Fire Emblem Fortune’s Weave Review: Nintendo’s most ambitious RPG yet is an incredible triumph

Fire Emblem: Fortune’s Weave is not just the biggest and most ambitious Fire Emblem, but it might be one of the boldest strategy RPGs I’ve ever played.

The game packs in four distinct protagonists – five if you count your player avatar – each with distinct storylines, personalities, and ambitions that see them fight against and alongside one another across three story arcs. But this isn’t a game you’ll be playing four times; the goal is to bring each of these characters and their allies together for a climax that’d make early Avengers movies blush.

In Part 1 of the game, you lead one of the four main protagonists and their allies through a tournament in the capital city of Dagsion. You’ll do battle in the arena while uncovering conspiratorial secrets and earning the trust of the warriors you meet, but each of our four protags has their own intentions. Cai feels like a traditional JRPG protagonist: a young boy fighting against much bigger foes in order to save his imprisoned father. Leda is the polar opposite — a beautiful and self-destructive dancer willing to follow her obsession with revenge to the bitter end.

Part 1 alone feels like an interesting and fully-featured Fire Emblem game. Choose one path, play through it once, and it’s already a satisfying experience. But with each of the four paths, you get to see new sides of the wider cast, new narrative beats, and you’ll uncover plot lines that elucidate the wider story. Dietrich and his posse might seem tough to understand from the outside, but his story will add depth to plot lines you see across all playthroughs.

Between fights in the arena, you’ll be passing time Persona-style while crossing an overworld map. You’ll be able to visit various locations across the game world, though most of the locations take the form of a shop menu and an inn. Each character will be given unique side quests to undertake to increase their renown, though they usually amount to visiting a location and collecting an item or completing a battle.

Week-by-week, you’ll spend most of your time courting the cast in an attempt to increase your support ranks so they can be recruited into your party, and the repeated meals, gifts, and even theatre performances are a lowlight. Increasing your support ranks quickly to ensure you have a fully-featured party for the fights ahead sounds like a good idea, but maximizing support ranks as efficiently as possible isn’t fun; it’s a bit of a chore.

It’s far more enjoyable to explore the overworld, bouncing between item harvesting locations, battles, and even explorable dungeons. These make a return from Fire Emblem Echoes: Shadows of Valentia, with the new Clash battle system. Clashes have your five-person party share a health bar, and so do your foes. You don’t need to move around a grid; just select attacks from a menu. It’s not a good battle system, but it helps combat encounters in dungeons fly by so you don’t spend long periods of time locked into a cave.

All of the activities are just prep for the main story battles. This is where the series’ main combat shines, iterating on what we saw in Fire Emblem: Three Houses. In addition to the usual blend of weapons, mounts, and magic, characters important to the story often wield one of Drake’s Treasures, a selection of cursed items that can grant their users Blaze Art abilities. These can take the form of buffs or outright attacks, giving your entire party an advantage in battle.

If that’s too difficult, you can abuse Blessings. The Dagdan Empire has an entire Pantheon of gods partially inspired by Greek myth, and you can use some of your weekly energy to service these gods in return for Blessings, which can grant you powerful buffs and modifiers to help you turn the tide of battle. They can also be ignored entirely if you prefer to rawdog your encounters.

Part 2 sees Theodora, Queen of Saramis, and one of the four protagonists go to war against the Dagdan Empire. You can play through this segment with each character, but Theodora is the true protagonist of this story arc, with the others playing support roles. As such, the game gives you the option to skip the arc, which you might consider after playing through it once for the story.

“It truly feels like an epic, one that stretches beyond even the ambitions of Fire Emblem games that received direct sequels.”

It’s all in preparation for Part 3, a climax bringing together your armies from across the four protagonists for a final showdown. This is built up from the game’s very first moments, and it will likely be dozens of hours before you see it play out — though you can take on Part 3’s challenges early with a poorly prepared army, even if it’s not recommended.

As a result of its unique structure, Fortune’s Weave isn’t another Fire Emblem game with multiple unique paths to play through from the start; it’s one where one single playthrough encompasses four unique perspectives on the story, which funnel into a single climactic finale. Timelines blur – not every protagonist can become the champion of Dagsion’s tournament – but through divine powers, all of the branching paths converge into one. Again, a bit like an Avengers movie, except you don’t need a chore list of extra media to understand what’s happening.

It truly feels like an epic, one that stretches beyond even the ambitions of Fire Emblem games that received direct sequels. This just might be one of the longest and most complex stories ever published by Nintendo, and it’s genuinely impressive in its breadth and depth. Even then, unlockable boons allow you to increase the amount of experience you receive in each engagement, allowing you to take on successive runs of Part 1 quickly, and Part 2 can be skipped entirely.

Yes, there’s a lot of content here, but you won’t be stuck playing through the same battles with a different cast for hours. Like the Clashes introduced to keep dungeons feeling breezy, Fire Emblem’s main story doesn’t want to bog you down and waste your time. That might be one of its most impressive qualities — managing to make a huge, lengthy experience feel concise and focused while you’re playing.

To capture what Fortune’s Weave is attempting to be in a few hundred words is difficult, but in any singular moment it’s easy to understand why it’s so easy to love. From the series’ iconic support conversations and interpersonal drama, to the focused and strategic turn-based battles that carry the entire experience, Fortune’s Weave is hard to put down.

Each battle is bookended by narrative dramatics, and the hours of voice acting across the entire cast help bring every character to life. Characters still grow and bond naturally as you have them battle alongside one another, skills still organically develop as you have units use specific weapons and strategies, and Part 1’s unique pacing helps make the downtime between battles feel that much more impactful.

When taken as a whole, Fire Emblem: Fortune’s Weave is as impressive as it is ambitious. It’s one of the most fully-featured strategy RPGs I’ve ever seen, and certainly one of the best games in the series. The size of the game feels like it should leave some aspect of it hamstrung and thin, but aside from some qualms with dungeons and the Clash system, everything feels polished and intentional.