The Fire Emblem: Fortune’s Weave countdown continues and with two days left to go, Nintendo has shared three rounds of interviews with several of the game’s developers. They offered insight on the themes behind the game (family) and how it differentiates itself from Fire Emblem: Three Houses. But the most interesting tidbit to come from the interview was how Fortune’s Weave‘s cast was almost double its current size.
Three Houses is a massive influence on Fortune’s Weave, and the developers say they originally wanted this new game to exceed the one that influenced it in every conceivable way, including when it came to the number of protagonists. “Initially, we came up with the bold idea of increasing the number of story perspectives from three to eight,” said Genki Yokota, producer on Fortune’s Weave. When that proved too unwieldy, they cut it down to four. But even with the four main characters, whose stories you can explore in parallel, there was still something missing, something that would inevitably…weave all the protagonists’ stories together.
Enter Eshmel, the game’s fifth protagonist and the initial player-character, who functions similarly to Byleth in Three Houses.
“If we continued to follow the story through each of [the other four heroes’] individual perspectives, it just wouldn’t have felt like it matched the concept of multiple stories converging into one,” said Fortune’s Weave director Toshiyuki Kusakihara. “We needed another character who could take a broader view of all four protagonists.”
The devs also addressed Fortune’s Weave being the first time guns show up in the Fire Emblem series. While they wouldn’t say exactly why, the devs did reveal that adding firearms was not done for the sake of simple novelty. “It’s rather an unusual weapon for the series, but as players progress through the story, they may uncover the reasons why something like it exists in this game’s world,” said Masahiro Higuchi, another one of Fortune’s Weave‘s producers. If I had to guess, considering there’s a time travel element in the game, the existence of guns is going to have something to do with that.
The developers didn’t say what happened to the other four main characters that were initially planned for Fortune’s Weave. We don’t know if they were merely turned into some of the many recruitable characters in the game, if they were scrapped altogether, or if Nintendo’s holding them in a dungeon under the floorboards of the Heroic Games amphitheater with the intention of releasing them as future Fortune’s Weave DLC.