Fire Emblem Warriors: Three Hopes

Golden Wildfire Playtime: 60.1 Hours

Finished 24 July 2025.

I decided to do GW first since it was technically the last house I played in the original 3H (minus Silver Snow, but that branches from the Eagles). I'm planning to play the three routes in reverse order, so will follow up down the line with the Lions, and finally the Eagles. There's no major branching routes this time.

The first run was on Normal/Casual, using Male Shez and Female Byleth (to mirror the cover art). Since the difficulty also affects the starting level of the enemies, I figured Normal would make the most sense for the first run; and I'm playing on Casual mode since I don't really want permadeath across a game this long. That mechanic makes much more sense for the TRPG games, not so much for a Musou. I recruited all available characters, including Byleth, and tried to max as many supports as reasonably possible (which was quite a few). Since I'm probably going to be flopping the genders of Shez and Byleth, I tried to get some of their gender-locked skills unlocked now since they carry over, even if I can't class into them.

As implied, I'm planning to do the other routes down the line for sure. I kind of started with GW in part because it seemed like a fun one to do just in case I didn't care enough to complete the others, but since I had a pretty great time I'll think about the other routes when I'm in the mood again for a button masher. I'm going to flip the genders of Shez & Byleth for the second route, and will just take my preference for the last. Also, I'm planning to recruit Byleth on all 3 routes - there's one extra paralogue that you can get which requires you to get a "bad" ending (ie. you kill Byleth), but the Lions are the absolute worst route to do that in because it loses you another unit and another paralogue. Since the hidden paralogue is actually just a solo re-enactment of the prologue fight, I'll take my chances not bothering with it TBH. I'm not going for 100% achievement completion or anything anyway.

Golden Wildfire

Having played through the first route, I really enjoyed the game! It feels like a very real evolution of the original FE Warriors, with a somewhat more grounded plotline set in the grittier world of Fodlan as opposed to the weird timeline fantasy-thing of FEW. As expected from a Musou game, combat largely consists of tons of button-mashing, but there are different playstyles per weapons and tons of different things that you can upgrade and enhance across your characters outside of the battles themselves. BTW, this game is visually almost the exact same as FE3H, and isn't actually upgraded at all for the Switch 2. It performs well, but the 720p-1080p scaling is a bit wonky when playing in portable mode. It's not the most beautiful game but it is workable, and not really worth considering more.

In contrast to the original Warriors, which was more of a series crossover title introducing characters warped in from several of the different entries (most notably Fates/Awakening, and a few others), Three Hopes is basically an alternate-history retelling of the Fodlan timeline, focused on Shez, a new mercenary character who's paired with a mysterious spirit named Arval. There's lots of parallels between this pair and the Byleth/Sothis pair from the original 3H; more details about this are expanded on later in the game. In this timeline, the incidents leading up to Byleth's employment at Garreg Mach never happen, yet a war breaks out across the three factions as before. Predictably, there are separate routes and storylines for each, where you follow one of the house's leader as a mercenary captain and key figure in ending the war. Golden Wildfire is the route for the Golden Deer, comprised of the Leicester Alliance under Claude.

Seeing as the route branch is near the very beginning of the game this time, as opposed to being over halfway through as in 3H, things got interesting very quickly without all the boring monastery-focused garbage. The initial war with the Empire comes to a halt and a truce quite quickly after just a few chapters, and I liked that a resolution was found regarding the Almyran attacks under the command of Shahid. A lot of the plot points are a little bit light to be honest, and the condition of the war feels mostly like an excuse to get your characters to move around Fodlan, but that's totally fine by me. I did think it felt a bit strange that this game kind of pulled its punches when it came to actually killing off any characters; the vast majority of them get to escape time and time again. It seemed like only a few side characters were given the kill/recruit switch, and there were a couple of other random sacrificial lambs, mostly side characters mentioned but not really seen in 3H. In this route, that was Margrave Gautier (Sylvain's dad), Catherine, etc. I imagine the other routes might be somewhat merciful as well.

Each route also gives you the option to recruit or kill Byleth; they're basically Shez's main goal for the first half of the game, as the first plot point is essentially that Shez's previous mercenary company was completely decimated by Jeralt's mercs. By recruiting them, it seems like you get set onto the "good" or "true" ending, giving you a couple of extra chapters in the game where the lords get a chance to talk and reconcile somewhat. I like the idea, but the implementation is kind of weird. Not only is Byleth kind of insignificant after she's recruited (ie. Sothis is never an important character, and Byleth isn't critical to the new chapters), the actual "good" ending for this route still ends with Edelgard lying siege to Dmitri, so who knows if anything actually changed. It feels kind of incomplete maybe?

Coming to the actual gameplay itself, the core of the combat is a musou, but with lots of added features. Combat arts and all kinds of individual and class abilities help to differentiate each character and each build from one another in battles, which feels far more varied and interesting than what I remember of FEW. The same button-mashy goodness is still there though; it's still very easy to basically just dodge and attack spam your way through most stuff. Tactics behavior is also very similar to before; each character has a variety of bonuses depending on certain actions (attacking, defending, etc.) but the concept of layered weaknesses is the same. One further addition though is the inclusion of the battalion mechanic, which can help to counterbalance or enhance the strengths and weaknesses of your class and weapon type.

Beyond the individual stages, each chapter is comprised of a single main mission, and most of them also have a battle "map", where you have to capture several intermediate regions on the way to the main mission by doing side missions. These typically have simpler objectives, limited deployment slots, and no-name bosses, and are fundamentally meant just to balance your characters' XP to make sure you're not falling behind for the big ones. There's also paralogues that occasionally unlock per chapter depending on which characters you recruited or have unlocked. Capturing a region also gives you some resources, which can be used for various types of upgrades. All of this felt really complex to me, and was actually responsible for me putting the game on pause early on -- I kind of went in expecting a brainless game, and instead got a giant checklist of things to do and upgrade. That's not necessarily a bad things, per se - these games are always built on grind, but the sheer amount of different things that you can work on in this game are kind of astounding.

To get into that a bit more, this game has a war camp hub that acts as your home base for each chapter. This is analogous to the Monastery sections of 3H, and it technically moves around... but it actually uses the same map every time. You can talk to people, do shopping, train, etc. It does get a bit tedious for sure, and it's a really big reason why the runtime of the game ended up being 60 hours. There's supports to build, cooking for per-chapter buffs, various chores for bonding between teammates, and tons of weapon, character, and camp enhancements that you can slowly work towards with money, and resources you pick up from missions. Trying to figure out character pairs in training slots, upgrade prioritization, and all that was a bit of a headache early on, where you get tons of resources but don't have the money or timeslots in camp to use them. Later on, everyone starts maxing their classes and supports, and you end up with more money and seals than you have any idea what to do with. Once you sort of get accustomed to the game a bit, I feel like most of this ends up feeling much simpler, since you can still beat people to death with a slightly-less upgraded weapon.

When considering individual upgrades, characters progress independently as might be expected. There's a quick-level function using money which is good for certain paralogues or to build up a new character, but class and weapon proficiencies must be done through training or actual combat deployment. None of this is out of the ordinary, but I'm not entirely sure how to feel about how open the class tree is; just like in 3H, every character can use any normal class, though gender-locked classes and unit-specific special classes still exist. I think it's nicer here that the game really tries to promote class diversity as most classes are weapon-locked, but it's kind of stupid that Lysithea can be a Warrior, for example.

Overall, this game was really nice! It takes a pretty specific mood to want to play a very long game which is mostly brain-off mashing, but I felt it nice and quite refreshing to see very familiar characters in a new, but not unrealistic context. I thought it was a really nice touch to introduce more of the characters that were heard about, but rarely seen in the original game; tons of the actual lords were hidden, though they should be the figureheads of their territories and major figures in the war. Also you get to kill Rhea in this routes so that's funny.

Azure Gleam

Todo! Eventually... (then Scarlet Blaze)