Fire Emblem: Fortune's Weave is an astonishingly large, whale belly of an RPG. At least, that's what my intuition tells me – I haven't personally finished playing publisher Nintendo's latest installment to its tactical fantasy since it launched on September 17, and it seems no one else has, either.
The Nintendo Switch 2 game's listing on the usually reliable How Long To Beat website is unusually empty; at the moment, there are only two respondents, who report taking anywhere between 74 and 99 hours to finish the game's main story and a selection of side content. But, considering there are only two respondents while fellow RPG Trails in the Sky 2nd Chapter, which also launched September 17, has six poll replies, "99 hours" sounds more like a hopeless plea for salvation than a real experience someone had.
At the same time, truly and fully experiencing every game in the Fire Emblem series requires you sacrifice several years of your life. RPGs have a reputation of being giant, over-puffed affairs that take forever to cut through, and Fire Emblem fits the stereotype: the last game, Three Houses, took an average of 75-and-a-half hours to beat, while the most popular Fire Emblem: Awakening takes a more modest, but still excessive compared to the other chores in your life, 44-ish hours on average.
"Really feels like there's just not enough time to play," says one Reddit commenter who notes they already have dropped 50 hours into Fire Emblem: Fortune's Weave in a thread discussing playtime.
"45 hours in have to stopped to go ti sleep and go back to work," says another haggard Reddit reply. So we may not know exactly how long it takes to beat Fortune's Weave, but a safe assumption for now is – it takes a lot out of you.
Fire Emblem: Fortune's Weave is my ideal RPG sequel and the Three Houses followup I always wanted.
