We’ve been fending off thousands of bad guys in what is perhaps the best Musou title in recent memory.
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Fire Emblem Warriors saw us play as a scrawny blonde young man with a lame haircut and weak one-liners (there’s also the option to play as a female character too) as we start to rhythmically mash the Y button to fight hordes of enemies off. In one such situation the body count climbs at a fast pace and a counter ticks up, and as a finale we activated our special attack. Nearly a hundred enemies are then taken care of, but Fire Emblem Warriors is one of Omega Force’s oh so popular Musou games, and the body count is about as impressive as tying your laces. Around the corner there’s another bunch of hundreds of enemies waiting for a taste of our sword, and further away, a boss is lurking. It’s time to start chopping again and rhythmically press the Y button.
It would be easy to just smack a low grade on Fire Emblem Warriors and move on. It differs very little from other entries in the Musou series, which have now grown into more versions and spinoffs than anyone could reasonably desire to play. They all have enemies in big hordes that throw themselves against your weapons like lemmings with a nasty death wish, and there really isn’t a whole lot more to it. Originally the series covered the Chinese epic Romance of the Three Kingdoms (Dynasty Warriors), albeit with very liberal interpretations of what happened, but we’ve also seen Samurai Warriors as well as renditions of the One Piece anime and the Zelda series in Hyrule Warriors.
However, we have absolutely no plans to give it a low grade – on the contrary. Basically, all the incarnations of the game we have tested have had one thing in common: they have all been fun to play. It’s a series that succeeds with the task of offering intuitive entertainment while there’s still plenty of depth to let players hone their skills from start to finish – and then still be in a hurry to play it another round (or two).
This time, Fire Emblem is the theme, and although this is normally a strategy game, it’s still very well-suited thematically. Instead of taking turns to kill off evil-doers, we get to run around freely and slash enemies in real time. It’s the same basic idea, just with a completely different perspective on the matter. The origin as a strategy game is also still noticeable too, and there’s a lot of fan service waiting for those who really like the series. For example, there are pixel versions of all heroes in the menus and you can still choose to play the game with permadeath switched on.
Perhaps the most obvious connection to the main series gameplay-wise is how the classic weapon triangles in Fire Emblem games are used in this game by highlighting which enemies you have a particular advantage and disadvantage against. This means there’s always a point in ensuring that your warriors are properly armed and that you order the right person to tackle the corresponding enemy. Swords beat axes, axes beat lances, and the lances of course beat swords. Before each battle starts, you can therefore easily play commander and move folks around to put them in favourable positions. You have to decide if you need someone on your side for strong team-based attacks (and for relationship-building purposes) or for healing, or should you send Frederick and this huge war horse straight through enemies in search of any remote minibosses?
The screen is instantly filled with symbols and features, which nonetheless usually feel quite easy to understand. In addition, we’re bombarded by help screens that constantly explain and/or remind us of how things work. Should you use extra energy, heal someone else, fire off special attacks, change characters, try to buy something from Anna in the heat of battle, try to take over a place where enemies keep spawning to make them stop, or maybe rush to the boss and try end the battle? All of these tips can help you decide.
There’s a certain amount of depth in Fire Emblem Warriors, something we actually appreciate, and it’s noticeably deeper than what the Musou series usually offers. We’d like to think that it’s because the game is based on Fire Emblems where tampering with menus, weapons sorting, and the like is a staple and something fans expect.
However, the menus are something we don’t really agree with in this game. Sure, it’s good that options are available, but it’s often not quite clear how things work and what the best options are. For example, scrapping a lot of collected equipment to extract new materials to upgrade your other accessories isn’t all that clear, and we found ourselves wishing that we could just automatically optimise the best equipment and avoid micromanagement. Of course, this tends to be a bit of a chore.
Just take such an obvious thing as playing co-op. That’s not something you choose from the start menu in the game, but instead before you start a chapter player one has to press the button for player two to be included (where it says press left joystick to let the second player join). It’s not brain surgery, but it says something about the menu design when it’s the first game where we had to go looking to even find the two-player mode, and even then not immediately get how to get it started.
When you find it, the two-player mode offers classic split screen gaming, which leads to a lower frame-rate, but it never feels too choppy, even when both players use their most spectacular attacks with fireworks of effects and dead enemies falling on all sides. We think the Musou series is definitely more fun with two players, but the fact is that Fire Emblem Warriors is just as entertaining alone. Then you get to make all the important decisions and you can enjoy the role-playing part more.
We definitely want to highlight the graphics as well. The Fire Emblem characters are very nicely created in three dimensions with great design. The picture quality is very clean with nice anti-aliasing and the frame-rate is surprisingly stable even when dozens of meanies attacks at once. It looks almost cooler in portable form, with the epic battles appearing on a small handheld device. The cutscenes are poor, however, which is a pity, as they largely consist of still images of people who speak in long dialogues. Fortunately, there are traditional cutscene-movies as well that make it more exciting to follow the story on-screen.
The voice acting is something that could definitely have been better too. When the game is released, Japanese voices will be available to download for those who prefer the originals, but for anyone who wants to play with English voices, just be prepared for too much of that cheap anime feel. On the other hand, we love the sound effects brought over from the Fire Emblem series and we enjoyed the Japanese guitars that frenetically play during the fighting.
The story of Rowan and Lianna (the former unbearable, the latter much more fun) is nothing that’ll aspire of any Game of the Year prizes for best narrative, but we’ve never felt the urge to have any reason to kill people in the Musou series and its spin-offs before and we don’t need it now either. We loved seeing all the familiar Fire Emblem faces that pop up along the journey and we often had trouble turning off the console in the evenings since we want to play more. A good sign, and in the end, this is a great game. A little more polish would have been nice, but the Musou series hasn’t been better than this for many years.
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Keyword: Fire Emblem Warriors