Fire Emblem: Fortune's Weave review: "Deep tactical battles and a compelling narrative make this an ambitious epic where every route matters"

Fire Emblem is no stranger to epic narratives with diverging paths that span generations, whether that's with one or multiple protagonists. Fire Emblem: Fortune's Weave isn't just Intelligent System's most ambitious iteration of these ideas, but one that ties together its disparate threads into one coherent unifying saga that had been lacking from, say, Fire Emblem: Three Houses' four different parallel routes, or Fire Emblem Fates where you had to pay for the privilege of unlocking its true path.

Fire Emblem: Fortune's Weave's bold solution, however, is to almost take a bird's eye view, pulling back to reveal the big picture from the outset, not only from the creation of your custom protagonist (canonically named Eshmel), and meeting with godly figures, but in showing what's at stake by having you cut down the game's four heroes – Cai, Dietrich, Theodora, and Leda – within the opening prologue. When you start, the world has already fallen to dark undead forces with the return of demon god Balor imminent, and your high-level character is seemingly already at the endgame.

But, with the aid of Fortuna, the goddess of fate, you can travel back in time five years to rewrite the fate of each fallen protagonist, turning the tables to fight alongside you in the final battle. The time trip transports Eshmel to the year 1449 in Dagsion, a Rome-inspired city that is holding its Heroic Games where each hero is participating for their own reasons, with the victor granted one wish. As to how each can go on to win the Games before joining together in the final act – well, I wouldn't try to think too hard about that in an already fairly convoluted story that features ancient yet futuristic sci-fi tech and undead warriors of past ages.

Four the win

This narrative approach risks feeling a touch too meta and alienating when you're knowingly manipulating characters like chess pieces. But it's also an improvement on Fire Emblem: Three Houses, where everyone has to awkwardly revolve around your mute avatar. By having Eshmel as just a distant observer in the guise of a Pale Raven (a literal bird's eye view), it means you do get to be more emotionally invested in your respective hero's arcs.

For instance, young Cai enters the Games to rescue his imprisoned father from execution, while Dietrich, hailing from the continent of Fódlan (the setting of Three Houses), has an insatiable thirst for battle. Others have even more complex backstories, such as Theodora, the warrior queen from the Kingdom of Samaris, whose tale begins years earlier as you follow her ascent to the throne following assassination and betrayal that could be lifted from Game of Thrones. But it's musician Leda's story that I ultimately gravitate towards the most, witnessing the destruction of her home and her father's murder, which takes her down an obsessive path of revenge. The Games becomes her route to crossing the culprits off her list.

Since Eshmel is essentially a conduit for these heroes, you're not locked into any one route but can return to the Obelisk Chamber, located in the game's present, before hopping over to another hero's path, giving you the freedom to pursue all the campaigns in parallel if you want. Initially, it's a good way to dip your toes into each route and appreciate the differences in how they play, even if they all share the core grid-based tactical battles and team-building downtime that defines Fire Emblem's flavor of strategy RPG, with the exploration loop of more recent entries that takes you beyond Dagsion's walls to the rest of the Dagdan Empire as an explorable world map.

In Leda's case as a musical performer, she can find towns she can dance at where she'll learn new songs that she can play during battle to buff her allies. As the youngest protagonist, Cai has more to prove but can also speak to other allies to receive mentoring, while Dietrich starts off as a seemingly overpowered warrior, all the more deadly as he has the ability to warp several spaces to attack enemy units further away.

These new skills complement the series' solid tactical foundations giving you all the clear information you need, whether it's bestowing your unit a terrain advantage that also baits the enemy to come to you, or the subtle hum of HD rumble warning you if the flying cavalry you're moving is going to be within the fatal range of an enemy archer. Then, there's always the satisfaction when you manage to trump the battle forecast and deliver a critical that kills your enemy in one go while you come away without a scratch.

Yet, being able to alternate between paths is also a double-edged sword, especially in the early chapters, where you inevitably encounter a lot of the same onboarding quests, including the same cinematics, such as when each respective protagonist enters Dagsion for the first time. There are nonetheless differentiations between each character's perspective, not just in the immediate allies you have and can recruit, but also how your protagonist's social status will determine which parts of the city they will have access to first.

It's intriguing seeing how their respective paths overlap, which might have one team working together in a battle, before their next encounter in the arena sees them fighting each other. But, the slow progression and momentum that comes with rotating between paths meant that, after 20 hours, I ultimately prioritized seeing Leda's path through to completion first. However, this focused approach also doesn't remove the game's pacing issues.

Turn on, turn off

If Fire Emblem: Three Houses was the series taking a leaf out of Persona with its expanded relationship mechanics between party members and activities to undertake in between the main quests, then those elements carry over here, including picking a posse for meals, or training your weapon skills required to promote to higher ranked classes. However, the other Atlus title I can't help but think about is Metaphor: ReFantazio, where your considerable downtime can also be used to explore the wider world, whether that's farming resources, discovering towns with unique wares, or just gaining XP through mini skirmishes.

There's even a nod to Fire Emblem: Shadows of Valentia, with mini dungeons you can explore in third-person. While you take a smaller party than usual in these excursions, that's also because enemy encounters play out as clashes much like classic turn-based command battles. Unfortunately, they lack any of the strategic spark from a Final Fantasy or Persona, and given you can also just skip straight to the automated outcome, I soon find myself defaulting to that for quick XP before moving on. To some extent, these mini dungeons exemplify my biggest problem with Fire Emblem: Fortune's Weave. It's so stuffed with filler that feels too granular compared to the larger goals – I don't want to feel bogged down with busywork while I leave the threads of fate dangling.

Your free time is measured not in calendar days but in turns, which can feel inconsistent. It can take multiple turns just to reach another destination on the world map – more if you run into a skirmish or decide to poke around a newly opened path – but, you also have to awkwardly move one turn at a time, as opposed to having the option to use up, say, three turns immediately to reach a farther location. Even then, most activities within Dagsion itself don't cost turns but party members' motivations, a completely separate resource.

On top of that, you do also have to take the calendar into account as many activities in Dagsion have a limit that refreshes every week. Want to spend more time bonding with your allies, or training up their combat skills? You're going to have to kill time out in the world until a week passes. That then also puts a cap on just how far out you want to be exploring, although initially some paths are gated until your Renown has leveled up from story and side quests you have completed.

Do I spend more time exploring the desert and seeing what secrets I can uncover, or do I hurry back in time for my next chance to have a dinner date? Pushing at the boundaries of resource limitations can be where the best Fire Emblem games shine, and to a point having to balance what's important to me can be compelling – but the web of different resources can feel exhausting to navigate for what often feel like low stakes choices.

Fire Emblem: Fortune's Weave may have dialled back on the series' fanservice, but building relationships remain a core part of the game. It does, however, force you to meet several requirements before you can recruit them, which can feel arbitrary. You can come across a character who has such a high Renown level requirement that you may as well forget about them until you've progressed the story a few chapters, or you meet someone else who technically can be recruited early on except you have to bribe them with enough pointless gifts and activities to raise their bond level first.

But just like friend-bombing, I can't help but feel disappointed by how less emotionally invested I am in my recruits compared to past entries, which is also reflected in how few support conversations party members share between one another, if they have any at all. Even though the real bonds do persist on the battlefield where buffs are applied when units are fighting adjacent to each other, I still find myself pining for the way past games more meaningfully present this by showing a dear ally follow up with an attack, or sometimes jumping in at the last moment to save you from an enemy's fatal blow.

Battle-weary

It frustrates me having to get into the petty things that Fire Emblem: Fortune's Weave does to annoy me at every turn (no pun intended), because whenever you do get back onto the main event, it's a really engrossing yarn. While I'm still accustomed to playing Fire Emblem games portably, the presentation – from the flashy cutscenes to the grandeur of the score – deserve to be experienced on your TV.

The grid-based battles carry over the best of the series, including combat arts that enhance attacks, like improving an axe's accuracy level, at the cost of the weapon's durability, while protagonists' new powerful bespoke Blaze arts come at the cost of their HP but also have a risk/reward where using them more unlocks even more powerful options but can also reduce their maximum HP.

The conceit of the Heroic Games also allows for elaborate arena set pieces, where you might be facing against chariot-riding units, or targeting a flying enemy who's immune to arrows, and there's even an unsubtle homage to a certain wooden horse. Yet, as the opening prologue should indicate, it's not a spoiler to say that these Games are just a warm-up before the stakes ratchet up significantly across the story's lengthy runtime.

There's even a whole mid-section that you have the option to skip entirely, though this was ironically where I found Fortune's Weave at its strongest, as it does away with its bloated systems for back-to-back unadulterated sweeping drama and hardcore battles. And from there, the most devious showdowns keep coming, as goalposts shift mid-battle, with more treacherous debuffing environmental hazards to navigate, bosses with more than one pool of health or even regenerating shields, and the kind of relentless pressure of reinforcements more reminiscent of XCOM.

It's the kind of dastardly challenge that may even have purists abusing the game's unlimited rewinds, while you can also unlock divine blessings that give buffs to the whole party that turn that can often prove decisive.

Fire Emblem: Fortune's Weave has such grand scope and ambition that it might have been the series' high, were it not for its mire of busywork that persists through to the endgame, which doubles down by introducing another kind of grind altogether. Yet, when you wade through some seemingly impossible odds to land the killing blow that ends a gruelling battle in triumph, it does compel me to want to see the other remaining paths through to completion so that I can see this rich tactical tapestry in full. All you need is time, and turns, to spare.