PETER HOSKIN reviews Fire Emblem Warriors – Three Hopes
A mercenary with supernatural assistance: PETER HOSKIN reviews Fire Emblem Warriors – Three Hopes
Fire Emblem Warriors: Three Hopes (Switch, £49.99)
Rating: 
Verdict: Still Fire Emblem, still good
Oil, meet water. Water, meet oil. On the one side, a gaming genre known as ‘musou,’ which is thick with fast action and has you swatting away hundreds of enemies with each sweep of your sword.
On the other, the Fire Emblem series, which features slow, strategic combat and equally slow conversations with all your brothers and sisters in arms.
Fire Emblem Warriors: Three Hopes isn’t just a long name; it’s also a Fire Emblem musou game, the second since the original experiment back in 2017. And the crazy thing is: it takes these seemingly immiscible ingredients, gives them a good stir, and creates something entirely coherent.
Fire Emblem Warriors: Three Hopes isn’t just a long name; it’s also a Fire Emblem musou game, the second since the original experiment back in 2017
It helps that Three Hopes borrows most of its story and characters from one of the most likeable mainline Fire Emblem games, called – keep up – Three Houses. Here you are, a mercenary with supernatural assistance, returned to the medieval-anime realm of Fódlan and its outlandish-sounding territories of Faerghus, Adrestia and, er… Leicester.
And that’s not all that Three Hopes imports. Its hyperspeed combat can, for instance, be paused so that you can direct your buddies towards different objectives on an overhead map. So while there’s less chin-wagging than you’d normally expect from a Fire Emblem game, there’s still a decent slug of the strategising.
What of that sword-swirling musou combat? I’ve never been particularly keen on (nor good at) it myself, preferring a pace that’s a little more glacial. But what’s served up in Three Hopes is varied, colourful and (crucially) accessible enough to sway even sceptics like me.
If only there were another kingdom called, say, ‘Sheffield’, or ‘Coventry’, or some such, this would be a five-star game.
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Here you are, a mercenary with supernatural assistance, returned to the medieval-anime realm of Fódlan and its outlandish-sounding territories of Faerghus, Adrestia and, er… Leicester
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