A Nintendo Direct for Fire Emblem: Fortune’s Weave has fleshed out what its gameplay loop looks like and revealed it has more in common with Three Houses than expected.
While there’s far more excitement for the remake of The Legend Of Zelda: Ocarina Of Time, any updates on that are being kept back for now, as Nintendo is focused on promoting its next big Switch 2 exclusive, in the form of Fire Emblem: Fortune’s Weave.
Earlier today, Nintendo aired a dedicated Fire Emblem showcase. It was about 22 minutes long and provided the first real details about the game, beyond what the brief trailers showed.
This includes a substantial plot twist in the game’s story, revealing that the initially advertised premise has been something of a deliberate misdirect.
Fortune’s Weave features four distinct protagonists with their own individual story lines, all of which revolve around a gladiatorial event called the Heroic Games, where the winner can have one wish granted.
Most of the Direct was spent on detailing Fortune’s Weave’s tactical gameplay and the various activities you can undertake outside of battle, which will be immediately familiar to any Fire Emblem fan, especially if you’ve played the last two games: Three Houses and Engage.
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Towards the end of the Direct, Nintendo dropped the bombshell that there will be a time skip of five years, where the world is suddenly being invaded by a demon god and its forces.
With the four main protagonists absent, you swap control to ‘the story’s true protagonist;’ a nameless white-haired individual who is summoned to save the world.
What’s more, Nintendo has confirmed what fans already assumed, that the mysterious green-haired woman seen in the initial trailers is an older Sothis, one of the main characters from Three Houses.
This effectively corroborates the theories that Fortune’s Weave is a distant sequel to Three Houses or at least set in the same world. And considering the true protagonist gains time travel powers, which is how you can recruit the other four leads, we wouldn’t be shocked if the game uses this as an excuse to bring back some fan favourite cast members from Three Houses.
It’s unclear if this means the Heroic Games’ portion is actually much shorter than it looks, perhaps just a prologue, but for that we’ll probably have to wait and see.
We’re willing to bet on the latter as Three Houses employed the exact same trick, having a time skip midway through the story, though you couldn’t travel back in time to the first half, like you can in Fortune’s Weave.
Another key difference between the two games is that Fortune’s Weave will allow you to hop between the four storylines and play through them in parallel to one another, whereas in Three Houses you were locked into whichever storyline you picked at the start.
Beyond that, Fortune’s Weave is rather lacking in surprises, although one of the characters is shown wielding a modern-looking gun that shoots lasers, which clashes with the medieval style fantasy setting Fire Emblem is known for.
Nintendo also took a moment to remind fans that a special Dagdan Collection of the game, which comes with an artbook and poster, is available for purchase… except it isn’t, as it’s still out of stock on Nintendo’s UK store at time of writing.
Looking around, it seems to be unavailable at most other retailers too. The only place we can see still accepting pre-orders for it is GAME and it’s offering it at a slightly lower price than Nintendo – £89.99 instead of £92.99.
Even without the extra goodies, Fortune’s Weave isn’t going for cheap. Digitally, it’s priced at £58.99 while physical copies cost £66.99, the same as Pokémon Pokopia and Donkey Kong Bananza.
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