// THE VERGE — MODA & SOCIETÀ
Nintendo opens up Fire Emblem with the gigantic Fortune’s Weave
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As Fire Emblem has gotten bigger, it’s gotten more ambitious, yet the new game is as engrossing as ever.
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Nintendo has gotten quite good at making open-ended games. The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild upended the idea of what a Zelda game could be by giving the player free rein to tackle any part of the map, a philosophy iterated upon with Tears of the Kingdom. On the Switch 2 this idea expanded to Mario Kart World and Donkey Kong Bananza. Now, Nintendo has brought this philosophy to Fire Emblem with Fortune’s Weave. It works really well; with its many ways to progress through the game and tailor teams to your liking, Fortune’s Weave has become my favorite game on the Switch 2 so far.
Fortune’s Weave’s structure is a big reason why it feels so open: Instead of locking you to one path, Fortune’s Weave is designed so that you can experience multiple stories in one massive playthrough. There are four main hero routes and a final act that ties things together, giving you several opportunities to start over from scratch and master the dizzying amount of mechanics and meta-strategy involved in winning fights and building up your group. From early on you can swap between heroes and storylines at will, and it’s even possible to merge stats from characters you use in multiple routes to make one supercharacter later. The systems go really deep, but Fortune’s Weave gives you many ways to customize things exactly to your liking.
The game is split into a few sections. There’s a brief prologue that introduces the main protagonist and your mission to save the world and defeat an evil demon lord. To aid in your quest, you can recruit the four missing heroes from the recent past by playing through their individual stories in two parts. Part one features the hero of your choice as they compete in a grand tournament in the city of Dagsion, while part two carries over your hero’s squad to fight in a war. If you complete a hero’s path, you can take them and any of their allies into part three, where the true protagonist leads an effort to fight the undead.
Parts one and three give you a lot of leeway to train up for battles and build your teams as you’d like. You’ll quickly fall into a rhythm of splitting time between the main story battles, running around Dagsion to prepare for fights, enlist allies, and explore a vast map to gather resources and fight in small skirmishes. There’s a calendar system that counts down the days toward the next main story event, but you have the freedom to spend your days however you’d like. I fell into a comforting pattern where I’d explore a map for one in-game week, come back to Dagsion to complete weekly activities like training up skills and sharing meals with people in town to build rapport, and then back head out to the map to tackle more quests or grind out some XP. (Part two is pretty much all about battles, as you’re mostly just playing one big fight after another with very little pre-battle prep.)