While Fire Emblem: Three Houses got me into the series, I have retroactively played every Fire Emblem I could access including those on the Gamecube, 3DS, and some of the Virtual Console games. While I personally enjoyed Fire Emblem: Engage, I was able to understand where people thought it wasn’t on par with Three Houses nor any previous Fire Emblem game. However, when Fortune’s Weave was announced and I saw all of the Three Houses references and callbacks, I knew we were in for what would be either an amazing game, or potentially the death of the franchise.
Folks, this game has been a BLAST. While I have fully finished Leda’s route all the way through, it took almost 35 hours to fully complete. So what we’re doing here is a review in progress where I’ll be adding notes on each route as I finish them and give a final score once fully complete with the game.
COMBAT GAMEPLAY
Fire Emblem: Fortune’s Weave shines in its gameplay. From combat being fine-tuned, to the day to day being more complex; the series takes a leap forward taking a lot of the things I loved about Three Houses and amplifying them to a whole new level.
From a combat perspective: you have skirmishes (that take between 1-4 turns), paralogues (that take between 3-6 turns), dungeons (uses an entirely third person system and turn-based group combat), main story moments (that take between 4-10 turns), and other special moments here and there. Each one is a little different but keeps the game feeling fresh.
I really enjoyed each of the maps I played through with there being a massive variety due to the Dagdan Empire’s landscape. From lush jungles to deserts and everything in between, there are plenty of great maps to do battle on and each worth taking a second to see what makes them special. Two examples I want to bring up are the amount of jungle tiles that boost AVO (avoid rate), making it even harder for enemies to attack. That works both ways though, as they will be harder to hit. Making it almost a standstill at times. The other example comes in the War Arc where mountains cut off one part of your team and the other. The variety keeps things fun and moving forward.
Weapons and their durability have seemingly been a source of conversation within the Fire Emblem community, but I absolutely love the way weapons and weapon-usage have been done for Fortune’s Weave. Essentially, unless you’re using a Combat Art, weapons do not degrade with usage. With how much money there is to spend in this installment of the franchise, Blacksmith’s for me were a means of last resort. So I would pull out a Combat Art for big moments or to protect another character, but for skirmishes and paralogues, I’m glad we’re not using up weapons for those moments.
Divine Sand is how you do godly-based abilities like boosting stats or turning back time. I didn’t find myself using a lot of the god abilities in my first route playthrough, but I am making a concerted effort to do more of that in my current route playthrough.
The main story battles are glorious. I knew that having a gladiatorial vibe would make them feel big. I wasn’t expecting simply how big they would feel overall. I felt like each one was worthy of the Free Time amount given and provided me with a challenge each and every time (maybe other than that first battle). I don’t want to spoil these moments, but they’re fun and feel important. The best feeling a Main Story moment can have in Fire Emblem.
FREE TIME AND MAIN EVENTS
Your free time is, ironically, pretty packed with things to do. There are theater performances, bath house moments, training, talking, paralogues, exploring the map, doing side quests, recruiting new characters, eating dinner, repairing and buying weapons, giving gifts, saying blessings, and more. It is so much fun to find all the ways to use this time and maximize it to get things done. My Type-A brain latched on pretty quick and found a route to start free time and collect all the side quests before setting off to explore the map and get some of those side missions done as well as the character-specific moments.
While I won’t go over all of the things to do with your time, I wanted to provide a snapshot of my typical usage of free time.
Go explore Dagsion
- Explore all locations
- Participate in training to boost skills
- Take recruits to dinner to boost relationships
- Visit the bath house and theatre to boost morale and relationships
- Repair any weapons that were damaged or need upgrading
- Buy ALL AVAILABLE gifts (gotta boost those relationships)
- Buy any needed weapons, healing items, and more
- Talk to EVERYONE and give gifts
- Do blessings at temples to gods, you want their special abilities
Explore the map
- Do all side missions first and anything along the way
- Prioritize timed missions such as paralogues along the way
- Do special missions pertaining to your current route (Leda is travelling to different locations on the map to perform)
- Don’t miss out on the dungeons, which are a great source of leveling and relationship boosting
- Purchase special items from different areas
- Unlock all carriages and shrines to help with transporting from spot to spot
- Make sure to keep your team well-rested as this section doesn’t automatically heal after battles and dungeons.
Go back to Dagsion
- Turn in all side missions
- Do all daily tasks again such as training, eating, and talking.
- Use all remaining free time for Auto-Tasks (located at any inn) which will help boost XP, Skills, and more
You can always return to Dagsian early and do more of the weekly tasks and gain recruitment ability.
Recruiting is so much harder in Fortune’s Weave than Three Houses. Relationships take longer to form, gifts provide less positive movement, there are fewer chances to eat with people in a time period, and there are simply so many characters to choose from. In my first route playthrough I recruited 16, which felt like a lot until I realized how many I had missed by just a few days worth of activities. So, playthrough one, prioritize those you really want and get the others afterwards.
Your main player character takes the form of a magical bird to be able to go back in time and watch over our four main heroes (I promise this makes sense once you play the game). You can learn about battle formations from them and feed the bird form to build the relationship between characters and the main player character. The story gets a bit complicated and quite a ride, but one worth taking on!
As you can see, there are a LOT of things to do and only so much time. So prioritize what makes Fire Emblem fun for you and the game will sort the rest out for itself.
LEDA
I can only describe Leda’s arc as “what happens if revenge is the only thing that matters.” She lost her father during a massacre in her homeland which spurred the rest of her life into a fury of destruction and single-minded choices all to lead her to one man: Bertrand.
The opening for Leda’s arc takes a LONG time to get going. While it’s all interesting to hear about, the pacing just creates a slow burn to a really interesting story. So if you start here, prepare for a long haul opening with an insane amount of conversations all back to back to back.
Along the way, she meets a plucky group of misfits and unbearable sweeties that make up her main crew. Buccar is her older-brother-type guardian who cares about her safety more than anything. Olympia is her rival during her earlier career who joins you after making you prove you’re better than her in a game. Sirocco is full of himself, but is indeed one of the most clutch teammates in the run. Finally, Mu, a young girl pretending to be a boy for safety reasons, becomes a sister-figure to Leda. Mu ended up being my personal MVP as her gauntlet prowess is unmatched and her dodge is extremely nasty.
Leda’s story leads her down a path of using her Vihuela (essentially a magic lute of EVIL) to get where she wants to go. She joins the Heroic Games with the purpose of meeting and killing Bertrand once she’s won the games. As things progress, her mental state declines and she struggles to keep her head in the game. Without spoiling things, this story gets dark really quickly and lines are drawn in the sand.
I would put this arc on the same line as The Blue Lions in Fire Emblem: Three Houses. The characters are solid, there’s one that makes me mad more than the rest, the leader goes mad in multiple periods of the story, and the ending is decently solid for all involved. After everything, we head forward to Leda’s War Arc.
LEDA WAR ARC
So far, the War Arcs seem to be where the rubber meets the iron. You’ve had great combat moments from the main story so far, but nothing compares to the battles in the War Arc. I was hitting 15 total controllable characters on the field with two being guest characters. While the story focuses more on Theodora’s war against the Dagdan Empire, Leda plays a pivotal role in moving the war forward. This pivot felt a bit jarring, but it narratively made sense and I ended up loving the format of the arc itself.
The War Arc forgoes the Free Time as we had in Heroic Games Arc, instead providing the main functions you need for buying drinks, reclassing, and a fun new warrior who allows you to do one of three things with your team. With those three, you can choose one each cycle. First is an XP boost to help bring all of your team higher before entering these massive battles. Second is to boost skills in order to get your team reclasses into the more advanced classes. Finally, is the Blessings boost which brings the godly blessings up moving into the final push. These don’t take up much time, which works well given how long some of these battles can take in this arc.
The shortest battle I went through was 13 full turns. This is with 13-15 controllable characters on the map, and hoards and hoards of seemingly neverending bad guys. You’re getting archers, warriors, mages, elephant riders, wyvern riders, and more all trying to push your team to the brink. I can truly see this being one of the most difficult Fire Emblem games on the hardest difficulties with the classic Perma-death turned on. There are so many opportunities for your team to get stuck in a bottleneck and picked off one by one. My favorite thing to do was to send Leda and a small group around the side of the map and bring my main force through the front and surprise the enemy from behind.
The total run time for the War Arc was 6 chapters with a VERY long Chapter 6. I would suggest playing through the War Arcs after finishing Part I with a character like I did with Leda. It feels more like a full story being told and allows you to reset before going back into the Heroic Games arc with a new character.
OVERALL
As you can read in the title, this is a review in progress. I will continue to update this article with every route that I finish and how that stacks up against the ones I have previously played and how it adds to the story.
Graphically Fortune’s Weave is stunning for Fire Emblem. The draw distance is decently far in Dagsian and the character models are smooth and colorful. The action isn’t choppy like some previous titles and the cutscenes are beautiful. I couldn’t be more excited about how this game looks. However, it does drain the battery on the Switch 2 just a bit more than I would like to see.
As it stands right now, Fire Emblem: Fortune’s Weave stands above Fire Emblem: Three Houses in gameplay, combat moments, weapons, graphics, and difficulty. While there was a lack of romance compared to previous Fire Emblem games, I found myself having deeper relationships with almost every character in my party. With a game as massive as Fortune’s Weave, there will be plenty of opportunities for replaying and trying new team combinations. I’ll return when I finish Dietrich’s arc.
