We finally got a fully voiced Byleth but at what cost?

I've read fanfiction better than this. Not like I had much hope about the story in the first place since it's a warriors spin-off game with a completely new protagonist. It has some good scenes and fights of course. Especially SB. I actually kinda liked the route and more Edelgard content is always a win, but man ...all in all this game is really kind of a mess.

Some characters behave strangely in order to fulfil nothing more than pure fanservice and awful tropes (looking at you AG). And some of them are just irrelevant in general.

The secret chapters are a joke and just prove that the original characters are unnecessary and only exist because it's a warriors game. I guess that was to be expected but it's still disappointing to see. Welp, I'm glad this isn't canon.

The gameplay is fun for the first few hours then it's getting too grindy and tedious for me.

Overall Three Hopes is an alright game if you like the cast because the new supports and character interactions are fun to watch, but this game only made me appreciate Three Houses even more to be honest.

I know this is a fanservice spin-off "nobody dies" AU, but the circumstances surrounding the lords this time around are too convenient imo. There was simply no tension. Even the endings felt too abrupt and all routes lacked the emotional impact Three Houses offered. The routes were lacking in emotional investment, mostly due to odd pacing and lack of exposition in certain things and character interactions.

(The game leaked a few days ago, so I had the chance to play it early.)

Hyrule Warriors: Age of Calamity has been on my backlog for a while and I've been trying to power through it for the last week or so. I can only hope that I'm almost done with it though, because the gameplay loop has become so incredibly tedious at this point and I don't really want to play it anymore.

I don't think I'm able to judge Three Hopes appropriately yet, because in comparison to Age of Calamity this is incredible so far.

Looking forward to feeling differently about it in a couple of days.

It's a Warriors game alright. The 3 or 4 stories really dont work as well in a warriors style since its VERY repetitive. Azure Gleam has my favorite normal story out of the 3 (just like how Blue Lions did) It definitely should have been a 1 story game since the secret ending NEEDS to happen for the story to actually conclude and make sense. The secret section is easily the coolest part of the game. I dont think its near the og though. Calm down on the warriors games pls cause I swear a new one comes out for a different series I like every 4 months lmao

All the tactical elements and unit micromanaging they added on top of the basic Warriors formula were really good and set this apart from the crowd a bit. I appreciated that the story was more focused than Three Houses, and skipped over basically the entire school life aspect. I still really like a lot of these characters so it was cool spending more time with them.

I just find the world of Three Houses to be kind of bland, and this really doesn't do much to spice it up. It's the same factions, doing a slight variation of the same conflict, with a couple new characters. Combine that with art direction that is just about as generic medieval fantasy as you can get, and it just kinda puts me to sleep. I really don't know how much map variation there was in this game because I can't tell most of the maps apart from each other lmao.

Fire Emblem: Three Hopes is the warriors-type spinoff to the game Three Houses, detailing an alternate universe where the main character of the original game never engaged on their path and allowed the story of the game to go in a different direction.

The gameplay here is very satisfying, and blends action with Fire Emblem strategy quite well. Each character is enjoyable to develop and play, and there are plenty of characters at that. Downtime comes in the form of a camp instead of a monastery, which provides plenty of activities to embark on with the cast of the game to bolster support conversations and gain buffs for the battles to come.

The story of the game was very surprising to me. I only played one of the routes, but the Scarlet Blaze path was very fleshed out, answering many questions from the base game and providing an intelligent alternative to the events that once occurred. The politics of the land of Fodlan play out like a Game of Thrones episode and each betrayal feels interesting and impactful. The ending was a bit rushed and the main characters role sometimes feels a bit unexplored, but the war between the three houses is capitalized on far more than it ever was in Three Houses. I am looking forward to seeing how the other routes play out.

Omega Force really have become masters of adapting other series to the musou genre. Persona 5 Strikers was an incredible follow-up to Persona 5 with unique twists on the musou formula to give it the Persona flavour, and now they've done it again where the only real difference between Three Hopes and Three Houses is the swap from tactical to musou battles.

The game features everything - an ungodly amount of support conversations, being able to spend activity points to train your units and level up your bonds, equipment forging/repairing, gift giving, permadeath, multiple unique routes; it's all here.

The plot itself follows an alternate timeline to the events of Three Houses where you play as a mercenary named Shez who also has an imaginary friend, Arval. I played through the game as female Shez through the Black Eagles route and she has a charming personality while also at times feeling like a fucking idiot, which really helps establish her as a memorable character. Yes, the main character has fully voiced dialogue this time around and as a results all of their supports have been pretty lively. The plot itself sadly doesn't really do anything unique or meaningful to stand apart from Three Hopes, but it's worth it to interact with these characters again all the same.

You'll end up recruiting a ton of units throughout your route of choice, and not every house ends up getting every character to serve as more incentive to play through the game multiple times to meet everyone. All units have access to the class tree, allowing them to respec into whichever you like best including an established "canon" class route (for example, it's recommended to spec Bernadetta down the archery tree but you could make her a fortress knight if you wanted to). Some characters even have unique classes they can eventually select, and each have some unique abilities/passives.

You can really tell a lot of care and effort went into the game. If I had a complaint, I'd say I wish there were a few more maps because I was seeing duplicates by the end of my first playthrough. It also runs admirably on the Switch at a (usually) locked 30fps. All in all, whether you enjoy musou or you just want to see the cast of Three Houses again, picking up Three Hopes is a no-brainer.

I played the pretty extensive Fire Emblem Warriors: Three Hopes demo since my friend recommended me to do so before I ultimately decide to buy or skip it and I don’t think it’s worth the money.

Even if I would get this game for less, I’m not even sure if I had enough motivation to finish this game, because I already got a bit tired of this game in the demo.

It gets grindy. And completing the game thrice is something that doesn’t sound good to me, even if you can transfer most of your progress to your next runs.

I really appreciate that they chose to use the Three Houses setting for this game, since I really love Three Houses, especially its world building and characters. Persona 5 Strikers did the same and they gave that game its own spin and that spin was so present that you almost forgot that you are playing a Musou game. That’s not the case with Three Hopes.

So I’m glad I listened to my friend. Otherwise I would’ve bought and regret it.

I had a lot of fun with the demo and I think I got the most out of Three Hopes with that demo.

El primer Musou que no me da asco, para mi sorpresa. Entre que es mucha más historia que combate, con lo cual, aun siendo la mierda de combate musou, tiene menos tiempo para aburrirme y que la parte de estrategia y RPG Fire Emblem está increiblemente bien integrada , resulta que me divierte.
Pero sobretodo la historia, está super bien escrita. Es un perfecto "What if...?" en el que vemos como los personajes actuarían en unas circunstancias diferentes, pero siendo realmente los mismos personajes que conocemos, cambiando únicamente dichas circunstancias, lo que les lleva por caminos diferentes y podemos ver diferentes facetas suyas o incidir en las que ya conocíamos.

A lot better than I was expecting honestly, I love Three Houses, mostly, and despite the fanfic-y nature of this title I find myself strangely compelled to it. For reference, I've only done the Golden Wildfire route where it functions as a better Crimson Flower honestly, the deviations from the original story are well illustrated and easy to infer why Claude deviates so much compared to his Verdant Wind actions, and better yet, people are actually willing to call Claude out on his actions when he does some pretty terrible things, something no-one ever did with Edelgard in Crimson Flower. I will say that the new protagonist, Shez, is pretty flat and their storyline ultimately ends up as an optional footnote in the overall story at large which is pretty jarring, and very strange how barely anyone acknowledges it happened.

Gameplay wise, this is the only Musou to date I haven't bounced off of, it's really fun to be strategic while slapping buttons with some really satisfying movesets, shout-out to Shez's Asura and Byleth's Enlightened One movesets for being the most fun. The territories between missions can get pretty repetitive, but they take like less than 5 minutes once you know what you're doing so I didn't feel all too fatigued by the game until the last chapter, and character and class progression manages to be really satisfying with movesets that change as you advance down your desired true.

Three Hopes functions actually pretty well as a lite version of Three Houses in this regard, the main story isn't as good as most Three Houses routes but it's not bad in it's own right either, the gameplay and class progression is also a small version of Three Houses class progression but manages to capture the same feeling of satisfaction and character growth. The supports exist, and they're pretty good too, although not as good as Three Houses, again. All the redesigns and music is pretty good too. The one thing I'd say is straight up better are Shez and Byleth, with Byleth getting a pretty good set of supports, fun gameplay, and a personality a million times more entertaining than when they were silent. Shez might be pretty cardboard, but at least they're still more interesting than 3 Houses Byleth too. In the end, a game worth your time if you like Three Houses.

Ok, so I actually like both 3 Houses and warriors games. And honestly, once I beat my first route (Blue Lions), I thought the game was fine, but with issues. I consider it a step back from Age of Calamity in terms of the warriors combat and the story felt watered down in the end. Basically, I would say you will be better off if you grab 3 Houses and Age of Calamity and play them rather than this.

However, the 1 star review goes for the NG+. It's plain unforgiveable. First of all, your levels carry over. Good! But for reference, I beat the game with the mc at level 50. For one of the first chapters, the choices of difficulty are: Normal with enemies at level 5, Hard with enemies at level 16, Maddening with enemies at level 150. Something is wrong here.

And of course, you get new units in the other routes! Except you don't, because they are either at level 1 which means you have to grind to hell to put them on par with the other units.

But the worst part, the one thing that made me drop this game without playing the other 2 routes, is that you unlock 3 cool units with Renown in NG+. But you CANNOT use them in story mode. You can only use them when you replay missions. But this game has literally 3 routes of content, I don't have time to repeat missions. Why such incompetence? I know these units would clash with the story, but like this is NG+? I don't care if there's two of the same character in one map.

Honestly, the worst NG+ I have seen in a game and I hope people start speaking about it once they reach it. Maybe we will get an update that fixes some of these issues. Until then, no thanks

As a follow up to Fire Emblem Warriors, this improves upon nearly every aspect of that game. By using Fire Emblem: Three Houses as a foundation for its focus, we get a bucket load of characters and three routes following much more indepth stories than what the original FE Warriors had.
A lot of Three Houses DNA makes it over with base camp exploration, freedom of class choices, cooking, training, etc etc. There's a ton of supports to gain as well as characters to recruit that in a lot of ways, this is Three Houses but with Warriors battles instead of Tactical RPG fights.

I don't think the game's story stands on it's own though. A lot of what makes the story enjoyable is that it expands upon stuff that Three Houses didn't make enough time for and as a result it assumes you have a lot of knowledge from that games characters and story. For example that academy phase in this game barely lasts a chapter and then it diverges into one of three routes depending on what house you chose. If you had played Three Houses, then the event that abruptly ends the academy phase is a huge oh shit this is cool moment, if you haven't play it then I can only guess you would be like wtf is happening here. So in that regard, while this is an alternate take on the Three Houses story that is completely different, it is also one that you really need to have played to really get the full experience from.

As for the three routes, I started with the Blue Lions and Azure Gleam and while I enjoyed it diving into TWSITD and the Tragedy of Duscur a lot more, I think it also horribly handles Edelgard's character and a few key characters from the Empire. I still found it enjoyable overall but I come away from it thinking it may be the most mixed route of the bunch

But yeah, there's plenty of content here and Fire Emblem meshes so well with the Warriors gameplay. I still have two routes to play at the time of writing this but I feel confident in saying this is the best Nintendo Warriors spin off we have gotten so far

Updating for Scarlet Blaze thoughts:
A very consistent route that handles it's characters well and doesn't fumble anything like how Azure Gleam does. My favourite route so far despite being more of a Blue Lions fan from Three Houses

To start off, I am not a musou guy, I played maybe a few dynasty warriors over 10 years ago. That's about my only experience with the genre. I intended to play the first Fire Emblem Warriors before this game came out, but that didn't work out like that. So I went into this pretty fresh in a couple of fronts, my incredibly mixed opinion on Three Houses was also lingering as I played. But man, what I got was incredibly surprising and satisfying.

STORY
Now I've only played Scarlet Blaze, so my opinions may change with additional playthroughs of other routes, but what I saw I really loved story wise. In a shocking turn of events, this story felt like a dramatic improvement over Three Houses, I say this even as someone who loved Crimson Flower as much as I could. It felt like it was delivered so much better, having more maps and more chapters led to more cutscenes which led to more time with characters I liked. World building and politics felt improved, getting to actually see the Lords of Adrestia that were just lore in Three Houses and parents the students would occasionally mention, added a lot of depth that Fodlan needed. Claude and The Leicester Alliance are actually big parts of the whole story, instead of two speed bump chapters in Crimson Flower Edelgard blitzes through. I liked the whole alliance arc a lot in this game, Claude actually felt like an actual character and lived up to his "scheming" reputation he didn't earn in Three Houses. I like how this game speedruns through White Clouds events that Three Houses spent an entire part on. The absence of Byleth at the academy makes a huge difference plot wise, which is great to see. It utilizes those White Clouds elements in interesting ways too, namely in Lonato, in Three Houses, he was a lord that each of the Lord trio dealt with in the same way. But in Scarlet Blaze, he rebels against the kingdom after they take in Rhea, which gives Edelgard an opportunity to save Lonato to take him into her side. I won't list every improvement over Three Houses plot points, as much as I'd like to, that would take a while. New stuff, Shez was a great addition to the game, I had reservations at first and they're pretty similar to Byleth conceptually (mercenary with a mysterious power and spirit inside them), but Shez is just such a fun character, great dynamics with the cast. I enjoy watching their relationship with characters like Edelgard, Hubert and Byleth, seeing elements of their characters from Three Houses stay consistent when presented with a new story. I won't go on too much longer, as I'd enter into spoiler territory, but I loved Edelgard's story, it felt properly chaotic as a war against basically four factions should. Edelgard is seemingly desperately bouncing around trying to clean up various messes, and you think she isn't making progress. But she's very composed and always feels in control and prepared even when it seems she's been blindsided. It was really fun to watch this army manage this big conflict, helps with the scale and world building too. I do have some complaints, a few questions are annoyingly unanswered, nothing game ruining but stuff that should've been there. One line in the ending monologue, that references the future of the story after the ending, kinda ruins what could be a great ending place. And there's a "big game changing decision" moment that isn't delivered to the player in a way they would really understand what they need to do. Two little fixes and that problem wouldn't exist, but it does so that's unfortunate. But these are minor complaints and compared to Three Houses? A few minor complaints is something I'll happily take for an overall great improvement.

CHARACTERS
Just like with main story beats, this game improves on the cast essentially unanimously across the board. Every character I loved in Three Houses I somehow loved even more in this game, namely characters like Edelgard, Ferdinand and Dorothea. Especially Ferdinand, he gets some really great content even in the main story. Characters I felt more neutral towards I liked a lot more, maybe even love them now, characters like Caspar, Jeritza and the Ashen Wolves. Jeritza especially, I don't know what they did but man he was really cool in this game. I love all his supports, while not a high number of them just as in Three Houses, they were just really good and added a nice layer of depth to his character. Characters I kind of bordered on disliking in Three Houses I liked the content they got here, they felt fresh and new and overall non archetypal, which is an achievement for Fire Emblem. Characters like Bernadetta, Ignatz and Raphael, actually had some great content. Obviously I didn't play Ignatz and Raphael's main route, but they have a great Paralogue I did. Nernadetta actually had a good amount to contribute in the main story, as her dad was a big key piece of Edelgard's plan and basically always a factor in the story to think about. Even in her supports, of the ones I saw, she didn't get dragged out of her room or pass out once. Now I could have missed some where that happens, but the fact that she has such a nice variety compared to Three Houses, where they keep repeating those gimmicks I mentioned save for one support or so, to this game where she has great supports with characters like Hapi and Marianne that utilize her under explored traits from Three Houses, or letting the player actually see her gain confidence in herself (also seen in her Shez support). I won't talk about every character, but the fact that I don't dislike any of them and that I enjoyed every support is such a nice thing to see. I only had two supports where they used quirky support music, and even those were pretty funny. Paralogues, as they aren't main story and rather character stories, I'll talk about here, I enjoyed pretty much all of the ones I got. They use good groups of characters of similar styles or familiar ties, like Manuela and Dorothea both being singers, or Leonie and Shamir both being mercenaries, or just all the Ashen Wolves together. This makes a great break from the main story to enjoy some more character focused content. I think Shez is a great character for everyone to bounce off of in supports and paralogues, I greatly enjoyed their supports with Edelgard, Ferdinand, Jeritza and Lysithea, but I liked them all. Only real negative is Linhardt's main story cutscene commentary I disliked, as well as any content he gets outside of supports and paralogue. He just kept repeating "war is bad, we should stop fighting" like every cutscene. You could say that's his role and that's his archetypal dialogue, but even more archetypal characters like Bernadetta, Petra and Caspar had interesting stuff to add now and then with their archetypes. Even then, Dorothea is a better character to deliver the same message, her role as a commoner makes her sympathizing with the common folk suffering from the war feel a lot more earnest and genuine than just Linhardt kind of blankly complaining, but this isn't a big issue as I do like his supports and paralogue a lot. Villain wise, I guess it's an improvement from Three Houses, but like, congrats lol. Similar vein as the playable characters, the ones I like (Rhea, Dimitri) I liked more And ones I felt neutral on or disliked (Claude, Slithery boys) got better. But still nothing I'd put among the best of the franchise. A new spoilery villain also wasn't super great, as they connect with the unanswered questions I mentioned in the story section.

GAMEPLAY
As mentioned earlier, I am not a musou fan, never played many of them, so this was a fresh experience to the genre with nothing really to compare too. But man it was great, I really enjoyed playing this game. General combat is overall pretty fun, targeting can be a bit quirky, certain classes are a bit awkward for a while and maybe certain reoccurring mechanics can get old after a while (I didn't really feel this but I can understand if someone doesn't). I liked all the classes, even awkward ones like mages, they all had fun stuff to use. From combat arts to warrior special animations to unique abilities and adjutant combat and warrior specials, man this game is just fun to play, great visual animations on all these things too. Especially warrior special animations, Shez's default ones are cool, the swordmaster one is raw, the Gremory is great, and it having different animation details for each "canon" Gremory is really cool. Shez's base class is a bit over powered, so it doesn't really give much insetive to experiment with them. But reclassing is implemented well in this game, you can train certain classes even if they aren't equipped, the only ones I really messed with were Edelgard was a wyvern rider for a bit and I made Manuela an armor knight when I was messing with the mechanic for the first time and never really changed that lol, so she was a Great Knight at the end of the game. A great accomplishment this game makes is implementing Three Houses gameplay elemts in a much better fashion, your base camp has a lot more going on and it doesn't feel empty after a while, you get a lot more content for and worth out of micromanaging training your units, building supports etc. This game does combat arts and abilities really well too, just a great implementation of Three Houses core content. Only thing to really complain about in the base camp, and this could easily be removed, is the resource loop. Managing smithing stones and building materials felt pretty awkward for a while, didn't hit a good stride till late game, but I say this can be removed as it could easily just be me being s dumbass. Maybe I missed a feature (extremely common) or didn't get the right pattern for upgrading or resource looping. So maybe in subsequent playthroughs I'll figure out a good pattern and I won't have an issue. But as it is now, it isn't a huge deal.

OTHER
Visuals
Man, another huge improvement over Three Houses (but another "not hard" moment) but even with the super low bar set, it is surprising how well it improved itself. Animated cutscenes don't look like 10 fps garbage, they actually looked pretty great. In engine stuff looked a lot better, I think the lighting just worked with the environments and models really well. I like most of the new character designs as well. So I don't know who in the studio made a big improvement, but I am happy they did.

OST
I enjoyed Three Houses OST, no real complaints there, some great tracks in fact and this game just made me like it more. With some great remixes of songs I already liked, and some great new stuff. I just loved what this OST did, definitely felt the more action vibe needed for the genre change.

Voice Acting
I loved Three Houses voices overall, and this game was just more of a good thing, getting to hear more from great voices I love was a very nice treat. Especially characters like Edelgard, Hubert, Jeritza and Ferdinand, I greatly appreciate their new content.

Conclusion
Left some spoilery stuff off this review, certain characters I liked a lot, I'd have nice things to say about them in the main story, characters and voice acting sections of this review. If you know you know basically. So yeah, this was only one of three routes in the game (and maybe more?) So obviously this isn't my permanent opinion on the game as a whole, so while my rating may seem odd, it's just how I feel. I greatly enjoyed my time with this route, if subsequent routes suck ass, so be it. There are some issues here and there, but nothing that I think can combat the scales against such a drastic improvement over Three Houses. I love Scarlet Blaze, I love Three Hopes so far, I love Ferdinand Von Aegir.

Un What if de Three Houses que consigue adaptar el formato musou a la experiencia de Fire Emblem mucho mejor que su antecesor. Al igual que Age of Calamity, se aprecia mucho el esfuerzo continuo por adaptarse a la idiosincrasia de cada adaptación.

Además, explora mucho distintas partes de los personajes y mundo de Three Houses, lo cual es muy agradecido para fans. El único problema, no único de este juego, es que con este tipo de juegos no se vuelven muy locos o inventivos con los movesets y al final se nota un poco de falta de variedad disimulada por pequeñas diferencias.

Pero en general, muy bien.

A nice companion game to Three Houses, I enjoyed the look at an alternate timeline and the differences all the characters experience (at least in Azure Gleam). A fully voiced protagonist is also a nice change, and as a result Shez is way easier to like than Byleth.
As a musou fan I enjoy the gameplay, but it does kinda get repetitive and a bit boring by the end (not helped by it being one of the longest musou games for just a single route). NG+ at least tries to help out by letting you buy an item that lets you skip optional missions for renown, but I have yet to see how well that works in reducing the grind and repetition. The only other minor gripe I have with the gameplay is adjutants seemingly being useless along with guarding, but I'm pretty sure that was just a result of not playing it on hard.
I think any Fire Emblem Three Houses fan should check out this game - especially if you enjoy musous (or at least the original FEW) at all.

[AZURE GLEAM]

It took three years, but they finally properly fleshed out the war on Fodlan! It was a joy to return to the world of Three Houses, especially with the lore this game adds to Fodlan. Three Hopes kind of retroactively makes Three Houses better by filling in a few of its lore's holes, despite taking place in an alternate timeline. The Musou combat is still loads of fun, and it's great to actually play out the warfare, rather than just simulate it. I would say I can't wait to check out Scarlet Blaze and Golden Wildfire, but I have some other stuff to do in the meantime, be it playing other games, making videos, and watching movies and shows. Still, I would like to revisit this to see what the other two routes have in store!

I have always hoped for a sequel to Fire Emblem Warriors and while I'm still sad that it's Three Houses focused, I like it quite a bit!
I decided to play the Azure Gleam (Dimitri) route first.

One of the first things I noticed is how much better the writing is over Three Houses, the story picks ups way faster and the characters are more fleshed out and not so one-note.

The gameplay is fun, they implemented the class system, personal skills, battalions and combat arts well. Though combat arts become incredibly easy to spam later on in the game.

Overall they have made many improvement with the critique on Three Houses and while there are still a few oddities and missing features here and there, I'd say it was quite a fun experience.

First I'll be going back to do the other part of the story split before starting a new route.
Hopefully the rest of the game holds up just as well, unlike in Three Houses.