Fire Emblem: Fortune's Weave builds on Three Houses and Engage to deliver a more-polished technical experience

Fire Emblem: Fortune's Weave is very much a follow-up to Fire Emblem: Three Houses, but it also happens to build on what I liked about Fire Emblem Engage when it comes to presentation. Note that these impressions are based on hundreds of hours spent with Fire Emblem: Three Houses and Engage in addition to the opening hours of Fire Emblem: Fortune's Weave based on the digital version I bought. All the games are patched and the testing has been done on Switch 1 for Fire Emblem: Three Houses and Engage with Fire Emblem: Fortune's Weave on my Switch 2. 

Before getting to Fire Emblem: Fortune's Weave, I forgot how prior games looked on Switch 1 and even on Switch 2 until I tested them via backward compatibility and also using boost mode. I love Fire Emblem: Three Houses, but it was not a polished game when it comes to technical aspects. It ran with an unstable frame rate, had no anti-aliasing, very low quality textures, and even suffered from long load times on Switch 1. When played on Switch 2, Three Houses benefits from faster storage and a more stable frame rate where it actually hit 30fps often, but the visuals were still quite bad. 

Fire Emblem Engage on the other hand was already a big step up over Fire Emblem: Three Houses in image quality, performance (hitting 30fps unlike the unstable Three Houses), post-processing, and more. It had longer load times than Three Houses and some cuts like using 2D backgrounds with 3D models, but it generally was the most-polished Fire Emblem game on Switch 1 by a big margin. I missed Three Houses' narrative and even the structure, but Engage was a massively better game when it comes to maps and its core gameplay. 

For those who don't know, Fire Emblem: Three Houses was developed by Koei Tecmo and Intelligent Systems while Fire Emblem Engage was developed purely by Intelligent Systems. When Fire Emblem: Fortune's Weave was revealed and it was a follow-up to Fire Emblem: Three Houses, I assumed Koei Tecmo was involved again. I was wrong. Fire Emblem: Fortune's Weave has been developed by Intelligent Systems.

Fire Emblem: Fortune's Weave makes a fantastic first impression with clean visuals, stable performance, and super fast load times compared to the Switch 1 Fire Emblem games. Based on the opening hours, it is evident that Fire Emblem: Fortune's Weave benefits from the more powerful hardware to increase its presentation scope, but also with how it takes advantage of the faster storage. We've seen how the Switch Fire Emblem games load via backward compatibility and Fire Emblem: Fortune's Weave is much faster across the board.

Fire Emblem: Fortune's Weave docked gameplay

Beyond that, Fire Emblem: Fortune's Weave appears to be using better post-processing than even Fire Emblem Engage, but it s very evident that it cannot keep up with fast camera movement or during fast animations when played handheld. This is where you notice some ghosting and even jagged edges before the image stabilizes when you move slower or stand still. It isn't bad by any means and I still vastly prefer it to Switch 1 Fire Emblem games, but Fire Emblem: Fortune's Weave isn't perfect technically.

On the performance side, I did notice minor dips below 30fps when playing docked compared to Fire Emblem Engage, but nothing really of note during actual gameplay so far. Things could change later on of course, and Cullen, our reviewer, tells me he only really noticed a dip during a large attack in a hectic battle later on.

As for load times, I tested Fire Emblem: Fortune's Weave on Switch 2 alongside the Switch 1 versions of Fire Emblem: Three Houses and Fire Emblem Engage on Switch 1. I included my older Fire Emblem backward compatibility data for Switch 2 testing below. I measured the time taken to load the title screen from the dashboard and the time taken to load random battles. The results below are in seconds. Switch 2 tests are with the game installed to internal storage while Switch 1 tests are with the games installed to SD card on Switch OLED.

As you can see, Fire Emblem: Fortune's Weave is much faster across the board. This helps a lot and I've already noticed how much better it is as I've jumped across Switch Lite, Switch OLED, and Switch 2 testing load times. All of this will only add up when you spend dozens of hours with the games each week. 

After about 3 hours with Fire Emblem: Fortune's Weave, it isn't perfect technically, but it has exceeded my expectations and delivered a more-polished result than even Fire Emblem Engage while retaining aspects I love about Fire Emblem: Three Houses. I look forward to losing potentially over a hundred hours into it over the coming weeks. I'm curious to see if it ends up being my most-played game on Switch 2 until Xenoblade Genesis arrives.