Fire Emblem games have an interesting relationship with stories. It has to be there to justify the political and supernatural drama fueling many fights, but it’s rarely what fans come to the games for. More often, players want to get to know the playable cast instead, building up their relationships and watching their personalities play out through cutscenes and battles alike. Those battles are also a vital draw, as Fire Emblem has upheld one of the most consistent release schedules for a tactical RPG series not only under Nintendo’s banner, but within its genre.
In these respects, Fire Emblem Warriors didn’t have much to offer fans. It took many updates for the series’ tactical gameplay to finally creep back in, and its function of bringing together various iconic Fire Emblem characters was better fulfilled by Fire Emblem Heroes, meaning the fandom was content to move to Fire Emblem: Three Houses. Now, Three Houses is receiving its own Musou spin-off titled Fire Emblem Warriors: Three Hopes. Some mistakes the original FE Warriors made could be rectified, but Three Hopes also needs to look to one of its Warriors contemporaries for guidance.
The Problems With Telling Another Fire Emblem: Three Houses Story
One of Fire Emblem: Three Houses' biggest selling points in the lead-up to launch was that it featured a war with multiple sides, and the player got to choose who they wanted to align with. These story paths included the Black Eagles led by Edelgard, the Blue Lions led by Dimitri, and the Golden Deer led by Claude, as well as another route splitting off from one of the three. This provides a lot of playtime to invested players, but the cracks start to show when a player finishes one path and restarts on another.
To ensure every route had value, lore details and major character arcs were divided up across the different routes. Each house had a core set of characters that shaped the focus of their route, and there wasn’t much room to cover the protagonists of the other stories. This left Three Houses in the unfortunate situation of having a lot of overlapping pre-time skip content between the routes, but arguably not enough new story to justify playing all of them. Fortunately, it seems like Fire Emblem Warriors: Three Hopes is primed to fix this issue by borrowing some aspects from the most recent Nintendo Warriors crossover.
What Three Hopes Can Learn From Hyrule Warriors: Age of Calamity
Hyrule Warriors: Age of Calamity was advertised as a prequel to The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild, but it is a much different story. Players who travel a few missions in will quickly realize that the game covers the same characters and general events that would be in BotW’s backstory, but it’s telling a new story resulting from time travel. Several future characters appear and interact with that era’s inhabitants, leading to a new series of events that cannot coexist with the original game. It’s still similar to BotW in several ways, but it’s more self-contained than expected.
Fire Emblem Warriors: Three Hopes should take that notion and go even further; becoming fully independent of Three Houses. Three Hopes ought to build a whole new route to take the story down, merging plot points from the original game’s paths while giving them different conclusions. Having all the houses unite against a new common foe is a cliche, but it is still a new experience compared to what is found in the base game. The promise of radical new content would give players a reason to venture through Garreg Mach Monastery activities one more time, and that’s what many Three Houses fans want to hear.
Fire Emblem Warriors: Three Hopes releases for Switch on June 24, 2022.
