Fire Emblem’s hack and slash spinoff just made me want to play Three Houses

theverge.com:

Fire Emblem Warriors: Three Hopes, the Fire Emblem: Three Houses-themed hack and slash game, is pretty damn good — I just wish I could enjoy it. Three Hopes made a bit of a splash for its debut during February’s Nintendo Direct. Fans had seen the familiar blue-red-yellow primary color scheme and hoped that the morose Dimitri, best boy Claude, and Edelgard and her merry band of fascists had come back in a sequel to one of the best Nintendo Switch games in the console’s history. Some of them rolled their eyes to see Three Hopes was not Three Houses 2 but the next in a long line of licensed hack and slash games.

I was not one of those fans. I love hack and slash games. I voraciously consumed the middle handful of Dynasty Warriors and Warriors Orochi games. And since those games have taken a bit of a dip in quality (the most recent Dynasty Warriors 9 has abysmal reviews), the licensed flavor of this genre has become a welcome substitution. It’s not only because they scratch the itch of just wanting to go ape shit in a game but also because Koei Tecmo didn’t skimp on the storytelling. It would have been easy and expected for these games to be narratively light — after all, there’s only so many times you can rehash the Romance of the Three Kingdoms, and Dynasty Warriors has managed to do that nine fricking times. But Persona 5 Strikers functions damn near as a Persona 5 sequel, and Hyrule Warriors: Age of Calamity fiddled with the canon of Breath of the Wild in a way that had some emotionally resonant and satisfying moments. I had high hopes for Three Hopes, thinking it would be the same, but it wasn’t.

One thing I really appreciated about Age Of Calamity and Strikers was that the characters weren’t forced to fit into the hack