The clock ticked past 2 a.m., marking yet another evening in August that I spent playing Fire Emblem: Fortune’s Weave for several consecutive hours far too late into the night. I couldn’t help myself. This time, I was guiding a small and woefully underprepared army across a fortified bridge, caught between rampaging elephants behind me and a bastion of horrors ahead. The horrors had to wait. A fourth wave of flying reinforcements caught me by surprise, and I was done for the night.
Not for the first time, I wondered why I decided to play on hard mode with a deadline looming. Not for the last time, my admiration for Fortune’s Weave rose even further.
Fire Emblem: Fortune’s Weave is dazzling as much for the scope of its ambition as for how adroitly developer Intelligent Systems executes that vision. It’s a gigantic turn-based tactics game that, despite a few missteps, carries itself with grace and purpose. And it’s a confident declaration for a studio, and a genre, that for decades have struggled to find where they fit — or if they even have a place — in modern entertainment. In short, it’s one of Nintendo’s greats.
Bigger and better
Fortune’s Weave is a time travel story that takes place centuries before 2019’s Fire Emblem: Three Houses in the Dagdan Empire, south of Fodlan. That’s not a spoiler, as geography and time immediately play a role in the prologue. After a scene that could’ve come from Attack on Titan, and a few more that have more of Xenoblade’s soul than Fire Emblem’s, your custom character finds themself in the middle of a dead city with a mage, a gun-toting old lady, and the goddess Fortuna. This is Fortuna’s story (hence the name), though the next 30 hours or so do their best to convince you otherwise.
The lord of the underworld has returned to the overworld, and the continent of Dagda lies in ruins. Your current forces are far too limited to attack him directly — you can try if you want, though, skipping the first two acts and heading straight for the final campaign. Or you can alter past events and call the nation’s best warriors to your side.
Back in time you go to guide your chosen Flame Lord on a path less destructive. Leda wants vengeance for her family. Theodora is determined to get her nation the recognition it deserves after centuries of hardship and discrimination. Dietrich wants to lose himself in carnage. Cai just hopes his family can spend time together. All of them descend on Dagsion, the capital city, for the Heroic Games and a chance to get their dearest wish granted if they win.
Functionally, this part of Fortune’s Weave is an improved Three Houses. You spend copious amounts of free time between battles finding allies, completing quests, doing odd jobs around the city, and improving combat skills. “Improved” is the key word here. Even when you have more than 100 turns to spend before the next fight, Fortune’s Weave never wastes your time or pads it out for the sake of seeming expansive. A slog, this is not, even when you leave the city and explore the vastness of the continent or when you are playing another character’s Act 1. Intelligent Systems ensured that everything is convenient and streamlined, even giving you useful rewards for doing “auto-activities” — passing time quickly if there’s nothing else you want to do.
The way Fortune’s Weave handles the almost overwhelming scope of its four opening acts is a noteworthy and refreshing contrast to the “bigger is better” approach other modern games so often adopt. The ever-increasing list of things to do exists to give you options, not to take your time. Whatever action you choose has noticeable influences over your preparedness for the next fight and, though you don’t see it immediately, your chances of success after the Heroic Games end. A trip to a dungeon gives you fast and easy access to weapon upgrade materials, while also letting you train weaker units in skirmish battles — traditional command-based fights like you’d find in Dragon Quest — without exposing them to as much danger as normal tactical battles do. If your team’s average level is high enough, you can win the fight with a single button press, get the experience, and move on.
Maybe you go to the theatre and baths every week to boost support levels. Fortune’s Weave gives every unit support buffs, even if they don’t have special conversations with each other, so it’s worth doing. Or you strike out to the edge of the map for a spending spree at a gift emporium, showering potential recruits with presents upon your return. Or you ignore all that and spend 10 in-game days on the map’s gathering spots as you horde fish and vegetables. A waste of time? No, not when you can offload your finds for rare goods from a traveling merchant. If you think you’ve made a mistake and want to spend your time differently, you can restart the chapter, too, and even replay it after completing the full arc.
Fortune’s Weave won’t turn heads with some of its sparse towns and cities, and a handful of side activities only get short, re-used animations. But it makes good use of the Switch 2’s improved hardware where it counts. Battle animations, in-game cinematics, portrait movements, and character models are vastly improved from Three Houses and Engage, and load times are almost nonexistent. You can go from booting the game to the menu in under 10 seconds, and it only takes a few more to load into the game from the main menu. Dagsion is filled with more people than Three Houses‘ Garreg Mach Monastery could ever hold, and the wait to travel from one part of the city to another is under five seconds, compared with the half minute it took to reach the other side of the monastery.
The weft and warp
Narratively, Fortune’s Weave‘s first acts are a kaleidoscope. At the center is the shape from which everything else, every Flame Lord’s story and the tragic history of Dagda, emanates: parents. Mothers, in particular. Fortune’s Weave is very concerned with mothers of all kinds — good, bad, indifferent, absent, toxic, spiritual — and the legacies they leave us or condemn us to endure. Turn the wheel, and the core undulates outward and births new shapes. Abandonment. Sibling strife. Infidelity. Misplaced trust, false hopes, and vengeance. It’s the stuff of deep personal drama, and when some of the people involved are also deified rulers of an empire, it mutates into institutionalized racism, genocide, nationalism, and tyranny.
How defined these shapes are depends on your perspective. That’s true for most narrative interpretations, but Fire Emblem has a history of making bulldozers look subtle. The themes of Fortune’s Weave are more elegantly presented with no efforts made at hammering the point home until you can’t help but recognize it. If you get it, you get it. If not, it’s just part of a well-written fantasy epic. The same is true for the large cast of exceptionally well-written characters. It’s full of strong personalities, but they’re more grounded and well-developed than we’ve seen in the last 15 years of Fire Emblem.
How much you notice Fortune’s Weave‘s themes and even the broader plot also depends on where you’re looking. Fortune’s Weave splits its initial story into four highly distinct paths — and by distinct I mean there’s zero overlap. You can play two paths and still miss half the story. Three of them don’t even include the main antagonists. They’re shaped by the Flame Lord you chose, and what you see and learn is what’s relevant to their struggles. All the paths are complete and function just fine on their own. But the wider situation only becomes clear when you start adding more perspectives to it. Here, too, Fortune’s Weave impresses with how sophisticated its plot structure is. It forgoes easy mystery boxes and melodramatic reveals. Some of its biggest twists happen in quiet conversations that forced me to stop for a minute and think about the ramifications of what I just learned.
One of the boldest things Fortune’s Weave does is withholding information. Lore is an expectation in story-driven games now, and acquiring it is just another task to check off a list, regardless of what it adds to the story or your experience of it. However, even if you play all four routes, you still won’t get the full narrative. The characters of Fortune’s Weave exist for more than exposition purposes, and their stories aren’t yours to know. (Unless they end up as DLC later, though I hope that doesn’t happen.) The current setup gives Fortune’s Weave a sense of vastness and a capability to surprise that’s rare in modern video games.
When you start the second act, Fortune’s Weave forcefully reminds you that this is not the story of your favorite character, no matter how invested you were in them; this is the tale of Fortuna’s intervention in the tragic, violent history of Dagda. The focus shifts from character-driven to events-driven storytelling. The act unfolds the same way regardless of which Flame Lord you chose, with only a unique scene at the start and end plus a few throwaway lines to distinguish one character’s path from another’s. It’s a jarring adjustment. I grew to admire the commitment to telling a specific, unexpected story in this segment — which is on par with that of classic Fire Emblem entries — but it’s still much rougher than any other part of the game. What it lacks in narrative smoothness, it more than makes up for by showcasing just how strong Fortune’s Weave‘s combat is.
Combat with exceptional depth
Intelligent Systems introduced class skills in 2005’s Path of Radiance and has iterated on them in each successive game. They remained largely impersonal — every cavalier would have the same skill regardless of the character’s personality, for example — until 2023’s Engage. Engage‘s skills were unique to each character, though most of those skills were variations of “If X condition, then unit gets Y stat increase +2.” Fortune’s Weave makes character skills as much a part of their identity as their backgrounds and relationships, and they improve over time.
Noctula the professional mercenary has a skill that grants her higher dodge chances after every combat instance, encouraging risk-taking. Dietrich’s homicidal tendencies grant him increased critical hit chances after every instance where he doesn’t land a critical hit. Jasmine, the armored knight, deals extra damage when she delivers counter attacks, while Esmeralda’s skills push her toward ranged attacks with powerful, heavy weapons. That’s before you even start factoring class specializations and combat arts in, not to mention the opportunities a revamped weapon system affords. The triangle — swords beat axes which beat lances which beat swords — is dead again, but each weapon has specific strengths that make them suited to certain scenarios, like swords dealing higher damage with follow-up attacks.
The sheer volume of build opportunities is as satisfying as it is nearly overwhelming. The Rogue class’ mastery skill grants increased evasion after you defeat an enemy. I combined that with Dietrich’s naturally high dexterity and speed with the Shido (swordmaster) and created an almost unhittable murder machine. I could’ve made him a melee fighter with skills that reduced weapon durability costs from using combat arts and increased combat art damage if I wanted, or any other number of viable options. Character skills make for extensive variation even in the same class, though. At one point, I had three wing soldiers all with distinct roles in combat — one for heavy ranged attacks, one for powerful single-hit spear strikes, and a fragile-but-speedy flier whose specialties always meant she struck twice.
Act 2’s maps recall the likes of 1996’s Fire Emblem: Genealogy of the Holy War but better, cramming large-scale battles into smaller spaces and forcing you to use everything at your disposal as effectively as you can. I’ve rarely played Fire Emblem defensively, and when I did, it was a standard strategy: lure enemies with high-defense characters, strike at range to soften them, close in with heavy hitters. Map layouts, reinforcement positions, and enemy combinations make that impossible. Lured enemies bring their allies, and they’re a mixed lot that you can’t just crush with a single unit type.
There’s an almost arcade-like element to this segment. You can return to anyone’s first act and replay chapters to train or build differently or even to recruit new characters, and that overwrites the starting stats for Act 2. Despite the act’s maps and story remaining the same each time, the sheer number of ways to manage your army before tackling it makes every run distinct. You can skip this arc and have that lord’s army automatically leveled up for the third act. I don’t think I ever will, though.
The third act is difficult to discuss in any way without spoilers. It combines the freer structure of the first acts with the intense battles of the second act and adds even more challenges. Map objectives are more varied, and you split your time between rebuilding a broken world and managing a (presumably, depending on your choices) massive army. It’s still Fortuna’s tale, but it’s also quite a lot more: the time for your custom character to take the stage, for the relationships your characters fostered years in the past to progress, and for the truth about Dagda’s past to finally get dragged out of the shadows of government-sanctioned history and face a reckoning centuries in the making.
Fortune’s Weave demands much — both in terms of time and of mental investment — but gives just as much in return. It’s a monumental achievement for Nintendo and Intelligent Systems. I’ve spent more than 120 hours playing this game, including more late nights than I should admit to, just completely absorbed in it. Yet I still haven’t completed every path or done all there is. It’s a game worth savoring and taking your time with, and even with the crammed release calendar over the next few months, I can see myself coming back to Fortune’s Weave again and again for another turn of fate’s wheel.
