Fire Emblem Warriors

Attack of the Clones

A brand name can indicate the quality of a product.  In the grocery store, Lucky Charms gathers more buyers than the store-brand “Lightly Sweetened Oats with Magical Marshmallows.”  In the video game world, a name alone can forecast a review score.  Anything with Mario attached to it will sell millions and earn high ratings, unless that Mario brand is attached to “Party” or a sport other than golf.  Conversely, if a game carries the Sonic name, we expect disappointing sales and some bizarre gimmick which screws up any hope of a Sonic comeback (excluding Mania).

Now let’s combine two big brands:  Fire Emblem and Dynasty Warriors.  The first one is known for immersive stories and complex gameplay, and the second is known for repeating itself more times than an NPC in Skyrim.  Put those two together, and you get next great Hyrule Warriors sequel, right?

Nope.  You don’t.  You just get a mediocre Dynasty Warriors with a palette swap.  Hyrule Warriors won me over, convincing me I enjoyed playing the same stage 50 times to level up all of my characters.  Fire Emblem Warriors (FEW) struggled to keep me engaged throughout my first play-through.  Because I have never played a single Fire Emblem game, the Fire Emblem brand did little to enhance my enjoyment of FEW.  Even if the brand was more familiar to me, it would not be enough to cover up monotonous gameplay packaged in a lackluster presentation.

What is it?

Like other Dynasty Warriors game, in FEW, you take on the role of the only competent soldier to ever grace the battlefield.  Scores of enemies stand in your way, but you’ll wipe them all out with simple combos by mashing the X and Y buttons.  You also have an army backing you, and they will magically die or succeed off-screen.  Most missions will task you to conquer keeps by vanquishing slightly beefier enemies until you can fight the beefiest commander and win the battle.  However, while you’re capturing keeps, the enemy is doing the same.  As such, you’ll have to backtrack and defend your positions as your soldiers figure out the pointy end of their swords.

Of course, you’ll get to wage this war with your favorite Fire Emblem characters like Marth, Wannabe Marth (Lucina), and Father of Wannabe Marth (Chrom).  Each hero has a certain weapon class which make up the world’s most violent game of rock-paper-scissors:  swords beat axes, axes beat lances, lances beat swords, and spell books kind of suck against everything.  During each battle, you can switch between three characters, pair two heroes together (allowing for tag-team attacks and specials), or delegate responsibilities to your teammates (such as protecting keeps, healing allies, or attacking enemy captains).  Compared to Hyrule Warriors, FEW requires a little more strategy to clean up the battlefield.

A hefty story mode features the royal twins, Rowan and Lianna, as they progress through a fan fiction writer’s wet dream while learning the value of friendship.  A sizable “History” mode is included as well, allowing you to re-experience classic Fire Emblem battles through the Dynasty Warriors hack-and-slash gameplay.  These historical battles do not offer new maps, but they do provide alternate mission directives not seen in the story mode.  Outside the first few story missions, FEW offers couch co-op to let you wage war with another efficient fighter.

What’s good?

1. Key changes bring some brains to a typically mindless experience.  By being able to give orders to your heroes, you can feel in control of your army rather than just your playable characters.  Swapping characters helps you to aid your helpless grunts more easily if your territory is being threatened.  Protecting your keeps is all the more important with the introduction of half-assed permadeath.  Let your heroes fall in battle, and you can’t access them again until you revive them with a small mountain of money.
2. Cutting through swaths of enemies is mindlessly cathartic.  Sometimes being shallow feels great, and the Dynasty Warriors franchise is a master of brainless gameplay.  Massacring small nations of people would be even more satisfying if your attack combos weren’t locked behind material-farming requirements.
3. If you like it, there is a lot of it.  With over 20 chapters in story mode, five History maps (each with multiple battles), collectibles, and S-rankings, FEW can devour tens of hours of your free time.  This is an estimate because I couldn’t be bothered to play more than 15 hours.

What’s bad?

1. Mindlessness soon bleeds into monotony.  There are no sub-bosses to be seen, and enemy commanders require a few more whacks than the typical grunt.  Maps are reused and aren’t that remarkable to begin with, and after spamming X and Y for hours, arthritis begins to set in.  The biggest insult is that many of your playable characters are carbon copies of each other apart from appearance and stats.  Any sort of originality the game had fades as you fight the same enemies on the same maps with the same heroes.
2. The voice acting and writing in FEW make Hyrule Warriors look like a Pulitzer-winning masterwork in comparison.  Understandably, no sensical plot could explain why all of Fire Emblem’s greatest heroes are on the same battlefield, but just about any fan could have written something better than the sticky-sweet clichéd mess they gave us.  Add in cringeworthy overacting and wacky one-liners (which repeat incessantly, mind you), and you’ll be screaming “double damn” every time a character speaks.
3. Co-op is a poor man’s version of single-player.  Hyrule Warriors’ multiplayer was not a paragon of multiplayer greatness, but at least you could complete the entire game (with top rankings) with a friend.  With FEW, the enemy count tanks when another player joins, and due to this, an S-ranking is virtually impossible on some missions.  Disregarding rankings, with two people, you’ll be lucky to face 10 or 20 enemies at a time compared to the single-player’s 100.

THERE’S NOBODY!

What’s the verdict?

With the definitive edition of Hyrule Warriors coming to the Switch in the near future, there is little reason to pick up Fire Emblem Warriors unless you’ve played the Zelda version to death and back.  I imagine I would have enjoyed the game more if I was more familiar with the Fire Emblem brand, but then again, I doubt even a Zelda theme could have saved this game for me.  Simplicity and familiarity can absolutely improve a video game’s playability.  FEW just happened to be as stupidly familiar as driving on a straight, empty highway.  It can be fun occasionally for an hour or two, but any more than that, and you’re stuck in Wyoming.

THERE’S NOTHING!

Arbitrary Statistics:

• Score: 6
• Time Played: Over 15 hours
• Number of Players: 1-2
• Games Like It on Switch: Hyrule Warriors:  Definitive Edition, Fate/EXTELLA:  The Umbral Star

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