My thoughts of Fortune's Weave (full unmarked spoilers inside)

Hello chaps,

One of my favorite games of all time is *Ghost Trick: Phantom Detective*. It is a game that starts good and only gets better, never slowing down until it reaches one of the most satisfying endings the industry has ever seen. Ghost Trick lasts only for a bit over 10 hours and likely had a miniscule budget, but every aspect of the game is extremely well thought out, down to how even movement is a fusion of story and gameplay elements. Once you’ve finished Ghost Trick, you’re likely to be completely satisfied; the game doesn’t overstay its welcome even for a single minute, answers any lingering questions you may have had, and has fired from all cylinders since the very beginning.

Not every game can or should be Ghost Trick. A handheld mystery game has different expectations placed on it than a meaty RPG or a first person shooter, for example. However, what Ghost Trick should teach any developer who plays it is how to make a game that respects your time and feels like a focused, complete experience.

If any developer of Fortune’s Weave ever played Ghost Trick, then this is a lesson they failed to learn.

**The structure of the post**

This post will contain unmarked spoilers for the entire game.

Fortune’s Weave is a big game, and as a result it’s more difficult to analyze and discuss it succinctly. The cast is big, there are multiple protagonists and paths, and it takes a long time to get through all the content and its many systems. I have not seen absolutely everything in the game, but I have engaged with the systems of the game to the best of my ability and my play time clocks in at around 110 hours. I try to go out of my way to get as many supports as I can because one of my favorite things in Fire Emblem is getting to know the cast.

All that is to say I will be unable to cover absolutely everything, and I might critique something that is revealed in an optional scene or support somewhere. I do that not out of spite or to be puposefully unfair to the game, but because these are my thoughts after a full playthrough.

I think the only way to tackle my thoughts in a single post is to split up the things I want to discuss into their own sections. Here is the table of contents:

1) The route system

2) The not so supporting cast

3) Three ~~Houses~~ parts

4) The incompletion

5) Kicking puppies and twirling mustaches

6) Errare divinum est

7) Final thoughts

With that said, let’s begin.

**1) The route system**

I love a good story where there is an emphasis on the conflict being shown through different perspectives. It can take many forms, from seeing the villain’s point of view in Breath of Fire IV to jumping back and forth between two separate timelines in Radiant Historia. More conventional, perhaps, is the route system.

Routes have become a staple of Fire Emblem by this point and I think it’s easy to see why. Fire Emblem games tend to have huge casts and splitting them up into groups makes it easier for the characters to stand out. In a meta sense it also fosters a bit of tribalism which can keep engagement going for longer.

That said, the route systems have been criticized before and it’s equally easy to see why. The story of Fates broke under its own weight and replaying White Clouds – plus the extreme similarity between Silver Snow and Verdant Wind – left a sour taste in the mouths of many.

In this sense, the route system of Fortune’s Weave is a great success. It mostly keeps a strong focus on the core group and scenes are only reused where they make sense. House Lamine seems to be the current favorite and it’s not hard to see why: The chemistry between the members is very entertaining and there is a theme of found family that makes the bickering all the sweeter.

However, the route system doesn’t treat everyone equally. Even before the game released, it was revealed that Bertrand was a good guy who liked doing good boy things despite being the primary target for Leda’s revenge. It was enough for most players to realize that Leda would never complete her vendetta, which isn’t necessarily a bad thing, but everything we had seen about Leda centered around her desire for vengeance, and indeed that is the vast majority of what the route focuses on. Bertie-boy is all but exonerated even before Leda reaches Dagsion, as the game spells out that Cydonia was put to the torch so that the Order of Mithras could access the Orichalcum found there. It doesn’t help that Leda’s wish is the easiest for herself to fulfil, doesn’t get to fight one of the main antagonists of her route who is killed off screen, and has the most repetitive interactions with her team.

Furthermore, Leda feels the most out of place in the third part, referencing a growth we never got to see as she references that she plays her music because she loves life. It’s difficult not to draw parallels to both Dimitri and Marianne from Three Houses. The former was consumed by quest for revenge and snapped out of it, while the latter was suicidal but is in a much better mental state after five years, much like Leda. The difference, however, is that we see Dimitri’s complete arc, what it costs him to get better and how his opinions on the Tragedy of Duscur and the lessons learned from it differ from those of his friends, and we see the positive impact others have on Marianne. Leda insists on getting worse and is essentially surrounded by enablers. Only Buccar tries to put any effort into stopping her, but Leda’s route doesn’t even have a scene acknowledging his betrayal after the battle. Put in other words, Leda is static until she isn’t, and her reasons for participating in the plot feels borderline flimsy.

The route system is more than Intelligent Systems could handle, which leads to some tragicomic moments. Solel is shocked to see Cai wield the Star Spear even though the two of them fought together at a point where Cai has already been given it, and – funnily enough tied to the same paralogue – Dietrich mentions Raksha kissed him and that he’s immune to her magic, and Solel and Anna keep talking as if he didn’t just say something of immense importance to what they were just talking about.

Finally, I would be remiss if I didn’t mention just how slow the progress between actual story content is. Dietrich’s path was the first one I played, and I was completely done with everything that had to do with recruiting and training characters. It felt like an endless stream of poorly optimized menus. Why can’t I see what food characters like before choosing the dish? Why does it take two skips to get through a meal? Why do I need to back and go into a separate menu to see which units have a support conversation? And that is just for one of the weekly activities. By the time you actually reach the next part of the main quest, you may have actually forgotten what the characters were up to.

**2) The not so supporting cast**

I think the moment I realized how little I knew or even cared about most characters outside of the main groups was when I was talking to a friend and couldn’t for the life of me remember Fianna’s name despite having recruited her twice.

Building supports in this game feels like a brutal slog full of clicking on a menu, but even if you’re meticulous about grinding supports, there are several extremely odd decisions that stand out. The “tutorial recruits” have almost zero supports with the clan they join, with, I believe, only Sofia having a C support with Tobias. Catania, despite having a backstory immensely relevant for Leda’s path, cannot support anyone on that team. There are similar omissions that frankly make the game feel more than a little unfinished, but I’m getting ahead of myself.

It feels extremely odd to play a Fire Emblem game and recruit a bunch of characters you don’t know at all. A lot of my enjoyment in the series comes from getting to know the ragtag bunch of misfits you build, but Fortune’s Weave made this much harder than it should be at best, and at worst made it impossible in some cases.

There is also the weird imbalance in supports in terms of quantity, reducing the characters to only a step above their NES predecessors in terms of depth, just with more polygons. I am also surprised by how some support chains end abruptly – Theodora x Bonaventure being the chief offender – and how mundane the topics of the supports tend to be. Cai and Ninae can only speak to each other in the third part, and it’s about Cai being embarrassed Aurora dotes on him in their C, and then in their B they talk about Aurora’s boxed lunches. This happens as the armies of hell are laying waste to the entire continent.

While Garreg Mach became repetitive for many, I think the good it did sometimes gets overlooked. After every main story mission you could almost always talk to every single playable character and a handful of NPC’s. While they obviously didn’t always drop banger lines or deep lore, they did often comment on the goings-on in the plot, solidifying their presence in the story and offering their opinions. Some of my favorite lines and moments in all of Fire Emblem are in Garreg Mach, like Dedue’s comment on Dimitri’s return, Bernie planting flowers on Jeralt’s grave and Dorothea commenting on killing Ferdinand.

I all but stopped talking to characters in Dagsion because they very rarely had anything interesting to say, and I got the impression the lines spoken weren’t changed as often. Activity in Dagsion or on the world map didn’t reward me with the character interactions I was looking for.

Speaking of character interactions, the tone of the supports tends to be very similar. Comedy and good vibes are front and center, with basic, casual topics being the game’s bead and butter. You don’t dive deep into the characters, nor do you get much of an insight into the details of Dagdan society or how it impacts the characters.

No one seems to be tempted to try and get a wish from the Divine Sovereign for themselves, but rather supports the wish of the person they’re fighting for. There’s no tension between clan members and it’s generally lacking between characters on opposing teams as well – an incredible immersion breaker for me was when Anatolia offered Dietrich buddy discounts for her fortune tellings despite the supposed tension between the two teams. If she had charged Dietrich 500 gold instead of 100 like for everyone else, it would have honestly gone a long way.

In Vestaria Saga, even unimportant characters tend to have their own arc, connections, quests, unique items and more. Kaga was able to build that in a retirement home with a box of generic assets!

**3) Three** **~~Houses~~** **parts**

So, we have the Heroic Games, the War arc, and the Salvation arc.

Question: why?

To say that these parts feel disjointed would be an underestatement. Everyone wins the Heroic Games in their route, which is something I vehemently disagree with since it’s not ever made relevant in the story, and then all of a sudden there’s a war. Dagda the Great is back and Theodora will stop him with the help of Bertie and \[insert route protagonist here\]. It’s an entire section of the game where only two Flame Lords are actually relevant, something I would not have actually minded if the other three playable lords weren’t awkwardly stapled to it. I would genuinely prefer the arc to focus only on Theodora and Bertie even if the other three were left with nothing over seeing them awkwardly watching from the sidelines.

But I think the greater question is why this arc is even here. We know Balor is the main bad guy, so what is the point of Dagda being some kind of midgame twist villain? Some may take the narrative at face value and say it was a necessary step to revive Balor, but was it really? We’re talking about magical supernatural things here, but wouldn’t it make more sense if the big blood sport tournament full of people wielding different parts of Balor’s magical corpse actually resurrected, you know, Balor, rather than his brother? It feels beyond arbitrary.

What does Dagda’s role in the story accomplish that Balor or his underlings can’t? Sacrifice all of Dagsion? Just have Solel do it after being put under Iliana’s spell, isn’t that already part of her job description? He could later be killed and be reborn into Eshmel from there, which would save us from the jank of involving Dagda.

I want to focus as little as possible on trying to fix the narrative, as it’s easy to end up in an endless stream of what-ifs, but this structure genuinely confuses me.

Finally, the third part feels like it’s barely able to tell a story. The four route lords only chip in on occasion since the entire game has been written in a way that doesn’t require their presence, and then you fight redshirt after redshirt who have had little to no time to build any sort of chemistry with the cast. They show up, spout some nonsense, get lectured by Fortuna, and then they disappear. You set out to stop Balor and his henchmen, and that’s what you do, the end. I don’t even think they mention the Flame Lords’ corruption a single time, something you’d think would be relevant when Balor’s strength is growing and his influence can be felt everywhere.

The discrepancies and jank hinder the games’ different acts and routes from truly coming together into a greater whole. It never becomes greater than the sum of its parts.

**4) The incompletion**

I don’t think it’s controversial to say you can tell this game is unfinished. I’ve already brushed on it above, but it’s clear a lot of content never made it into the game. If I were to guess, the War arc was originally going to be more different based on the lord you had picked, but even in the Heroic Games section there are glaring gaps.

I don’t know when in development the sublords’ routes were cut, but it feels as though the game wasn’t actually adjusted for their removal. Orchel is some kind of simulacrum of Yu Phas, yet we don’t see Solel confronting her – or Credna – about it after his initial surprise, Bertie becomes the king of Brezarant, and Talimun is a very old demigod whose confrontation with the Order of Mithras we never get to see. These are not isolated details of characters on their own journey, but rather major components of the story we were given that we don’t actually get to see. Multiple antagonists get teased only to drop like flies off screen, likely handled by the sublords.

There is also Solel’s death, which happens off screen, just like Dagda’s resurrection.

I could continue, but I believe the point has been made. Fire Emblem is no stranger to having incomplete games, and indeed it’s not too rare in the industry for a lot of content to be cut or unfinished, but it’s more than a little bizarre how in your face the cut content is in Fortune’s Weave. Dietrich’s route is full of scenes focusing on the Order of Mithras, only for them to either be dealt with in completely optional scenes, disappear or die off screen. It’s made even weirder when you realize they’re not actually dealt with in other routes. They all just fell down a flight of stairs I guess.