Fire Emblem: Fortune's Weave almost had eight protagonists before being cut to five

With two days left before Fire Emblem: Fortune's Weave launches, Nintendo has published three rounds of Ask the Developer interviews, and the most striking detail is how radically different the game's cast almost looked. The team originally planned eight protagonists — more than double the five the final game ships with.

Producer Genki Yokota explained that Three Houses was a massive influence on Fortune's Weave, and the team initially wanted to outdo it in every way, including protagonist count. "Initially, we came up with the bold idea of increasing the number of story perspectives from three to eight," Yokota said. That proved too unwieldy, so the team cut it to four. But four still felt incomplete — the parallel stories needed something to pull them together. That led to Eshmel, the game's fifth protagonist and the initial player character, who functions similarly to Byleth in Three Houses. Director Toshiyuki Kusakihara said the team needed "another character who could take a broader view of all four protagonists" to make the concept of converging stories actually land.

The interviews also touched on Fortune's Weave introducing guns to the Fire Emblem series for the first time — a notable break from the franchise's medieval fantasy weapon set. Producer Masahiro Higuchi said firearms weren't added for novelty's sake: "as players progress through the story, they may uncover the reasons why something like it exists in this game's world." The game also features a time travel element, which may well be connected to why modern weapons exist in this setting.

What happened to the four extra protagonists from the original eight-character plan remains unclear — Nintendo hasn't said whether they were folded into the recruitable roster, cut entirely, or saved for future DLC. Fortune's Weave launches in two days.