r/fireemblem

If yall interested you can play it here: https://www.n-puzzle.com/en/nintendoku

Personally, Awakening is still my favorite, with 3H coming second.

His route is lacking on tank characters and he's one of the first fights in the game, i really feel like they should let him join Cai's team early on.

Especially Since Centurio is an endgame leveled unit, jasmine is a very late recruit and simply not very good by the time you get her and ultand Can't be a defender if you do Cai's route first

Source: https://x.com/korokorokoroko/status/2106700859694604641

I miss the time of Sacred Stone in which retreating actually meant you can be on your way, rather then being forced to defeat it.

Just to be clear my main issue is how the game forces you to do them.

The answer:

The goal of this post is not to present any opinion. The goal of this post is to inform people what the production of Fire Emblem Fortunes Weave, so we can all understand this better when discussing and to clear up any misconceptions.

Fire Emblem: Fortunes Weave Credits

Fire Emblem Engages Credits

Fire Emblem 3 Houses Credits

Fire Emblem Shadows of Valenia

Moby Games Fortunes Weave Page

Other sources will be linked as the post goes on

Who Worked on Fire Emblem Fortunes Weave?

There were around 35+ companies that are credited in Fortunes Weave in various roles. I will be highlighting 5 of them. Intelligence Systems, Nintendo, O-TWO inc., D.A.G inc, and Shirogumi who seem to make the core development staff on the writing, visual, gameplay, and production of the game.

Intelligent Systems Before Fortunes Weave

This is IS’s first fully developed game in the Fire Emblem 3 Houses universe. Fire Emblem 3 Houses was a Koei Techmo game through and through. For a refresher, Excluding Special Thanks, Executive and General Producers Roles, 18 people are credited in IS roles, mostly in music, art and direction. Warriors games are all KT.

For more information here is my Fire Emblem 3 houses Proudction Post

Fire Emblem Engage was the first game since Shadows of Valentia that was fully made with Intelligent Systems in all creative leads. Engage was at least content finished in the summer of 2021, as we can see. According to both the Aussie Classification Board and the USK in Germany. It can be guessed full-scale development for FW started before or around then.

The company as a whole in 2025 had 208 employees as of 2026 the company sits at 223 employees. 98 graphic designers, 71 programmers, 26 planners, 11 sound creators, 3 hardware engineers, and 14 in accounting and sales

For more information on Engage, please read my Fire Emblem Engage Production Post

Intelligent System, O-TWO inc., and D.A.G inc

Only three men have been credited as head writers AND directors on a Fire Emblem game. Shouzou Kaga the creator of the franchise. Kouhei Maeda, the director of Fates and Awakening, and Toshiyuki Kusakihara, the director of SoV, 3 Houses, and the head writer and director of Fortune's Weave. Kaga and Kusakihara are the only people to be sole directors and sole lead writers on the same game.

Masayuki Horikawa is listed as a Game Director Scenario in Binding Blade, but without another scenario credit, and based on his previous credit for Thracia, I am assuming he was just the writer. He was a director for FE9, I would assume he did have a lot to do with the story as he came up as a writer, but he was not credited under head scenario so its best speculation. Kouhei Maeda was credited as both scenario and director for Awakening and Fates; however, there were other scenario writers credited, and he is not listed as a head writer on Fates. It should also be noted, Kusakihara is the first director to get the lead credit in a Fire Emblem game since Kaga. As every other game listed the producer first, this game listed the director first.

As for the rest, the producers are mostly the same leads, with Higuchi, Genki Yokota being moved from director to producer and new to the franchise but a longtime producer on other Nintendo games, Shinya Saito. The director of Engage, Tsutomu Tei, was project manager and a “Game Director” by Yuya Ishii. A role that's hard to pin down what it means, but it seems like Kusakihara games have some sort of ‘game director’ type role, whether it's “Game Designer and Lead Planning" in SoV or “Lead Game Designer" in 3H.

As for the rest of the team, with a focus on the leads, 9 leads had never been a lead on a Fire Emblem game before, and 15 had, mostly Engage. I didn’t check everyone because I got lazy. From the looks of it its a lot of the same names from Engage with new faces in minor roles. I do have the list for leads; it will be in the comments.

Overall there are 128 total IS employees, not counting executive producers and special thanks roles that worked on this game. This is up from the 85 in Engage. This, although a bigger team, is smaller than the typical AAA studio. In just the art department, God of War 2017 had 77, Breath of the Wild over 220, Final Fantasy 7 Rebirth has 160+ in its environment, lighting, cutscene, character, facial, animation, VFX and UI artist alone. This is where a lot of smaller companies that worked on the project and D.A.G inc, a studio specific for animating characters in games, help.

Naoya Inui, Tomomi Tanigaki, and Shoichi Kanehisa, the other 3 scenario writers, have never written a Fire Emblem game as well or any game since 2008. With Inui, text support for Engage, the only one that has ever worked for IS. O-TWO inc. also has employees with various writing credits and 4 designers. They are the only company to have writing credits outside of IS; in what capacity, we do not know.

Nintendo

Nintendo historically did a lot of what they always do, worry about bigger macro things, such accessibility, delays/release dates, along with marketing, and translating the game, ect. However, there was a CLEAR CHANGE in how Nintendo treated this game. An example of how it might have worked was in Engage. In the Engage Nintendos 'Ask the Developer' we can see that IS were asked to tone Alear's personality down and in the past would manage what was happening in the game on a macro level.

With Yokota, a Nintendo employee, moving to a producer, this is the first Fire Emblem game since Radian Dawn with a sole director, and there has been an internal change in how Nintendo operates with the franchise as the publisher. Yokota from ask the developer on Fortune's Weave.

Yokota: “For this game, we wanted to create a different gameplay experience while maintaining a connection to the world of Fire Emblem: Three Houses. That’s why we established a new development structure with Nintendo and Intelligent Systems. I think this allowed us to fully realize the world that Kusakihara-san wanted to depict, much as we did in Fire Emblem: Three Houses, while making use of the experience and knowledge we had gained from our previous projects.”

What was that change? We are not sure as of now; the best we can do is speculate.

Shirogumi

Shirogumi is an animation studio based in Japan, primarily known for their Academy Award-winning visual effects on Godzilla Minus One and for their work on Shin Ultraman. They did the CGI cutscenes for Fire Emblem Fortunes Weave. They have also worked on various games from Bandai, Capcom, Square, and Nintendo. They have done many CGI trailers for various Pokemon Games, Elden Ring, Tears of the Kingdom, and more.

Hopefully this post clarifies some misconceptions about who did what during the development of the game. If you have any questions or concerns, or if you think this post contains any heavy bias writing or wrong information, please feel free to correct me.

Thanks for reading and have a great day.

From Chris Mayek. Full interview here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5zSocAwjk7A

Pretty much what the title says. I’m trying to use a unit on only 1 of the 4 routes, is this a good divide? Any suggestions of how to improve?

Thought they were somewhat similar both from a story and gameplay perspective.