Fire Emblem: Fortune’s Weave is almost upon us. The game launches later this week on 17th September, and to drum up one last little bit of hype, Nintendo has released a new Ask the Developer interview, going behind the scenes with Intelligent Systems on the latest series entry.

The interview contains all sorts of interesting tidbits about the game’s development, but there was one note that really stood out to us as we were reading it: its hero roster was initially even bigger.

Beefing up Three Houses’ main trio, Fortune’s Weave boasts four central protagonists (Cai, Deitrich, Leda and Theodora), with one “true” hero, Eshmel, above them all. It’s quite a tall order, with each hero having their own unique storyline and mechanics, but Nintendo’s initial plan featured a whopping eight protagonists with their own perspective on the story.

“We were very fortunate that so many players enjoyed Fire Emblem: Three Houses, but at the same time, we had an enormous sense of responsibility. We spent a lot of time wondering how we could create something that would surpass it,” game director Toshiyuki Kusakihara says in the interview. “So initially, we came up with the bold idea of increasing the number of story perspectives from three to eight. The three powers in Fire Emblem: Three Houses are fundamentally at odds with one another. This time, we decided to take the opposite approach, with the stories unfolding along each path ultimately coming together into one”.

Eight perspectives sound like quite a lot to keep up with, and as it turns out, it was. While producer Genki Yokota admitted that he “felt it could lead to something really interesting,” he ultimately found that the eight-way split was too much: “with eight protagonists, there was almost too much we could do… It seemed like players would have a lot to keep track of, which could make the game feel complicated”.

As a result, the team cut things down to the four heroes that we see in the finished product. Roughly half of the development time was spent with this central quartet, but Kusakihara-san felt that the stories weren’t neatly coalescing into one as intended. And so, Eshmel joined the party.

“We were already halfway through development,” the director says, “but I went to the team and said, ‘Sorry, but we’re adding one more character'”.

“We needed a character who could look at the whole picture, like the professor in Fire Emblem: Three Houses,” associate producer Kenta Nakanishi adds. “I think adding that character made the overall structure easier to understand, with the idea that Eshmel helps the four protagonists rebuild a world that has fallen apart”.

The finished result is Fortune’s Weave as we now find it. We had a wonderful time with the interwoven storylines in our preview, and it’ll be interesting to see how they all line up in the finished product. At least we don’t have eight storylines to get through in this busy month of game releases, eh?