Every Tactics Game Needs a Rewind Button

The rewind and blessings features in Fire Emblem: Fortune’s Weave have convinced me this is the way more video games should handle difficulty options. Especially tactics games, which need to allow wiggle room more often. It's not about whether you're good enough or preserving a sense of identity through challenge. It's about giving you ways to experiment, have fun, and learn at your own pace without altering the game's fundamental structure.

Three Houses introduced the Divine Pulse rewind feature in 2019, and Engage reproduced it practically unchanged in 2023. You had very few uses of it, a limitation that suggested Intelligent Systems felt uncertain about how people would receive it and whether it might make Fire Emblem too "casual." Fortune's Weave tosses that hesitation out the window and gives you more rewinds — infinite if you're playing on normal difficulty, and up to 20 on hard mode. It costs Divine Sand on hard mode, so if you're using other blessings, you get fewer than 20 uses out of it.

Yes, the diehards are annoyed that you can rewind, but there's a very important thing these folks evidently forgot: No one's forcing you to rewind. And for those complaining about infinite rewinds ruining difficulty, you're playing on normal mode, buddy. Of course it's easier. For everybody else? It's nice! And I'd even go so far as to say it's essential. Having options for how you enjoy the thing you spent money to enjoy is always good, doubly so when that thing frequently throws gigantic battles at you that could take upward of an hour or more to clear.

That might sound odd to you if you're still in Part 1. A lot of the battles there are comparatively less challenging, unless you're playing Dietrich's story, but Part 2 chapters ratchet up the difficulty considerably. On hard mode, the War Arc battles regularly took me about 90 minutes on hard mode, and my colleague playing on normal mode (without having kneecapped himself like I did) still had to set aside about an hour to finish them.

Part 2 Chapter 3 was one such instance. You're pushing through a densely packed city center, flanked on one side by cavalry and elephants on the other, with long-range magic attackers at the far end. Then flames engulf the city as the reinforcements keep hounding you down narrow alleys. I'd used all my Divine Sand on rewinds and a few blessings and was down to relying on the single, mid-battle save file to cover my mistakes, knowing full well some of my bigger mistakes had happened long before and that starting over was a distinct possibility. Reader, I was thrilled. This was some of the most fun I'd had with Fire Emblem in years. But without rewinds and saves and little bits of extra help? I probably would've walked away frustrated and reluctant to pick it up again, knowing an unforgiving 2-hour slog waited for me. Nobody's got time for that, not when the next two chapters are just as grueling.

Image: Intelligent Systems/Nintendo via Polygon

I'm very much in favor of difficulty options in general, but playing Fortune's Weave right after Star Wars Zero Company made my position even more concrete. Zero Company is great, don't get me wrong. But it's so inflexible sometimes and in a way that adds little to your tactics. That's not a dig specifically at Zero Company; the broader genre still has catching up to do in terms of approachability. But when missions have multiple phases and no way to record your progress, and when you can't even undo movement if you realize you made a dumb mistake — or hit the wrong button completely by accident — it starts looking more like punishment instead of strategy.

Why can't I undo my movement in the Mario + Rabbids games? Battles don't take that long, at least, but there really is no need for such draconian restrictions. Battles do take that long in Final Fantasy Tactics and its spin-offs and remakes. Reloading and starting over to fix a mistake doesn't make me think smarter about my plans. It just makes me not want to play anymore. Even classic Fire Emblem is unnecessarily brutal. Some of Blazing Blade's later maps take so long, and all you get is a suspend option that takes you back to the menu. It's basically just a pause button to save your Game Boy's battery life. And I probably wouldn't have replayed Path of Radiance earlier this year without Switch Online's save anytime feature.

Meanwhile, Fortune's Weave's difficulty options make more room for strategizing. You take bigger risks knowing you don't have to spend half your evening correcting them should they not pan out. You figure out smarter ways to position units, more effective team combinations, different ways to use combat arts, and basically learn to play the game on its terms.

Image: Intelligent Systems/Nintendo via Polygon

That's before even taking blessings into account. Make a bold move, but worried you might suffer for it? Aurora's got your back with her damage-halving powers. Spread everyone too thin and need to keep casualties low? Good thing you've got a direct line to Kalla the evasion goddess. Or maybe you just want Majide to finally land a single hit for the first, and likely last, time in his life. Mars approves.

Blessings aren't surefire guarantees of success. You can even pray your way into a very bad situation if you mismanage your Divine Sand (good thing mid-battle saves are back on the menu). But they give you options, and they make the game more open as a result. I've played Fire Emblem since Blazing Blade's official international release in 2003, and Fortune's Weave is the first time I felt like I had the freedom to think and plan outside the box since then. Sure, part of that comes from the open class system and some excellent personal abilities, but it's mostly the result of giving you better, more flexible ways to use those things.