"Oh cool! I find that whole rock paper scissors shit really demeaning about Fire Emblem, but honestly assigning squads in a Warriors game format that have to follow those rules seems neat! Usually the squad movement thing in those games is an absolute afterthought so I'd love to see a game stress that further."

[two hours of play pass]

"Oh. I'm supposed to know who these people are already. Damn. That's a real shame."

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.

Believe it or not, this was my first Fire Emblem game, so I have it to thank for why I am such a massive fan of the franchise now. I have put an insane amount of time into this game. While its roster is highly disappointing, the gameplay is better here than in any other Warriors game in my opinion. The music and levels are also well designed, to a point where I don't actually mind that they are reused over and over in the extra content (which I never finished, hence "shelved" being my completion rating of this game). I would highly recommend this game actually.

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.