I have some conflicted emotions when it comes to Fire Emblem Warriors: Three Hopes. When the game was first announced, I was really excited because I wanted a new Fire Emblem game and Three Houses was my favorite of the series by far, so a new game that takes place in Fodlan sounded great to me. But I’m still not the biggest fan of Warriors games. Up until now, the only two that I ever liked were the pervious Fire Emblem Warriors and Persona 5 Strikers. But because it says Fire Emblem, I knew that I had to play it.

I will say it right away that I do love this way more than the original Fire Emblem Warriors because it feels much more grounded in the Fire Emblem universe than what was going on in the previous title. But of course, I also loved it so much because it involved the Three Houses characters. In total, there were a lot of aspects that I really liked such as sound and characters, which is what to expect from a Fodlan game, but there were also a few aspects that almost turned me away from the game.

But overall, I really enjoyed it, and what better way to talk about Fire Emblem than by starting with the incredible music.

SOUND: 10/10

It’s no secret that the soundtrack to Three Houses was my most favorite soundtrack of any game, movie, or TV show ever. There were easily more than 20 songs that I loved so much and then many more that I liked. The soundtrack for Three Hopes is just as good if not better in some areas. The first thing about the soundtrack is that there’s two versions of the main theme. When it came to the original from Three Houses, which was only two minutes long, I didn’t like the part with lyrics.

But with Three Hopes, it was four minutes of an amazing theme that was just instrumentals. Just like with previous games, there’s two versions of some songs, which are known as Inferno and Ember. For me, the best thing about the soundtrack is that many of the best songs from Three Houses not only had new versions in Three Hopes but had both an Inferno and Ember version. So now a song like Fodlan Winds, which is a really good song, has four official versions, Thunder, Rain, Ember, and Inferno.

It is kind of a shame that such a large portion is just reviving songs from Three Houses instead of new and original songs, but I can’t complain because they’re all so good. Though, there are a lot of original songs too, which are pretty good, but didn’t really leave much of an impact on me. In total there’s close to 120 songs, which is more than Three houses had outside of amiibo and DLC.

Aside for eh music, the game has an insane voice cast. Three Hopes has the same cast that Three Houses had, which were all amazing but there’s also new characters with no voices and they all did great too. The game is full of great dialogue whether it’s through cutscenes, battles, animations, or other casual interactions. Many of the voice actors went on to become some of my favorite voice actors in general such as Billy Kametz, Erica Mendez, Cherami Leigh, Zach Aguilar, Faye Mata, Mark Whitten, and Alejandro Saab, so being able to hear them all again has been a treat.

GRAPHICS: 8/10

The graphics are sort of a mixed bag for me because I just don’t really care for the animation in Warriors battles. Seeing a thousand generic looking characters flying around in a set path just doesn’t look all that great to me. The good thing is that while battling, the characters that you’re supposed to focus on have around the same amount of detail as Three Houses characters had during battles. It’s just everything around them that looks bad.

Some of the textures don’t look great either, and I guess this is because of how important a fully 3D environment is in a Warriors game. In Three Houses, the monastery was in full 3D but battles were mostly a top down view unless you chose to go into a 3D mode. Warriors is almost always 3D so there’s a lot more of the weak textures to look at.

When you’re not in battle, everything else looks great. During in-game cutscenes, you get to see full-sized models of the characters and they all look great and the regular cutscenes look as good as they did in Three Houses. If this was a direct sequel to Three Houses with the same genre and gameplay, I’d probably think that the game looked about the same or better, but to me the Warriors aspects just don’t look as good when it comes to graphics.

ADDICTIEVNESS: 9/10

For me, the game wasn’t as fun as Three Houses when it came to the combat. I would much rather prefer the grid based RPG combat over the Warriors style, but when it comes to other aspects of Fire Emblem such as the character interactions and class systems, I love them just as much in Three Hopes.

I will never get tired of the little things like raising your support ranks with different characters or doing different activities like cooking. If you like Warriors combat, you’re going to get even more enjoyment out of the game than I did and that’s saying a lot since there were so many aspects of the game that I really liked.

STORY: 8/10

The thing about the story of Three Hopes is that it’s basically the same as Three Houses but with a few twists and in an alternate timeline. You still pick which side you want to play for and that changes the course of the game including the story, music, battles, and characters that you interact with. While this game does have a heavy presence of the two Three Houses protagonists, you play as two new characters in Three Hopes.

One thing that I’m not a fan of is that the story seems much shorter than that of Three Houses because each path only lasts 15 chapters, but each one still has a decent amount of content, lore, and potential for character developments. I personally prefer the story and emotions of Three Houses, but there’s still lots of lore here and it’s pretty good.

DEPTH: 9/10

When it comes to depth, it’s nowhere near as close to Three Houses or even the previous Warriors, but there’s still a lot going on. The two biggest aspects of depth would be the number of chapters and the number of characters. For starters, all the characters from Three Houses are returning and there’s new characters such as Shez that are added into the game, which increases the roster.
As for chapters, each path has 15 total, though the first few chapters are the same for everybody and one of the paths has an additional diverging path that adds a little bit more to the content. The problem that I have with depth is that a lot of the things that you could do while exploring the monastery in Three Houses were removed and in my opinion, the combat is a severe downgrade.

In Three Houses, one battle could take anywhere from 10 minutes to an hour depending on how you play. Each battle required a lot of strategy, thinking, creativity, and in some cases, risk. But in Warriors, it’s a lot of mindless running around and slashing. It’s not the same, there’s less to do in battle, and it’s not really as fun.

For me, Three Hopes doesn’t even have as much depth as the previous Warriors game. While I do love the fact that Three Hopes is strictly characters from Fodlan, the previous game had a lot of variety going on with its characters because they were from many different Fire Emblem games.

The previous game also had three big DLC packs that added a ton of content and while I’m sure that Three Hopes will get some in the future, it’s not something that I’d be able to talk about now. Even with that being said, it’s still easy to get 25 to 30 hours of content from one playthrough which means you can get close to 100 hours if you do all the routes.

DIFFICULTY: 4

Honestly, I could probably just copy and paste the difficulty section from my review of the previous game, it’s that similar. Just like with all the Fire Emblem games, there’s a bunch of difficulty levels for you to choose between. There’s going to be Easy, Normal, and Hard. I know it would seem like the best choice for a die hard Fire Emblem fan to choose the Hard option but that’s not always the case here.

The best Fire Emblem player in the world will have trouble on hard if they aren’t great at the Warriors combat to begin with since it’s so different than the classic Fire Emblem gameplay. You also have Casual and Classic modes. If you play on easy and casual, the game will be very easy and forgiving if you make a mistake or 50. But if you want the challenge, you can always go for the combination of Hard and Classic, which will make you want to cry.

For the most part, the game is pretty simple and easy but you can make it as difficult as you like.

OVERALL: 9/10

Other than the issues with graphics and gameplay, my main concern with the game is that it adds way too many alternate timelines and branching paths to an already constipated Fodlan landscape. I loved what Three Houses did in this regard because each path was basically a new game with a few similarities but its become too much. Three Houses had four different paths that you could take, with a fifth being added through the expansion pass. That alone was sort of confusing with its timelines and with what’s canon, but I loved it.

But now Three Hopes adds even more. Now there’s another three possible paths to take with one of them having another branch down the line which brings the total number of different timelines across all of Fodlan to nine. The entire lore of Fodlan just became more complicated and convoluted with Three Hopes. At least with Fire Emblem Fates, the story changed based on the outcome of a single event, which felt grounded. Here, the story has sort of evolved into a mismatch of a bunch of different “what if” scenarios.

The game also seems much shorter, like what I mentioned earlier with the number of chapters. It’s still a decent length and if you do all three paths and you love interaxting with all the characters, you’ll be able to push 100 hours. Other than that, it’s still a very good game and it’s perfect for anyone who invested way too much time into Three Houses. If you aren’t a fan of Warriors games, you might get fed up with the combat after a while, but this is very much a Three Houses game at heart.

Overall, the game had a few aspects that I just didn’t like, but the music, voices, characters, and certain gameplay mechanics and graphics are all amazing. I think it’s great even though it doesn’t have as much content or value as Three Houses and personally I’m hoping that the game can get even better as the year goes on. The first wave of the Three Houses expansion pass launched just six weeks after the game was released and the first DLC pack for the previous Warriors was released after eight weeks. So there is hope that the Three Hopes can get a lot more content by the end of the summer.

Even if it doesn’t, it’s still great and perfect for any Fire Emblem fan who can get past the Warriors gameplay.