Fire Emblem Warriors follows the recipe of similar Musou crossovers while managing to implement a surprising number of mechanics from the Fire Emblem franchise to make it a unique experience. While many of these features are interesting initially, they ultimately fall short and often become flaws instead of features.
The weapon "triangle" is an excellent example. Early on picking whichFire Emblem Warriors follows the recipe of similar Musou crossovers while managing to implement a surprising number of mechanics from the Fire Emblem franchise to make it a unique experience. While many of these features are interesting initially, they ultimately fall short and often become flaws instead of features.
The weapon "triangle" is an excellent example. Early on picking which units to deploy and where feels a lot like preparing for a battle in Fire Emblem, making sure to place someone with Armorslayer near Knights on the field and keeping my air units away from Archers. However about halfway through the main story-line many of the characters are already so overpowered on Normal difficulty that you can just force your way through any match-up.
Special moves and Awakening moves are cinematic showing the character pulling multiple enemies in before obliterating them. They pulled in the faces of the character attacking in a tear-away style, similar to skill activation or critical triggers in the Fire Emblem games. While this is exciting and fun to watch the first couple of times, it becomes more of an annoyance after a couple hundred goes, especially when the animation takes 10 seconds and the mission has a time limit as time continues while the animation plays.
Unfortunately another aspect brought in from the games is the fact that the "Main" cast of characters are severely overpowered compared to less important ones. The Royals from FE:Fates are indicative of this problem, particularly Ryoma. His Astra skill increases attack speed, making him a permanent member of any battle once it is unlocked because you will want to max his bonds with as many characters as you can to spread the Astra love.
On that note, the bond system is included in this game. In the Fire Emblem games pairing up characters would allow them to form relationships, have interesting and unique dialogue, improved stats when paired in battle, share classes/skills, and in some cases have children. FE:W misses the mark here, with only the highest bond rate having any interesting dialogue. Skills are share-able and you earn the items needed to unlock them by increasing bonds, which is at least convenient.
The bond system actually has a problem that I think the weapon system also suffers from, which is a lacking user interface. Keeping track of bond levels is something I have yet to find a solution for in-game, I have already lost track of who is a B or a C with my Ryoma. In FE:Fates you can view a character and see the relationship levels with other players in a menu, as well as a bubble on the screen while deploying units, either option would have been appreciated here but seems to be missing. The weapon system does let you view skills on weapons, however it is non-intuitive and requires either equipping the weapon first or going into the skill removal/fusing options in the Smithy. This is only made worse due to the skills having different names that barely make sense. In Hyrule Legends skills we fairly clear, Materials+ increases material quality drops while Rupees+ would increase the amount of rupees dropped. FE:W instead has skills like First Class which increases weapon drop quality, Divining for materials, and Power Up which is probably the worst because it doesn't have anything to do with the weapons power or damage and instead affects the number of slots on a weapon drop. Baffling.
FE:W does at least one thing right, gone are the boss fights from Hyrule Legends and the annoying mechanics that came along with them. You will not have to worry about waiting 4 minutes for a stupid dragon to open his mouth so you can finally throw a bomb in. In fact there seems to be a complete lack of bosses in general, with only one enemy that could be considered a "boss" in the main story. The stun system is a lot more streamlined as well this time around, offering the player more opportunities to stun an opponent and perform a special attack.
Music and sound are what you might expect from a crossover title, pulled in almost directly from the original games with maybe a few remixed tracks. Honestly it is hard to hear the music because of the frantic and constant chatter of characters while objectives are being updated and attacks unleashed.
Graphically the game is inferior to Hyrule Legends, especially when alternate costumes are unlocked for characters. It is very clear that these costumes were not optimized for the smaller screen and generally render oddly and have an ugly appearance to them. This was also true in Hyrule Legends to a degree, but is much more noticeable here. The plus side being that there seem to be more enemies on the screen much of the time.
Overall it is a decent game and if you are Musou/FE fan worth a try. However if you have no attachment to Fire Emblem, give this game a pass and make an investment in Hyrule Legends instead for a better overall experience.… Expand
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