I feel bad for the Wii U sometimes. Admittedly, it was not a great console. Difficult to develop for, underpowered and poorly marketed, it was just a disaster. But, like many Nintendo consoles, it was full to the brim with just fantastic exclusives. One of which, was Hyrule Warriors. Hyrule Warriors was probably the most fun experience I had with a Wii U game period. This interesting blend of Zelda and Dynasty Warriors seems like it wouldn’t work on paper but it surprisingly does. I mean, mostly because it’s just primarily a Dynasty Warriors game with a Zelda coat of paint on it. Unfortunately, I’ve already completed Hyrule Warriors and, therefore, can’t really talk about it as a 52 game. But, we need not worry. Because last year, Nintendo and Koei-Tecmo teamed up once again for somewhat of a spiritual successor to Hyrule Warriors, Fire Emblem Warriors. And today, we’ll be talking about this second crossover.
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| Welcome to the world of Fire Emblem! Are you a boy, or a girl? |
Fire Emblem Warriors stars a pair of twin royals from the kingdom of Aytolis, the prince Rowan and the princess Lianna. These two will serve as your Lords on this journey, a common Fire Emblem class denoting essentially main character status and Super Smash Bros. eligibility. Aytolis is a land that is seemingly always in a state of war, with its peace treaty with the neighboring kingdom of Gristonne being a relatively recent development by all accounts. During a sparring match between the twins and the prince of Gristonne, their childhood friend Prince Darios, an army of otherworldly, cyclopean monsters in various shades of red and yellow start attacking Aytolis. During the struggle to escape, the twins are separated from their mother during a tunnel collapse, but before she seemingly dies, she gives her children a shield and tells them to seek out the Infinity Stones in order to complete the shield and stop the army. With no choice, they must now venture the world seeking out these mysterious MacGuffins to stop the resurrection of the Dark Dragon, a ceremony that is being performed by Darios’ own father, King Oskar. Along the way, they will meet classic Fire Emblem heroes that are mostly from Fates, deal with grand battles that are mostly ripped from Fates and learn what it truly means to be a hero of destiny, apparently like the main characters of Fates.
Of course, the original story of Fire Emblem Warriors is not exactly the point. The point is really to give a lot of love to the Fire Emblem series as a whole and as a result, you end up playing more through quick recaps of the plots to previous Fire Emblem games, in this case, Awakening, Fates and Shadow Dragon. The main story is just an excuse to connect these three seemingly unrelated stories together and your reward for completing these stories is progress on the main plot. But, honestly, the main plot is pretty decent as well. It’s a standard FE plot, don’t get me wrong. I feel like that’s the point, though. FE has a lot of repeating tropes throughout the series and basically, all of them are present in some way, but that’s exactly what you’d like to see in a game meant to be a massive love letter to the series. It’s not great, but as a Fire Emblem fan, I felt rewarded by it.
I feel though it’s going to be impossible to talk about Fire Emblem Warriors without also discussing the games that went into making it in some capacity. It takes so much of its plot from the three Fire Emblem games it highlights during its main story. And, honestly, I have thoughts on Fire Emblem Awakening and Fates that I want to share with you and I will pretty much never have the chance to do a full 52 entry on them as I’ve already completed Awakening and I have at least 50% on all three stories of Fates. So, I’m going to detour right now and talk about Fire Emblem Awakening, Fire Emblem Fates and Fire Emblem Shadow Dragon. Hooray for long entries.
I mentioned previously that during the days of the Jake Chapman streams, I watched him play through Fire Emblem games. In particular, he played through Fire Emblem Path of Radiance for the Gamecube during this period. What I never mentioned was that this was really my first introduction to Fire Emblem. I had seen the characters in Smash, obviously, and I had played part of the way through Fire Emblem Shadow Dragon on a GameFly rental, but I had never really experienced what Fire Emblem was like with any sort of depth until his streams. And I fell in love with the franchise almost immediately. But I wouldn’t get to play one fully for myself until Fire Emblem Awakening. The story of Chrom, Robin, and the Shepherds was really endearing to me, I loved the cast of characters so much and, while the story of gathering the MacGuffin stones of ultimate power was cliched, I loved what they did with it. I fell in love with Fire Emblem because of Fire Emblem Awakening and sought out any way to satisfy my itch for more. But, looking back, I see Fire Emblem Awakening’s weaknesses way more. The gameplay is not very deep and oftentimes too simple. It gives you way too many ways to grind your characters so, if you are playing with permadeath on, you don’t have to worry about getting walled because you can just grind until you overpower it. And the idea that Awakening probably would’ve been the last Fire Emblem game if the series hadn’t suddenly hit a massive boom in popularity does kind of sour me on it. But it is still a game I love to death and one I have already played through three times just from how much I love it.
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| Starring Yuri Lowenthal as the most Yuri Lowenthal role ever. |
I don’t have a lot of memories of Fire Emblem Shadow Dragon. I played about a third of it 10 years ago when, honestly, I just didn’t have the patience for turn-based strategy, especially when permadeath was a mechanic. I’ve always been the first to admit that I’m not a guy who particularly cares for overly difficult games and that I honestly probably whine too much about difficulty, but I was way worse ten years ago. I hated all my current favorite games for years because I was mad they didn’t hold my hand throughout because I was so used to the relative linearity of Pokemon and Kingdom Hearts. But, really, regardless of the whole not being patient thing and not liking decently hard game mechanics thing back in 2008/2009, Fire Emblem Shadow Dragon just didn't grab me. I admittedly gave up on the game too early and I would love to revisit it at some point, but my memories of Shadow Dragon are mostly just me not really caring about the story or Marth or anything and then not understanding when my characters suddenly aren't there anymore. I’ve heard Shadow Dragon wasn’t great though anyways, but I still feel like I should go back and complete it.
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| Could you believe this is the only picture I got of Corrin in the entire game? |
I hate Fire Emblem Fates. That may seem strong but hear me out here. I was super hyped for Fire Emblem Fates. The game that was advertised to me was a multi-faceted, complex story where the player would have to make tough decisions in a completely gray storyline where both sides are right and both sides are wrong. And I got hyped. The idea of there being no clear villain and the player basically having tough decisions with serious consequences was exactly what I wanted for a Fire Emblem game. That’s not what Fates was. Fates was a giant narrative mess with no depth or complexity in any way, shape or form. All three storylines lead to the same resolution, the villain is just one or two obviously evil dudes who may or may not become dragons. The game recommends you do the Birthright, Conquest, and Revelation in that order because of difficulty if you wish to play the three stories, but difficulty is a meaningless term because the games are structured for completely different play styles and may actually fluctuate depending on if you are playing in Casual or Classic. Like how most of Birthright's characters are just glass cannons that will die very easily because the game is built for more of the Casual Mode audience the series attracted in Awakening and it manages to skew the difficult to insane levels if you're playing Classic. Corrin is by far the worst Lord I’ve ever seen, the game builds her up as this great warrior and tactician but in all scenarios, she just behaves like a petulant child who believes she’s right all the time and her siblings just need to see things her way. Oh, and there’s required party death. In a Fire Emblem game. What the heck.
So, why explain all this. Well, there’s a big issue with Fire Emblem Warriors related to how these three games are represented overall. In that they are basically the only three games represented. Now, to be fair, there are two other classic Fire Emblems represented in here, Fire Emblem Echoes: Shadow of Valentia and Fire Emblem The Blazing Blade. But these two games each have a single representative that you can only unlock after beating the game. Meanwhile, there are a total of three characters from Fire Emblem Shadow Dragon, six characters from Fire Emblem Awakening and nine characters from the dreaded Fire Emblem Fates. And, granted, Hyrule Warriors also only initially contained characters from three games, Ocarina of Time, Twilight Princess and Skyward Sword. The difference there is that Hyrule Warriors contained far more original versions of classic characters as well as adding more games into it in subsequent releases and DLC packs. Fire Emblem Warriors only added more from Shadow Dragon, Awakening and Fates in DLC. And this is my issue, the character selection is indicative of the fact that this isn’t actually a love letter to Fire Emblem, it’s a love letter to only the Fire Emblem games that modern fans would recognize.
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| This image makes it seem like almost half the roster isn't Fates characters. It lies. |
And you know what, that’s fair. I can totally understand why you’d highlight Awakening and Fates over anything else. I get that by the time this game was being developed you didn’t really have time to know who were going to be the members of Echoes that fans want to see. It just feels like, with Nintendo’s Fire Emblem crossovers, their focus is more on what’s current and what’s popular than the series as a whole. Fire Emblem has a rich history full of plenty of great characters that I’d think would be worth spotlighting. Bring in guys from the Ike series or more from Blazing Blade or Blazing Blade’s followup that was also released on the GBA. Give more of a reason to have fans look back on the series as a whole and maybe even get them craving some re-releases that you could turn profit on. I know I’d love to see an HD remake of the Ike games for Switch since those are what really turned me on to Fire Emblem. It feels like you’re limiting Fire Emblem Warriors’ potential by having such a limited pool of games to draw from. Though, that might have also been because of another problem with Fire Emblem Warriors’ character selection.
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| No wait, found more Corrin. She's so cute in this game, you guys. Class A waifu. |
Hyrule Warriors benefited primarily from the fact that it was a series that always had a single protagonist, Link. We all know what Link plays like and that was all they had to represent in making the game. But then, they got to have fun. They had an entire cast of characters that we had never played as before, some of which were new and many of which were old favorites who had never been in a combat setting before this, to play around with and create an entire cast that plays almost uniquely. Fire Emblem Warriors, meanwhile, is beholden to the fact that Fire Emblem has specific classes with specific gameplay styles you now have to represent. As a result, too many of this game’s characters play the same. Rowan and Lianna’s only difference is that Rowan can deal hits better and Lianna can take hits better. Other than special moves and slight unique weapon differences, I don’t think there is a difference between Chrom and Lucina, Leo and Elise, Cordelia and Hinoka, Sakura and Takumi, etc. It creates a real Fire Emblem feel, don’t get me wrong. You have a lot of different options in the same role and, because of different Fire Emblem mechanics they also imported, that is overall beneficial. But it also cheapens the feel of a lot of characters who just end up like carbon copies of other characters you currently have.
Speaking of Fire Emblem feel, the way this game actually manages to properly import all the weapon mechanics into a Dynasty Warriors setting is great. If you’ve never played a Fire Emblem before, the game functions on a weapon triangle system. All weapons have a roshambo feeling where they’re strong against certain weapons, weak against certain weapons and draw against certain weapons. The basic weapon triangle is that swords get a damage multiplier on axes, axes get a damage multiplier on lances and lances get a damage multiplier on swords. There are specific weapons that reverse the triangle but it’s otherwise set in stone. Warriors uses this to great effect, adding a lot of that classic Fire Emblem strategy to a fairly mindless hack n’ slash. Also, bows are still ridiculously good on flying enemies and I love that because it just means that I can take a small, sickly Japanese girl and make her a dragonslayer. Sakura is the immortal hero of legend and her songs shall be sung forever.
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| Fire Emblem Warriors also manages to translate Fates' obsession with fanservice. |
But that’s not the only thing from Fire Emblem that Warriors manages to translate over. After all, what would Fire Emblem be without strategically ordering your units around to allow as much of the map covered with as little hassle as possible? Fire Emblem Warriors allows you to pause at any time to order any units you’re not currently playing as to go do specific tasks from capturing enemy strongholds to guarding important NPCs. This allows you the closest feel of playing FE while still doing your hack n’ slash Warriors thing and it’s much appreciated. Unfortunately, the AI isn’t especially intelligent in combat situations and will often times just sit around letting themselves get hit so I wouldn’t trust it too greatly. It is, however, a convenient way to spread units throughout the map so you can readily switch to different corners without much effort. But if you want to get the full Fire Emblem feel, after you beat the game, you unlock the Tactician blessing where you can just play as the big commanding voice in the sky ordering all your units to take over the world.
Pair Up is one of the more recent Fire Emblem mechanics, but the impact it had on the series and this game especially is notable. The idea of quickly building party affinity by having members team up and gain specific boosts from their cooperation both allows your characters more survivability and basically turned Fire Emblem into a dating sim with tactical RPG elements and I’m weeb trash so I wouldn’t have it any other way. The way it’s used here, though, is possibly its strongest showing ever. You, unfortunately, don’t get the option to play as every unit you currently have on the field at all times, with many maps having four playable characters and four support characters. However, you can easily team up your playable and support characters to both give the player characters an extra boost, a free hit if you’ve charged up the pair up’s defense icon, a free attack that could double as a way to aid your character in a battle against a weapon mashup they’re not good with and a dual-special. This game gets pair up not just right, it improves on every issue that pair up has in the original games. If only this showing would be present in the actual source material.
I feel like the most bizarre addition to the game was the decision to keep the permadeath in. The game gives you the option to play it in both Casual and Classic, Casual being a mode introduced to Fire Emblem in Awakening to ease new players into the formula, being a mode where all dead party members are resurrected at the end of a stage, and Classic being the traditional permadeath mode. Kind of. It’s not really permadeath as after a certain threshold is reached in the game, you get the ability to revive party members, albeit with a steep cost. I don’t know what that cost is, mind, because even though I played on Classic mode, I didn’t have any issues overall. There was only one time where one of my characters even died, my almighty dragonslayer falling to her older brother, Takumi, the worst Fire Emblem character, and the Fire Emblem in me just caused me to reset the level to get her back. I’m glad how smooth Classic ended up going, as I was initially worried permadeath would be a serious problem in this kind of game. But if you do find Classic to be too problematic, the game does give you the option to switch to Casual mode at any time. Unfortunately, you can’t switch back if you wanted to, so be warned on that.
I wanna take a moment to talk about History Mode. I usually don’t mention alternate side modes on these as my feelings on it is that a game should mostly be judged on main content rather than a bunch of side content, regardless how large and varied that content is. Also, I’m too lazy and too busy to 100% every game. But History Mode is a worthy exception. Adventure Mode in Hyrule Warriors was honestly the best part of the game. Just hundreds of hundreds of extra levels with unique objectives and great secrets to find for those who know their Zelda. Unfortunately, for those that don’t know their Zelda, it’s a bunch of difficult guesswork to get all the secrets and progress. History Mode is a similar animal. Taking you through a series of levels based around memorable encounters in previous Fire Emblem games, including some that actually aren’t Shadow Dragon, Awakening and Fates. It’s a ridiculously replayable side mode with lots of levels to add onto the game and will probably have you picking the game up to clear a few History battles long after you’ve completed the main story. And you don’t have nearly as much complicated guesswork because, thankfully, Fire Emblem maps are very straightforward.
Despite all my issues with the game, I feel like Fire Emblem Warriors is a better game than its predecessor, Hyrule Warriors. It blends the Fire Emblem mechanics into the Dynasty Warriors formula way better than Hyrule Warriors did with Zelda. It’s a fun game and one I’d really recommend you play if you like this kind of game but want something a little more complex out of it. I hope you enjoyed this look at Fire Emblem Warriors and we’ll be back next time with something that’ll develop the imagination a little more. See ya guys then.
Of course, the original story of Fire Emblem Warriors is not exactly the point. The point is really to give a lot of love to the Fire Emblem series as a whole and as a result, you end up playing more through quick recaps of the plots to previous Fire Emblem games, in this case, Awakening, Fates and Shadow Dragon. The main story is just an excuse to connect these three seemingly unrelated stories together and your reward for completing these stories is progress on the main plot. But, honestly, the main plot is pretty decent as well. It’s a standard FE plot, don’t get me wrong. I feel like that’s the point, though. FE has a lot of repeating tropes throughout the series and basically, all of them are present in some way, but that’s exactly what you’d like to see in a game meant to be a massive love letter to the series. It’s not great, but as a Fire Emblem fan, I felt rewarded by it.
I feel though it’s going to be impossible to talk about Fire Emblem Warriors without also discussing the games that went into making it in some capacity. It takes so much of its plot from the three Fire Emblem games it highlights during its main story. And, honestly, I have thoughts on Fire Emblem Awakening and Fates that I want to share with you and I will pretty much never have the chance to do a full 52 entry on them as I’ve already completed Awakening and I have at least 50% on all three stories of Fates. So, I’m going to detour right now and talk about Fire Emblem Awakening, Fire Emblem Fates and Fire Emblem Shadow Dragon. Hooray for long entries.
I mentioned previously that during the days of the Jake Chapman streams, I watched him play through Fire Emblem games. In particular, he played through Fire Emblem Path of Radiance for the Gamecube during this period. What I never mentioned was that this was really my first introduction to Fire Emblem. I had seen the characters in Smash, obviously, and I had played part of the way through Fire Emblem Shadow Dragon on a GameFly rental, but I had never really experienced what Fire Emblem was like with any sort of depth until his streams. And I fell in love with the franchise almost immediately. But I wouldn’t get to play one fully for myself until Fire Emblem Awakening. The story of Chrom, Robin, and the Shepherds was really endearing to me, I loved the cast of characters so much and, while the story of gathering the MacGuffin stones of ultimate power was cliched, I loved what they did with it. I fell in love with Fire Emblem because of Fire Emblem Awakening and sought out any way to satisfy my itch for more. But, looking back, I see Fire Emblem Awakening’s weaknesses way more. The gameplay is not very deep and oftentimes too simple. It gives you way too many ways to grind your characters so, if you are playing with permadeath on, you don’t have to worry about getting walled because you can just grind until you overpower it. And the idea that Awakening probably would’ve been the last Fire Emblem game if the series hadn’t suddenly hit a massive boom in popularity does kind of sour me on it. But it is still a game I love to death and one I have already played through three times just from how much I love it.
Speaking of Fire Emblem feel, the way this game actually manages to properly import all the weapon mechanics into a Dynasty Warriors setting is great. If you’ve never played a Fire Emblem before, the game functions on a weapon triangle system. All weapons have a roshambo feeling where they’re strong against certain weapons, weak against certain weapons and draw against certain weapons. The basic weapon triangle is that swords get a damage multiplier on axes, axes get a damage multiplier on lances and lances get a damage multiplier on swords. There are specific weapons that reverse the triangle but it’s otherwise set in stone. Warriors uses this to great effect, adding a lot of that classic Fire Emblem strategy to a fairly mindless hack n’ slash. Also, bows are still ridiculously good on flying enemies and I love that because it just means that I can take a small, sickly Japanese girl and make her a dragonslayer. Sakura is the immortal hero of legend and her songs shall be sung forever.
Pair Up is one of the more recent Fire Emblem mechanics, but the impact it had on the series and this game especially is notable. The idea of quickly building party affinity by having members team up and gain specific boosts from their cooperation both allows your characters more survivability and basically turned Fire Emblem into a dating sim with tactical RPG elements and I’m weeb trash so I wouldn’t have it any other way. The way it’s used here, though, is possibly its strongest showing ever. You, unfortunately, don’t get the option to play as every unit you currently have on the field at all times, with many maps having four playable characters and four support characters. However, you can easily team up your playable and support characters to both give the player characters an extra boost, a free hit if you’ve charged up the pair up’s defense icon, a free attack that could double as a way to aid your character in a battle against a weapon mashup they’re not good with and a dual-special. This game gets pair up not just right, it improves on every issue that pair up has in the original games. If only this showing would be present in the actual source material.
I feel like the most bizarre addition to the game was the decision to keep the permadeath in. The game gives you the option to play it in both Casual and Classic, Casual being a mode introduced to Fire Emblem in Awakening to ease new players into the formula, being a mode where all dead party members are resurrected at the end of a stage, and Classic being the traditional permadeath mode. Kind of. It’s not really permadeath as after a certain threshold is reached in the game, you get the ability to revive party members, albeit with a steep cost. I don’t know what that cost is, mind, because even though I played on Classic mode, I didn’t have any issues overall. There was only one time where one of my characters even died, my almighty dragonslayer falling to her older brother, Takumi, the worst Fire Emblem character, and the Fire Emblem in me just caused me to reset the level to get her back. I’m glad how smooth Classic ended up going, as I was initially worried permadeath would be a serious problem in this kind of game. But if you do find Classic to be too problematic, the game does give you the option to switch to Casual mode at any time. Unfortunately, you can’t switch back if you wanted to, so be warned on that.
I wanna take a moment to talk about History Mode. I usually don’t mention alternate side modes on these as my feelings on it is that a game should mostly be judged on main content rather than a bunch of side content, regardless how large and varied that content is. Also, I’m too lazy and too busy to 100% every game. But History Mode is a worthy exception. Adventure Mode in Hyrule Warriors was honestly the best part of the game. Just hundreds of hundreds of extra levels with unique objectives and great secrets to find for those who know their Zelda. Unfortunately, for those that don’t know their Zelda, it’s a bunch of difficult guesswork to get all the secrets and progress. History Mode is a similar animal. Taking you through a series of levels based around memorable encounters in previous Fire Emblem games, including some that actually aren’t Shadow Dragon, Awakening and Fates. It’s a ridiculously replayable side mode with lots of levels to add onto the game and will probably have you picking the game up to clear a few History battles long after you’ve completed the main story. And you don’t have nearly as much complicated guesswork because, thankfully, Fire Emblem maps are very straightforward.
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