Fire Emblem: Fortune's Weave Scores 89 on Metacritic — Switch 2's First Must-Buy SRPG

Quick Summary

Fire Emblem: Fortune's Weave launched exclusively on Nintendo Switch 2 on September 17, 2026, and five days later the review picture is clear: this is the best Fire Emblem game since Awakening. Metacritic sits at 89 across 66 critic reviews, matching Three Houses (2019) for the second-highest score in franchise history, trailing only Awakening's 92 from 2013. OpenCritic puts it at 89 "Mighty" with 97% of critics recommending it — top 1% of all games ever reviewed on the platform.

It has also spawned the most unlikely meme of fall 2026: a banana at a Walmart checkout desk.

Sources: Shane the Gamer (Sept 21, 2026) · GamesReviews.com (Sept 21, 2026)

At a Glance

The Franchise Comeback Story

After 2023's Fire Emblem: Engage landed at 80 on Metacritic — the series' weakest mainline score since the 3DS era — Fortune's Weave needed to do more than be good. It needed to remind players why the franchise mattered.

It delivered. The 89 represents a 9-point jump from Engage and puts Fortune's Weave in the same company as Three Houses, the game that brought Fire Emblem to mainstream attention in 2019. A Metacritic user score of 9.0 from over 200 ratings tells the same story: this isn't a case where critics liked something fans didn't.

Franchise Metacritic History

The Official Trailer

Screenshots

Review Scores

15 of 60+ critics gave it a perfect score. The lowest marks are three 7/10 ratings. Not a single negative review in the Metacritic aggregate.

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"builds upon its strategic arts in ways I couldn't have anticipated" — IGN

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"Fire Emblem: Fortune's Weave builds on Three Houses' multi-path structure as an even grander and more ambitious epic" — Alan Wen, GamesRadar+

The common praise: the four-protagonist structure works, the combat is the tightest in the series, and the sheer scope is earned. The common knock: late-game pacing drags, and the Act 3 structure has been misread by part of the community (more on that below).

The Setup: Four Heroes, One Tournament, One Demon God

The Dagdan Empire is on the brink of collapse. Balor, a demon god revived after millennia, is closing in. Your avatar, Eshmel, travels back five years with the help of the time-manipulating goddess Fortuna to compete in the Heroic Games — a tournament held in the capital Daxia where the winner gets one wish.

The Four Protagonists

The game lets you switch between all four routes at will. Each one plays differently and resolves differently, but they converge in the final act. This is the structure reviewers are most excited about — and also the source of the Act 3 controversy.

Debunking the Act 3 "Gacha" Claim

By day four after launch, forum discourse had shifted from "this is great" to "is Act 3 a gacha?" Posts on Famiboards and similar fan spaces claimed that characters recruited in earlier routes get pooled into a shared roster in Act 3 — and that pulling them back requires real money, like Fire Emblem Heroes.

This is not accurate. GamesRadar+ and other outlets addressed it directly: the shared pool in Act 3 operates on in-game gold, not real-money currency. There is no actual gacha system in Fortune's Weave.

What muddied the waters was Nintendo's 1.01 patch, which added "Chosen" weapons — Alfonse's Chosen Sword and Fjorm's Chosen Lance from Fire Emblem Heroes — as obtainable items in Daxia. The attack animation imitates the summoning animation from Heroes. That's a fan-service easter egg, not a monetization system. Two separate things got conflated.

Bottom line: no gacha. The Act 3 recruitment pool costs in-game gold. The Heroes items are a nod to mobile fans and nothing more.

The Walmart Banana Moment

Fortune's Weave also generated one of the stranger viral stories of launch week. Physical copies launched at $79.99 — the series' highest retail price — with supply running short at Walmart and Amazon almost immediately.

Deal hunters discovered that applying promo codes like FAST30 or SAVE3X at Walmart checkout could cut the price to roughly $60. The codes didn't work consistently, but shoppers found that adding a single banana to their cart seemed to make the discount apply. Photos of people posing with the game and a banana flooded social media. Walmart's online banana stock briefly showed as out of stock.

Nobody, including the people who found the glitch, could explain why it worked. Walmart has not commented.

Switch 2 Features

Fortune's Weave is also a showcase for what the Switch 2 adds to a genre built on precision. For the first time in Fire Emblem history, you can use Joy-Con 2 mouse controls to select units and draw movement paths with a cursor instead of a directional stick. Reviews describe it as a natural fit for tactical grid games.

Pricing and Editions

The Dagdan Collection's artbook and map are physical-only — digital buyers cannot purchase them separately. Physical copies sold out repeatedly at major US retailers in the first week.

The $10 gap between digital and physical is standard for Nintendo Switch 2 titles. The Switch 2 supports only microSD Express cards for expanded storage, so factor that in before going digital.

For players outside North America: Nintendo's regional pricing applies through local eShop storefronts. The Hong Kong eShop listed the game at HKD 499 at launch.

How Long Is It?

This is the largest single Fire Emblem title by content volume. For a $69.99 digital purchase, that's among the strongest hours-per-dollar ratios in the tactical RPG genre. The late-game pacing issue is real — multiple critics flagged it — but it doesn't invalidate the overall structure.

Should You Buy It?

If you own a Switch 2 and have any interest in tactical RPGs, this is a system-defining purchase. It builds on Three Houses' template with more routes, a larger world, and a first-party technical showcase in mouse controls. The four-protagonist structure that sounded risky in the previews delivers in practice.

If you're on the fence about Switch 2: Fortune's Weave joins Dune: Awakening (launching today on console) and the upcoming Control Resonant (September 24) in what's shaping up to be the system's strongest fall window. This is probably the clearest argument yet for the hardware outside Nintendo's Zelda catalogue.

If you're a lapsed Fire Emblem fan who bounced off Engage: this is the return to form the series needed.

Sources

• ▶Shane the Gamer — Metacritic 89 debut analysis (Sept 21, 2026)
• ▶GamesReviews.com — Act 3 fan controversy fact-check (Sept 21, 2026)
• ▶Nintendo.com — Official product page