Fire Emblem Warriors Review [Minor Spoilers]

Gameplay

One thing I didn’t mention in the beginning of this review was that the team behind this game was also the team that made Hyrule Warriors, and so the overall gameplay experience is less like traditional Dynasty Warriors, and more akin to what you would find in Hyrule Warriors. Nevertheless, veterans of Dynasty Warriors will find themselves right at home with this title (I sure did, and I never even played Hyrule Warriors).

One day sweet prince… one day you’ll come out…

For those unaware of what a typical warriors game feels like, here’s a quick little rundown. You control what can only be described as a super saiyan, playing mowing simulator where instead of cutting grass, you’re cutting down thousands upon thousands of soldiers/monsters, in an attempt to control the battlefield and defeat the final boss. You also get to have the option to share the fun with a friend in two-player mode (which this game also has). Now, while many people like to claim what I just said as a typical warriors game, there’s actually a surprising amount of strategy in warriors games in the form of objective control (try playing in the hardest difficulties, you’ll see what I mean). This will be especially important as I dive into the mechanics of this game.

Fire Emblem Warriors plays and refines with these mechanics while also making the game feel like a Fire Emblem title, perfectly blending elements from both franchises to make it feel truly unique among Warriors games. One such mechanic includes the ability to switch between and play up to four different characters at once in a given battle, as opposed to just one character in any other Warriors games. This gives the game have a lot of replay value, as it encourages players to experiment with lots of different characters, instead of always just playing their favourites. It also emphasizes the strategic aspect of Warriors games, as players will have to choose what characters they want to have before starting the battle. It encouraging the players to carefully choose their characters before each battle, so as to maximize their chances of successfully completing their mission (more on this later).

Camilla: Sir, what are your orders? Alatoren: How about first changing into a more suitable outfit?

Will this do, commander?

….. perfect

The game also incorporates Fire Emblem game mechanics into its core gameplay, that is the weapon triangle system, critical attacks, the pair-up system, and the inclusion of casual and classic modes. The weapon triangle system emphasizes positioning and pre-battle planning, as having weapon advantage over an enemy is extremely important in determining whether you’ll effectively eviscerate an enemy commander, or die spectacularly to a one-hit KO, since whoever has the advantage gets inherent bonuses such as accessing the enemies stun gauge, of which when fully depleted, deals a critical attack to the enemy officer, dealing massive damage. The pair-up system further emphasizes this type of strategy, as it can give your characters a tactical advantage by having access to multiple weapons, as well as access to dual specials, at the cost of having the paired-up character on the field. The inclusion of casual and classic modes meanwhile, serve merely as fanservice for fans of the series, with classic mode having characters “permanently” die when they fall in battle, and casual mode for the more “casual crowd” (AKA no permadeath). The game also has support conversations (as mentioned earlier) pulled from the recent Fire Emblem games, players unlock them by earning support points by performing special actions between characters (pair-ups, healing, etc), until they finally reach max rank. To note however, not all characters have support conversations, only some do, which is a shame considering how good these supports are, but considering how many characters there are in the game, it’s certainly understandable. Overall, the inclusion of these mechanics makes the player feel like they’re genuinely playing a Fire Emblem title, and for players who don’t know much about it, it gives them a good idea of what the series is like gameplay-wise.

Sir, she is striking a pose, what are your orders? Just MAKE SURE TO STAY IN OUR PERFECTLY ALIGNED FORMATION! WE STAYED UP ALL NIGHT PRACTICING THIS!

The game also rewards weapons and materials, which can be obtained by defeating enemy officers, at the end of each battle, which can be used to upgrade your characters combos, defenses, and skills. Getting all the necessary materials for all characters can take a very long time, and is where most of the grind is found within the game. Fire Emblem Warriors also brings back master seals, an item from the Fire Emblem series that promotes your units to their advanced class, providing massive stat boosts, and is absolutely crucial for the harder missions.  While this system is fine in most cases, considering the amount of characters in this game, it quickly becomes quite an overwhelming task for those who want to keep every character at around the same parity. It also doesn’t help that the menu system for upgrading the characters are quite cumbersome and outdated, requiring you to scroll through multiple characters, each having multiple menus, to check which skills can be upgraded. The same could be said for the weapons, but the game does provides a small hotfix in the form of an optimized button, optimizing your character to its best needs, but it still doesn’t beat just manually customizing the characters yourselves.

“The intent is to provide players with a sense of pride and accomplish for unlocking different crests”

For game modes, Fire Emblem Warriors provides a total of two, that is story mode and history mode. Story mode has players playing through the games story (of which you know my opinion of) while also featuring different difficulty modes. History mode on the other hand is an alternative mode where players can essentially relive iconic moments from various Fire Emblem games. Much like adventure mode from Hyrule Warriors, players embark on missions in different maps, each offering a variety of objectives to complete, and sometimes even have certain requirements/restrictions, such as using only a select number of characters, and tons of great rewards, serving as the bulk of the game’s content.

This mode adds an extra layer on top of the strategy that was already inherently built within the game’s mechanics discussed earlier, and I honestly found myself almost addicted to it for quite a long time. This mode alone can provide players with almost 60+ hours of content, add on top of this the DLC content that will be released in the future, and you have yourselves an experience that will last for a very long time.

And here we see the young Prince Corrin in his natural habitat, greeting his fellow distressed companions with a friendly cry.

However for all the fun that is to be had with this game, there is a glaring problem that really brings the experience down a notch, and it has to do with the character roster. No, I’m not talking about the overabundance of swords (can you tell that it’s an overused meme at this point?), I know that fans really like to nitpick how the character roster is terrible with its lack of representation of older Fire Emblem titles, but in my opinion, as long as each character is fun and unique to play, then I don’t really care what characters make it into the game. It’s always a tricky thing with choosing a roster that will make all the fans happy, especially when there’s hundreds of characters in all of Fire Emblem to choose from, someone is bound to be mad, and it will always be controversial regardless of what Koei Tecmo does.

Then again, the only Fire Emblem games I’ve played are the 3DS titles, so what do I know?

In light of this, my actual problem is with the lack of diversity of movesets within the roster, which funnily enough, means that the controversy about the character roster actually have some merit. See, there’s 23 playable characters within the game, but only 15 of those characters have unique movesets, the rest of them are just clones of other characters. I’m not sure if this is laziness from the developers part, but something is not right when literally every bow user in the game (including DLC) have the same moveset. I eventually grew accustomed to this due to how fun it was to just play the game, but it still plagues my mind every now and then.

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