Fire Emblem Fortune’s Weave brings open-world design to tactical gameplay

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Nintendo has released Fire Emblem: Fortune's Weave, a tactical role-playing game that borrows the open-ended design philosophy the company has applied elsewhere on Switch and Switch 2, from The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild and Tears of the Kingdom through to Mario Kart World and Donkey Kong Bananza. Rather than pushing players down a single fixed storyline, the game is built around a short prologue followed by four separate hero campaigns, each split into a tournament-style opening act set in the city of Dagsion and a subsequent war-focused act, before everything converges in a final chapter in which the recruited heroes unite against an undead threat. Players can move between the four hero paths largely as they choose, and characters used across multiple routes can have their stats carried over and combined, allowing for a good deal of team customisation. The game is due out on 17 September.

Reviewers describe a gameplay rhythm built around a calendar system: rather than being forced through events on a strict timetable, players are free to spend in-game days exploring a large map, gathering resources, fighting smaller skirmishes, training units and building relationships with allies over shared meals, before returning to the main story battles. One reviewer noted that the middle, war-focused act is more battle-heavy with comparatively little preparation time, in contrast to the more open first and third acts. Several critics remarked on the sheer scale of the game as a result of this structure — one outlet reported a full playthrough taking around 161 hours, while another compared the experience to getting two full games in one package, warning that a newcomer could spend a month on it without finishing.

Aggregated review scores put Fortune's Weave at 89 on Metacritic and 90 on OpenCritic, making it, by Metacritic's measure, jointly the second-best-reviewed entry in the Fire Emblem series alongside 2019's Three Houses, behind only 2013's Fire Emblem: Awakening. A number of outlets awarded top marks, including perfect 10/10 and five-star reviews, with praise focused on how the game blends elements from across the series' history — the character-driven storytelling associated with Three Houses, the streamlined combat of Engage, and a party-based battle system reminiscent of Fire Emblem Echoes: Shadows of Valentia — within a considerably larger explorable world than previous instalments. Reviewers also highlighted the single save-file system, which lets players revisit and replay any previously completed chapter from a snapshot of their army at that point, as a notable solution to managing the game's branching structure without sacrificing replayability.

Not every assessment was uniformly glowing, and outlets differed in where they placed their emphasis. Some reviewers who scored the game highly nonetheless flagged issues: one review awarding 8/10 praised the combat and side content but noted that pacing suffered in later chapters, pointing to a convoluted hierarchy among the four protagonists and some repetitive map management. Another review, also settling on 8/10, praised the tactical battles but was notably more critical of the narrative, describing the plot as thin and the writing as underwhelming — a markedly different take from reviewers who singled out the storytelling as a highlight. A further review welcomed the game's ambition but suggested its very length occasionally worked against it, while another otherwise enthusiastic critique noted disappointment specifically with the game's support (relationship-building) mechanics. Taken together, the reviews agree strongly that Fortune's Weave is a large, ambitious and mechanically rich addition to the series, even as they disagree on whether its narrative and pacing fully live up to its scale.

• www.theverge.com
• www.ign.com
• www.polygon.com
• www.nintendolife.com