Fire Emblem: Fortune's Weave took me 121 hours to finish, and boy, did it feel like a journey. This is an enormous game, one that occasionally seems determined to find the outer limit of just how much Fire Emblem can contain. The remarkable thing is how rarely I resented the time it asked of me. Its scale comes not from endlessly stretching the same ideas, but from a game that keeps finding more things it wants to do with them.
That scale is clearest in the way Fortune's Weave structures its campaign. Part One is effectively four separate campaigns, each following one of its playable leads, while Part Two splinters again into something similar. Rather than presenting a long, linear succession of maps, the game repeatedly gives you room to decide how you tackle what is in front of you, encouraging experimentation with route order, characters, and builds. It did not feel like following one very long road so much as repeatedly choosing how I wanted to travel through an unusually broad one.
Fortune's Weave gets much of its mileage from repetition with variation. Its four Part One campaigns cover the same stretch of the same year, but Eshmel's presence alters the course of events around whichever Flame Lord you follow; you're not simply replaying one conflict from four camera angles. Leda's story is driven by an intensely personal, comparatively selfish desire for revenge, while Theodora fights for her kingdom and its devotion to a goddess who isn't favoured by the empire's central government. Both are forceful, ambitious people, but those shared qualities produce very different stories.
The mechanical separation between routes is less elegant. Each army gets ideas that give it an identity, but Fortune's Weave is oddly strict about keeping them apart. Theodora can recruit Battalions, returning from Three Houses, while Cai's army can care for its mounts to unlock new skills; neither system is available to the other Part One armies. They eventually come together in the end, but playing the routes back-to-back makes their temporary absence conspicuous. Why can't Theodora feed her horse? Why?! Learning an interesting new wrinkle only to lose it for the next several dozen hours can make experimentation feel artificially rationed.
That structural ambition would mean considerably less if the battles filling those campaigns weren't worth the time. At its core, this is an excellent showing of Fire Emblem's familiar tactical combat, but it is unusually willing to get a little unhinged. One Arena battle gives every unit infinite automatic revivals while two sides race to kill a set number of enormous monsters first. One particularly memorable side quest has you chasing huge birds that steal valuable items while a separate group of thieves tries to beat you to those same prizes and escape. Fortune's Weave understands the satisfaction of carefully moving units around a grid, but rarely mistakes familiarity for a reason to play things safe.
For all that experimentation, the difficulty level is mostly fair. Each route offers plenty of straightforward recruits, often pointed out by the game's hint system. This means difficult maps rarely leave you feeling as though you missed some obscure prerequisite for success. Some late-game battles are considerably meaner, particularly from awkward starting positions, and the fondness for reinforcements eventually crosses from pressure into irritation. Even then, breaking through one of its nastier encounters produces exactly the fist-pumping satisfaction Fire Emblem is built for.
Its most generous concession can almost become a problem of its own. Fortuna's ability to rewind time has no usage limit, meaning virtually any tactical mistake can be undone without consequence. That removes frustration, but it makes perfectionism dangerously tempting. I caught myself rewinding not because somebody had died or a turn had collapsed, but because one inaccurate attack missed. When every small imperfection can be erased, it becomes remarkably easy to treat anything short of the ideal turn as something that needs correcting.
You have plenty of freedom in developing the cast, but rarely need to wonder what any unit is actually for. Characters arrive with affinities and strengths that strongly suggest their intended roles, even if there is room to push some in stranger directions. Class progression works much as it did in Three Houses, with units taking tests to unlock classes they can then freely switch between, while skills offer similar room for fine-tuning. In practice, though, I found the optimisation tools so reliable that I happily let the game handle the minutiae in almost every case.
سەرچاوەی فەرمی بە زمانی ئینگلیزی: https://www.thegamer.com/fire-emblem-fortunes-weave-review-an-embarrassment-of-riches/
