Fire Emblem: Fortune's Weave Review

Three Houses mentioned Dagda and never took the player there. Fortune's Weave does, with most of that game's senior staff and a setting drawn from the ancient Mediterranean rather than another pass at medieval Europe. Four Flame Lords, Cai, Dietrich, Theodora and Leda, each carry a full campaign through the Heroic Games in the city of Dagsion, and each has an overworld ability nobody else has: Cai tames mounts, Dietrich finds enemies on the map, Theodora recruits soldiers, Leda earns by performing at inns.

Combat splits between grid battles in the arena and a party based system for dungeons, which the series has not used since Shadows of Valentia. The class list and the weapon list are the widest it has carried.

The reservations are real and small. Dungeon crawling turns repetitive, the middle of a route sags, and a technical limit around carrying elements between paths means the whole game runs on one autosaved file, a strange thing to accept in a series built on permanent loss. Against that: four routes that genuinely differ, voice work sustained across all of them, character art worth stopping on, and an orchestral score reviewers kept breaking off to praise. Near universal acclaim, and it earns the reception it got.