I’m always happy when I get the chance to make more Fire Emblem content, and nothing is better than talking about a brand-new game. Fire Emblem: Fortune’s Weave takes place in the same world as Fire Emblem: Three Houses, but on an entirely separate continent in Dagda. You play as the enigmatic Promised One, who has to go back in time to alter the fates of four Flame Lords to have an army great enough to challenge Balor, God of the Underworld, who has all but destroyed the modern day.

The story here is on a scale unlike anything seen before in Fire Emblem. There are four Flame Lords and each one has an individual story of 12 chapters. Each story is unique, and each Flame Lord has their own motivations as they compete in the Heroic Games, where the winner gets a wish of their choosing granted. These are not short stories, too, as each one can take the length of a game just to complete it. Not only are the individual stories all amazing, but it’s interesting to see parts where they intersect. For example, I did Cai’s route first, and he fought alongside another Flame Lord, Leda, early on. Conversations with Leda’s party seemed motivated by information I didn’t have at the time, context which I had by the time I saw the same scene again when playing as Leda. So even the same scenes will look very different in places with the change of perspective.

Doing all of that four times only completes part one. Then you have part two, which escalates the conflict as it shows the path of how the world came into ruin in the first place. Where part one is more character-driven, part two is more cinematic and focuses more on advancing the story. This all leads into part three, where you take your forces to finally take down Balor. This part is also very long, as there’s a lot to do, such as restoring parts that were destroyed as well as preparing to take down various underworld Gates. The story is on a scale unlike anything seen in Fire Emblem history. It’s massive, fun to watch, and worth diving into each Flame Lord’s story.

The gameplay is predominantly positive, but I do have a critique as well. You have your usual turn-based combat, and really, the mechanics here don’t change that much. You lead your army to battle as you move each unit to fight off the enemy units on the map. The gameplay features the recurring element where you can turn back time to undo bad decisions, but that’s where something new comes in. Dagda has a myriad of gods, and you can develop bonds with them for special in-game battle perks. For example, the Goddess Kalla can grant +50 avoid, which can make your entire army nearly untouchable for a turn. Though you only have so many points to spend doing this.

In part one, especially, you have a set number of turns before the story progresses. During this time, you can do a myriad of activities to make your army stronger. The big one is building your bond with recruitable units and your renown by doing side quests. Only by having a strong enough bond and a high enough renown can you recruit new units. You can also use the arena to build up your forces, give service to the Gods for battle perks, and even bird time. Bird time is with the unit that goes back in time, who ends up showing up as a bird, and you can interact with the bird for units to bond with the main character. Outside of the city, you can explore the main map and find items, dungeons, complete quests, and unlock new areas. Within dungeons, you have another new mechanic where you take a small group of five units to explore, and you fight enemies in turn-based combat. It essentially plays like Pokemon, where your army and the enemy function as a single entity with one health bar each. It makes exploring dungeons with enemies faster, and it’s a fun mechanic.

All of this is wonderful, but this does lead to my one and only critique is that it can be too much sometimes. Most of the activities refresh weekly, and it can be a grind to get your bond or renown high enough for particular units. No one individual activity is tedious on its own, but doing all of these over and over again, especially for part one, gets very tedious. This is especially so when you have to do the entire process again for each Flame Lord’s part one. I was very invested in this process for the first two Flame Lords, but by the time I got to the third, I really wanted to do more to just see the story because I grew tired of the weekly tasks over and over again. They all proved well worth it as the difficulty spikes after part one, but it also slowed my playthrough down as I could only spend so much time doing these tasks before I needed a break.

I really liked the map designs a lot too, as many of them have their own twists to some of the challenges. Part one maps had various unique obstacles in a lot of the maps, part two bombarded you with massive maps with a lot of enemies, and part three gave you a little bit of both. You really had to plan each move carefully for not just the enemy but the map itself.

The characters are amazing, as the leads all have very unique personalities and are so much fun to watch. It’s genuinely hard to pick a favorite because they are all so entertaining. They are also paired well with their own supporting cast that are equally entertaining to watch. I was really invested in everyone’s story as well as the lore developing all around them.

That’s another thing I want to point out: the sheer amount of lore here. There’s a lot of depth to this game, as you have the story of the gods, different civilizations of humankind, connections to Three Houses, and more. As a side note, you don’t need to know what happens in Three Houses to know what is going on here. There are just a lot of references that connect the two games that makes it helpful to have that experience going into Fortune’s Weave.

This game took me longer to beat than going through most of Xenoblade Chronicles X: Definitive Edition, which gives you an idea of the scale this game has to offer. I got a reward for 100 hours of gameplay just as the credits were rolling, and I still have a list of things I want to go back and do. The game does make that easy, as you can revisit where you were at any previous chapter and continue from that point onward. You can even replay entire routes and carry over a few things, such as bonds, how much of the map you unlocked, and more, to make a lot of that go a lot faster. So I like how subsequent playthroughs of the routes take away a lot of the time-consuming elements of the first playthrough.

I was also shocked that there was only one save file, but after playing the game, I stopped being bothered by it. As much as I loved my playthrough, I would much rather start over my current playthrough than to do this all over again.

Overall, this is an absolutely amazing game. Its size, depth, and scale are at a level far beyond anything Fire Emblem has ever produced. I am left in awe of how much I enjoyed this game and how much time I spent on it just to see the credits. Its one and only downside is that elements between battles can be too repetitive and tedious at times when you have to do them over and over again in a single route and then repeat that three more times. I’m fine with tasks between battles, but I don’t need that many different tasks that I have to do regularly. I would like the list to be smaller so that I don’t feel like I have a list of chores to do regularly. Other than that, it’s a beautiful game that I am glad I got a chance to play.