Fire Emblem: Fortune’s Weave Actor on Dietrich and Fabio: ‘His First Real Love’
A beast no more
With a sprawling cast of more than 60 playable characters, Fire Emblem: Fortune’s Weave is positively stuffed with dramatic moments and unexpected plot twists. And perhaps the very best of them comes in the final chapter of Dietrich’s Part One route, as the battle-loving warrior faces his most daunting enemy yet.
During this showdown, there’s a jaw-dropping exchange between Dietrich and his right-hand man, the eccentric scholar Fabio. (If you’ve seen it, you’ll know the one I’m talking about. And don’t be surprised if we continue talking about it through awards season.) Actor Jimmie Yamaguchi, who plays Fabio in Fortune’s Weave, took Polygon behind the scenes of this memorable moment in a recent interview.
While Yamaguchi vividly remembers his time in the recording booth as Fabio, he hasn’t experienced the final product just yet. “I haven't even gotten to play the game yet,” he told Polygon. “I was desperately trying to get the collector's edition, but everywhere was like, no, you're too late. I still want it, but you know, it's so rare now.”
[Ed. note: Spoilers follow for Part One of Dietrich’s route of Fire Emblem: Fortune’s Weave.]
Anyway, let’s set the scene. Ahead of the final-round match between Dietrich and Theodora, the queen of Saramis is forced to withdraw from the Heroic Games due to unrest back home. That means Dietrich wins by default — a very undesirable outcome for one so obsessed with the thrill of combat. When the Divine Sovereign asks Dietrich what he wants as a reward for his victory, Dietrich makes a surprising request: a duel to the death with Mars, the god of war. Intrigued by Dietrich’s ability following a previous clash, Mars accepts.
After Dietrich and his companions defeat Mars, the boss activates his second phase and transforms into a dragon. Dietrich faces off against Mars alone, while the rest of his team fends off reinforcements. (If you try to attack Mars as anyone but Dietrich, intense waves of enemies will spawn in.)
Dietrich eventually defeats Mars in his dragon form, but the god will not be felled. To gain a last measure of power, Dietrich begins to surrender his will to the demonic power contained within his sword, Answerer. Black tendrils of evil energy swirl around his face and body, threatening to transform him from a human into a beast. It’s then that Fabio launches into an impassioned speech, reminding Dietrich of his innate goodness. “Stop this now and come back to us!” he pleads, his voice breaking. “You are human, and I love you.”
In both the main story and optional support conversations, it’s clear that Fabio’s curiosity about Dietrich has always been more than anthropological. During their first meeting, Fabio addresses him as “beautiful stranger,” and he frequently squabbles with Esmeralda over which of them is truly the object of Dietrich’s affection. (I happen to think it’s both of them.) It’s to Fortune’s Weave’s enormous credit that this romance is never once played for laughs; indeed, Dietrich seems to return Fabio’s love, as evidenced by dialogue in their A- and B-level support conversations. It pulls him back from the brink of destruction, after all.
And it’s Yamaguchi’s all-out performance as Fabio that makes this confession so powerful. That’s why I was shocked to hear that the actor didn’t even know the scene was coming until he was already in the recording booth.
“I didn't know the scene was happening, because we don't get the script. So they show it to you and you just go. When you do voice acting such as this, particularly games of this magnitude, they give you nothing because they don't want anything spoiled. So all the actors you're listening to, every performance in the game, it is their very first time seeing the script, and very likely it is either their first, second, or third take of their performance,” Yamaguchi explained. “They don't have months to prepare, they don't have weeks to get ready. It's literally ‘here's the script, act.’”
Fabio’s confession prompted Yamaguchi to call upon his own past experiences and unspoken emotions. “For me, anyways, it's just important to remember that you're human. You've experienced all those emotions already. Even if you never let them out because you had certain social obligations around you, those feelings were always still inside you. In this case, just let them out. Let all the things you may have wanted to say at one point in your life come through as this character,” he explained.
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As Dietrich’s fate hangs in the balance, we see Fabio realize in real time that his elitist worldview has been totally wrong. The Agarthans may see “surface dwellers” as inferior beasts, but Fabio’s time with Dietrich and Esmeralda has shown him otherwise. Throughout Dietrich’s route, Fabio is scathing in his assessment of others, but that makes his moments of openness and vulnerability toward Dietrich all the more delightful and compelling. Fabio may be a pompous windbag, but we soon discover he’s also startlingly earnest and sweet.
“That’s kind of how I worked that scene. All that desperation, the longing, the love, the fear, the abject fear of losing the one thing in his life that actually had true meaning. It was his first time experiencing this. This very well may have been his first real love, too. It was the culmination of everything,” Yamaguchi said. “So if you've ever experienced those in your life and you need to bring it to your acting, just remember those feelings and just just do it. Just let it go. Don't be afraid of who's listening. Don't be afraid of where the mic is, just let it happen.”