After 12 hours with Fire Emblem: Fortune's Weave, I can't quite fathom how big this game is
It's like a never-ending well, from what I can tell
After the stunning success of Fire Emblem: Three Houses, absolutely one of the finest RPGs you could possibly hope to play, Fire Emblem: Engage was a bit of an oddity, and I don't think I'm the only one who bounced off its slightly looser storytelling and lighter tone.
Fortune's Weave aims to bring fans like me right back into the fold, and it's the first Fire Emblem game for Switch 2, making it a really interesting release from multiple angles. After a dozen hours with the game, I'm almost agog at how ruddy big it is, and how interestingly it's been structured – this is a Fire Emblem game unlike any that I've played.
Opening the game by taking control of Eshmel, theoretically the main player character, you discover that the world is being consumed by a demonic threat, and that it's seemingly too late to stop it. With the help of a friendly goddess, though, you get the chance to go back in time to influence the past and try to ensure that you have more allies in the future.
It's a bit of timey-wimey time travel plotting, and the early hours of the game don't really clarify how much you'll be able to change, or how you'll alter various heroes' fates, but the crux is this – you get access to four protagonists, each with their own timeline and campaign. You can play one of these campaigns all the way through, if you like, but you can also chop and swap between them, with each having its own save state so that you don't have to progress them all at the same rate.
These four stories are quite different in tone, too, ranging from the optimistic coming-of-age story of Cai and his rural friends to the blood-soaked revenge journey of the bard Leda; they offer quite contrasting experiences. Given that I spent hours getting Cai through various tutorials and opening battles, I'm genuinely baffled by the idea that there are three more full versions of this process to progress – Fortune's Weave could be genuinely massive.
Of course, while the story routes are interesting, they're arguably only part of the equation, with the battles being the main attraction. Based off this early slice of the game I'm actually interested to see if the cadence of fights picks up – I was often only overseeing one or two per hour, with all the other busywork that the game offers up, from exploration to bond-deepening.
Those fights were excellent, though, full of the old-school rock-paper-scissors style management of your troops' weaknesses and strengths, and with some new powers thrown in to spice things up. Big hero characters have combat abilities that cost them HP to cast, and they're unsurprisingly very powerful if you can manage your health properly.
Again, these are only the early hours of the game, though, so if I say that I didn't encounter much challenge in the early fights, you'll have to bear with the fact that the rest of the game could easily underline that I was just fighting tutorial battles, even after a few hours.
Juggling battles and time-keeping actually makes this yet another game that feels Persona-like, which isn't a criticism. It just underlines how influential Atlus' RPG series has been over developers in the last decade, and the similarities between Fortune's Weave and Metaphor: ReFantazio are striking.
Still, after playing through some of the early phases of Fortune's Weave, I'm basically now just champing at the bit to keep going – I have a feeling this could be one of the biggest RPGs released in years, from a sheer content point of view. That means September's busy release schedule is now looking even more improbable, frankly.
