can take jobs to perform as a dancer in the tavern. There you can also get jobs to do local performances around the world map. Performing at the tavern earns you news Blaze Arts, which are special combat abilities. Performing at those local shows, however, will often earn you special info about “secret spots” around the world map. Those spots, like many of the map’s nodes, will feature resources like minerals or vegetables. You can use those to upgrade your weapons, complete side quests from people in Dagsion, or as gifts to win over your other units or to recruit new ones. Oh, and as you are exploring the map looking for local performance spots or vegetable patches, you’ll encounter enemies and caves. Enemies take the form of traditional Fire Emblem turn-based tactical battles. Caves and dungeons, however, have you exploring on foot and taking on enemies in combat that looks like something more out of a standard JRPG. 

If I sound breathless as I explain this, well that’s because that is the energy of the first 10 hours of Fire Emblem: Fortune’s Weave.

But it’s not like it isn’t fun.

In fact, I eventually started getting into its flow. Coming out of a battle, I would get excited to see how much I could optimize everything. I’d run around Dagsion collecting quests, and then head out into the world to complete everything in the time allotted. And that time varies. Between some battles, you’ll get 30-to-50 days while others will give you 130-to-150 days. That sounds like a small thing, but it introduces a player-guided sense of pacing. For example, maybe I discovered a node on the map when I had little time left to spend. Well, that creates a fun, optional exploration goal the next time I end up with extra days to use.

Now, you might notice that I’ve not talked about a lot of the combat in the early part of the game, and that’s something of a tricky subject. On normal difficulty, the game is simply no challenge at all. This is frustrating because it means you have no reason to interact with a lot of the systems, like the aforementioned Blaze Arts. To be clear, I did use them – but I wasn’t strategic in my deployment. The battles – whether they were the big  tournament fights or the generic world map encounters – never put any of my characters under any threat. 

Thankfully, that does change in the second and third parts of the game. But one playthrough of a hero’s tournament arc can take up to 24 hours. What that means is you can go 40ish hours, like I did, without really breaking a sweat in the combat because you played through multiple character campaigns. And the game gives you a lot of reasons to do exactly that. The “weave” in Fortune’s Weave is seeing how these characters intersect with one another on their journeys. Also, you’ll get to a point where the game expects you to have multiple heroes unlocked to take on a tougher foe. 

You can change difficulty, but this requires you to leave your current playthrough to start a new run where you go through the prologue again. Once you do that, your new character can join up with your previously completed character arcs. I do not consider this a ding against the game, but I do wish “normal” was a touch more difficult or it was easier to adjust the difficulty.

Even on normal, though, the second and third parts of the game will put you in situations where you need to use most of your characters’ abilities. That is when the game is at its best. 

As always with Fire Emblem, one of the keys to the difficulty is a desire not to lose any characters. This turns it into something of a puzzle game. How can you manipulate everything so that you are outputting as much damage as possible while sheltering your vulnerable units? In Fortune’s Weave, that still means positioning your troops correctly and taking advantage of environmental defense bonuses. But it also means using those Blaze Arts, which are super skills that only a handful of characters can use. 

Because Leda is a dancer, most of her Blaze Arts come in the form of buffs. For example, the undead is a popular enemy type in Fortune’s Weave, and they are extremely strong and resilient. Leda has a Blaze Art that can increase effectiveness of all attacks against the undead for all companions within a certain area. That is good! But using Blaze Arts damages your HP. That is bad!

That risk reward gives you more options for dealing with tough enemies while also forcing you to manage your crew. That risk-reward carries over to using Blaze Arts multiple times per map. As you activate this ultimate ability repeatedly, your character will build up their Blaze Gauge. Once you get that gauge to half full, you enter Overblaze, which increases all that character's stats and makes Blaze Arts more powerful. If you fill the gauge, though, the unit Bursts and Overblaze ends. As you go along, you’ll find ways to manage Blaze to maintain it for longer periods of time. 

The game is filled with these kinds of engaging mechanical quirks, and it turns the battles in the latter half of the game into fun resource-management challenges. 

Now, if only the writing also drastically improved in the second half of the game – or at any point.

If Fortune’s Weave has a major failing, it’s definitely the writing. Developer Intelligent Systems has a dial labeled “more plot” and it just keeps looking back over its shoulder looking for approval as it turns that dial up at every possible opportunity. The problem is that none of it means anything or says anything. Things just happen, and I never found a reason to care. 

The source of this issue is the number of characters for sure. But because Intelligent Systems wanted to give each of those characters (whether they are playable or not) their moment, you end up with the game stopping for minutes at a time so you can hear yet another sob story. Or so that a character can do some other trope you’ve seen 50 million times in cartoons.

Even when the plot hones in on its central threat, it frequently devolves into a proper-noun soup. Did you know that flamma is the melted essence of souls? Well, you’re about to find that out, and I will be shocked if you care. 

This hollow writing is especially disappointing for Fortune’s Weave because the point is to see how the stories “weave” together. That trick -- where you see the same event through multiple perspectives -- is neat up to a point, but it’s not because of its compelling tale. 

That said, I think the characters are nice to look at. A lot of effort went into making some cool and attractive designs that are going to make for amazing cosplay. The look is so appealing that I often didn’t mind sitting through drawn-out, mind-numbing conversations. But Fortune’s Weave has so much meaningless plot that it can’t help but outweigh the goodwill that its art creates. 

Fire Emblem: Fortune’s Weave is a gigantic game, and its vastness only steals a little bit of the spotlight from the tactics that I come to these games for. Thankfully, it finds its footing on that front and delivers some unforgettable battles. An excellent soundtrack, beautiful visuals, and a surprisingly strong gameplay loop that connects one fight to the next cements this as one of the best on Switch 2. All of that is weighed down slightly by a vacuous plot that you will struggle to care about.  

If you can ignore the writing, though, you’re in for dozens of hours of gaming in an entry that lives up to the Fire Emblem legacy.