The actor, who plays Cai in Fire Emblem: Fortune’s Weave, was not a newcomer to Nintendo’s popular strategy RPG series. He’d previously portrayed Fogado in 2023’s Fire Emblem Engage and Ross in 2017’s Fire Emblem Heroes. Robinson auditioned for several parts in Fortune’s Weave, including supporting characters like Peter, Simon, and Lysander.
But he told Polygon in a recent interview that he wasn’t aware Cai was one of the game’s four protagonists until he’d already landed the gig. So my mind was blown,” Robinson said. Instead, he was expecting a young boy with a minor role.
It was exciting,” he explained. I saw a lot of myself in the design. He's got this really kind, gentle heart.
He has the biggest heart, I think, out of everybody in the game, and that's how I am in my life, too.” The other three main characters in Fortune’s Weave are a battle-hardened warrior, a formidable queen, and a vengeful dancer with a kill-list a mile long. Meanwhile, Cai’s a 15-year-old from a rural village who enters the Heroic Games in the slim hope of preventing the execution of his father, Castor. For Robinson, getting into character meant embracing a shift in perspective.
As we grow older as adults, there are things that happen that sort of get us away from that innocence that we have as kids and also as teenagers. You have a very idealistic [view of the world], like, ‘things should be like this.’ It's mostly in attitude and psyche, playing a 15-year-old Cai,” he said. He's got the bright eyes, right?” Robinson said one of the main challenges of this performance was making Cai more relatable and memorable than a typical “shonen boy,” a plucky young hero in the vein of anime and manga series like Naruto and Dragon Ball.
And I also knew that there would be a bunch of routes in the game, and everybody had these really complex stories. And I think I was really, deeply afraid that people would find Cai boring,” Robinson said. So when things were sad, I wanted you to feel the weight of that.
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