Fire Emblem: Fortune’s Weave is a massive game that can easily last well over 100 hours. But you can actually make it a little less massive with the surprising ability to skip over a whole swath of the game, as players are starting to discover.
Fire Emblem: Fortune’s Weave consists of four story arcs starring separate protagonists, the four Flame Lords: Cai, Dietrich, Theodora, and Leda. You can play these in any order (though we have some recommendations) and by themselves each of these campaigns can last around 10-20 hours. Each one comes to its own resolution, of sorts. But after you’ve completed any one of them, you can move onto the next story arc, which starts to tie all the threads together. The fortunes start to weave, you might say. And if you want, you can just skip that part entirely.
Ultimately you’re all coming together to defeat the Demon King under the leadership of Eshmel, a sort of futuristic warrior construct made to bring together these legendary heroes under their banner. You know from the very start that’s where all this is going. The second arc starts to develop the coming war, and ramps up the difficulty with much larger maps and more formidable armies than the Heroic Games arc. But if you’d rather just skip straight to the endgame, you can actually do that. Fortune’s Weave will skip the story ahead, give you a summary of the events you missed, and auto-level your characters to scale you up for the last battles.
If you want to save even more time, and if you crave a real sicko-level strategy challenge, you can just skip to the final battle right from the beginning. As soon as you finish the prologue, you can turn your Eshmel around and head right to the Door of Destiny to defeat the Demon King. If you do this, the goddess of fate Fortuna will issue a stern warning that this is a terrible idea, but she won’t stop you. So you really have lots of options about how and when to approach the endgame challenges.
“Fortune’s Weave rewards those craving both deep interconnected stories and intricate, interlocking RPG systems in equal measure, creating a new high-water mark for the series,” I wrote in my Fire Emblem: Fortune’s Weave review.