Fire Emblem: Fortune's Weave Debuts at 89 on Metacritic

Fire Emblem: Fortune's Weave went on sale worldwide for Nintendo Switch 2 on September 17, 2026, and it arrived carrying one of the year's strongest review tallies. Metacritic lists a Metascore of 89 for the Switch 2 version, built from 68 critic reviews: 61 positive, three mixed and none negative. OpenCritic shows a top-critic average of 89 with 97% of critics recommending the game, which the aggregator places in the 99th percentile of everything it has ever scored.

The numbers landed because the review embargo lifted on September 16, a day before release, and dozens of outlets published at once. Writing that day, GamesRadar+ noted that 89 makes Fortune's Weave the joint second-highest-rated entry in the series on Metacritic, level with 2019's Fire Emblem: Three Houses; Fire Emblem Awakening still leads the franchise with 92. GamesRadar+ counted 60 reviews at the time, 15 of them perfect scores, with the lowest three sitting at 7 out of 10. Metacritic's tally had risen to 68 reviews by the following day.

For anyone weighing a purchase, the spread of opinion matters as much as the average. IGN's Brendan Graeber gave it 10 out of 10, calling it "an excellent pairing of combat strategy and management"; Eurogamer's Dom Peppiatt gave five stars; GameSpot's Steve Watts gave 9 out of 10. The more measured reviews agree on where it strains. Nintendo Life's Jim Norman scored it 8 out of 10 and wrote that "the pacing slipping in the later chapters" and "grindy map management" can make it "a bit too much of a good thing." GamesRadar+ freelancer Alan Wen gave four out of five, praising a "grander and more ambitious epic" held back by "the myriad of busywork dragging down its momentum." The complaint is length and repetition, not the tactics.

Nintendo's own description sets up a protagonist who travels back in time to guide four heroes — Cai, Dietrich, Theodora and Leda — through interwoven journeys from past to present, against a demon god called Balor. Two things remain open. Nintendo has released no sales figures, and aggregate scores still move: Metacritic's review count climbed by eight in a single day. Whether the game is a direct follow-up to Three Houses is also unsettled — GamesRadar+ wrote only that it "could be a sequel" based on character appearances in trailers, and Nintendo's store page makes no such claim.