Topic: Fire emblem fortune's weave

Based on what I've read so far, I think that I'm just going to ignore the discourse and play the game.

I loved Three Houses, but I also enjoyed the 3DS games.

So far I’m really liking this one. The dungeons are neat, in my opinion - not as fresh in application as they marketed them, but still a nice twist that gives you more direct control of your character.

The graphics style is neat, but the overall fidelity and performance definitely don’t scream “Switch 2 generation” to me.

The prologue is a bit too long and bogged down. Absolutely skip the combat training if you’ve ever touched a game like this lol

i forgot to mention that three houses' performance on switch 1 feels like xenoblade performance on a game with less than half the same scope

About 10 hours in now. I have been rotating the stories so not really gotten out of the prologues yet for any character, I think Leda is my favourite of the Flame Lords so far, she is gorgeous, has so much aura and is as mad as a bag of cats. The one person I haven't tried yet is Dietrich, I am using the moments where you bump into the other FLs on a route as a not so subtle hint to swap over, and so far he hasn't show up in any route I've played (each one up to roughly chapter 4, where the games haven't kicked off proper in any of them).

I hope you all enjoy this game, I’m super excited for it but I just started university so unfortunately I don’t think I’ll have enough time to warrant picking it up. Sucks because I absolutely adore Fire Emblem. Hope to join you all when winter break comes!

It's a very bad sign that I downloaded a demo for another game instead of playing this game more. I'm going to give it more of a chance but I just am gutted by how angry I am.

Somehow games are even more rage inducing when they're closer to being great rather than just being bad. Hype is the happiness killer. Seriously, just play Three Houses.

@Polvasti Funnily enough, a lot of stuff that happens in the prologue wasn't in the marketing. I've been keeping my eye on it, and I'm even surprised with everything they chose to show. While they showed a character with a gun in the marketing, I never thought that they'd go to this extent when it came to digging into the advanced tech. They're finally digging up more of the stuff I found interesting about Three Houses' worldbuilding and lore.

@Misima I don't really get how Three Houses is better than this? Like perhaps in the moment to moment writing, I could say that Three Houses probably is a bit better- but in terms of the actual gameplay structure that game was hell. If you only played a single route, it probably feels way better- but I recently played through all of them and by the end I was genuinely tired.

You also speak on this game being half-baked, but you're trolling right? Especially since you're bringing up Three Houses as being superior- when that game was far more rushed. The story falls apart under scrutiny, the routes are pretty much copy and pasted from one another, and there's no sense of a world outside of the Monastery. There's a lack of narrative build-up in Three Houses, with most of the big story events only being built towards if you talked to absolutely everyone in the Monastery. Some of the largest events in the story of Three Houses only happen off-screen as well.

Don't even get me started on how bad the map design is for Three Houses. There's only a handful of good maps in that game, with the majority of them being maps where you clump all your units together and move them in a single direction. Most maps in Three Houses have a single goal, that being "route the enemy." There's only ever been a couple of times in my playthrough where the maps had more going on than that- as opposed to Fortune's Weave, where the maps actually have far more going for them in terms of goals and proper strategy.

Three Houses is a rushed and flawed game. There are multiple indicators in the code that the game was originally planned to have features like units deserting from your party, or split routes on every path in the game- and those got cut because of how thin they stretched themselves. You complain about the visuals, but I'd say that at least Fortune's Weave looks good- where as Three Houses used PNGs for fruit in the market area.

@SplatRay001 Congrats on Uni!

And yeah, I am with Void on basically everything above. I reserve the right when I get deeper into FW to change my stance, but so far FW has been better than Three Houses in every single way for me already and has kind of so far been my dream Fire Emblem game? Like it sounds hyperbolic maybe, but so far it has given me everything I kinda longed for from Engage and Three Houses, and it even taps into some stuff from the older games and brings them into the present day.

My issue with Three Houses is it really struggled to give you a real sense of place, and it's heavy reliance on info in menus meant you didn't get a clear sense of what your day to day ever looked like. Like we call it a social sim as short hand, but on no route did I ever actually feel like a mercenary who became a teacher, navigating classes, school life and forming bonds with my students. Like the game told me that was what my story was, but in practice I am mostly just spending a lot of time in menus and fast travelling as time hurtled forwards, and so much of the important texture of the world and the relationships between the characters that should have formed my emotional anchoring to the story happened entirely off screen. And to this day, there is actually a remarkable amount of story, especially in the first half of the game, that feels sorta unfinished to me, like even with playing every route? Like twists that come out of nowhere, and characters with no context or motivations. And those are the parts you have to play on every route. Really weird.

FW addresses that directly, and differently, in each route, as we follow each Flame Lord's arrival in Dagsion, complete with their own separate small core casts of unique characters, and as various mechanics and systems come online in different places and times for different FLs as needed for their own story and journey, so you get a clear sense of place and the wider world firmly established before you, before it begins taking steps forwards, and plenty of opportunities to just exist within that space, rather than menus suddenly throwing you months forwards like in THs.

I absolute agree that with Three Houses if you played one route blindly and never played the game again, I can see why you'd love Three Houses, as you'd have no idea how much content you missed because of how much that game obfuscates from the player, nor would you see how insanely unfinished some of the routes were compared to others, and just how much of Three Houses is copy and pasted from one route to another with different bits of flavour stuck on and I'm really interested to see if FW ends up in a similar place by the end, because it isn't hiding this from the player this time, as you can freely jump from route to route almost any time.

Weirdly, I think Three Hopes (while having plenty of its own problems) did a much much better job of grounding you in the world, giving you a proper sense of the characters and gave them clear arcs, and I do think they weirdly took a lot from that game for FWs in terms of how the story is presented, structured and paced.

Yeah, this dude has to be trolling. Ignoring everything brought up in my actual post and just writing a huge blurb on how they're expecting this game to be a carbon copy of Three Houses. Jesus Christ.

@Misima But addressing this anyways- you act like there's no goals to work towards in the slightest in Fortune's Weave. You mention that the Professor Rank is gone, and so there's no purpose in doing things- and yet Renown in Fortune's Weave literally functions the same way. You do quests and battles, and you end up getting experience in Renown for it. That renown can be used in order to upgrade and unlock the facilities at the main base.

It just seems to me that you aren't actually doing much of the side content in this game, or don't know how to play it. It isn't a fault of the game itself, but of you for not understanding the systems or not being able to plan out what you want to do with your time. You still have the ability to train units, to explore, to rest, etc. It's easier to run out of turns- at least in my case.

I also don't understand how this is "eshittification." The game isn't any worse than Three Houses, and in fact improves upon a good chunk of Three Houses' weaknesses. Its far higher quality graphically, as well as in terms of the main plot. It has more content to do than Three Houses did. "Eshittification" implies that the quality of the game is poor, and yet you're being charged more for it. I genuinely don't get how you can look at this, then look at Three Houses and act like Three Houses is both better graphically and narratively? Like Three Houses looks like a Gamecube game with the shoddy texture work.

So... I don't Like it... here's why...

Because I absolutely LOVE IT!!!

Did 15 hours on Theodora's path today. Finally put down the controller, but unable to stop thinking about how much I adore this game. This is feeling like my GOTY.

@VoidofLight it's like giving opinions in the most cookie-cutter internet hatedom way possible. this is what gets downvoted to hell and back whenever someone asks for opinions on a game

@squiddu-real Pretty much, yeah. It feels like whenever people talk about games like this- they're either purposefully being disingenuous about it, or they don't actually know how to play the game or how the systems work and want to complain about it due to that. Most of the things this guy is complaining about are still in Fortune's Weave, just executed differently due to the game having an entirely different premise. The idea that "it should've stayed in a school" is wild to me, because they've already done all they can do with that premise (and that premise was extremely restrictive in a story telling way).

I have to say this was a bit disappointing to me too (though it doesn't ruin the game or anything). The pre-rendered cutscenes look great as always, but the in-engine scenes and the battle animations somehow feel stiffer than they were Engage, even though Fortune's Weave should benefit from the Switch 2's better specs. Like, in the prologue already you see Kouka/Hong Hua suffering from the "long flowing hair that looks stiff and unnatural because of limited animation" syndrome that plagued Hilda, Sothis, and other such characters in Three Houses, even though they'd already improved upon hair animation in Engage. It almost feels like Three Houses and Fortune's Weave are using a different engine than Engage, but I'm sure that can't be the case?

Speaking of Hong Hua, I wonder why the English changed her name to that from Kouka in the original Japanese version? I know sometimes the localisers alter Western-sounding names to make them feel more natural in English (like Lueur to Alear in Engage), but in this case they've changed a Japanese name into a Chinese one, which is something quite different. AFAIK both "Kouka" and "Hong Hua" refer to the Crimson Flower route in Three Houses, so the meaning of then name stays the same, but it's still a weird change.