Fire Emblem: Fortune's Weave Doesn't Have to Be a Slog
Do what you want, when you want
I admire Fire Emblem: Fortune's Weave approach to bigness. What stood out to me during the review period and since is how many ways it lets you tailor free time and some battles to your needs, even if that tailoring means skipping certain things entirely. So I was surprised after Fortune's Weave launched on Sept. 17 to see a rising number of complaints around the internet about how oppressively big and unnecessarily bloated the game is, as if it took the wrong lessons from Three Houses and then multiplied them. It can feel overwhelmingly big, but it doesn't have to be a padded time-waster if you don't want it to be.
Fortune's Weave throws a lot at you when you get free time between Heroic Games matches. The world map is gigantic and enticingly blank, tempting you to explore every corner. There's a bunch of side quests. Monsters roam, dungeons loom, and treasures idle in their designated spots, waiting for you to find them. If you spent every turn of free time exploring and fighting and pulling vegetables out of the ground, yes, Fortune's Weave would be an unbearable, fatuous game, Nintendo's concession to the worst tendencies of modern game design.
But the idea is to just do what you need to do, when you need to do it. If you don't need a specific kind of ore, ignore the dungeons. (Well, maybe explore some of them, since you can find some really good cursed weapons there.) All those search spots exist for quests and trades with Vandhal merchants, they aren’t a mandate in their own right. If a quest isn't sending you to a certain part of the map, ignore it until you need to go there. And make sure you use the local carriage to get back and forth quickly. If you've done all that and still have 100 turns of free time left, skip that and do auto-activities. It's a completely valid way to approach the game. You pass over empty time and can get skill, class ranks, and character experience or just a heap of gold. Miss recruiting a character? Replay a single chapter to get them on board or do a second (faster, easier) Flame Lord’s route and get them there. None of the characters or paralogues are strictly “missable” here in the same way as previous Fire Emblem games.
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Admittedly, it's no wonder people look at the space between battles in Fortune's Weave and think they have to do everything. Most big-budget games push you to spend as much time trying to do everything as possible — collecting whiskey bottles, finding cats, searching for treasure, ticking all the things off a list so you can say you completed the game, regardless of whether you enjoyed the process. The length of that list is typically a selling point elsewhere, so I'm not surprised Fortune's Weave initially comes across to some players like a bigger, worse Three Houses.
Nintendo hasn't helped that impression, either. Nowhere in the pre-release demo segments or post-launch info drops did Nintendo publish an overview of how to handle the vastness of free time. That's hardly surprising, even if it is a bit counterintuitive. The way Fortune's Weave handles its social and management sim aspects is a correction of the inescapable drudgery in Three Houses' first half. But presenting it as such, while it might be informative, would be acknowledging past mistakes in game design, and Nintendo never acknowledges mistakes.
Fortune's Weave is what you make of it. If you're tired of exploring the map or doing random battles, you can totally just not do that, and the game won't punish you. If you don’t feel like doing Bird Time or temple duties on a given week, you truly do not have to. It's almost literally impossible to miss things, and you've got the freedom to do what you want with it all.