I knew the story was going to be very bad, and the story was indeed very bad. Patrick Seitz is seemingly working overtime voicing nearly every unnamed character here (at least, it certainly sounds like him!). I think playing Three Hopes ruined this game for me a little given how well that game hones the formula here and gives it all a very strong narrative framework.

It's surprising how much of the general plot is ... Fire Emblem Engage, beat by beat, but that game honed a lot of the same tropes to avoid it feeling as cheap as this one does. It's also 70 hours, and this game is more like 10-ish.

Honestly I just wanted to play as Corrin in an action game. And apparently she is low-tier in this game, but I don't care. I like her VA's vocal performance a lot and I like her character a lot and that's all I wanted.

Once I finished the story, I sort of felt like ... yeah, I could go through history mode and grind and grind and grind. But — have you ever seen The Completionist's Hyrule Warriors video where he spent 1000+ hours to max level and S-rank everything on every difficulty? The Warriors games are probably the most blatant example of the differential between the effort in setting an achievement and actually setting out to complete the achievement. It's all well and good to say you have to hit this threshold by this time and then add characters to then add to the workload of maxing out their crests and finding every master seal so that they're actually useful in anything above level 30 ... but I don't want to be memed into that. I don't need to spend a hundred or a thousand hours hating myself. In a way, I healed that day.

After loving both Hyrule Warriors titles, I wanted to give the Fire Emblem Warriors a try. However, this game is a definite step down from Hyrule Warriors. The cast is predominately from Fire Emblem: Awakening and Fire Emblem: Fates which I think was a missed opportunity to showcase more characters from past Fire Emblem games. I think the even bigger issue though is that the characters don't feel as unique from each other. Every swordwielder plays like every other swordwielder. Maybe this issue was also present in HW and I just don't remember but there were several times where the models for the enemies wouldn't load until I was pratically on top of them which made for an annoying game experience at times. The game also seems to have a delayed reaction to changes to the battlefield. For example, I would defeat an enemy and the game would have to go through several dialogs before it would recognize it. At the end of the day, it's still a Warriors game so if you're just looking for another one of those then it's fine but I'm glad that I waited until it was heavily discounted to pick it up. Even with the DLC, it feels very barebones.

The worst of the four Nintendo Warriors games on the Switch. The same problem with FE's smash representation, where a big majority of the characters are sword wielding lords that don't give enough variety of play styles to choose from. Lance users suffer the most, with the only choice being flying mounts.

A celebration of a whole franchise that only focuses in the 2 newest games and the original one, with a single appearance from characters from Shadows of Valentia and Blazing Blade. FE Warriors fell flat on its face so FE Engage could run.

The story it's okay, you can easily overlook the way it forces the different factions to go into conflict.

I don't recommend playing it in hardcore / with permadeath, since it'll make it harder to grind some of the less used characters in later missions.

They had so much potential to make a cool roster with this game but unfortunately it's probably one of the worse rosters in any warriors game. Too many characters just copying movesets of another, too many similar weapon types, the supports are all basically the same, "we have this thing in common, hey we get along quite nice in this aspect" like there's no originality most of the time. Not to mention the roster is focused on 3 damn games, Shadow Dragon, Awakening, and Fates. Only Lyn and Celica are from other games and they aren't even in the main story. It's such a disappointment. I will say though, the music remixes are nice, and being able to assign your other characters is great as this is the first warriors game to introduce that. Destroying things with Celica can be quite fun at times too. But other than that, this game needs another do over.