Fire Emblem Warriors: Three Hopes fails to reinvigorate the Musou genre
It was a cold and misty night in November of 2001 when I leapt up from my desk chair, grabbed my keys, and drove across Terre Haute, Indiana to get to the mall. Dynasty Warriors 3 had come out and completely blindsided me, a thing that was a little more plausible in the pre-eternal media-blitz game-marketing world of the early aughts. I had to go get it, rush home, and slam that baby into my PS2. I was just that excited.
As I’ve played through Fire Emblem Warriors: Three Hopes, I keep reflecting back on how much those early Musou (“Warriors”) games gripped me. I’ve enjoyed my time with Three Hopes, don’t get me wrong — but it’s hard not to notice that the sense of wonder I felt playing DW3 two decades ago was missing as I worked through this latest title. In my last review of a Musou game for Polygon, I said that I don’t really know how to talk to people about Musou games anymore, and I think that position holds true now.
Three Hopes is a perfectly serviceable game. The gameplay is fine. The story is fine. The graphics are fine. The music is fine. The controls are fine. Everything’s … well, fine. What I’m left asking myself after two decades of high-impact mook murder as a rotating series of one-person armies, though, is: “Is ‘fine’ enough anymore?”
Since Fire Emblem: Awakening, there’s been what I’d call a steady Persona-fication of Fire Emblem games, with a greater emphasis on support conversations and the social connections between characters. Three Houses was really the culmination of that, with the dating sim-esque social downtime in the central hub of Garreg Mach between combat maps. Three Hopes takes that same slice-of-life structure and applies it to the core framework found in the first Fire Emblem Warriors
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