Fire Emblem Fortunes Weave is one of the biggest and best Switch 2 exclusives yet

A little more than a year into its lifespan, the Nintendo Switch 2 has almost everything you could ask for.

We've gotten a great 3D platformer from the core Mario team, the triumphant return of Star Fox , a bevy of excellent third-party ports, and a library full of older games that look and run fantastic on the new console.

But one thing it's been lacking is a new, exclusive, original RPG to sink dozens and dozens of hours into.

I feel the pain of people who have been begging for this since launch; I put a collective few hundred hours into the Xenoblade Chronicles series on Switch 1, and while The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild is not strictly an RPG, it was a huge game you could devote your entire life to right when the older console came out in 2017.

Without beating around the bush, Fire Emblem: Fortune's Weave fixes that problem.

Developer Intelligent Systems' latest entry in the long-running series of tactics RPGs is almost exactly what I wanted out of the true follow-up to 2019's Three Houses : A big, dense tactics game with memorable characters, a setting with lots of cool stories to tell, and multiple ways to experience it all.

While Fortune's Weave falls short of Three Houses in some respects, it outshines its predecessor in others, and gives Switch 2 owners exactly what they've been missing since last June.

SEE ALSO: The Nintendo Switch 2 is getting a 'Legend of Zelda' makeover Fire Emblem weaves a compelling, if occasionally scattershot, tale Part of what endeared Three Houses to so many, including myself, was its grandiose story that followed a few dozen characters in a large-scale conflict across a period of years.

Fortune's Weave is broadly similar, though it carves its own path, for better and worse.

After a relatively quick prologue, you're asked to choose from one of four protagonists for the first part of the story, which revolves around a large martial tournament in Dagsion, the capital city of the massive Dagdan Empire.

The winner of the tournament will have one wish granted, and naturally, each of our heroes has their own motive for being there.

Leda is a dancer hell-bent on revenge for the death of her father, Cai is a teenage boy who wants to rescue his father from prison and certain execution, Dietrich is a foreign warrior who live to fight increasingly stronger opponents, and Theodora is the newly crowned queen of a semi-autonomous nation within the empire with distinct cultural needs.

There isn't a dud among the crowd here, which is one of Fortune's Weave 's strengths.

I like all four protagonists a great deal, and thoroughly enjoyed playing through all four of their campaigns.