Fire Emblem: Fortune's Weave Punishes You for Playing Favorites

Fire Emblem: Fortune's Weave plays a mean trick on you. No matter who you pick first, it starts you out with a handful of really good characters. They're cool and charming and strong, and yeah, okay, the game tells you to recruit more allies. There's even a tutorial for it. But why would you want to, when you have a small posse of the most special people who ever lived? Then you get to the War Arc in Part 2 and quickly realize why.

This piece contains mild spoilers for Fortune's Weave's War Arc, including the identities of certain guest and recruitable characters.

Before that, though, Fortune's Weave lulls you into a false sense of security in your favoritism. Dungeon exploration and skirmish battles only have a few character slots, usually five or six. Most matches in the Heroic Games have slightly higher unit caps, but in the early rounds, you have guest characters to fill out the roster. When the difficulty ramps up later in Part 1 (or earlier, if you're playing as Dietrich), it's your core group that carries the day. Not the drunk monk lagging behind at level 20. Or that guy who wants to be a knight with his little pony, but is built like a horseless brick wall, so you turn him into an armored class and feel bad about it.

This is me speaking from experience, if you couldn't tell from that last example. (Guilt won out, and I made him a charioteer later.) I first played as Dietrich and ended Part 1 with him pushing level 40, with Esmeralda, Mikaela, and Fabio in the mid-30s and Io close behind. I also had Nydine, Yang Jie, Alexandra, Lysander, Noctula, and Dante trained to varying, underwhelming degrees. Kiroc, whom I perpetually ignored, was also there. You're not a bird, dude. Stop cawing at me.

Anyway, that was it. I could've recruited other characters, I know. But this was when I was still figuring out how things worked, and I spectacularly mismanaged my free time, funds, and gift-giving for about 10 chapters. At that point, it was too late to fix things. The same for training my non-core group, all of whom languished in their starting classes with dreadful stat growth. Train you? When my best friends need their skills trained? Please be serious.

Image: Intelligent Systems/Nintendo via Polygon

Then the War Arc started. The lowest unit cap in the second act is 15, and while you get two guest characters automatically (and two more named guests if you're still under 15), I felt the strain immensely. Dietrich could survive just about anything in Part 1, and he pulled off some miraculous evasions at certain points. But facing down dozens of enemies and dozens more reinforcements, including giant elephants, across treacherous maps with just a few worthwhile characters — while struggling to keep the underperformers alive — is difficult and exhausting. Act 3's battles are even larger and more demanding.

The moral of the story is: Don't ignore your other units. Also, y'know, recruit other units. You don't have to swap them into battle to level them up. The War Arc has a feature that lets you bring everyone to roughly the same level before a battle begins. But you should at least bump up some of their skills and change classes to encourage better stat growth. In those stretches where you have nearly 200 turns of free time, spend an in-game week doing auto-activities with your low-leveled units doing combat exercises to raise their levels. Trust me. You'll be glad you did.