// THE VERGE — GAMING
Nintendo’s next Fire Emblem has a bold new structure
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I’ve played hours of Fortune’s Weave on the Switch 2, but I’m struggling with repetition.
I’ve played hours of Fortune’s Weave on the Switch 2, but I’m struggling with repetition.
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Nintendo’s first Fire Emblem game for the Switch 2 is structured in an ambitious way. Unlike the well-loved Three Houses, a strategy game that tasked you with pledging allegiance to a specific faction and seeing their story all the way to the end, the new Fortune’s Weave lets you swap between four heroes and their compatriots so you can tackle multiple storylines at once. With Three Houses, I only ever played one path and never went back to experience the others. I hoped that the new game’s structure would be a way to see everyone’s stories in one playthrough.
After playing 26 hours of Fortune’s Weave, which launches on September 17th, I’ve really started to bond with each of the four heroes. But while their stories are different, I’ve been disappointed to find that the basic structure of each path is so far essentially the same — even down to repeated quests, battles, and cutscenes. This has been especially disheartening because the strategy and RPG elements the series is known for have so far been excellent.
Fortune’s Weave takes a bit to get going. Initially, you control a fifth protagonist in a world ruined by a revived demon lord, and you play through some initial battles to teach you mechanics and set up the story. The other four main characters, who each wield powerful weapons, are absent. Your mission? Time travel back to the Heroic Games, an event a few years prior that the four heroes participated in, and change the past so that they can come to your aid.