OK, so I’ve never been much of a Fire Emblem guy. Nintendo’s long-running fantasy strategy game series first came out around the same time as Advance Wars (2003). On the old Game Boy Advance, I liked its similar turn-based style but fuzzed out on the fantasy drama. But Fortune’s Weave, the newest in a long series of Fire Emblem games coming out this week as a Switch 2 exclusive, has a story I actually got into. Four, actually.
I’ve come in and out of the series over time, peeking in on the last few games that arrived on the Switch. Fire Emblem: Three Houses impressed me with its extended story flow, and it was critically acclaimed, but it was too academy-focused for me. Fire Emblem Engage, a more recent one, was more about the battles. But I lost interest in that, too.
Fortune’s Weave goes back to epic story, but its net feels like it’s been cast far, far wider than Three Houses. Right from the start, it’s surprising, strange, dark and futuristic. (People have laser weapons and ancient machines?) And it gets more tangled from there.
There are four characters whose fortunes you follow, heading back in time in a region of the Fire Emblem world called Dagda and its Rome-like capital city, Dagsion. You start as an odd glowing ambassador named Eshmel, who then… travels back and in time and turns into a bird? Just go with it. And then in Dagsion, over four tales that overlap in the same storyline, you look at four interestingly flawed characters as they advance to dreams of success and sometimes revenge.
It’s the backstories of all four characters that I appreciated the most: a reckless boy, a moody warrior, a bold queen, a vengeful dancer. The game itself becomes centered on waves of gladiatorial battles with various rogue candidates you can recruit to your side, but there’s in-between stuff, too. There are side quests across the city and in maps around the region, battles and items to find, reputations to build.
I admit, after about 20 hours, I started to feel my interest waning. Fortune’s Weave is a massive fantasy novel of a strategy game, with some story cutscenes going on for minutes on end. I have the rest of my life to live! I got distracted. I want to go back, but slowly.
As another demonstration of the Switch 2’s increasingly impressive library of exclusives, this game does its job. And yet it never became a game I fell deeply in love with. That’s me, someone who, again, never was a massive Fire Emblem fan. But if I were to pick a modern Fire Emblem, it would be this one without any doubt. And it’s a game you can get into without knowing the rest of the series, because its mythology and history are unique.
Do I want to know what happens to everyone over the chapters to come, when they inevitably face a zombie-like horde of evil that we see destroying the world at the start of the game? Yes. Would I like to skip some chapters? Also yes. Fortune’s Weave lets you skip past the weeks between arena battles, if you like, but I felt guilty. Where’s the fun in that?
For pure gameplay time for the dollar, I don’t think Fortune’s Weave can be beat. But it’s repetitive, often reiterating story beats that all four tales share. Thankfully, you can skip between all four parallel stories at any time, making it a bit like reading four intertwined books at once.
Just remember to carve out a lot of time for this game, be ready for lots of characters and be patient with some repetition. But if ever there was a Fire Emblem I’d play again, this is it.
