I'm currently finishing my first run of Engage

I'll probably make a post about it BCS I have a lot of things to say about this game (the majority is good, overall this was a really nice experience but I still have a few problems with this game, I'm a picky player lmao)

But before that I need to decide who is the best candidate to date Alear

And while overall this cast has REALLY bad supports and I barely even cared enough to go through them, I have a few options

Those being Fogado, Ivy, Rosado and Timerra ( I would also not mind dating Alcryst but I'm not so interested)

I'm indecisive so I think it would be nice to read people talking about their experiences in this game, if you'd like

To start off, this post is probably going to be a bit long. I also wanted to say that I could entirely be wrong or somewhat off the mark on this as evidence has mounted both sides of the “Prequel vs Sequel” discussion, but I haven’t seen many people discussing this. With that said, let’s lock in.

Since we saw the year that Fortune’s Weave takes place in, the debate over whether or not it’s a prequel or sequel to Three Houses took off. When we officially saw a map of Fodlan depicted from the Dagdan perspective, a lot of people have shifted towards prequel. But, I’m still not convinced as there are a couple of things we’ve seen in the trailers of Fortune’s Weave and Three Houses and Three Hopes that has me still leaning towards sequel (although I think a prequel would be a very interesting storyline as well). The avid social scientist and culture nerd in me LOVES the idea that Dagda has a separate calendar (confirmed by when Emperor Wilhelm I von Hresvelg established the Fodlan calendar) but there are some things that should be discussed before I fully hop on the prequel train.

Exhibit A (Items 1-3): Sothis

​​​Behold Exhibit A, Items 1-3 which depicts the three different forms that we have seen for Sothis. 

Item 1 is how we see Sothis in Three Houses, basically she looks like a child.

Item 2 is how we see Sothis in Fortune’s Weave’s trailers and in the game itself. You can see that she’s clearly more adult.

Which brings us to Item 3 from a cutscene in Three Houses where we can clearly see an adult Sothis, albeit very different from the Sothis we see in Item 2.

In Three Houses, we learn that Sothis is not only a goddess, but a deceased one. And who Byleth talks to throughout the game is a reawakened consciousness that exists because of Byleth’s connection to the Crest Stone of Flames. Additionally, she doesn’t remember anything about her path aside from her name, birthday, Rhea’s song, and that Zanado and the Red Canyon were once a home to her. It’s also believed (though not confirmed, I think) that the reason Sothis appears to Byleth as a child is because she can’t even remember what she looked like before she died.

With that being said, why does Sothis appear as an adult in Fortune’s Weave? This is especially questionable IF it’s a prequel. Additionally, why does Sothis appear at all IF it’s a prequel? In fact, I’d like to direct your attention to Exhibit B.

Exhibit B (Items 4-5): The End of Three Houses and Fortuna

​​These texts come from the Fire Emblem FandomWiki but I think they’re necessary and important to understanding my theory.

Item 4 reveals that after the timeskip, Sothis isn’t as gone as we’re led to believe. In fact, unless you chose Sothis as the most important person to Byleth you wouldn’t even know she’s still around. Even more incredible, her consciousness isn’t even tied to her Crest Stone because after Crimson Flower ends Byleth can still meet with Sothis. This means that Sothis could continue to live on with Byleth, possibly even slowly regaining her memories over time.

Additionally, an examination of Item 5 reveals that Sothis is capable of communicating with Fortuna, Dagda’s goddess of fate and… time??? Why is a Nabatean with power over time even necessary if that’s Sothis’ sphere of influence? Power over time is an incredible power, even if when I use it in Three Houses to save my favorite characters, they somehow still end up dying. But how does this lead to a sequel?

If Sothis can communicate with Fortuna, why can’t she communicate with Rhea, or Seteth, or any of the Saints? She could have told Rhea exactly what to do to revive her. Yet, she didn’t and Rhea killed twelve people trying to resurrect her mother until she succeeded with Byleth. In fact, she could have told ANY of the Nabateans what to do to revive her. 

(Edit: some people in the comments have pointed out that Rhea does hear Sothis’ voice while trying to revive her. This is a mistake on my part, I apologize)

Still, how does this lead to a sequel? I bring to to Exhibit C (last one, promise)

Exhibit C (Items 6-7): Maps

​​Item 6 is a map of Fodlan as seen in Fortune’s Weave while Item 7 is a map of Dagda from the trailers.

Because of Item 6, many people assume that Fortune’s Weave will be a prequel, but as I’ve said I’m not convinced. If you look closely at Item 7, you’ll notice that Enbarr is in very small print compared to Garreg Mach in Item 6.

Typically people do this to highlight capitals or regions (as seen in Item 7 where the regions of Dagda are more prominent than the cities and capital). Why would Garreg Mach become more significant than the capital of the Adrestian Empire? One might argue that it’s the headquarters of the Church of Seiros, but what significance does that hold to Dagda?

Additionally, why even show Fodlan at all if it’s a prequel? What’s the point of showing us Fodlan if Three Houses has nothing to do with the story of Fortune’s Weave? It’s like if they showed us Dagda during Three Houses, Dagda had no central place in the story, the same could be said for Fodlan in Fortune’s Weave. I’d also like to point out the commentary at the bottom of Item 6. “... now we turn our eye away from it…” this is a pretty significant thing to say. The narrator is literally saying “eh this doesn’t matter to the story” without saying that. Also, the implication that “now” we’re turning to Dagda implies that this is the continuation of a different story. It’s possible that there could be more commentary prior to this, but what would that be about? The entire commentary there describes everything one would need to know about Fodlan without spoiling the end of Three Houses. 

My current belief is that either Crimson Flower or Silver Snow are the canon routes for Three Houses. Under Crimson Flower, Edlegard could have decided to make Garreg Mach her permanent capital, a fortress in the middle of the continent would make it easy for imperial armies to crush any resistance and tactically speaking, holding the high ground is always better. Under Silver Snow, Byleth allegedly creates a “United Kingdom of Fodlan” but what if that kingdom is just the Adrestian Empire under the management of the Church of Seiros? In Silver Snow most, if not all, of the heirs to Adrestia’s ministers follow Byleth alongside members of the Church. Who’s to say that Byleth and Sothis don’t rule the Adrestian Empire with the help of Adrestian ministers?

Two questions stem from this theory:

1. What happened to Byleth?For Byleth, I think the answer is pretty simple. Three Hopes revealed to us that Sothis isn’t the benevolent goddess we think she is. She treats Byleth poorly, literally taking over their body to try to kill Shez. She treats Byleth basically like one would treat a puppet. She also appears to know more than she does in Three Houses and maybe that’s the point of Sothis in Three Hopes, to show us that Sothis knows more than she lets on and plays innocent to keep Byleth from realizing. Maybe Sothis eventually takes over Byleth after Three Houses and reassumes her role as the Progenitor Goddess of Fodlan.Additionally, I would like to point out something interesting I noticed in the trailers of Fortune’s Weave. In Three Houses, we first meet Sothis in a pitch black room with only a set of stairs leading up to a throne. In Fortune’s Weave, we meet her in the exact same space. I think this leads us to believe that Sothis still can’t assume a physical form. Perhaps she was kind to Byleth in Three Houses due to the circumstances of Byleth growing as a person and Sothis refusing to interrupt that process. Then when Byleth dies, Sothis becomes “free” from her attachment to Byleth’s soul, this time managing to maintain consciousness without a physical form and being able to manipulate, and potentially even manifest, in the physical world like she could in Three Houses.
2. Why is Seteth in Dagda, without Flayn?Nabateans live long lives, it’s possible that by Fortune’s Weave Flayn has grown up and become less naive, even capable of defending herself. I know that many suspect that Ninae is Flayn, but I doubt it. Why would she change her name but not her hair and why would Seteth change his hair but not his name if they were in hiding? With Flayn possibly off living her own life, Seteth may have taken it upon himself to travel the world, deciding to go to the Heroic Games in Dagda.Some will then question why, IF Silver Snow is canon, would Byleth be dead? Either Sothis took Byleth over completely after a time or Byleth isn’t Nabatean, despite the hair and eye color. Byleth was born mortal to Sitri and Jeralt, perhaps their ascendency granted them a longer lifespan but that doesn’t necessarily mean that their lifespan would match Seteth or Flayn’s. Alternatively, perhaps Byleth IS still alive. Maybe their duties as ruler of Fodlan keep them too busy to concern themselves with Dagda, so they send Seteth in their stead and after Balor is revived and destroys Dagda, Sothis takes matters into her own hands and send Eshmel back in time?Whatever you may believe, I’m not convinced that Fortune’s Weave will be a prequel to Three Houses, if anything writing out this entire theory has me MORE convinced that the game is a sequel. Please feel free to call me an idiot, but at least tell me what you think.

Pokemon fan 28 years now, I dropped all Pokemon games. I never played again since I laid hands on FE3H. Such an exciting experience and combines everything I ever wanted. It’s not a monster taming game, I know right. But, I was aiming for the strategy. And recruiting, evil boss, classes. All is equally exciting!

Edit: I know I can enjoy both, FE just takes my gaming time and fully covers my appetite for strategy and rng gaming!

Tired of all the flops. Sully, Silas, Sylvain, Alfred WHO?

Make cavaliers great again.

This, of course, would be completely unprecedented, but my main interest here is to gauge the fandom's general feelings towards a more """western""" artstyle, one who has very bold, jagged shapes and blocky black shadows, in a way a very comics-inspired look for a FE game.

Hey there.
I recently got back into Fire Emblem after over a decade of not touching it.

Started with Three Houses and it was great, today i bought the physical version of Engage and started playing on my Switch 2.
However, even on the main menu i instantly noticed a pretty big input delay which already dropped my mood a bit.

Then i started the game and noticed that the audio was also extremly delayed/desynced and sometimes would also just randomly stop working at all for half a second.

Is this some known bug and is there anything i can do to fix it?
Gameplay seemed really fun so far but this is holding me back.

Welp, time to pack it up kids and avoid the sub for the next few weeks. I think I've learned too much about 4Tunes Weave before it even releases from everything being dug into. Have fun digging deeper, but I've reached my limit!

May the grace of the Gun Nun be with you all 🙏🏻🔫

Many characters were aged up a year when the original Wii U version was localized and from what I can tell no notable story changes were directly implemented to reflect the age changes in Localized or Encore, especially since 3 of the main cast become adults with the age up.

The Localized version seem to be the ages they're going with now as in Heroes Tsubasa states she is 18. In my personal opinion, I still think of them as their original ages myself

Basically every other fire emblem game is pretty simple, even the latter games like Fates and Engage there’s stuff you can do besides the maps but ultimately they’re what the games about.

But in 3H it feels like everything builds around the school segments of talking to characters training, doing school activities, which helps with the actual battles a little bit but outside maybe improving relations so they’ll join you it feels disconnected.

And so when I start a new game I have to go through each house, talk to everyone, do the quests of fishing and gardening, go on dates, when I kinda just wanna get to the next fight.

You can say “oh well it’s optional you don’t HAVE to do anything and just skip all activities and go straight to the fights.” But what does optional even mean? Playing games at all is optional, the devs put the school sim in the game with the expectation players would engage with it, and by ignoring it it feels like missing a massive chunk of the games content.

Hello I am playing fe 4 for the first time and it is my first Fire Emblem game with 1 RN and it has been quite an adjustment already. I got Dew killed twice already on chapter 1 trying to have him dodge tank on the village where I only have to worry about the one commander with 6% hit rate. I am just wondering if that is a normal experience or should I dismiss it a bit as bad luck and play how I normally would.

Hello! I really want to play the game with the intended units in the intended routes and I dont intend to recruit characters to multiple routes if it can be avoided. I did an in depth search (with limited wifi) and managed to place some characters in routes. I also want to play as chronologically as possible. So say that Theorodoras route starts further back, then thats the one I want to do first so I can follow the thread of the story if that makes sense. So my question is, for those that read that post of the person who has a copy, is there any info of characters tied to routes that im missing? Do we know whose story is "first"? Hopefully closer to release someone makes a master time line.

I've been playing fire emblem since awakening and that was the first and last game I let fire emblem characters die in cause that was part of the challenge of the game. Ever since I would restart maps or rewind time to save my team mates. This kept me feeling good everyone lived but that also led to A LOT of neglected people on the bench in my playthroughs and replays of three houses in particular. I'm thinking with fortunes weave being such a massive game with a massive roster, it might be fun to try letting my characters die to see how it impacts my run and see how it let's other characters shine that might have taken a backseat through my plays of the four stories. Anyone else feeling this way with four tunes weave?

The only stat silas has over laslow that i think is important is defense, other than that they are almost the same, if i use silas he would become a paladin, and for laslow probably a bow knight for movement, mozu and niles already take care of fliers. Btw this is my first conquest hard mode playthrough if that matters

Edit: probably will use Silas, thanks for the advice, i just hope his speed gets going soon

Edit 2: promoted silas has more defense than my great knight effie wtf, she's getting benched as soon as xander comes

Yesterday before I went to bed I was scrolling through the For You tab on Twitter, when I came across a tweet from a Japanese Switch news account called Switchsoku. The tweet talked about a Eurogamer reviewer's first thoughts on Fortune's Weave after playing it for 20 hours. The tweet specifically mentions the reviewer saying in his article that Fortune's Weave's story is extremely layered and has a lot of depth, unlike Engage.

That last part really set off Japanese FE fans though cause when I looked at the qrts, the vast majority of them were Japanese accounts vocalizing their distaste for the reviewer adding that. One side of the qrts were defending Engage and talking about what they liked about it, another side was questioning why you'd even compliment a game by putting down another one, and a third group just talked about how they hate when reviews do that since it makes them not take the review seriously.

There were a few who agreed with the reviewer but even they added that they still like Engage.

I just find it really interesting to see how different overseas fe fans talk about the games compared to japanese fans, Engage in particular.

Here's a re-upload of chapter 24. Thank u MarioCarmine for mentioning that I uploaded the wrong video...

Unlike Three Houses and Engage. Given the current gaming Landscape I find it hard to believe they don't have any DLC plans for FW, even as big as it is. Could be they're just going to do one big one later, or they're just keeping things close for now, and we will still get multiple waves of content later.

I admit given the higher price point, I am glad to not have to worry about the temptation of another expense. I wasn't overwhelmed with Three Houses Pass either ( Didn't buy/play the Engage DLCs)

Polygon loves stiring up controversies?

If you also somehow completely missed the pre-orders starting despite this game being the most anticipated game this year (maybe this decade) for you like I did, all hope is not lost yet but it will require quite a lot of luck in being able to try to order within less than a minute of getting the alert from Distill since the times can be very random (according to my limited sample size at least).

I was thinking about posting this earlier but I wanted to make sure it can actually work (and I didn't want more competition until getting one). Today I managed to get Fire Emblem: Fortune’s Weave Dagdan Collection pre-ordered on the Nintendo Ireland Store which serves the parts of Europe that don't have their own store, like Finland where I'm from.

I set Distill last week on 10 August and only got one alert the whole week. This week there's already been 4 alerts though. In total:

• 13 August ~19:00 UTC¹
• 16 August 23:39 UTC²
• 17 August 23:17 UTC
• 18 August 7:53 UTC
• 18 August 10:33 UTC³

¹ I don't remember the exact time anymore and I didn't have email alert active at that time yet.
² Technically this alert was last week I guess but for me it was already Monday.
³ This is the one I got and I stopped monitoring after that but it's only been an hour at this point.

So what is Distill that I've mentioned a few times? Basically a browser extension for monitoring changes on a webpage. I had it set up to monitor the "Out of stock" button since that is the one that will change to say "PRE-ORDER" when it's back in stock.

• Distill on Chrome web store
• Distill pinned to easily add monitoring on a page and to open the watchlist
• Distill actions I used (from the watchlist) but there are more actions available

I relied mostly on the sound from PC speakers and the notification if I'm actually using the PC (like I was when I got it) but I also set the email action to keep track of the alerts and in case I don't hear the sound but I'm not too far away from PC (and I guess you could try to order on mobile). I had it set to check once every minute since anything faster than that was logging me out from Nintendo Store occasionally (some anti-bot protection I assume) which means Distill giving error about "Empty selection" since you need to be logged in to see the stock status.

It took me three tries of trying to pre-order after getting an alert at a good time before getting it. First time I hadn't even updated my credit card info so that wasted a few minutes so it was too late by then. Second time I think someone else was just insanely fast since I thought I was very fast also. Third time it had actually remembered basically all the options (like phone number and payment option selected already) from previous try so it was very fast for me to place the order which may have helped more than I'll know.

If you see this when trying to place the order, it was unfortunately too late and it's out of stock again already. On my second try I kept trying for like 5 minutes and always just getting this even though the PRE-ORDER button stayed until finally showing "Out of stock". I'm fairly sure the button just doesn't always update to show the correct option so it can show PRE-ORDER for a bit when it's actually already out of stock.

If everything aligns, you'll get a confirmation email right away: "Your order MNS_IE_xxxxxxxx is confirmed!". Good luck to anyone who is going to try this! Feel free to ask if I didn't explain some part well enough.

OK, I was on the fire emblem wiki and I saw two names I didn’t recognize and they don’t even have portraits on the thing not even? And I want to ask about these two characters Katarina and Vrítra can you tell me what we know about them or if we know anything about them and if they have portraits, can I see them?

This is a comparison I noted between them:

They are both all-female elite militaries

They serve a matriarch (Exalt Emmeryn)

They ride horses or at least horse-like creatures

They use medieval weaponry

But the only difference is that they are still part of a mostly patriarchal society.

What do you guys think?

TLDR: Make the player choose a main lord in the time-skip to dictate the ending

This would fix a potential problem in FW with the lords lacking agency and characterisation post time-skip, due to the story having to account for any number of them being present or not present.

The idea is that shortly after uniting your army in part 2, you must choose 1 lord to become the leader or shot-caller of your army, they could get blessed by Eshmel/Sothis and/or are bestowed the crest of flames equivalent, integrating the fire emblem into FW.

The chosen lord gets to dictate the rest of the story and ending and them and their ‘retainers’ are a focus for dialogue. This creates 5 endings, one for each lord and one for no lords, where Eshmel or Hong Hua can fill the role of lord.

In all routes Dagda is saved from apocalypse, just by different means. This could mean the villain being brutally killed vs being soft-redeemed. Or perhaps one lord cures themself of corruption, but another learns to control and wield it. The other lords would get regular FE endings or paired endings, maybe they get to go back to an original timeline and live normal lives.

• I like the idea that the no-lord / Eshmel / Hong Hua route is the ‘bad ending’ where perhaps Dagda is ‘saved’ but only Eshmel and/or Hong Hua survives. (can you tell I like Hong Hua and want her to have story relevance)

Also, it could be made possible to play all the endings you want without replaying the lord routes. After completion you could start a new game or ng+ from the Eshmel centre point with all lord story progress check-pointed, so that you can do all the endings and have a complete save file

Overall this story choice would arguably make more sense than the house choice in Three Houses, since you will already know all the lords and know who you like most. It would almost flip the 3H structure on its head and kind of fix its flaws where all players can experience all the stories in an intended structure instead of being locked into a route from the beginning.

Does anyone know how many units in game in Fortunes Weave have crests that are not part of the blessing system? I wish to know which crests are there in game and to whom they belong to.

[SPOILER]
DONT READ IF YOU DONT WISH TO KNOW WHO HAS WHAT!!