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Jen Glennon is a New York-based journalist and editor with more than a decade of experience covering games and entertainment. She has previously worked at Kotaku, Inverse, and Newsweek. Jen joined Polygon in 2025 and has a relentless appetite for Final Fantasy, Yakuza, and Costco rotisserie chicken.
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It's been several weeks since the launch of Fire Emblem: Fortune's Weave, and fans around the world are still sinking their teeth into the massive strategy RPG. With a sprawling cast featuring dozens of unique characters, it's no small feat for one to emerge as a clear fan favorite.
Yet that's precisely what's happened with Fabio, the condescending scholar of mysterious origins who becomes Dietrich's right-hand man in the Heroic Games tournament. Actor Jimmy Yamaguchi's heartfelt and often hilarious performance has contributed immeasurably to the character's popularity, and he recently revealed the unexpected inspiration for Fabio's voice in an interview with Polygon.
"His accent is actually probably more like a mid-Atlantic accent. Someone who has lived in multiple places. So it's not distinctly anything. One of the inspirations, at first, was Jeremy Irons," Yamaguchi told Polygon. "When I got the specs, before I started reading the lines, I did something like, 'Well, I was first in line... until the little hairball was born.' And then I went into the line as I did it, so that way, I could kind of get an idea."
If that "little hairball" line sounds familiar, but you can't quite place it, it's from Disney's The Lion King. In it, Jeremy Irons plays Scar, the envious and conniving uncle of Simba. The line comes from a tense interaction between Scar and his brother Mufasa, the reigning king of the Pride Lands. Scar is seething that the young cub Simba has taken his place in the line of succession, and we soon learn Scar is willing to stoop to the most loathsome deeds imaginable to be in charge.
Yamaguchi has previously appeared in high-profile games like Zenless Zone Zero, 2XKO, and Wo Long: Fallen Dynasty. But he says the overwhelmingly positive response among Fire Emblem fans to Fabio has been something truly special.
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"When you sit there and you read it... I think I started to tear up when I saw it. Because sometimes when you're acting, you're acting into the void, and you never necessarily get the response back. It meant so much to me that people enjoyed it, that it meant something to people, that it made them tear up, or cry, or made them happy that I brought the character to life in such a positive way," Yamaguchi said. "To all of you who said all those wonderful things, thank you, truly, from the bottom of my heart."
Fire Emblem: Fortune's Weave is available now for Nintendo Switch 2.