I’ve been playing Fire Emblem: Fortune’s Weave for two weeks now and the experience has started to take its toll. The world-building is entertaining and intriguing, representing a bold new direction for the sword-and-sorcery strategy RPG. But after thirty hours, the desire to know what’s going on and to discover the ultimate fates of these well-written, colorful characters is really the only things compelling me to continue playing the game.
The game’s character progression and EXP grind—at least in part one—are borderline tedious. Instead of reveling in a world replete with mystery and anachronisms, I’m spinning my wheels, wasting valuable time criss-crossing a map with precious little to show for my investment.
Fortune’s Weave works in roughly the same way as previous Fire Emblem games. Each of the four Flame Lords’ stories is broken up into parts. And despite my best efforts to focus on Theodora and make progress, I haven’t made it out of part one yet. Theodora is a queen newly enthroned, winning her crown after a fight with her brother cost her one of her arms. After securing a new, more powerful magic arm, Theodora has come to the Heroic Games to win back ancestral lands her kingdom has lost in the past. But as she fights her way through the tournament, she must also must fight against the corruption spreading from her newfound arm that’s slowly eroding her mind.
The character work in Fortune’s Weave is carrying the entire game. It’s not often you get to play queens in video games, and the royalty you do see is often portrayed as arrogant, cruel, and short-sighted. Whenever I’m watching or reading something with that kind of all-powerful authority figure, I always think, “I could do better. It’s so easy to do better.” When I play Theodora, she’s the “better” I think of. If it weren’t for the truly delightful support conversations between her and the crew she slowly amasses over time, I’d have put this game down long ago.
The way Fortune’s Weave handles time is at the heart of the painful acknowledgement that this game is not yet what I’ve been hoping for. There are still days with a calendar to manage, but they’re broken up into smaller time segments that become like a currency you spend whenever you move across the map or complete specific tasks. For example, going from 3/15 to 3/20 represents 20 time segments in addition to five concrete days. On paper, that sounds great; you have more “time” to do activities. The problem is you’re gonna be spending the majority of that time walking on the map.
Unlike in Three Houses where activities like training or cooking a meal would cost you time and advance the day, those are free in Fortune’s Weave. Again, sounds like a great deal, although you do “pay” for activities with a stamina meter for each character and artificial limits on how often you can complete an activity within a given day or week. Where you pay for your time is through map exploration, and the way the map is constructed…is bullshit.
When you want to move between destinations, you have to select your route in increments of one “time” segment at a time. There’s no option to pick a destination and automatically deduct how much time it’ll take to get there, likely because there are so many intersecting routes representing multiple ways to reach the same place. The map is littered with nodes that you can search for raw materials—fish, meat, vegetables, smithing materials—while on your way to wherever you’re going, in addition to dungeons (which are also bullshit) and towns where you can share a meal or buy goods.
What’s so frustrating is that the map is huge. If I want to explore a new area, I have to spend 15-20 chunks of time just to get there, another 15-20 to unlock an area’s nodes, then another 15-20 to get back. The game is generous, with some chapters offering over 100 chunks of time before your next deadline, but this is where the second frustration, character progression, comes in.
You can only train your party’s skills once a week and only in the main city. If I’m out and about exploring a big chunk of the map and decide I want to level my characters, I have to stop what I’m doing and head back to the main city, my chunks of time slipping away like grains of sand in an hourglass. Then, I have to spend that much time again, heading back to pick up where I left off. There are carriages you can use that can cut down some of that back and forth but they only work within an area, not between them.
I enjoyed the time management gameplay mechanic that undergirds The Blood of Dawnwalker, because there was narrative tension there. In Fortune’s Weave, it impedes rather than enhances. If I could train outside the main city, I’d hate this system a lot less. Thankfully, I know that after I pass some as-yet-undiscovered progression point, I’ll unlock fast travel. It can’t come soon enough.
Another frustrating component is how progression is gated. Certain sections of the map are blocked by gates only passable at a certain level of renown. You earn renown by participating in main story quests as well as completing general side quests and special side quests specific to each Flame Lord. In Theodora’s case, that means sending supplies to your citizens back home. You also need higher levels of renown if you want to widely recruit any one of the many colorful allies Fortune’s Weave throws at you. General side quests earn you a pittance. The best way, at least in part one, to earn the renown needed to grow your party and expand the map is by gathering supplies.
And it fucking sucks. You have to gather 10, 20, 30 pieces of a specific material from a specific region, and whether you even get what you need when you go looking is down to random chance. I just feel stuck on this unsatisfying wheel of walking across a map picking vegetables and fish like some kind of hobo hunter-gatherer. I am a Flame Lord, damnit! I’m supposed to be leading my troops from winged horseback, and I don’t even get to do that often enough!
Clashes in dungeons feel like a waste of time, trading blows back and forth with little friction or difficulty, and the strategic combat encounters that play out on a map are few and far between. And that double sucks because those battles are the only place you can really gain the kind of EXP you need to grow your characters. The other way is by sending your characters out on “auto activities” where they can either train, search for materials, or fight. I want to play the game! I don’t want it to play itself for me, but it’s felt like it’s on auto pilot for so much of my initial time with it, a constant cycle of explore and train, train and explore. The fact that this tedium is split across four characters makes experiencing everybody’s story feel like an insurmountable task. I don’t have the strength to sit through three more boring-ass part ones. I know there are boons you can accrue that are supposed to smooth out parallel playthroughs, but I haven’t seen them in action yet. And because of the way this game is structured, my first playthrough with the Flame Lord I love the most is the one that I’ll have the worst experience with, which I hate. If I had known this was going to be such a slog, I woulda picked Dietrich as the sacrificial struggle bus.
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