It’s been three years since the stellar Fire Emblem: Three Houses graced the Nintendo Switch, marking a return to form for the strategy series and becoming one of the console’s must-have games in the process. The wait goes on for the next game, despite plenty of rumours making the rounds in recent months, but for now, we have a ‘Musou’ spin-off that follows the same characters in Fódlan but in an alternate timeline.
Those familiar with 2017’s Fire Emblem Warriors will have a good idea of what to expect from Fire Emblem Warriors: Three Hopes. Instead of battles unfolding through turn-based tactical gameplay where the player takes their time to meticulously plot each individual unit’s move, storyline missions here are hack-and-slash affairs.
The story is a ‘what if?’ scenario, following a version of events where Byleth is not the one who saves Edelgard, Dimitri, and Claude and enrols in Garreg Mach Monastery. In this timeline, Shez is the mercenary protagonist who intervenes before deciding which house to join at the monastery, while Byleth, dubbed the Ashen Demon, is positioned as a major antagonist.
Nintendo
Without Byleth’s intervention, events and character development play out in a very different way. The cast of characters you previously got to know may still feel the same at their core, but in some cases you will see a new side to them whether it’s through the decisions they make under different circumstances or through well-written new paralogue stories.
We experienced Edelgard’s route. The heir to the Adrestian Empire once again ends up marching to war to seek the unification of Fódlan and destroy the nobility system, but this time around more time is spent on what drives her, a smart choice that helps to make up for some of the more meandering chapters in her campaign here.
The actual missions themselves are engaging but can be repetitive from time to time. Despite a large cast of characters at your disposal, you can only usually bring a few units with you to the battlefield (and control one at a time) as you complete various objectives, often by running to certain points in the map, mowing down hundreds of weak enemy soldiers in the way, and defeating a specific foe.
Often, mashing out a combination of regular and strong attacks while remembering to occasionally guard or dodge will do the job, but there are several layers on top of that, some of which have been borrowed and adapted from the Fire Emblem games.
Nintendo
While all of the systems combined can be a little overwhelming at times during real-time combat, elements like the combat arts and abilities, adjutants, and the weapon triangle (swords are effective against axes and so on) successfully offer depth – even if the battles admittedly don’t quite match the satisfaction, thrills, or scale of the skirmishes found in Three Houses.
Three Hopes goes further to evoke the original game by replicating the monastery downtime spent in between missions. Instead of at Garreg Mach, Shez’s time is spent at a base camp, and they can do a range of activities that help to deepen bonds with their allies or serve as preparation for the next battle, as well as upgrade facilities.
This portion of the game works almost as well as it did back in 2019, helping to immerse the player in the story and subtly raise the stakes, although being able to only deploy four characters in a mission most of the time – instead of at least ten – disincentivises the player from bonding with and building more than a small handful of units.
The overall game may fail to hit the same (perhaps unrealistically) lofty highs of one of the best titles on the Switch, but it’s impressive how much it manages to feel like a Fire Emblem game and not just a Warriors title with familiar characters thrown in. That is its greatest strength, and the result is an experience where it’s easy to warm to and invest in your favourite Fódlan characters all over again.
Fire Emblem Warriors: Three Hopes is out now on Nintendo Switch.
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