Fire Emblem: Fortune’s Weave review – bigger and better than ever

Nintendo’s new Fire Emblem game is by far the most ambitious the series has ever been, with a massive new adventure that elevates the franchise to new levels.

It’s been less than four years since the release of Fire Emblem Engage and we have no idea how developer Intelligent Systems has been able to make Fortune’s Weave in the time since then. Even if they’ve doubled their staff numbers and worked 24 hours a day it doesn’t seem anywhere near enough time to create what is one of the most content rich video games ever made.

The game is absolutely bursting at the seams with four separate story campaigns, featuring a completely different set of characters and often unique gameplay elements. Just one of these strands is bigger than most video games in their entirety and yet in Fortune’s Weave, it’s barely scratching the surface of everything the game has to offer.

On hearing that you may be worrying about bloat, but while there’s definitely a lack of elegance in how everything has been squeezed together – and the usual issues with the graphics and script – this is undoubtably the best Fire Emblem game of the modern era and perhaps of all time.

All the Fire Emblem games have the same turn-based strategy battles, but Fortune’s Weave is very obviously a response to Engage’s mixed reception and so instead builds on many of the same gameplay and structural ideas as 2019’s Three Houses (it’s also set in the same fictional universe, which not all Fire Emblem games are, but that’s largely irrelevant). We never liked Three Houses nearly as much as some fans, but Fortune’s Weave feels like the same concept done right.

You don’t need to have played any of the previous games to enjoy Fortune’s Weave, but if you have any familiarity with the series you might wonder why it opens up with a sci-fi laser battle. Fire Emblem is usually a very generic Tolkien-esque fantasy adventure, but Fortune’s Weave goes off the rails from almost the first moment, although that’s nothing compared to what happens later in the game – which we’re obviously not going to spoil here.

The set-up is laid out pretty clearly in the opening hour, with the world suffering a demonic apocalypse in the future. The plan to reverse this involves both supernatural and sci-fi elements, as your stop playing as what is nominally the main character after the first couple of hours and instead take control of one of the four Flame Lords back in the pre-apocalypse past, in an attempt to get them to avoid whatever choices led to their disastrous future.

All their stories coverage at a tournament in the continent’s capital city, with each character coming into possession of a cursed item that gives them demonic powers, but which threatens to possess them. Winning the tournament will grant them a wish from the ruling elite of gods, with the game using ancient Rome for inspiration in many of its elements.

The four playable characters all have completely different backdrops and unique gameplay elements, and you can pick whichever one you want to start with and swap between them with relative ease. So, for example, Queen Theodora’s great wish is to annex a neighbouring country and she’s the only one that can recruit and use battalions of soldiers from cities on the world map.

The young child Cai, who has a magic gem stuck in his palm, is initially just looking to help his dad, but becomes the most adept magic user and can recruit new allies more quickly. Dietrich, the edgelord that everyone constantly describes as incredibly handsome, has a unique magic sword that can teleport him in battle and detect otherwise hidden foes on the world map. Meanwhile, Leda is a musician that is both consumed with revenge and can summon demons with her magic vihuela, while also being happy to put on impromptu stage shows to unlock new abilities for battle.

As well as facing them in the arena you do frequently come across the other characters when exploring the capital city, where you sometimes see the same plot points play out from different perspectives. One side quest, for example, involves getting rid of a demonic monster that’s terrorising the back streets at night, but it’s only when playing as Leda that you realise she’s the one that summoned it. As the game continues, the stories begin to interlink further and the dialogue gains more context if you’ve already seen what a character is talking about from a different angle.

The battles themselves are largely the same as usual and take place on a relatively small grid-based map. They’re very different to a Western game like Star Wars Zero Company, where the rules are very malleable and there’s a lot of playing around with the idea of how much you can move and do in each turn. In Fire Emblem that sort of thing is largely immutable and instead the tactics are based on characters’ different abilities, which can vary widely, and their role-playing stats and weaponry.

There’s a huge range of different character classes and while the traditional rock, paper, scissors style relationship between swords, axes, and lances is reduced almost to the point of irrelevance you definitely don’t want to be putting up flying units against someone with a bow and arrow, or have your best magic user go toe-to-toe with an expert swordsman.

The cursed items that each of the four main characters have grant them unique special moves, but they drain their health if they use them. Employ these Blaze Arts enough and you’ll get a major stat boost, but if you push it too far you’ll then have your maximum health permanently reduced for that battle. So there’s some interesting risk versus reward ideas going on.

Even so, in terms of the core gameplay, relatively little has changed about the battles, but they are impressively fast-paced and exciting, even against more mundane foes. The highlight is the arena matches, which always have a unique gimmick or map layout and keep the game’s focus firmly on the turn-based combat.

This is important because there is a lot of extraneous content, and by a lot we mind such a mind-boggling amount that it makes us question the sanity of the developers. But it does somehow hold together, in large part because you can take most things at your own pace and sideline elements you don’t like so much.

The game has a three part structure, with the first one focused on the tournament. This is subdivided into a dozen different chapters, each of which generally takes two or three hours to play through. Once the preliminary chapters are over with (which are all completely different for each character) you then settle into a more predictable routine where you’re given several in-game weeks of free time between arena bouts, in order to explore the world map and level up.

Sometimes, particularly when the plot starts hotting up towards the end, you have a mandatory goal during this time but mostly it’s up to you to pursue side quests (and longer but still optional paralogues, involving main characters) and explore the world map, which at first is completely blank. Even though this is where most of the repetition is found, in terms of most of the side quests being the same for each character, it’s still great fun and feels surprisingly different thanks to the different agendas and abilities.

Resource gathering, for various different reasons, is a key reward for exploring the map and while this can often be done with simple menu options there’s also a large numbers of dungeons which you can explore from a third person view and, when you come across an enemy, fight them in a traditional Dragon Quest style line battle.

This is the one element of the game that seems notably underdeveloped, not least because enemies usually run off after you’ve only beaten one or two of them, but it’s a decent palette cleanser and one of the most obvious examples of something you can’t believe the developers found time to include, considering how much else is in the game.

The capital city is the largest area to explore from a third person view and the place to recruit new fighters to your team. Traditionally, Fire Emblem has featured permadeath and so in theory you need to constantly bring on new people to make up for losses. However, we recommend turning that off because when they do die the game barely acknowledges it and they always turn up in cut scenes anyway, as if they’re perfectly fine. Plus, it means you don’t have to play so defensively, if you know you’ll only lose someone for that battle and not permanently.

That doesn’t mean there’s no point in recruiting new people, as they’re often of class types you don’t have yet, although you have to have a high enough renown rating and give them gifts and chat them up in a restaurant before they agree to join. The series has been flirting with sub-Persona style elements like this for a while now and it still seems silly and random, but it’s a simple enough procedure that it never manages to irritate too much.

Technically, you can just skip the free time sections entirely and go straight to the next battle, but we don’t think even the most accomplished strategist could succeed without levelling up their characters at least a bit between fights. We also can’t envisage anyone playing all four characters and completing the game in less than 100 hours but in theory it is possible and, importantly, if you just played as one and took them to the end you would be getting a relatively satisfying and complete experience that lasts around 40 hours.

Rather than the underdeveloped social elements, the game’s two main problems remain the same as ever: the bargain basement presentation and the terrible script. The game doesn’t look quite as cheap as Three Houses and Engage but the idea that this is a fellow first party game, running on the same hardware as the Zelda: Ocarina Of Time remake, is hard to credit. With its incredibly basic animation and gaudy cel-shaded visuals it looks like a remastered PlayStation 2 game and while that doesn’t negatively affect the gameplay, it is jarring. Also, the music is awful and often inappropriately chirpy.

The more serious problem, and the one that’s holding the franchise back at this point, is how simplistic and banal the dialogue is. Some of the more secondary characters have literally one personality trait (being obsessed with food or money, for example) and that’s literally all they talk about, which is immersion-shatteringly tiresome.

As you might gather, there is an awful lot of dialogue, which creates inherent problems of quantity versus quality, but our main issue is with the tone. The character designs make everyone look like they’ve just stepped off a carnival float in Rio and yet the game never acknowledges this inherent absurdity, even while it’s stumbling to address serious issues (and throwing in minor, low level swear words, which is very odd).

Tonally, the game either needed to play things completely seriously or lean into the camp that is already present visually. Instead, it’s just scripted like a low grade anime and that limits your ability to engage with the characters and misses a prime opportunity to elevate the game further.

Fire Emblem has plenty of room for further growth, but this feels like the first time one of its home console incarnations has come anywhere close to realising its full potential. The battle system is excellent, the role-playing elements and exploration are great, and the insanity of the plot is very welcome, given how staid and workmanlike the storytelling usually is for these games.

Some fans consider Three Houses to be Fire Emblem’s Zelda: Breath Of The Wild moment, when the franchise excelled itself and broke through to a much wider audience. That may have been at least partially true, in terms of the latter, but Fortune’s Weave feels like the point at which Fire Emblem truly comes into its own as an A-list Nintendo franchise.

Formats: Nintendo Switch 2
Price: £58.99
Publisher: Nintendo
Developer: Intelligent Systems
Release Date: 17th September 2026
Age Rating: 12

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