[[{“value”:”
Even for a series known for its sprawling scope, Fire Emblem: Fortune’s Weave is ambitious. Nintendo and developer Intelligent Systems clearly approached this latest entry in the series having learned from its success in Three Houses, its missteps in Engage, and even some of the series’ historical oddities. Fortune’s Weave rewards those craving both deep interconnected stories and intricate, interlocking RPG systems in equal measure, creating a new high-water mark for the series.
The structure of Fortune’s Weave often feels like a series of concentric circles, constantly broadening and deepening your understanding of its systems and its characters. It’s so massive it’s hard to even know where to start, so I’ll begin where the game does: in the future.
Or at least, in a futuristic, science-fiction setting that is strikingly different from the series’ norm. Right from the beginning of Fortune’s Weave, your created character, Eshmel, is literally created, birthed by sci-fi-coded magic as the last hope for humanity against the army of the Demon Lord, who is already on the verge of total victory. Fortuna, the Goddess of Fate, is cooperating with the last bastions of humanity and sees an opportunity to turn the tide in your favor. Four instrumental heroes, the legendary Flame Lords, can be recruited to help in the coming fight, so Fortuna sends Eshmel back in time to a key moment in the Flame Lords’ lives to guide them. That moment is their participation in the Heroic Games, a sort of gladiatorial and tactical version of the ancient Greek Olympics.
Right away, this imbues the story, and the Flame Lords’ individual stories, with propulsive force. You know from the very beginning that your ultimate destiny is leading toward a major escalation, but you also know these four characters are special, destined for greatness in ways that make them inflection points in history. In many stories like this, you see individual protagonists and slowly come to learn of a mysterious visitor who reveals a greater destiny. In Fortune’s Weave, you are the mysterious visitor, and you have hidden knowledge that they don’t, creating an interesting dynamic as you watch the events of their lives unfold.
This premise also creates a setting that confidently blends tropes from the Age of Antiquity, smooth futuristic science-fiction, and high fantasy. Regardless of the particular details in your character creation, Eshmel has an otherworldly quality to them that seems distinctly out of place in the nation of Dagda, which is obviously inspired by ancient empires, and both Eshmel and the Flame Lords themselves all regularly interact with actual gods and goddesses. It’s a compelling blend of storytelling motifs that feels fresh and new for this series.
Fortuna emphasizes the importance of recruiting the Flame Lords to have any real hope of defeating the Demon King, but you can actually proceed to the endgame at any time. After finishing the prologue you could, technically, proceed to the final battles alone. I wasn’t brave enough to attempt this, but I’m sure some impressive Fire Emblem experts will pull it off. For me, simply having the option emphasized a central theme of the game. You constantly have choices about how to approach almost every aspect, even down to the core structure of it. You can play and pivot in whatever manner you choose.
The four Flame Lords can be played in any order, and each has their own motivation for competing in the Heroic Games, in which the winner is promised to be granted a single wish. Cai is a young boy hoping to save his father from a false imprisonment; Dietrich is an expert swordsman looking to prove himself by taking on the toughest opponents; Theodora is a newly crowned warrior queen who wants to clear a historical injustice for her people; and Leda is a dancer and refugee who sees the games as an opportunity to get close enough to her father’s killer that she can exact revenge. Each of the stories is a compelling premise, though I only played through Leda and Theodora’s stories so far. Each of them is driven to a fault, obsessed and single-minded, even when their motivations are ostensibly just or even noble.
You spend a lot of time with each hero you choose, gaining insights about their motivations and desires as they navigate the twists of their individual stories. And that’s one of the most impressive tricks in Fire Emblem: Fortune’s Weave–these stories are satisfying on their own as individual narratives, but grow even richer in conversation with each other, and with the larger story of the war against the Demon King. It’s a layered narrative that builds upon itself and becomes more compelling the more you explore it.
Once you enter the story of a Flame Lord, you can play it to completion or jump out to dabble in others. Again, you always have choices. But the individual Flame Lord stories themselves have a smooth difficulty ramp, scaling up the challenge as you continuously recruit more forces to your side, upgrade your skills and equipment, and unlock new classes.
That does mean you have to repeat some easier missions when you begin a new Flame Lord’s quest, but the strength of the narrative pulled me through those easier missions. And a series of Notable Deeds grants you currency to spend on things like universal XP boosts, which create a glide path to maintain momentum as you go back to visit other Flame Lords from the beginning.
The structure of the Heroic Games is simple. You climb a bracket of competitors, starting with lower-level recruitable characters and building your way up to more serious opponents, sometimes including the other Flame Lords. The matches are set for specific days on the calendar, giving you downtime between story quests to partake in side quests and paralogues, recruit new units, etc.
While the Heroic Games take place inside the capital city of Dagsion, there’s a massive world map outside of its walls to explore. I found the map movement a little clunky, as you have to select an action (move, wait, search, etc) on map nodes before selecting a direction to move a limited number of spaces, similar to a board game. The idea, though, is that every action you do outside of Dagsion’s walls–and some that you do inside–makes time pass. You can’t simply farm random encounters to get overpowered for the main quests. You have to manage your time and make use of it wisely to balance the various demands of side quests, leveling up, and making progress on recruiting new team members. It sounds daunting, but I found the system was flexible enough to absorb some time wasted without feeling too punishing. For those who want to take on the toughest challenges with permadeath turned on, however, I expect this system to be a satisfying challenge for meticulous min-maxxers.
Similarly, some activities in Dagsion can only be performed weekly. Those include giving gifts or attending a play–sorry, you can’t simply love-bomb a character you want to recruit–or training at the Arena. It also includes performing acts of service at the temples of the gods. Some characters are naturally more pious than others, granting bigger bonuses to your acts of worship. And each god grants you a special benefit that can be used in battle. Fortuna is unlocked from the start, letting you rewind turns, but there are others to be discovered with important passive benefits that can turn the tide of battle.
Exploring the map outside of Dagsion is a must, because it’s vital for completing your Flame Lord’s individual quests and gaining Renown. Each Flame Lord has their own specialized quests, and those give you much bigger bonuses to Renown points than any other side quests. Theodora, for example, has to scour the world searching for supplies to send back to her nation, while Leda gets tips about taverns in distant cities where she can perform. Those grant you regular rewards like any other side quest, including even unlocking some specialized classes early, but the real reward is Renown.
Renown is an important resource because it’s one of two factors that determine who you can recruit. The other is Support, which you gain by improving your Flame Lord’s bond with another character via giving gifts or sharing meals. I found progressing this stat fairly slow, so it can take time to win someone over to your side–even as the ticking clock of the game means you may not manage to recruit everyone you had your eye on. Fortunately, there’s a good variety of recruitable characters with different level requirements, so as long as you’re making a little progress with several at a time, you’ll get a decent flow of additional allies.
Randomized battles also populate the world map, along with dungeons that can be explored in third-person a la Fire Emblem: Shadows of Valentia. Those provide a nice change of pace and a different way to engage with the world, granting you a little experience boost by taking part in more traditional turn-based RPG combat. Once you’re sufficiently overleveled for a dungeon, you can farm experience by simply striking an enemy without triggering the combat, making this an even more streamlined way to quickly gain treasures and experience. I never found them very challenging, but they seemed more intended to break up the pace, and they worked well for that purpose.
The best missions, of course, are those involving traditional tactical combat. Fire Emblem is second to none in this regard, and Fortune’s Weave manages to improve on it further. The main quests always find ways to add new wrinkles to combat scenarios, forcing you to think differently and staving off the complacency that can come from having a powerful team.
In one memorable battle, I was being targeted by a long-range attack, requiring careful movement and creative blocking while I slowly advanced. In another, I would lose if any enemy units reached a certain goal line, but their forces were so overwhelming, and reinforcements so frequent, that I quickly realized I had to prioritize cutting my way through to the one enemy unit whose defeat served as a victory condition. Sometimes I needed to keep my forces tightly packed together to take out tougher enemies, while, in others, I had to spread them terrifyingly thin to address dispersed threats. What’s so satisfying about these challenges is that the game never explicitly explains how to resolve the puzzle; it just presents you with a scenario and presses you to figure out the solution. My own conclusions certainly aren’t the only ones possible.
Aiding you in combat are two types of special abilities: Combat Arts and Blaze Arts. Combat Arts are available to all units as they level up and specialize in skills, letting you perform special actions at the cost of weapon durability, which can then be repaired at a Blacksmith. Blaze Arts are reserved for special characters, letting you sacrifice HP for powerful effects. Theodora, who is imbued with a magical, superpowered prosthetic arm, can grab a hunk of stone from the earth and chuck it great distances, for example, while Dietrich can teleport forward to strike down an enemy before they even see him coming, and Leda has a series of special dances that buff her allies. New Blaze Arts are offered as you take part in the quests to improve Renown, so all of the systems feed into each other nicely.
However, all this complexity does come at a price. While the battles themselves are snappy and intuitive enough for newcomers to understand, the menu user interface is overstuffed, and at first it was hard to find certain elements. I got accustomed to it well enough after several hours, but there’s just a lot going on, and I wished the UI had been easier to navigate.
With four heroes all existing concurrently, sometimes you see the same story beats repeated, but I rarely found this tiring or repetitive. Instead, it was delightful to see a similar scene recontextualized through the lens of the current character’s story, adding more color and texture to their own tale by how they’ve interacted with others. Each of the characters also has their own entourage of close companions, and Fortune’s Weave excels at making each of them likable in their own ways. It’s a strong ensemble cast, even before you start recruiting a variety of distinct warriors with their own odd designs.
And since this is all happening concurrently, the narratives intertwine in ways that make the whole story richer the more you engage with it. Seeing the events only from Theodora’s perspective was interesting enough, but then seeing the same and other contemporaneous events from Leda’s perspective filled in a fuller picture. Plus, since each story interacts with the other Flame Lords, you get a sense for the other heroes’ stories even if you haven’t started their actual quest. This is a narrative with criss-crossing interests and characters, so you’re really meant to play through all four Flame Lords to see how all of the puzzle pieces fit together.
Naturally, after your Flame Lord’s individual story resolves, events in the world take a turn for the more dramatic on a global scale. This is very similar to the arc of Fire Emblem: Three Houses, where your chosen House then became instrumental in a massive war. This time, though, you aren’t forced to pick favorites. You can play through all four Flame Lords’ stories, the more the better, and each of them have a part to play in this second arc as you proceed towards the endgame against the Demon King.
All of this is complemented by an incredible orchestral score, as evidenced by finding myself idly humming the main theme for days at a time, and the voice acting is well-performed. I made a point of playing Fortune’s Weave in quiet environments where I could hear everything, because I just didn’t want to miss an audio moment. And while Dagsion itself can look a little plain in places, the character designs themselves are universally gorgeous, with incredible detail and flourishes, and class designs that look great and fitting no matter how you spec your characters. The cutscenes, as well, are remarkably cinematic and help accentuate the epic scope of this story about war in an age of antiquity. Fortune’s Weave is the best-looking and best-sounding Fire Emblem to date, on top of all of its other excellent traits.
Fire Emblem: Fortune’s Weave is a sprawling masterpiece of a strategy RPG, building upon the successes of past Fire Emblem games with new interconnected elements, expertly designed combat puzzles, and an emphasis on flexibility and choice. Nintendo and Intelligent Systems have topped themselves, making this the new high point to beat for future entries.
“}]]
[[{“value”:”Even for a series known for its sprawling scope, Fire Emblem: Fortune’s Weave is ambitious. Nintendo and developer Intelligent Systems clearly approached this latest entry in the series having learned from its success in Three Houses, its missteps in Engage, and even some of the series’ historical oddities. Fortune’s Weave rewards those craving both deep interconnected stories and intricate, interlocking RPG systems in equal measure, creating a new high-water mark for the series.
The structure of Fortune’s Weave often feels like a series of concentric circles, constantly broadening and deepening your understanding of its systems and its characters. It’s so massive it’s hard to even know where to start, so I’ll begin where the game does: in the future.
Or at least, in a futuristic, science-fiction setting that is strikingly different from the series’ norm. Right from the beginning of Fortune’s Weave, your created character, Eshmel, is literally created, birthed by sci-fi-coded magic as the last hope for humanity against the army of the Demon Lord, who is already on the verge of total victory. Fortuna, the Goddess of Fate, is cooperating with the last bastions of humanity and sees an opportunity to turn the tide in your favor. Four instrumental heroes, the legendary Flame Lords, can be recruited to help in the coming fight, so Fortuna sends Eshmel back in time to a key moment in the Flame Lords’ lives to guide them. That moment is their participation in the Heroic Games, a sort of gladiatorial and tactical version of the ancient Greek Olympics.
Right away, this imbues the story, and the Flame Lords’ individual stories, with propulsive force. You know from the very beginning that your ultimate destiny is leading toward a major escalation, but you also know these four characters are special, destined for greatness in ways that make them inflection points in history. In many stories like this, you see individual protagonists and slowly come to learn of a mysterious visitor who reveals a greater destiny. In Fortune’s Weave, you are the mysterious visitor, and you have hidden knowledge that they don’t, creating an interesting dynamic as you watch the events of their lives unfold.
This premise also creates a setting that confidently blends tropes from the Age of Antiquity, smooth futuristic science-fiction, and high fantasy. Regardless of the particular details in your character creation, Eshmel has an otherworldly quality to them that seems distinctly out of place in the nation of Dagda, which is obviously inspired by ancient empires, and both Eshmel and the Flame Lords themselves all regularly interact with actual gods and goddesses. It’s a compelling blend of storytelling motifs that feels fresh and new for this series.
Fire Emblem: Fortune’s Weave
Fortuna emphasizes the importance of recruiting the Flame Lords to have any real hope of defeating the Demon King, but you can actually proceed to the endgame at any time. After finishing the prologue you could, technically, proceed to the final battles alone. I wasn’t brave enough to attempt this, but I’m sure some impressive Fire Emblem experts will pull it off. For me, simply having the option emphasized a central theme of the game. You constantly have choices about how to approach almost every aspect, even down to the core structure of it. You can play and pivot in whatever manner you choose.
The four Flame Lords can be played in any order, and each has their own motivation for competing in the Heroic Games, in which the winner is promised to be granted a single wish. Cai is a young boy hoping to save his father from a false imprisonment; Dietrich is an expert swordsman looking to prove himself by taking on the toughest opponents; Theodora is a newly crowned warrior queen who wants to clear a historical injustice for her people; and Leda is a dancer and refugee who sees the games as an opportunity to get close enough to her father’s killer that she can exact revenge. Each of the stories is a compelling premise, though I only played through Leda and Theodora’s stories so far. Each of them is driven to a fault, obsessed and single-minded, even when their motivations are ostensibly just or even noble.
You spend a lot of time with each hero you choose, gaining insights about their motivations and desires as they navigate the twists of their individual stories. And that’s one of the most impressive tricks in Fire Emblem: Fortune’s Weave–these stories are satisfying on their own as individual narratives, but grow even richer in conversation with each other, and with the larger story of the war against the Demon King. It’s a layered narrative that builds upon itself and becomes more compelling the more you explore it.
Leda is going through a lot right now
Once you enter the story of a Flame Lord, you can play it to completion or jump out to dabble in others. Again, you always have choices. But the individual Flame Lord stories themselves have a smooth difficulty ramp, scaling up the challenge as you continuously recruit more forces to your side, upgrade your skills and equipment, and unlock new classes.
That does mean you have to repeat some easier missions when you begin a new Flame Lord’s quest, but the strength of the narrative pulled me through those easier missions. And a series of Notable Deeds grants you currency to spend on things like universal XP boosts, which create a glide path to maintain momentum as you go back to visit other Flame Lords from the beginning.
The structure of the Heroic Games is simple. You climb a bracket of competitors, starting with lower-level recruitable characters and building your way up to more serious opponents, sometimes including the other Flame Lords. The matches are set for specific days on the calendar, giving you downtime between story quests to partake in side quests and paralogues, recruit new units, etc.
While the Heroic Games take place inside the capital city of Dagsion, there’s a massive world map outside of its walls to explore. I found the map movement a little clunky, as you have to select an action (move, wait, search, etc) on map nodes before selecting a direction to move a limited number of spaces, similar to a board game. The idea, though, is that every action you do outside of Dagsion’s walls–and some that you do inside–makes time pass. You can’t simply farm random encounters to get overpowered for the main quests. You have to manage your time and make use of it wisely to balance the various demands of side quests, leveling up, and making progress on recruiting new team members. It sounds daunting, but I found the system was flexible enough to absorb some time wasted without feeling too punishing. For those who want to take on the toughest challenges with permadeath turned on, however, I expect this system to be a satisfying challenge for meticulous min-maxxers.
Strategy combat in Fire Emblem: Fortune’s Weave
Similarly, some activities in Dagsion can only be performed weekly. Those include giving gifts or attending a play–sorry, you can’t simply love-bomb a character you want to recruit–or training at the Arena. It also includes performing acts of service at the temples of the gods. Some characters are naturally more pious than others, granting bigger bonuses to your acts of worship. And each god grants you a special benefit that can be used in battle. Fortuna is unlocked from the start, letting you rewind turns, but there are others to be discovered with important passive benefits that can turn the tide of battle.
Exploring the map outside of Dagsion is a must, because it’s vital for completing your Flame Lord’s individual quests and gaining Renown. Each Flame Lord has their own specialized quests, and those give you much bigger bonuses to Renown points than any other side quests. Theodora, for example, has to scour the world searching for supplies to send back to her nation, while Leda gets tips about taverns in distant cities where she can perform. Those grant you regular rewards like any other side quest, including even unlocking some specialized classes early, but the real reward is Renown.
Renown is an important resource because it’s one of two factors that determine who you can recruit. The other is Support, which you gain by improving your Flame Lord’s bond with another character via giving gifts or sharing meals. I found progressing this stat fairly slow, so it can take time to win someone over to your side–even as the ticking clock of the game means you may not manage to recruit everyone you had your eye on. Fortunately, there’s a good variety of recruitable characters with different level requirements, so as long as you’re making a little progress with several at a time, you’ll get a decent flow of additional allies.
Sun’s out, guns out
Randomized battles also populate the world map, along with dungeons that can be explored in third-person a la Fire Emblem: Shadows of Valentia. Those provide a nice change of pace and a different way to engage with the world, granting you a little experience boost by taking part in more traditional turn-based RPG combat. Once you’re sufficiently overleveled for a dungeon, you can farm experience by simply striking an enemy without triggering the combat, making this an even more streamlined way to quickly gain treasures and experience. I never found them very challenging, but they seemed more intended to break up the pace, and they worked well for that purpose.
The best missions, of course, are those involving traditional tactical combat. Fire Emblem is second to none in this regard, and Fortune’s Weave manages to improve on it further. The main quests always find ways to add new wrinkles to combat scenarios, forcing you to think differently and staving off the complacency that can come from having a powerful team.
In one memorable battle, I was being targeted by a long-range attack, requiring careful movement and creative blocking while I slowly advanced. In another, I would lose if any enemy units reached a certain goal line, but their forces were so overwhelming, and reinforcements so frequent, that I quickly realized I had to prioritize cutting my way through to the one enemy unit whose defeat served as a victory condition. Sometimes I needed to keep my forces tightly packed together to take out tougher enemies, while, in others, I had to spread them terrifyingly thin to address dispersed threats. What’s so satisfying about these challenges is that the game never explicitly explains how to resolve the puzzle; it just presents you with a scenario and presses you to figure out the solution. My own conclusions certainly aren’t the only ones possible.
Dietrich considers his exam options
Aiding you in combat are two types of special abilities: Combat Arts and Blaze Arts. Combat Arts are available to all units as they level up and specialize in skills, letting you perform special actions at the cost of weapon durability, which can then be repaired at a Blacksmith. Blaze Arts are reserved for special characters, letting you sacrifice HP for powerful effects. Theodora, who is imbued with a magical, superpowered prosthetic arm, can grab a hunk of stone from the earth and chuck it great distances, for example, while Dietrich can teleport forward to strike down an enemy before they even see him coming, and Leda has a series of special dances that buff her allies. New Blaze Arts are offered as you take part in the quests to improve Renown, so all of the systems feed into each other nicely.
However, all this complexity does come at a price. While the battles themselves are snappy and intuitive enough for newcomers to understand, the menu user interface is overstuffed, and at first it was hard to find certain elements. I got accustomed to it well enough after several hours, but there’s just a lot going on, and I wished the UI had been easier to navigate.
With four heroes all existing concurrently, sometimes you see the same story beats repeated, but I rarely found this tiring or repetitive. Instead, it was delightful to see a similar scene recontextualized through the lens of the current character’s story, adding more color and texture to their own tale by how they’ve interacted with others. Each of the characters also has their own entourage of close companions, and Fortune’s Weave excels at making each of them likable in their own ways. It’s a strong ensemble cast, even before you start recruiting a variety of distinct warriors with their own odd designs.
Your warriors enjoy a Feast
And since this is all happening concurrently, the narratives intertwine in ways that make the whole story richer the more you engage with it. Seeing the events only from Theodora’s perspective was interesting enough, but then seeing the same and other contemporaneous events from Leda’s perspective filled in a fuller picture. Plus, since each story interacts with the other Flame Lords, you get a sense for the other heroes’ stories even if you haven’t started their actual quest. This is a narrative with criss-crossing interests and characters, so you’re really meant to play through all four Flame Lords to see how all of the puzzle pieces fit together.
Naturally, after your Flame Lord’s individual story resolves, events in the world take a turn for the more dramatic on a global scale. This is very similar to the arc of Fire Emblem: Three Houses, where your chosen House then became instrumental in a massive war. This time, though, you aren’t forced to pick favorites. You can play through all four Flame Lords’ stories, the more the better, and each of them have a part to play in this second arc as you proceed towards the endgame against the Demon King.
All of this is complemented by an incredible orchestral score, as evidenced by finding myself idly humming the main theme for days at a time, and the voice acting is well-performed. I made a point of playing Fortune’s Weave in quiet environments where I could hear everything, because I just didn’t want to miss an audio moment. And while Dagsion itself can look a little plain in places, the character designs themselves are universally gorgeous, with incredible detail and flourishes, and class designs that look great and fitting no matter how you spec your characters. The cutscenes, as well, are remarkably cinematic and help accentuate the epic scope of this story about war in an age of antiquity. Fortune’s Weave is the best-looking and best-sounding Fire Emblem to date, on top of all of its other excellent traits.
Fire Emblem: Fortune’s Weave is a sprawling masterpiece of a strategy RPG, building upon the successes of past Fire Emblem games with new interconnected elements, expertly designed combat puzzles, and an emphasis on flexibility and choice. Nintendo and Intelligent Systems have topped themselves, making this the new high point to beat for future entries.”}]] Read More GameSpot – All Content
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