It seems crazy to think that I started this project 50 days ago. That’s fifty days of no work, stuck at home, when, as the whole Covid-19 thing started to take hold, I was working for 3 of 5 days a week 250 miles away.
I was travelling by train from my home on England’s south coast to Manchester in the north west on Sunday night and returning on Wednesday. To help cope with the nine hour round trip, my brother generously bought for me what he called an ‘early birthday present’; a Nintendo Switch.
For as long I was staying in hotels for half the week I was doing a really good job of sticking to a self imposed ‘complete one - buy one’ rule for games, but when I got furloughed and the travelling stopped I may have accidentally bought two or three titles, including this one, that have added to this ridiculous backlog.
The ‘Fire Emblem’ series is one I’ve been aware of since the days of ‘The Blazing Blade’ on the GBA. I didn’t actually play it, but through ‘Advance Wars’ this hardware reminded me how much I enjoyed turn-based strategy, and so I knew of ‘Fire Emblem’ as another option. The style and setting of the series always appealed, but the RPG elements put me off as much as the usually inflated prices.
As a result the most time I’ve put into any game in this IP was ‘Heroes’, the gacha Android game which I dabbled with for some time when it was first released and which only further sealed my appreciation for the characters and art style of ‘Fire Emblem’, and my distaste for this kind of mobile game.
‘Warriors’, which takes the elements I like away from the genre I do not, was always on my Switch ‘to buy’ list, so when I saw it on sale a couple of weeks ago I couldn’t resist picking it up brand new for less than the usual cost of a second-hand copy.
I don’t want to do myself out of anything else to say but this game is quite simple to summarize: It takes the structure of the genre that has become known as Musuo - made popular by the ‘Dynasty Warriors’ games - and basically gives it a ‘Fire Emblem’ coat of paint.
On the off chance you don’t know; Musuo games are typically characterised by 3d hack-and-slash action with the player character laying waste to, literally, hundreds of enemies across a large open map. This is not ‘Fire Emblem’ as you have ever seen it before, and from what I’ve seen around the internet some fans weren’t happy about that.
Which is a shame really because there was no duplicity in the development or marketing to suggest this was a typical turn based series entry, so anyone expecting that only has themselves to blame. Moreover, the game goes out of it’s way to deliver fan service in a plot that exists only to allow 23 characters (32 if you include DLC) from different worlds and timelines to come together in the same place. (If you’ve played either of the ‘Project X Zone’ games on 3DS you’ll recognise the conceit.)
You usually have a few characters in play at any given time and can switch to them on the fly, with the AI taking over whichever heroes you are not in direct control of. This works well in conjunction with another nod to the series tactical roots: You can pause the game at any point and direct individual AI controlled heroes to certain points on the map to attack specific targets or support other characters.
Support is also nuanced in the ‘Fire Emblem’ tradition, with bonds building between characters who fight close to one another and there’s the additional option to directly team up with another character as a tag-team. In this formation you can swap out who is ‘on point’ in a style that reminded me of ‘Mario Kart Double Dash’ - but that’s probably just me.
The ‘Fire Emblem’ IP also brings it’s signature weapon triangle to the table which is a fantastic addition to the usual musuo set up. Organising the members of your group so that the right character is fighting the right kind of enemy brings a welcome layer of complexity to the undertakings.
There’s weapon and ‘emblem’ management between stages which I think a lot of people will find too simplistic but I thought was over-complicated - one or the other would be fine but when you have an increasingly large roster to choose from, keeping them all up to spec becomes a bit of a chore.
The sum of these small details is the biggest thing ‘Fire Emblem’ brings to the world of musuo is, simply, class. There is so much beautiful art and design to draw upon that the game almost can’t help being fantastic to look at. Games of this genre aren’t always blessed with the highest budgets and can therefore perform a little scrappily too, which is, on the whole, not a problem with this game . It's not just a very well polished, beautifully presented Musuo game, but, even compared to the best of the biggest franchises in this genre, ‘Fire Emblem’ Warriors is the most polished, and the most beautiful Musuo game I’ve ever played.
Obviously there’s a big bite of personal taste in that assertion, but anyone who appreciates the beautifully realised quasi-european renaissance/medieval style of the ‘Fire Emblem’ world will find a lot to love in the way this game is presented.
That this care and attention is brought to a musou game of this rare complexity and depth should not be underappreciated either; this game is not just a pretty face, it brings a lot of fresh twists to a well worn format.
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