Fire Emblem Warriors is another game in the Musou series (aka the
Dynasty Warriors games), which means you’ll control a small group of heroes to
annihilate literally thousands of enemy mooks in some over-the-top hack and
slash action.
The twist this time is that the game features characters and elements
from Nintendo’s Fire Emblem series, which is known in equal measure for its
strategic turn-based battles and making you choose which of your loyal
battle-hardened soldiers will end up dating one another.
So is it any good? Well, if you’ve played a Dynasty Warriors game
before, you’ll know that the Musou series is gaming junk food: it’s not really
“good” in an objective sense, but heck, you’ll enjoy it so much that you’ll want
more.
There’s a story mode?
It starts off as a simple “Good Kingdom A is attacked by Evil Kingdom B
so plucky heroes must gather allies”, but then quickly spirals out into
subplots involving parallel dimensions, future children from an alternate
timeline (Fire Emblem Awakening), samurai fighting knights over their missing
shoeless magical dragon princess (Fire Emblem Fates), and assorted fanservice
madness.
But to be fair, you’re never really playing a Musou game for its story.
Fighting forever
The main draw – and drawback – of Fire Emblem Warriors is the endless
fighting, which is both repetitive and therapeutic. As with most Musou games,
the moment-to-moment gameplay mostly consists of you mashing the Regular and
Strong attacks ad infinitum, wiping out hundreds of enemy soldiers in the
process.
There’ll be bosses and lieutenants who put up more of a fight, but
power-levelling is such a core component of the game that you’ll inevitably
start killing them before they can finish their opening boasts. “Ha, you dare
face the supreme knight of- BLAARGH.”
That said, the Fire Emblem influence actually adds a surprising amount
of strategic depth to the hacking and slashing, as team composition and unit
matchups matter. For example, flying units can cross chasms but are vulnerable
to bows, while sword wielders are strong vs axes but weak vs spears.
This means you’ve got a big decision to make when you choose the four
heroes (only one of whom you’ll control at a time) and four supports that go
into each battle. You’ll want a team that’s suited to tackle a variety of maps
while you juggle between the combat and strategic layers of the game.
You’ll often be switching control between your four heroes, depending
on who’s best suited at handling a tricky mission objective, while you
simultaneously command the other AI-controlled heroes to attack enemies or
capture forts that are weak to their particular abilities.
Friendship is madness
Since the game also features Fire Emblem’s “friendship” and pair-up
systems – which reward you with new skills or story scenes for making your
soldiers fight together – you’ll often have to make some hilariously terrible
team-up decisions. For example, I kept sending my squishy, under-levelled
cleric to “guard” my enemy-blitzing Samurai in the middle of battle, just so
that the latter can learn the former’s Strength +10 skill. Good luck tanking
those hits, tiny cleric!
If you prefer a real world version of the friendship system, however,
the Switch version of Fire Emblem Warriors has a local (splitscreen) co-op
option.
You can now bring your friend/partner along as you both comfortably
descend into the endless vortex of madness as you wipe out a thousand enemies.
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