Fire Emblem: Fortune’s Weave balances four paths with repetition
Developed over time first seen 2 months ago
Nintendo’s Fire Emblem: Fortune’s Weave, due for Switch 2 on 17 September, allows players to follow four protagonists’ stories in parallel rather than committing to one factional route. After 26 hours, The Verge’s reviewer praises its strategy and role-playing systems and has grown attached to the characters, but says the ambitious format is weakened by extensive repetition across the separate paths.
The story starts in a world devastated by a revived demon lord, before the player travels back to the Heroic Games to change the past and recruit four weapon-wielding heroes. Each has distinct motivations, powers and cursed artefacts, yet by chapter five of each route the reviewer had repeatedly encountered the same quests, dungeons, battles and cutscenes; intersecting storylines may later justify some overlap, but the repetition has made progress feel laborious.
- Fortune’s Weave launches for Switch 2 on 17 September.
- Its four-route structure repeatedly reuses content.
- Strong strategy gameplay keeps the reviewer engaged.
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Fire Emblem is Nintendo’s long-running series of fantasy strategy games, in which players move characters around battle maps and make story choices between fights. Its games usually combine military conflict, political rivalries and relationships between a large cast of characters.
The 2019 game Fire Emblem: Three Houses divided its story between three rival groups, with players choosing one route and seeing events from that side. Playing the other routes meant starting again with a different leader and perspective, though parts of the story overlapped.
Fortune’s Weave uses four main characters instead, and asks players to follow their stories alongside one another. Its setting centres on an attempt to change a past disaster, while the heroes’ powerful weapons are also a danger to the people carrying them.
Both sides, in good faith
The strongest fair case each way — we don't pick a winner.
The case for
Allowing players to follow four protagonists in parallel is a genuinely ambitious way to give a strategy role-playing game a broader cast, intersecting perspectives and a more cohesive overall narrative than mutually exclusive faction routes. Reusing key events can reinforce how different characters experience the same crisis, make the world feel interconnected and let Nintendo concentrate its development effort on richer tactical systems, character writing and meaningful variations in context rather than four wholly separate campaigns.
The case against
If players must repeatedly complete substantially the same quests, dungeons, battles and cutscenes, the structure risks treating their time as less valuable than narrative ambition. Separate routes should offer sufficiently distinct gameplay and story developments to reward curiosity; otherwise, repetition can weaken pacing, make progress feel like obligation and leave the game less replayable in practice than a more focused campaign or genuinely divergent paths.
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Originally published by The Verge as “Nintendo’s next Fire Emblem has a bold new structure”.