Nintendo’s next Fire Emblem has a bold new structure

Nintendo’s first Fire Emblem game for the Switch 2 is structured in an ambitious way. Unlike the well-loved Three Houses, a strategy game that tasked you with pledging allegiance to a specific faction and seeing their story all the way to the end, the new Fortune’s Weave lets you swap between four heroes and their compatriots so you can tackle multiple storylines at once. With Three Houses, I only ever played one path and never went back to experience the others. I hoped that the new game’s structure would be a way to see everyone’s stories in one playthrough.

After playing 26 hours of Fortune’s Weave, which launches on September 17th, I’ve really started to bond with each of the four heroes. But while their stories are different, I’ve been disappointed to find that the basic structure of each path is so far essentially the same — even down to repeated quests, battles, and cutscenes. This has been especially disheartening because the strategy and RPG elements the series is known for have so far been excellent.

Fortune’s Weave takes a bit to get going. Initially, you control a fifth protagonist in a world ruined by a revived demon lord, and you play through some initial battles to teach you mechanics and set up the story. The other four main characters, who each wield powerful weapons, are absent. Your mission? Time travel back to the Heroic Games, an event a few years prior that the four heroes participated in, and change the past so that they can come to your aid.

Cai, a plucky teen who feels like the most traditional hero, fights in the games to save his imprisoned father, though he also gets a mysterious jewel implanted in his hand. Dietrich wields a powerful sword and thirsts for combat. Theodora is strengthened by a magical arm and doesn’t take shit from anyone. Leda, a musician with a mystical vihuela, is hell-bent on revenge in a way that reminds me of Ghost of Yōtei’s Atsu. All of those artifacts give the characters superpowers on the battlefield, like Cai’s burst of flame that can hit multiple enemies at a distance. But the weapons also have a dark side that makes each a ticking time bomb for the people who wield them.

So far, I’ve played up to chapter 5 for each character’s story. By the time I played my third and fourth characters and I started to see the underlying, repetitive structure, it sometimes felt like a slog as I realized I was seeing many of the same quests, dungeons, and even cutscenes. There’s a narrative reason for this structure: If you haven’t played anything else from any other character, there’s always the possibility that you’re encountering something for the first time and that you may not play any more of it beyond the path you choose. I’ve also already encountered some intersecting story threads that I am curious to see resolve. But overall, the repetition really bogs things down.

Still, I’m actually finding myself willing to suffer through it because I’m completely engrossed in the strategy and RPG parts of the game. In the capital city, you’re given a calendar deadline for the next main quest battle, and you get to spend those days as you see fit to train up, build bonds between characters, and explore the world map. From there, you can fight in short battles from the traditional top-down, grid-based view as well as take on turn-based RPG battles inside dungeons.

When I’m in the groove in the preparation phase, I get obsessed with maximizing every stat for my teams. The big event battles, which occasionally also repeat across characters, have so far been excellent capstones, though I haven’t yet run into any real challenge yet on the game’s standard difficulty. (Maybe I’m taking min-maxing too seriously.) But even with as much time as I’ve played, I feel like I’m just scratching the surface of each storyline, and I don’t have a sense of how much is left. One playthrough in Three Houses was around 50 hours long, so there could be quite a ways to go.

Fortune’s Weave is a big release for the Switch 2; Fire Emblem is now one of Nintendo’s tentpole franchises, so much so that the company is launching it smack in the middle of one of the busiest gaming months of this year and in close proximity to the looming elephant that is GTA VI. I think Fortune’s Weave will stand out from the crowd, though. For all my griping, I keep looking forward to the next time I’ll be able to play more — even if I have to deal with something I may have already seen before.