All it takes is one hit to turn a struggling series into a franchise, especially before games started costing a fortune and every new installment had to justify its existence with an astronomical return. That’s how Nintendo has traditionally approached its projects, rather than checking Twitch to see what the most popular game of the week is and throwing a bunch of money at it. Tangent aside, that’s what happened back on the Nintendo 3DS with Fire Emblem Awakening. With one last chance to turn things around, Intelligent Systems threw everything, including the kitchen sink, into it, producing one of the handheld’s best games. Three Houses later brought the series to an even bigger audience on Switch, leading us to a point where a tactical fantasy anime RPG is now one of Nintendo’s tentpole releases. After nearly 140 hours with Fortune’s Weave across every campaign, I can safely say this is a great entry point for newcomers, even if it continues the series’ shift toward a more forgiving experience than its older installments.
The setup sounds like enough material for one game, then decides to become four. In the Dagdan Empire, the Heroic Games promise the winner a single wish, attracting everyone from Cai, a young boy trying to save his imprisoned father, to Dietrich, a swordsman obsessed with battle, Theodora, a queen fighting for her homeland, and Leda, a musician driven by revenge. Their stories intersect, but the real hook is Eshmel, a customizable hero attempting to change the past so these four can help stop the demon god Balor in a ruined future. The story unfolds across three acts, moving from tournament drama to war and eventually a combined final campaign. Unlike Three Houses, you aren’t forced to restart an entirely separate playthrough to see another perspective; you can move between the four stories as they build toward the same ending. It’s a clever solution to branching narratives that makes the enormous cast feel like pieces of one story rather than four unrelated adventures.
Of course, none of that storytelling would matter if the combat weren’t good, and thankfully it is. The familiar grid-based battles are still about positioning, class builds, and knowing when to retreat, but the game has more tricks up its sleeve. The traditional weapon triangle is absent, with different weapons and skills instead rewarding specific matchups. Combat Arts spend weapon durability, while the new Blaze Arts let important characters unleash powerful abilities at the expense of their own health. That trade-off can turn an easy victory into a completely unnecessary disaster. Blessings can provide temporary advantages, and the ability to rewind a mistake returns. Add the choice between Classic permadeath and Casual mode, and it’s easy to see why this is more welcoming than the series used to be. Some longtime players may feel the safety nets take away too much tension, but there is still plenty of strategy in the bigger story battles, particularly the arena maps with their unusual hazards and objectives.
Then there’s everything that happens when you’re not fighting. Like Three Houses, the game wants you to spend time with your army, sharing meals, training, raising support ranks, and recruiting more fighters. Only now you also have a sprawling continent to explore through a turn-based world map, complete with towns, side quests, skirmishes, and dungeons. Each lead brings their own approach to exploration: Cai can farm and attract mounts, Leda performs in taverns, and Theodora commands battalions. You have plenty of freedom between battles, even if it sometimes resembles a second job. Repeating support activities across four storylines gets old, traveling around the map can be slower than it needs to be, and the dungeon Clashes—traditional menu-based RPG fights rather than tactical grid battles—never quite have the depth of the main combat. This is a game that occasionally mistakes having more things to do for having better things to do.
Presentation-wise, Fortune’s Weave is a major improvement over the Switch-era entries, with stronger character models, elaborate battlefields, stylish cutscenes, and a soundtrack that knows exactly when to make a confrontation feel enormous. The voice acting also does a lot of heavy lifting, especially with so many competing motivations. It isn’t some technical powerhouse, though. The game runs at a stable 30 frames per second on Switch 2 rather than 60, which is disappointing, even if it’s hardly fatal for a turn-based RPG. More frustrating is the pacing: every new storyline has its own buildup, and the repeated preparation routines can slow the larger narrative just when you want it to move forward. For all the ambition on display, a little more restraint would have made an already excellent game even better.
Still, nearly 140 hours is a strong argument for how much Fortune’s Weave gets right. It combines the character-driven appeal of Three Houses with some of the sharpest tactical encounters the franchise has offered, then attempts a much bigger interconnected story than either. Not every side activity or experiment lands, and the easier approach won’t please everybody, but those flaws don’t erase the sheer achievement here. Fire Emblem is no longer a series fighting for its survival. With Fortune’s Weave, it’s a series confident enough to take an enormous swing—and, for the most part, land it.
Score: 9 out of 10
Reviewed on Nintendo Switch 2