Guns are responsible for the best and funniest moment in Fire Emblem: Fortune’s Weave, which arrives barely an hour into the game.
It didn’t take long for me to discover my favorite character in Fortune’s Weave and it’s not any of the game’s four main protagonists. Her name is Troy. Not only is she an older woman, instantly rocketing her to the top of my “characters I’m obsessed with” list because video games tend to forget older women exist; she’s also one of the first characters you meet who uses a gun.
Guns are a new weapon type for the series introduced in Fortune’s Weave. Mechanically, they’re typed as gauntlet weapons, meaning that when equipped, they raise a character’s evasion, making them harder to hit. It’s hard to really tell how powerful they are in relation to other weapon types because I haven’t unlocked them in the main game yet, only seeing their use in the game’s brief prologue.
The actual appeal of guns comes from how they influence the narrative around their use. One critical piece of information: Troy, like the infamous nun with a gun, is a priest. Healers, especially Fire Emblem healers, don’t rock a Glock. The idea that guns seem to be the standard-issue weapon of the healer class in this sword-and-board fantasy game is deeply hilarious. We’ve got armored soldiers, dagger-wielding rogues, and…is that Mercy from Overwatch? Troy is literally the embodiment of the “I’m a healer but” meme.
And surprisingly guns aren’t just a tool you equip that gets a brief tutorial before never being acknowledged again; instead, the narrative specifically highlights their power in what is the greatest cutscene in Fire Emblem history. After your party defeats the evil lieutenant of the death god Balor, he launches a surprise attack, catching the party unawares and collapsing a building onto them. Fortuna, the goddess of Fate, intervenes and rewinds time so you can avoid the ambush. Surprised that his enemies suddenly disappeared, the lieutenant briefly looks around before Troy unloads a shitload of bullets into his skull at point-blank range before quipping, “That’s the force it takes to get anything into the skull of a man like that.” I can’t wait to see what other gun-related shenanigans this game gets up to.