How Much Fire Emblem Is Too Much Fire Emblem?

When I was on the fence about buying a Nintendo Switch 2, I held off with the self-aware knowledge that I would eventually cave come September. I knew that Fire Emblem: Fortune’s Weavewould break me. I needed to play this game like my life depended on it.

A month (and a few days) after release, I have 70-plus hours played on Fortune’s Weave, and I wish it were double the amount. Still, though, 70 hours is a huge amount; aside from World of Warcraft, I simply don’t spend 70 hours on a single video game anymore. (The last “long” game I played was another strategy role-playing game, but even the Final Fantasy Tactics remake only took me 36 hours to complete.) Fire Emblem is different, though. More than perhaps any video game series I have devoted chunks of my life to, Fire Emblem finds its way into both my waking thoughts and my sleeping nightmares. I began to see spreadsheets in the dark, thinking about ways to best build my virtual army of adorable murderers. I sought out the magic lightning Levin Swords in my deepest fantasies; words like “troubadour” and maybe-not-words like “bardinger” took on new meaning. I became obsessed, as fellow Defectorite Kathryn could prove by producing even a portion of the many messages I have sent her about this game in just over a month.

The series trades in strategic, turn-based combat in which an army of some amount of characters takes on a much bigger opponent across a tiled map setting. Each of these characters can be built in ever-improving “classes” of fighters. There are the usual ones—a tank wearing big armor, a healer who can teleport allies around the map—but there are also flying dragoons, horseback archers, and the samurai-like Shido. The main tension in the gameplay comes from balancing your army’s make-up, equipping them with the best items and spells, and then carefully battling opponents while managing hit percentages and ever-increasing demands for more specialized tactics. Fortune’s Weave gets this all spot on, and I never tired of each individual battle, whether it was a race against time to escape from a dangerous situation, or just a demanding “kill everyone involved” massacre.

And yet, after one month and 70 hours, I have come to an ideological standstill with Fortune’s Weave. I have completed two of the four routes that make up part 1 of the game; the game’s structure follows four “Flame Lords” (Leda, Cai, Dietrich, and Theodora) through 12 chapters each of introduction, conflict, betrayals, and level-ups. I first started with Leda, a vihuela-playing lunatic deadset on revenge. Then I moved on to Cai, a 15-year-old boy who wants to rescue his dad and build up a cavalry division powerful enough to rival the Mongols. I have just started Dietrich’s route, and after four quick intro chapters all I really know about him is that he loves to aura farm. Theodora, a queen working to save her nation, awaits. Beyond even that, the four routes continue in part 2 and then, finally, a converging finale in part 3.

That’s a lot of video game. My estimate is that the entire game will take me about 120 hours to complete, and there’s the promise of downloadable content and Maddening difficulty—the ultimate challenge in Fire Emblem—coming down the pipeline over the next year.

Fortune’s Weave is a beautiful game, visually and sonically, crafted with love and care on a console that can truly power its vision. Unlike 2019’s Three Houses, which at times looked like hot garbage, there are no moments in Fortune’s Weave that jar me from the flow state I enter in Fire Emblem games. Everything works as it should, and everything looks fantastic in motion.

The characters, too, are wonderful. They represent a clear step-up from 2023’s Engage, though it’s impossible to get close to Three Houses and its ragtag group of students. Each Flame Lord gets a small cast of “retainers,” fully voiced and characterized helpers, relatives, and one moody priest (Fabio, from Dietrich’s route). Their conversations, whether in cutscenes or in the many Support conversations, are a delight, and my only complaint is that there aren’t more Supports with more characters. At times, it feels like your army is made up of 10 to 15 disconnected characters who are just there because they are strong, or because they look cool, rather than due to any narrative decision.

With some great map design—looking at you, Cai’s Chapter 11 battle—and classes that feel powerful and fun to use, the Fire Emblem gameplay in Fortune’s Weave is at something of a series high, if not outright a series best. If those were the only things to contend with, Fortune’s Weave would be a near-perfect game. But, alas, we need to talk about the bloat.

When it comes to Fire Emblem fandom, I am but a mere noob compared to the diehards. Though the series has been around since 1990 in Japan and 2003 in the United States, I was only aware of Fire Emblem through Marth’s appearance in 2008’s Super Smash Bros. Brawl. I never really gave the main games a chance until, like a whole bunch of people, I played Awakening in 2013. After that game got its hooks in me, with its complicated marriage-and-offspring mechanic, I played Fates (both main games, but not Revelation, I have standards). It was fine; Conquest was hard enough to drive me insane in a good way. Then came Three Houses, which I loved as much as any game I’ve ever played. Engage left me cold, as the truly incredible combat did not do enough to paper over a weak story and the aforementioned even weaker cast of characters. I never finished that one.

This is all to say that Fortune’s Weave was made for a player like me, someone who doesn’t come into the game with the weight of decades of Fire Emblem around their necks. This is as far from old-school Fire Emblem as a game can get. I haven’t played many of those games—my experience dabbling with old-school Fire Emblem amounts to Echoes: Shadows of Valentia, a 2017 remake of the second game in the series, and only a bit of Path of Radiance, widely considered the best of the old(er)-school games—and so I do not have the same context heading into a game as massive, as convoluted, as bloated as Fortune’s Weave.

After Three Houses was such a wild success, it makes sense that the sequel would port over and improve upon some of the main mechanics. The main framing mechanic in both games is a calendar. Players have set dates for main storyline missions, and a bunch of days to get through before advancing the story. Within those days, the game has plenty of mini-games and optimization events to advance the army management part of Fire Emblem. Fortune’s Weave saw what Three Houses did and blew it up to suffocating levels, overloading the player with weekly activities. They can now earn additional abilities by praying at temples, watch theater to improve relationships (or perform in the theater to earn gold), take baths (don’t ask), eat meals, and talk to a time-traveling bird (seriously, don’t ask).

In between weekly resets, the player is set loose on a world map of sorts. It’s not an open world, but more of a board game map—a series of spaces connected in a web of roads and caves. Every four spaces traveled consumes a turn, and you have four turns in a day. The intended gameplay pressure is such that you want to explore the world map, but also get back to the capital city of Dagsion in time to do the weekly activities again. Then you repeat that. Over and over and over again.

This creates the biggest pacing issue I think I’ve ever encountered in a video game. The plot of Fortune’s Weave feels like a slog because it takes place over about nine months of balancing story battles with days upon weeks upon months of “free time.” I found myself wanting to see what happened in the next chapters of these stories—Will Leda uncover the secret of a ghost carriage? Will Cai save his father from execution? Will Dietrich kill a bunch of people?—but I didn’t want to ignore the minimal-yet-necessary improvements that came from free time in between each story beat. There were times when I would go three or four hours of game time without touching a story mission; I was just running around the world map with Cai, planting vegetables to bolster my material inventory, taming wild pegasi for my battle-mages to ride around, and fighting a lot of insects to sell their lucrative parts. By the time the main story rolled back around, I had lost all momentum and excitement.

It doesn’t help that the narrative itself is also told in fragments, a conscious choice to almost force the player to not skip any of the Flame Lord’s routes in part 1. Certain scenes are shown to the player for seemingly no reason, and they only make sense once you play the complementary route that shows another side of the story. Even then, the narrative sometimes still reads as inconsistent or just straight up bad; there’s a scene where Leda and Cai work together that didn’t make sense from her POV, or his. Instead, the game just threw two of the main characters into the same scene and had them talk past each other and jump to conclusions for reasons the player only understands as a third party. Each individual story works extremely well, at least in terms of what I have experienced so far, and the narratives do come to conclusive and satisfactory endings (Cai’s more than Leda’s, for me). That lack of focus on one larger story allows each Flame Lord to shine in their own way, something that the player avatar-centric stories in the Fire Emblem canon have struggled with in the past. However, the larger intersecting plot is still a wisp of smoke in my hands, and that’s 70 hours in.

Fortune’s Weave is a game that does a lot of things extremely well, as well as any Fire Emblem has ever done, but it’s also a game that throws entirely too much garbage at the player. Fortune’s Weave is good enough when it is great to overcome that, but even the developers knew that their initial ambitions were too much. The downloadable content announced for next year will add four more lead characters, all of which were part of the original plan for the game before they were cut after being deemed too ambitious a project. I can only imagine how long and exhausting this game would be with four more routes of running around playing Menu Simulator in a beautifully shallow city like Dagsion, and I hope that the extra development time will allow Intelligent Systems, the game’s designers, to tweak the formula that is already tiring two routes in.

Since I do not have much experience with or affinity for older Fire Emblem games, which mainly consisted of hitting up a shop, talking to your troops, then going back into the story, I don’t necessarily want the series to return to that. In many ways, Engage also had that style of in-between-missions gameplay, and it was dull. But there has to be a better balance between the meat of the game—the strategic battles against tough opponents with nigh-impossible odds—and the fluff padding out the game time, like praying at six different temples just to get some usable buffs. I haven’t even gotten into the gift-giving tedium, either—to recruit new characters, the Flame Lord of whatever route is being played must improve their relationship with said characters by sharing meals (fine) and giving one gift per week (awful, tedious, barely effective).

In many ways, Fortune’s Weave is a perfect compilation of everything the series has ever thrown into the mix over the last 36 years. No idea goes unexplored, even at a rudimentary level, and the player is given enough choice and agency to build their own experience out of disparate parts that oftentimes don’t really mesh. Fortune’s Weave really is great, though, despite itself. There’s enough of an all-around gem in here to put it high on my own personal rankings, but it could have been so much better with a bit of editing and restraint, and a clearer vision of what exactly is “fun” about Fire Emblem, and what is simply busywork.

Fortune’s Weave is a sequel built according to a maximalist philosophy. With much better gameplay than its predecessor comes much increased drudgery. Whether that balance works or doesn’t will come down to each specific player, and that player’s own biases and desires. I’m glad Fortune’s Weave exists, but I can’t help but be disappointed at just how much it exists, and how afraid it is to let the player breathe without worrying about turn count and min-maxing every interaction across 100-plus hours. Fortune’s Weave isn’t confident in its own design, and it’s only because the Fire Emblem formula is a winner at almost any level that it is a triumph anyway.