Fire Emblem Fortunes Weave is one of the biggest and best Switch 2 exclusives yet
A little more than a year into its lifespan, the Nintendo Switch 2 has almost everything you could ask for. We’ve gotten a great 3D platformer from the core Mario team, the triumphant return of Star Fox, a bevy of excellent third-party ports, and a library full of older games that look and run fantastic on the new console.
But one thing it’s been lacking is a new, exclusive, original RPG to sink dozens and dozens of hours into. I feel the pain of people who have been begging for this since launch; I put a collective few hundred hours into the Xenoblade Chronicles series on Switch 1, and while The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild is not strictly an RPG, it was a huge game you could devote your entire life to right when the older console came out in 2017.
Without beating around the bush, Fire Emblem: Fortune’s Weave fixes that problem. Developer Intelligent Systems’ latest entry in the long-running series of tactics RPGs is almost exactly what I wanted out of the true follow-up to 2019’s Three Houses: A big, dense tactics game with memorable characters, a setting with lots of cool stories to tell, and multiple ways to experience it all.
While Fortune’s Weave falls short of Three Houses in some respects, it outshines its predecessor in others, and gives Switch 2 owners exactly what they’ve been missing since last June.
Fire Emblem weaves a compelling, if occasionally scattershot, tale
Part of what endeared Three Houses to so many, including myself, was its grandiose story that followed a few dozen characters in a large-scale conflict across a period of years. Fortune’s Weave is broadly similar, though it carves its own path, for better and worse.
After a relatively quick prologue, you’re asked to choose from one of four protagonists for the first part of the story, which revolves around a large martial tournament in Dagsion, the capital city of the massive Dagdan Empire. The winner of the tournament will have one wish granted, and naturally, each of our heroes has their own motive for being there. Leda is a dancer hell-bent on revenge for the death of her father, Cai is a teenage boy who wants to rescue his father from prison and certain execution, Dietrich is a foreign warrior who live to fight increasingly stronger opponents, and Theodora is the newly crowned queen of a semi-autonomous nation within the empire with distinct cultural needs.
There isn’t a dud among the crowd here, which is one of Fortune’s Weave‘s strengths. I like all four protagonists a great deal, and thoroughly enjoyed playing through all four of their campaigns. What makes it work is that each of them gives the player roughly 25 percent of the information they need to piece together what’s going on in the grander story, while showing off different parts of the very cool setting. Leda’s campaign takes you through Dagda’s seedy underworld, Cai’s exposes some of the underlying tensions in its system of worship, Dietrich’s illuminates the continent’s relationship with wider Fire Emblem lore, and Theodora’s adeptly sets up the latter half of the story.
Credit: Nintendo
Where things get a little jarring is that the tournament only represents a third of the story. Parts two and three almost tell entirely different stories of their own, though the events of each part do lead into the next. My problems begin here, as I found more to chew on and enjoy in the tournament arc than in the arcs that come after it. I became invested in each of the four protagonists’ individual struggles, only for those struggles to largely get resolved and fall by the wayside about halfway through the game in favor of something grander and a little more conventional.
In contrast, from beginning to end, Three Houses had a pretty consistent thematic throughline about class stratification and the role of the church in that game’s setting from beginning to end. Fortune’s Weave touches on a lot of different things, like the relationship between the Dagdan populace and its gods to the way that seemingly minor decisions about imperial land transfers can destroy the lives of regular people. But ultimately, there isn’t one single thread carrying you all the way through the story, and it’s a slightly lesser experience for it.
You’re doing tactics even when you’re not doing tactics in Fortune’s Weave
Credit: Nintendo
Of course, Fortune’s Weave is a video game, so there’s more to it than just watching cutscenes and pondering themes. As with every other Fire Emblem game, it’s a turn-based tactics game with a strong emphasis on individual units in your army having their own personalities and relationships with one another that you nurture as you go along. That includes doing things like inviting people out to meals or to theatrical performances in order to increase their bonds with each other, which in turn has benefits in battle.
Battles work about the same as they always have. Each unit has its own class, which dictates what kinds of weapons and abilities they can use, as well as how many spaces they can move on the grid-based map. Different maps will have their own bespoke hazards and objectives, and these become increasingly challenging to work around as the game progresses. I am honestly not much of a tactics game guy, but I found myself consistently engaged with what Fortune’s Weave threw at me. Some of the later battles are so large in scale and complex in strategy that I found myself legitimately exhausted by the time they were over, in a good way.
When you’re not engaging in these chess-like battle sequences, Fortune’s Weave throws almost an entire other game’s worth of things to do at you. Aside from the aforementioned character-building activities, there is a board-game-like world map to traverse, and a limited number of turns with which to traverse it, depending on which part of the story you’re in.
Credit: Nintendo
I really, really liked this aspect of Fortune’s Weave, as it adds a second layer of strategizing on top of the tactical thinking you have to do in battles. It pays off to look at the world map and decide what you want to accomplish before the story deadline, and how you plan on accomplishing it without running out of time. Each protagonist also has unique actions only they can perform on the map, such as Dietrich’s ability to conjure powerful opponents and Theodora’s ability to recruit soldiers for her army in towns and cities. These serve to make each campaign feel a little different from one another, even when what you’re doing is broadly the same across all of them.
All of that expands even more in the third part of the story, as you’ll eventually have to command several squads on the map at once. At that point, Fortune’s Weave feels like a tactics game on top of another tactics game, and it’s absolutely riveting. I love being forced to think strategically outside of battles, and there’s plenty of that here.
My only real issue with this aspect of the game is that one of the main activities on the world map becomes a little tiresome over time. I’m talking about dungeons, which are short, little areas you explore in third-person to find treasure and fight enemies. Dungeons are extremely useful for leveling up several units at a time, and the treasures hidden within can be game-changing. But the conventional RPG-style combat in these dungeons is fairly simple, and over time, I found myself opting to just let the game auto-battle my way through all of them.
These dungeons typically don’t take longer than about 10 minutes to complete, but you might find yourself doing the same ones multiple times before the story is over, and that’s kind of a bummer. I respect the ambition of adding these onto an already very large and experience-rich game, but they’re not the best part of it.
The structure fixes the biggest problem with Three Houses
Quickly, I’d like to mention that Fortune’s Weave allows you to play through each of the four protagonist campaigns in parallel with one another. You can bookmark and suspend one and go to another at any time with no penalty. This stands in contrast with Three Houses, which had several branching paths in the story, but no real way to see everything in one playthrough.
Fortune’s Weave is structured in such a way that playing through each campaign is not only encouraged but also extremely rewarding. Not only do you get the full breadth of the story that way, but you can bring the armies you’ve recruited in each campaign into the game’s exceptionally challenging final act. I sincerely cannot imagine finishing this game without doing all of that. It just wouldn’t be a great experience, narratively or mechanically.
Be ready to lock in for the long haul with this one
Credit: Nintendo
Fire Emblem: Fortune’s Weave took me a clean 100 hours to finish. Yes, that says 100. This is a beast of a game, almost as if it’s trying to over-compensate for the lack of a big Switch 2 RPG up to this point. Fortune’s Weave does earn that length, as you’ll get as much out of it as you put into it, but the fact that it’s so long means it isn’t for the faint of heart.
One minor disappointment I should acknowledge before closing out here is that Fortune’s Weave is not exactly a visual showcase for the Switch 2 hardware. Character models are largely excellent, thanks in part to outstanding art direction, but environments are pretty plain. It is also one of the few first-party Nintendo games to be locked to 30 frames per second, despite looking worse than several games that run more smoothly. This is not a particularly huge deal, as frame rate does not impact playability in turn-based tactics games to any real extent, but it does stand out among Nintendo’s other Switch 2 titles.
Despite a handful of shortcomings, Fire Emblem: Fortune’s Weave is that beefy, juicy Switch 2 RPG you’ve been looking for. It marries great character work with demanding tactics, battles, and a lot of things to do when you’re not engaging in said battles. Even with its somewhat unfocused story and some kinda boring dungeons, this is one of the best Switch 2 games yet, and one of the best games of 2026 so far.
