Fire Emblem: Fortune’s Weave arrives on the Switch 2 this week, and as a heads up, there’s only “a single save file”.

This was revealed during Nintendo’s latest ‘Ask the Developer’ chat with the Fire Emblem team. According to Intelligent Systems’ director Toshiyuki Kusakihara, the team felt consolidating everything into a single save was the “best approach” for this latest entry:

“In Fire Emblem: Fortune’s Weave, players can progress through multiple paths simultaneously as well as replay the same path multiple times. To ensure that none of the experiences players had accumulated would go to waste, we felt that consolidating everything into a single save file was the best approach for this game.”

Nintendo’s Kenta Nakanishi, associate producer on this title, slightly expanded on this, noting how “separate save files would create system-related complications”.

To avoid limiting the game too much, the team has also taken a “creative” approach to make the single save system “work better”. This includes preserving save data for each protagonist and chapter, allowing players to replay chapters and revisit other aspects of the game.

“Of course, I’m sure there are players who prefer to keep multiple save files, and I’m actually one of those players myself. But because the game system of Fire Emblem: Fortune’s Weave is built around multiple paths, having separate save files would create system-related complications. It becomes difficult to keep track of how far players have progressed in each protagonist’s story when that progress is spread across multiple save files. So rather than simply limiting the game to a single save file, we added other creative ideas to make the system work better. In this game, we preserved save data from the start of every chapter for each main protagonist, and made it possible for players to jump back to those points. If players think, “I want to play this chapter again”, they can play again from the beginning of the selected chapter. This feature isn’t just for replaying chapters, either. Players can use it to review maps, revisit specific cutscenes, or even retry particular battles, so we hope players will make full use of it.”

So, if you were hoping for a more classic save file option, you at least now know what to expect from Fortune’s Weave.