The Fire Emblem: Fortune’s Weave direct just finished and while it did contain more detail about a bunch of stuff we already knew, there was also some new information that was legitimately exciting. You can catch the full direct below, and read on for a roundup of the most interesting details.
You Can Play As All Four Protagonists At Once
Fortune’s Weave, much like Three Houses before it, features protagonists you get to choose from. Cai, Dietrich, Leda, and Theodora each lead their own factions and have their own special combat abilities. But unlike Three Houses, Fortune’s Weave will let you experience the stories of all four protagonists within the same playthrough. Instead of starting a new game to explore what happens to each of the four, you can visit the Pale Raven’s Perch to hop between them, playing their stories in parallel.
New Classes, Same Fire Emblem
The class progression in Fortune’s Weave will be familiar to any player with Fire Emblem experience. Classes are arranged in tiers: Beginner, Specialty, and Advanced. There are five beginner classes for each character that get them acquainted with the game’s basic offensive styles including swords, spears, axes, gauntlets, bows, and magic. From there, specialty and advanced classes open up depending on the character, their weapon proficiencies, and the class path they pursue. The higher tiers of classes offer sick-looking special units including elephant riders, dragoons, and more.
Guns
The developers at Nintendo must have seen all the memes about how short Three Houses would be if they gave any of the protagonists a gun, because they’re giving us guns in Fortune’s Weave. Even though the game has bows—y’know, a weapon capable of doing damage at range—guns are categorized in the gauntlet category, the type of weapon that’s effective in melee range. And the game doesn’t even bother to be cute about it and make them look like fantasy-type firearms. That’s a goddamn Glock, laser sight and all.
Combat Arts and Blaze Arts
In addition to making use of the game’s various weapon types, characters in Fortune’s Weave can call upon combat arts in battle. Combat arts, available to any of the game’s recruitable characters, are special abilities that do damage to enemies or provide support to allies and can be used at the cost of the character’s weapon durability. Blaze Arts are unique to the four main protagonists and eat up their life bar in exchange for power. Cai can shot fireballs from his palm to do area-of-effect damage. Deitrich can teleport after moving to get at enemies behind cover. Leda uses her instrument to summon monsters while Theodora’s power is slinging big-ass rocks across massive distances to hit a single target.
There’s A Time Jump
Now this is the story info I’ve been waiting for. Tucked at the end of the Direct was the new detail that the game will feature a five-year time jump, further cementing that Fortune’s Weave is firmly within the Three Houses era of Fire Emblem games. According to the Direct, five years after the Heroic Games which Fortune’s Weave initially focuses on, the world is on the brink of destruction, threatened by the demon god Balor, and the four heroes have vanished.
There’s a Fifth Protagonist: Meet Eshmel
For the first part of the game, you can play as any one of the game’s four protagonists. However, after the time-jump, it seems that the progenitor god Sothis has called forth a new hero, the game’s real hero, to help in the fight against Balor: Eshmel, the white-haired character featured but not named in all the key art. Eshmel has some kind of connection to the bird that lets you hop between the protagonists’ stories earlier in the game and can also call on the goddess Fortuna to travel back in time.
Your Choices Will Ripple Across Time
With the arrival of Balor, the game puts a choice before the new character Eshmel: fight the demon god alone, or go back in time to meddle in the events of the Heroic Games. It seems that you’ll be able to recruit at least one of the four protagonists to aid you in the fight against Balor, mimicking the choice in Three Houses that forced you to select a single faction to continue the story.