Fire Emblem: Fortune's Weave Reviews Just Gave Nintendo Another Massive 2026 Win

Published Sep 16, 2026, 9:51 AM EDT Most critics agree Nintendo's latest tactical RPG is a new series high point Fire Emblem: Fortune's Weave is absolutely massive and absolutely brilliant, say reviews Image: Intelligent Systems / Nintendo Critics are almost unanimous in declaring that Fire Emblem: Fortune's Weave is superb, and a new high point for the long-running series of tactical role-playing games from Intelligent Systems and Nintendo. And they're 100% unanimous in saying that the game is absolutely enormous. At present, Fortune's Weave's aggregate rating sits at 89 on Metacritic and 90 on OpenCritic, with perfect scores from IGN, Eurogamer, TheGamer, and more. By Metacritic's rankings, it is tied with 2019's Three Houses as the second-best-reviewed Fire Emblem game. The all-time critical champ is 2013's Fire Emblem: Awakening for 3DS, which has a Metascore of 92. In a five-star review, Eurogamer's Dom Peppiatt called Fortune's Weave a "pinnacle of combat design," a "sumptuous feast of a game," and a "shining jewel in the strategy RPG genre." Like many critics, Peppiatt felt that Fortune's Weave is the first Fire Emblem game in a while to succeed in both storytelling and game design. "It plaits a tapestry from all of the series' various highest highs, somehow managing to entwine the storytelling prowess of Three Houses with the clean, satisfying combat of Engage, threading a bonus party-based battle system from the 3DS title Fire Emblem Echoes: Shadows of Valentia into a world map that's bigger and better than anything we've seen in the series to date." IGN's Brendan Graeber was similarly wowed, awarding the site's 10/10 "Masterpiece" rating. Graeber was impressed by how the game's story resolves across four threads, and how the game allows the player to manage the tale's many permutations through a single save file. "The many unique twists of each hero’s story path had me eager to see all the ways those journeys differed from each other, making the grand culmination in the final act hit so damn well," he wrote. Image: Intelligent Systems/Nintendo For Siliconera's Jenni Lada — who also gave the game a 10 — the sheer size of Fortune's Weave, which plays out over three acts, is its most impressive feature. "It’s just… massive. I’d say it sometimes feels like a game and its sequel bundled up into one package like The Hundred Line: Last Defense Academy," Lada wrote. "There’s so much to it, and yet the developer made efforts to make it feel more manageable. If someone picks this up, they could spend at least a full month playing and probably still not be 'done.'" Lada did express disappointment in the Support system, though. There are some dissenting voices to all this acclaim — that is, if you consider 8/10 scores to be dissent. GiantBomb's Jeff Grubb loved the tactics but felt the game suffers from "vacuous" plotting and "hollow writing." RPG Site's Cullen Black thought the game's sheer girth works against it some of the time: "This might be the longest and most complex game I’ve ever reviewed, topping off my full playthrough at 161 hours," Cullen writes, while admitting "I spent most of those hours adoring every second of the run." For Polygon's Josh Broadwell, Fortune's Weave is simply "a monumental achievement" and "one of Nintendo's greats." "Fortune’s Weave demands much — both in terms of time and of mental investment — but gives just as much in return," Broadwell wrote. "I've spent more than 120 hours playing this game, including more late nights than I should admit to, just completely absorbed in it. Yet I still haven't completed every path or done all there is. It's a game worth savoring and taking your time with, and even with the crammed release calendar over the next few months, I can see myself coming back to Fortune's Weave again and again for another turn of fate's wheel." Judge for yourself when Fire Emblem: Fortune's Weave is released exclusively for Switch 2 on Sept. 17.