As a mild Fire Emblem fan, I was looking forward to a new entry in the series for the Switch 2. I loved Awakening and dug parts of Three Houses. By "parts," I mean anything that didn’t involve the social aspects or the schools. I like Fire Emblem battles for their turn-based strategy that can wipe out your entire party with one wrong move, but Three Houses still mostly stuck to the tried-and-true formula I really resonated with.
This time, Intelligent Systems basically threw out the rulebook for Fire Emblem: Fortune's Weave. And honestly, it's a massive shock to the system how far they leaned into storytelling over gameplay.
I never played Engage despite pre-ordering day one, so I have no frame of reference, but even compared to Three Houses, Fire Emblem: Fortune's Weave went down a path that might not sit well with everybody.
If you expect the slow, methodical political table-setting that defined the opening hours of previous games, prepare for the opposite. The game drops you into a frantic action sequence right from the start. It feels way more like an episode of Attack on Titan than a traditional politically heavy tactical RPG. You get thrown into a sci-fi setup that relies heavily on time travel. There's zero slow burn here. The developers are clearly trying to break down the niche barrier.
They want a mainstream audience, and they want them now.
The presentation does a lot of heavy lifting to pull this off. Cell-shaded character models look absolutely gorgeous on the new hardware. The cinematic flourishes genuinely elevate the story, and fully voiced anime cutscenes keep things moving with real urgency. During the opening chapters, you won't find the usual dialogue bloat or agonizing downtime between major events. It just shoves you directly into high-stakes situations.
It truly feels like watching a premium anime series.
But once the dust settles, you realize Fortune's Weave is a completely bizarre mix of ideas. The most jarring shift is how blatantly the game pivots into traditional Japanese RPG territory.
The central school hub from Three Houses? Completely gone.
Instead of wandering a static courtyard, you now explore bustling towns in third person. It sounds like a massive upgrade that gives the world an impressive feeling of scale. You can pick up side contracts off local notice boards, gather materials for crafting, and even plant seeds to run a farm on the map.
The problem is that most of this lacks any real substance. I spent about twenty minutes running back and forth to plant seeds and manage a farm, stopping halfway through to ask myself why I was playing a farming simulator instead of commanding an army. Plenty of quests for the countless NPCs litter the map, but it's mostly window dressing.
If you love Fire Emblem for the tactical gameplay rather than the personality management, none of this will tick your boxes. It feels like busywork designed to pad the runtime, not a meaningful evolution of the core loop.
Things get even weirder when you actually step into a dungeon.
When you run into enemies while exploring, the game triggers active Clashes. This completely ditches the traditional grid tactics for real-time battles. You can set up paired Attack Links or just flip on auto-battle to clear out low-level mobs. It's a neat concept, but the execution feels incredibly clunky. To enter these dungeons, you first have to navigate a dedicated preparation menu screen. Slapping a menu between real-time town exploration and a real-time dungeon completely breaks the seamless flow.
The game also borrows from titles like Final Fantasy XV by adding rest spots. You stop to cook food, manage gear, and heal up. It gives the adventure a grounded road trip atmosphere. Which is cool, but it pushes the actual strategy elements even further into the background.
When you finally drop back onto the classic tactical grid, you see flashes of pure brilliance. The overworld map is where you find the traditional combat the series is known for, and the mechanics here are fantastic.
Resource management is noticeably tighter this time around. Combat Arts chew through your weapon durability at an alarming rate. You really have to think twice before burning through high-tier swords and lances on regular grunts.
To balance this, the game introduces Blaze Arts. These powerful abilities consume your unit's actual health points instead of weapon durability for high-damage moves. It adds a brilliant layer of tense risk and reward to every single turn. If you mess up and a favored unit gets swarmed in Classic permadeath mode, you can trigger Overblaze. This gives them a temporary stat surge to help pull them out of a desperate position. It's a clutch lifeline when your tactical positioning falls apart.
The glaring issue is that the game simply doesn't offer enough of these pure strategy moments.
Dungeon exploration and the story constantly push their way to the front. Even features that sound great for strategy fans fall flat. The gladiator arena for the heroic games is used throughout the campaign, but I never clicked with it. It ends up being just another piece of window dressing for standard battles rather than a standout feature that actually tests your tactical skills.
The narrative structure is equally divided. You play as Eshmel, a resurrected hero fighting off Risen Dead armies in the present day. Eshmel is a fantastic protagonist. He gives pure aura, and controlling him in the futuristic sections is easily the highlight of the story. I honestly wanted the whole story to happen here.
Everything revolves around the Obelisk Chamber, a narrative hub where you travel back to past timelines. You get to experience other warriors' stories, rescue them right before their canonical deaths, and recruit them to your current roster. It's a cool way to alter your team dynamic. You can hop in and out of different campaigns if you want a change of pace.
There are so many story beats and character moments I could run through, but for review, we can't touch on them. Needless to say, FE lore hounds among us are going to eat well here.
But outside your main heroes, the general party recruitment process bogs down the pacing.
Recruiting happens in the hub areas, not on the battlefield. You have to navigate conversations and pick specific dialogue options to earn permanent stat boosts and shift relationships. You end up spending a massive amount of time with every single character you go back to recruit.
All in - I just got bored of the historical heroes' stories. The present-day stuff with Eshmel is so much more compelling. Being forced to constantly step away from that to play through a substantial campaign for each recruitable hero became a chore.
Fortune's Weave is a massive investment, but it's just too long. There's a whole lot of game here, and some of it will definitely take time to land with series veterans. The blend of classic grid tactics, time-bending recruitment, and full-on JRPG exploration is the most radical shift the series has attempted in years.
But stripping away the slice-of-life downtime for active exploration just trades one type of bloat for another.
Die-hard fans will probably dig the references and enjoy seeing all the characters' stories play out. But for casual fans, or anyone who plays this series strictly for combat, it's an investment that probably won't pay off if you don't connect with the cast.
It's an interesting experiment. But the tactical core deserved better.
