Been a bit since last post! This time we're talking about Fire Emblem Warriors Three Hopes developed by Intelligent Systems and Omega Force. Three Hopes is the second 'Warriors' game that adapts the series standard turn-based strategy to real-time combat. While the previous Warriors game on WiiU (rip) was more of a crossover game between popular (mostly 3DS) Fire Emblem games, Three Hopes is more of a sequel to Three Houses. Sorta! A major goal of today's post is to solidify how I handle this first general impression post on a game just so that I can take notes better and not sit on posts between games too long. Basically, first impression posts will go as thus:
This is not to say a game may only get one post! I'll still do deeper dives on particular of a game's story or game systems but I need to put a limit on myself for these general game writings to not go too long. Onwards to Fire Emblem meets Dynasty Warriors! Fire Emblem Presents What If..?Three Hopes follows in the recent vein of more ambitious Omega Force projects, creating direct sequels to beloved game entries like Persona 5 or Breath of the Wild. Taking an alternate timeline approach of the Three Houses story, Three Hopes works with the presumed knowledge of premise and major twists of the original. The player controls Shez (the default character name), a member of a mercenary band that competes with the Jeralt Mercenaries. By trick of chance, Shez is who comes to the initial aid of the titular house leaders Dimitri, Edelgard, and Claude instead of Byleth, the stoic player character of the original. Byleth, instead, is now far from their role as professor at Garreg Mach and the mortal foe of Shez. Shez joins Garreg Mach as a fellow student of the political-leader-building Officer's Academy, but only for a brief moment. Like mentioned, Three Hopes works on knowledge of the original game and chooses to skip the slow burn development of the Academy phase. Instead of the 'Flame Emperor' mystery, the major conspiracy of 'Those Who Slither In The Dark' is unmasked immediately. This is followed by three separate national power struggles exploding across the continent, allowing the three house leaders to leave the monastery on amicable terms. Shez, along with their body sharing and supernatural friend Arval, would eventually join as a mercenary hungry for one of the three house leaders as war unfolds across the continent. This is a great approach for a sequel to an original game founded on multiple divergent choices. This choice smartly allows more of the world to be developed since the cast is not limited to the immediate area of the Garreg Mach monastery. The work of establishing Crests and the tension of being nobility is done already, we can get directly to people wanting to change the world in how they think it should be! Shez does provide an in to (re-)learn some of the larger narrative beats while bringing a unique perspective to the world. They're a direct and vocal mercenary, heavily contrasting Byleth's stoicness, and learns about major beats as they become relevant to their line of work. It all feels like a good choice to play off of what work has been done by Three Houses narratively, and leads to the strengths of Omega Force's gameplay focus. Real-time Weapon Triangle WargamesOmega Force as a game studio has a particular house style best known through the Dynasty Warrior games; high energy action where you cut down hundreds of enemies in a map with a few boss generals. They're very easy to pick up and the simplicity lends Omega Force to adapt multiple franchises as 'Warrior' games (One Piece, Hyrule Warriors, Gundam). Three Hopes directly pulls upon the same fundamentals: big maps, lots of enemies to kill, General boss units, large splashy cinematic attacks that juggle 30 enemies at a time. You can pick any particular favorite character and quickly get running with them as your best performing unit in minutes. Be strong, Bernadetta, be strong. The unique spin here is the Fire Emblem staple weapon triangle plays a major role in decision making. Every unit has a weapon type that is weak or strong to another weapon, and certain units have critical weaknesses like winged units against bow attacks. Every boss enemy has a stun gauge that, when depleted, allows for a cool cinematic special that sweeps up whole chunks of the battlefield. The stun gauge is heavily affected by the weapon triangle and drastically swings pace to feeling very smooth when properly approached. So with each map of gameplay you're allowed up to 4 controllable characters (and 4 additional support characters for major battles) for flexibility against each map's slate of enemies. Three Hopes gives a tactics map that allows you to direct your 4 units toward ideal targets, capture key points, or defend important units. The tactics map is probably the biggest draw in defining the uniqueness of Three Hopes amongst the slate of Omega Force projects. While it directly adapts a key aspect of Fire Emblem really well for real-time, it also works to accentuate why 'Warriors' games are designed as they are: high stimulation. Making Mashing Go Down Smooth The Omega Force brand of action game, while simple to pick up, has to work hard to keep engagement for long hours. The key aspects of a character's gameplay kit is their 4-step combo of Weak & Strong attacks, a class-based action, a dodge & guard, 2 combat artes, a special meter charged move, and a unique skill/passive tied to each character. These parts are what carry the game from beginning to end, so Three Hopes gives lots of variety to each of these parts! There are 40+ classes that change all of a unit's kit but their unique skill, but fall under ~10 archetypes for ease of use. Generally, I really enjoy the spread of classes through the game. Classes are either very fast and high action or hit large areas for slower/magic focused classes. Then there's each character's unique skill. These range from being fundamentally changing in gameplay like Shez's high speed dash, to a nice variety on pace like Hilda's 'hold heavy attack button to hit harder and vacuum enemies', to.. okay unique skills like the house leader's 'add an element to all attacks'. That said, enough skills are good enough to fill a map with units of fun skills! All of this combines for a pretty varied experience for what amounts to repeating a lot similar core mechanics! Well, at least if you curate your experience. I turned down difficulty to Easy about a dozen hours into Three Houses and now 60+ hours (between three saves picking different houses) and feel very confident about the choice. Fundamentally, I tend to not like increased difficulty just leading to enemy health and damage being increased unless it comes with a dramatic shift in strategy. With how simple Three Hopes fundamentally is, higher difficulty mostly asks for longer consistency with not much added complexity. I wanna mash, but mashing too long hurts my hand and my attention. Also quickly, permadeath as a difficulty option was just a.. non-option to me? Fire Emblem has always had an odd relation in trying to establish stakes with permadeath, in practice acting as a game over state to reload a save over. Three Hopes doesn't have such a fine tuned tactical control to make a case for 'Classic' unit death. Like I said, I want my mashing to go down smooth. Build A Base, Have Love Bloom on the BattlefieldReplacing the monastery, the camp serves as the same area to handle unit management, social supports and weapon management standard to Fire Emblem. Out with the monastery, in with the war camp run by the chef-army captain-chore wheel: Shez! Instead of having to handle each week of teaching, Shez has a Training & Free Time points to spend each chapter. Training points let you train a unit in any class they've unlocked, while Free Time points let you do various activities like cooking to buff everybody, chores to improve morale, or.. go on a date with someone. But more on that later. There's a lot of flexibility to the Training & Free Time points as long as they're used before the big Chapter fight, and occasionally smaller battles give some as a reward. In hindsight, I wish I could've handled all the weeks of teaching in the original like Three Hopes handles it. The camp is also home to a simple base management layer. Shez gathers various building materials to be spent on buildings across the camp to improve a part of gameplay. These range from simple (but effective) upgrades like better prices at shops, to major improvements like allowing the training camp to unlock higher tier classes, or the strategist building to allow units to upgrade their unique skills and number of skills they can equip. It's basic but effective enough for a long term system! What else could you ask from a smooth Warriors game experience? Many Chapters of a War Tale Chapters continue from Three Houses as the major organizing structure of narrative, connecting multiple smaller combat maps to build up to a major narrative changing fight. Instead of being given a flat month of monastery time, the framing shifts to the march of the army advancing on the chapter's war objective. The end of Chapter battles, generally, absolutely rule. These battles are bombastic with allowing for 8 total player units across large maps (though only 4 are directly controllable). 'Strategies' uniquely come into play, allowing the Chapter's effort to be paid off with multiple options to change how the map plays. You can weaken whole parts of the enemy army, make a bridge over a side area, or (most importantly) choose to recruit major enemy units into your army! On paper, I really like the approach of the Three Hopes chapter structure. The camp management is a firm incentive to not immediately aim for the Chapter major fight. The building resources are substantial for big gameplay upgrades, and possible Training point rewards let you experiment with more classes. The issue comes in with the same reason I turned down difficulty to Easy: I want to be engaged with (or in spite of!) the simple systems of the game. The smaller maps tend to blend together with their objectives and start to wear on the novelty of obtaining new classes. Doing every single map in a Chapter really drains on pace, especially when you become tempted to skip the unique Paralogue maps dealing with major character arcs. This compounds into a 'fear of missing out' issue in approaching the Chapter battle. Skipping the smaller maps may skip vital Strategy Points needed for recruiting a character, which would cause an odd pacing shift of leaving the major battle to grind the Chapter. But maybe it's alright to not recruit characters with how flush you are with units. Romance Chess, But Real-Time The support system of previous Fire Emblem entries also carries over, handled very cleverly to match Omega Force's development scope. Units can build support points with each other (if compatible) by being paired together on training, chores, or assigned as direct support in combats. Personally, I never really used combat as a way to build support levels which was great that it did not require warping gameplay to interface with the system. Three Hopes tackles an interesting game design issue of how much writing is required for all the possible support conversations by simply reducing the number of conversations! Units will have support levels with other units building from C, B, to A-rank (certain unit pairings stop early at C or B-rank which is a pity). Fire Emblem games since the 3DS have had issues in writing all the possible permutations of supports for each rank, and Three Hopes just chooses selectively which supports are given a conversation. Please do this more and reduce your scope of writing, it's really effective! To More Years of Really Good Fire EmblemDespite my qualms with how too simple Three Hopes ends up in practice, I have a blast with the game in returning to it. It's directly driven by how much I really love the world of Fodlan and just the idea of Fire Emblem that doesn't rely so heavily on evoking popular characters.
The cast of Three Houses is just such a great cast and I hope they return to a new full cast after Fire Emblem Engage does its dance as a crossover game. I believe in you Intelligent Systems.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AboutTriangles, Tactics, and Tabletop, Kupo! is a blog discussing thoughts on tactics games and tabletop rpgs I've played. Archives
May 2023
Categories
All
|