Less than an hour into Fire Emblem: Fortune’s Weave, the newest entry in Nintendo’s long-running fantasy tactical RPG series, I found myself paralyzed by a decision that should have been trivial. As the herald of the pale raven, you are dispatched back through time to alter the fates of four legendary heroes known as the Four Flames of Dagda, recruiting them to help save the world from an encroaching wave of undead in your own era. The opening choice is simple on paper: which flame do you walk with first? Yet sitting there staring at the roster of Cai, Theodora, Deitrich, and Leda, I realized this single decision had quietly transformed into a reckoning over how much time I was actually willing to invest in a game that appears designed to consume them all.
The framing is deliberately forgiving. Unlike Fire Emblem: Three Houses, where selecting one faction permanently locks you out of the others, this title lets players switch between the four heroes at any point during their campaigns. The developers have made clear there are no hard consequences to your ordering, and that every route remains fully accessible regardless of whom you greet first. In theory, this means you could spend 120-plus hours chasing down every thread without ever missing a single story beat.
In practice, that freedom feels less like a gift than a trap. The moment I commit to one flame, I know exactly what will happen: I’ll imprint on them the way a duckling imprints on its mother, shadowing their steps and neglecting everyone else until they become my entire world. I’ve already considered playing through Deitrich purely as chores—eating your vegetables before you earn your dessert—just to clear him from the board so I could return to Theodora with a clean slate. But following my heart means almost certainly abandoning serious playthroughs of three other fully realized campaigns, and that guilt sits uncomfortably beside the math.
The Weight Of A Hundred-Plus Hours
I have no concrete sense yet of how long a single complete run will take, but dedicating myself to one hero feels like I’d be kneecapping my own experience in the game’s later hours. The alternative—leaping between all four protagonists and progressing each storyline simultaneously—reads less like an adventure than a life sentence. It is the kind of commitment that would sign me up for over 120 hours of gameplay, and as much as I love this series, Nintendo, I simply do not have that much time in me.
“The latest entry in Nintendo’s fantasy tactical RPG has a lot of everything for everyone.”
Gamer24h editorial review
The reviews arriving ahead of launch seem to confirm my dread. Critics have praised the game’s tactical combat while simultaneously warning about an exhaustingly long runtime and uneven pacing, painting a portrait of a title so generously sized that its own ambition may overwhelm even devoted fans.
An Overwhelmingly Generous Campaign
The sheer scale appears to be intentional. Recent developer interviews revealed that the game almost had eight protagonists rather than four, suggesting how much raw material was carved away in service of a more manageable—if still massive—experience. The studio has also opened up about why certain characters exist at all, including one nun who turns out to be everyone’s favorite flame for reasons both surprising and thoroughly entertaining.
The community reaction has been exactly what you’d expect from such a richly cast ensemble. Players have already rallied behind the game’s most diverse lineup in franchise history while simultaneously demanding better cosmetic treatment, with fans joking that no one should have to look so ashily rendered on screen. And of course, there is the character everyone wants made romanceable for entirely unfixable reasons—a sentiment echoed across forums and comment sections alike.
Looking Ahead
Fire Emblem: Fortune’s Weave arrives soon, promising to be a beefy, possibly weird, and absolutely enormous entry in the series. Whether you choose to commit fully to one flame or attempt to conquer all four at once, the real question hanging over this release is no longer which hero you’ll love most—but whether anyone will have enough hours left in their life to prove it.
Join the conversation