Fire Emblem: Fortune’s Weave reviews went out this morning, and from the sound of it, Nintendo and Intelligent Systems have put together an excellent, if exhaustingly long, new entry in the tactics RPG series.
Following 2023’s somewhat divisive Fire Emblem Engage, Fortune’s Weave is shaping up to be a more widely acclaimed successor to Three Houses, the Switch release which took the world by storm back in 2019. Reviewers are praising the game’s massive scope, with full playthroughs reportedly ranging anywhere from 70 to well over 100 hours to play through all its routes. Whether that’s a daunting challenge or an exciting prospect is in the eye of the beholder, but it sounds like Fortune’s Weave is a whale of a game with a lot of challenging tactical battles, social sim goodness, and political intrigue to sink your teeth into.
That said, those yearning for the more traditional Fire Emblem experience without all the social sim elements (though you can skip them this time around) and a new focus on exploration might come away disappointed with some of Fortune’s Weave’s various swings, but there is also so much game here that you’re bound to get a lot of whatever you do come to the series for. Here’s what critics are saying.
Game Informer
The scope of Fire Emblem: Fortune’s Weave allows it to take massive swings at surprising, cool concepts and mechanics that feel fresh and interesting for the series. Packing them all into a single game might have made this the most intimidating entry to jump into since Fates, but putting it all in a single package with some excellent quality-of-life options, like cross-path progression boosts and side quest clears, helps smooth out the road for those who want to see everything.
Eurogamer
Ultimately, Fire Emblem: Fortune’s Weave represents the pinnacle of Intelligent Systems’ achievements. It plaits a tapestry from all of the series’ various highest highs, somehow managing to entwine the storytelling prowess of Three Houses with the clean, satisfying combat of Engage, threading a bonus party-based battle system from the 3DS title Fire Emblem Echoes: Shadows of Valentia into a world map that’s bigger and better than anything we’ve seen in the series to date. […] Fortune’s Weave has an obsession with scale; but it never loses sight of the minutiae because of it – this is a game with heart, and brain. A shining jewel in the strategy RPG genre, and an essential one for the Switch 2. I can’t wait to play another 80 hours.
Giant Bomb
Fire Emblem: Fortune’s Weave is a gigantic game, and its vastness only steals a little bit of the spotlight from the tactics that I come to these games for. Thankfully, it finds its footing on that front and delivers some unforgettable battles. An excellent soundtrack, beautiful visuals, and a surprisingly strong gameplay loop that connects one fight to the next cements this as one of the best on Switch 2. All of that is weighed down slightly by a vacuous plot that you will struggle to care about.
IGN
Fire Emblem: Fortune’s Weave builds upon its strategic arts in ways I couldn’t have anticipated. It’s never satisfied to make me grow only as a battlefield tactician, or only in my ability to manage my time between skirmishes wisely, but both in perfect harmony. Every time I turned around, I was being given more challenges to face and more tools to master in order to overcome them. The many unique twists of each hero’s story path had me eager to see all the ways those journeys differed from each other, making the grand culmination in the final act hit so damn well. Planning out my expeditions across an imposing map became an unexpected highlight that not only hooked me, but rewarded my persistence by continuing to expand all the ways I could direct my armies as I tried to stay on top of newly emerging threats. The scope of both its formidably challenging battles and intricate management systems would be wildly ambitious for one path, let alone spread across four – yet somehow Fortune’s Weave only gets better and better each time you guide its captivating heroes into the colosseum and far beyond.
Polygon
Fire Emblem: Fortune’s Weave is dazzling as much for the scope of its ambition as for how adroitly developer Intelligent Systems executes that vision. It’s a gigantic turn-based tactics game that, despite a few missteps, carries itself with grace and purpose. And it’s a confident declaration for a studio, and a genre, that for decades have struggled to find where they fit — or if they even have a place — in modern entertainment. In short, it’s one of Nintendo’s greats.
Gfinity
Fire Emblem: Fortune’s Weave is a visually stunning departure that trades the series’ beloved tactical combat for heavy JRPG exploration. While the core grid battles are brilliant, they often get buried under clunky real-time dungeons and tedious open-world busywork. It is an ambitious, beautiful experiment, but strategy purists may find themselves left out in the cold.
Nintendo Life
On the whole, Fire Emblem: Fortune’s Weave is dense, deep, and really rather delightful. It can sometimes feel like a bit too much of a good thing, with the pacing slipping in the later chapters, thanks to an unnecessarily complicated protagonist hierarchy and some grindy map management, but the battles have never felt better, and there’s no knocking the sheer amount to do.
RPGSite
For me, Fire Emblem: Fortune’s Weave ended up being something of an inversion of Three Houses. I loved the characters and world of that game, and thought the tactical gameplay was just fine. For Fortune’s Weave, I spent so many sessions just unable to put the game down. The time management system has been designed to satisfyingly feed into just about everything you do, and battles feel polished, stressful, and exciting. It doesn’t nail everything that it sets out to do, but I think this is an exceptionally strong SRPG for most of the run time. I’ll just need to take a long break from huge RPGs to try to get my sleep schedule back on track.
Checkpoint Gaming
Despite the damper the uneven pacing puts on the overall experience, I still recommend Fortune’s Weave with the caveat that it comes with a heavy price tag measured in hours. Everything else– story, characters, gameplay, art direction, and voice acting- is good to great, and I will no doubt return to complete the other characters’ storylines; I will just need a very long break first.
