Experiencing Fire Emblem: Fortune's Weave: The Core Game Experience
Unless you're one of those weird people who completely avoids reviews, you've heard one common message: Fortune's Weave is a very lengthy game. And it absolutely is.
Given this, there will be multiple writeups, because you essentially have 5-6 games within the one with this. The core gameplay will focus simply on it as a game, irrespective of the various storylines, which will be covered separately. Each of those will be linked from here when they are written.
Disclaimer: Three Houses is the best in the series, and Three Hopes nearly perfected the flaws of the story of Three Houses. Meanwhile, Engage might have been an homage to something, but it was a terrible experience. More on this later.
At a high level, Fortune's Weave is more than just the arena battles. Each of the four "Flame Lords" has a motive for what they're doing, and Eshmael, the avatar you create, is just one component in a larger puzzle.
Some people are apparently complaining about the non-battle stuff. Let me be clear on this, because some are lying.
You can skip the in-town stuff entirely. Just train for the full span of days.
Note though, this means you will be grossly underpowered, because the way you build up is by interacting with the world, not avoiding it.
You do NOT have to do supports at all.
Supports do their thing as you fight together, but that's all you're required to do. You don't need to do paralogues or sidequests or anything. If all you want to do is fight, you 100% can turn this game into a better looking version of Engage if that's all you want (despite what some are claiming).
You don't even need to recruit extra members if you don't want.
But if you do, almost all of them require some sort of questing, even if that's just to get money.
The bottom line: you are not required to do anything but the fight segments, despite what people keep saying. But it means a much harder, less fulfilling experience, and that's because you need exposition to justify why you're doing stuff. The older games got that wrong. Engage had a "why" that was silly.
What I Liked
✅ The women and men actually openly flirt, like they should do, unlike Engage, aka "Friendgage".
✅ There's quite a bit of variety in the challenges. It's not always just beating enemies to a pulp.
✅ The graphics are a significant improvement over Three Houses (but see negative below).
✅ There's a lot to do. You can basically play the game however you want - either focus on social elements, or focus on battle elements, or mix it up. It's entirely up to you, and only infrequently are you forced to done or the other.
✅ Some of the characters, like Sirocco, Cai and a few others, are actually very well written and voice acted.
✅ Females can be full-on brawlers (and in fact, one of them excels at it). There's less gender locking, in other words (but see negative below).
✅ An incredibly deep story that not only expands what was going on in Dagda, which Three Houses only glossed over; but also more about Sothis, the Agarthans, and the world overall. Story is easily the strength of the game.
What I Didn't Like
👎 Eshmael's character creator is wokified, with "body type" instead of genders.
👎 The creator options are extremely limited - the hair is basically nonbinary.
👎 There's no New Game Plus. You can replay any chapter of any line, but you lose the progress, so it's not the same thing (the point is to be able to have everything you earned and run roughshod through everything on subsequent playthroughs).
👎 Only 30fps. Some people think this is a minor thing - the problem is, if you have motion sickness, the blurring when rotating the camera during exploration is absolutely unbearable. Given what Monolithsoft was able to do with Xenoblade Chronicles 2, this is a disappointing outcome.
👎 Some characters are just blatantly underpowered. It turns out that they have affinities to classes that don't match what they start with; so if you build down their "normal" path, you'll find them falling behind in later battles.
👎 Some of the main story battles are just straight up unfair. One has a team member switch sides unexpectedly, then a mysterious third party adds undead troops. It's artificial challenge for the sake of it.
👎 Growth ends up tedious simply because of the way it must happen. If you don't train or do dungeons, you're not going to be keeping up with the Jonses. But if you train and do dungeons, you won't have sufficient time for social bonds. Three Houses solved this by ensuring that class experience was gained through the weekly classroom teachings that didn't cut into your other time. You don't have that here; the only time available for this is taken out of your time allotment.
👎 "Black Fog of Doom" under certain skirts. Yet, if the outfit doesn't involve a short skirt but instead a slit dress, panties are readily shown. Also, some NPC enemies have no such fog despite having the same type of skirt. It's inconsistent and stupid.
👎 Healing items are in extremely limited supply.
👎 Path 2 feels half-baked and not well thought out. In truth, it's very important to the overall story and helps build your character's levels for Part 3...but having to replay the exact same story four times is not appealing.
👎 While the story is amazing, there's clearly a bunch of content missing - explanations of things that should be there that simply aren't expounded upon.
👎 Anna feels half-baked.
Summary
Let me be clear. Fortune's Weave is light years better than Engage in almost every way that matters. The number of negatives above has to be put in perspective: the game is absolutely a return to form. But some decisions are stupid and hold the game back from being better than Three Houses, which it is isn't.
Regardless, it's a fine game in its own right, and well worth the asking price for pretty much anyone that enjoys strategy games or role-playing games.