Nintendo’s next Fire Emblem lets players switch among four heroes but repeats quests and cutscenes, The Verge reports.

The Verge played 26 hours of Fortune’s Weave ahead of release. The reviewer said the strategy and RPG elements are excellent, but the basic structure of each hero’s path is so far essentially the same, with repeated quests, battles, and cutscenes across the four storylines.

The game opens with a fifth protagonist in a world ruined by a revived demon lord. The four main characters, each wielding a powerful weapon, are absent. The player must travel back to the Heroic Games, an event held a few years earlier, to change the past so the heroes can come to the aid of the present.

Cai, a young competitor, fights to save his imprisoned father and gets a mysterious jewel implanted in his hand. Dietrich wields a powerful sword and thirsts for combat. Theodora is strengthened by a magical arm. Leda, a musician with a mystical vihuela, seeks revenge. Their artifacts grant battlefield powers, such as Cai’s burst of flame that can hit multiple enemies at a distance, but also carry a dark side that makes each weapon a ticking time bomb for its user.

By chapter 5 in each character’s storyline, the repetition becomes apparent. Many of the same quests, dungeons, and even cutscenes appear across paths. The Verge noted there is a narrative reason: a player who only follows one path may encounter everything for the first time and may not experience the other storylines. Even so, the repetition bogs the game down.

The gameplay remains engaging. Players receive a calendar deadline for the next main quest battle and spend the intervening days training, building bonds between characters, and exploring the world map. Battles include short top-down, grid-based combat and turn-based RPG battles inside dungeons. The large event battles, though occasionally repeated across characters, have been strong set pieces, but the reviewer had not yet met a serious challenge on standard difficulty.

Fortune’s Weave is a major release for Switch 2. Fire Emblem is now one of Nintendo’s tentpole franchises, and the game is launching in the middle of one of the busiest gaming months of the year, in close proximity to Grand Theft Auto VI. The Verge’s reviewer said that despite the repetitive structure, they keep looking forward to playing more.