Fire Emblem Warriors: Three Hopes Review – Game of Thrones

Two weeks ago, we first talked about the enormity and success of this JRPG series. Fans probably don’t need to explain, but for the rest, let me remind you that the essence of Fire Emblem games is the player’s choice between several sides of a fantasy military conflict, which is all the more difficult because each side has its own heroes and villains. In particular, recent games, including this one, have honed the process to perfection by learning all the characters in the military academy at the beginning of the game, so that not only you as a player, but also each other, will like characters from different countries. The more difficult it is to stand against each other on the battlefield in the course of the story and decide who will live and who will die.

• Platform: Switch
• Publication date: 06/24/2022
• Producer: Intelligent Systems (Japan)
• Genre: Warrior / Tactical JRPG
• Czech location: Not
• Multiplayer: 2 Player Split Screen Co-op
• Data to download: 15 GB
• Game time: 40+ hours
• Price: 1400 CZK (Nintendo)

military campaign

You enter the story as a mercenary named Shez, choosing whether you will be male or female (the same decision you can make for the character of your barrel’s main enemy named Byleth). At the beginning of the story, you will join an expedition of key representatives of all three of the greatest powers of the continent, which will end with your integration into a military academy in neutral territory between the Empire, the Kingdom and the Alliance of Lords. You will spend two years studying and getting to know not only representatives of all three powers, but also their other representatives and personalities. Then you will need to choose one of these three sides as the main one. As a mysterious conspiracy fuels the flames of war, former friends and allies become adversaries on the other side of the battlefield.

By far the best feature of this game is that although it is a “twist” of the main series, the movie (anime) set and especially the complete tactical and strategic layer are not only left over from the highly successful last installment of the main series. series, but even improved. If you’re a fan, you’ll find everything you’d expect from a Fire Emblem game: tactical planning, choosing between territories and missions, character training, weapon upgrades, the ability to give directions to unfamiliar characters, and cooperative cooking activities. dates in nature (the so-called tea parties). The complexity and fun of these strategic layers of the game is amazing, and at the same time, the game will teach you slowly so you won’t be overwhelmed. In the second half of the game, I already had a well-rehearsed ritual between battles, and I wasn’t quite sure if I liked this part of the game or the action.

Here you will find everything you expect from a Fire Emblem game.

As usual, this confirms that well-developed characters and their relationships make for a good story. Each of the opposing sides offers a diverse group of protagonists, among which it is almost impossible for someone not to like. The more interesting are not only the moments when they face in a duel not for life, but for death, but also rare moments when you get the opportunity to pull one of the enemies to your side. Towards the end of the game, I really shook my head at the twists and turns of the story and how diverse the group of fighters I put together was. Of course, everything is for the best, because when you play again, you can choose a “new game plus” and decide everything else for your side, or, conversely, experience a noticeably different campaign and plot for another of the opposing sides.

wild fights

So far, we’ve talked about the story and the strategic layer of the game. But when it comes to the fight itself, referring to the “Warriors” in the title, the game turns into a wild action in the style of “Musou”, which Wikipedia says: “A Japanese type of hacking video game in which the player controls a character that runs through hundreds of common enemies and destroys them with relative ease. It’s the epitome of soulless entertainment.”. While I don’t really like this genre of games, I have to admit that the authors managed to mix such a fun combination of attacks, combos and controls here that I really enjoy the action. Especially in the second half of the game, when I started to really dominate the battlefield with improved gear and demon skills, wreaking havoc on a massive scale. But this was largely offset by the more complex mission design.

You can customize your entertainment with a variety of difficulty options, from the difficulty of the fights themselves to whether or not fallen heroes actually stay dead or return to your party after a mission. But I don’t really recommend this setup because it requires a lot of excitement from every mission. Rarely have I been stunned by video games, like when a character on the battlefield started calling for help and I saw that I would not get to her in time. Perhaps, for the perfection of the game, only a clear encyclopedia of characters and the history of the game world is not enough, because sometimes I really got lost in such numbers. I was also a little annoyed by the repetition of the same messages, especially when shopping with some merchants. But these are just minor flaws that do not fundamentally detract from the fun and greatness of this hugely successful game.