Review #599: Fire Emblem Warriors

 Warriors games never go out of style.

 I was worried. Hyrule Warriors was, in my opinion, absolutely dreadful and went against most things I loved out of the Warriors series, so another Warriors spin-off based off another Nintendo property wasn't very promising. A forum-conversation later, I was told that Fire Emblem Warriors did away with a lot of the 'novelties' Hyrule Warriors brought to the table, and boy, oh boy, was FEW worth it!

 The main story mode follows newcomer siblings Rowan and Lianne as they escape from an assault and... find themselves crossing over to the worlds of other Fire Emblem games...? Yeah, the story is dumb. It's 21 stages long and will ease you into the game. Then you've got History Mode, of which there are 5 maps with a ton of stages each(Wouldn't be surprised if each map had 20 objectives each). Apparently, these maps follow missions from a few games in the series.  As for the character roster, there are 23 playable characters, and, sadly, they don't cover many series. Awakening and Fates are in, because of course, as they are the newest games, Shadow Dragon is in as well, because you gotta have Marth, and then there's a single representative for the final 3DS FE game as well as a representative from The Blazing Blade. Their excuses? If they covered many series they'd have to have many protagonist which meant many Sword users. The reality? Most characters are sword users.

 As for gameplay, it's you against thousand of units, as per usual. In this game, on most stages, you can take four different characters on missions, and freely switch between them at any time. You can pre-set how their AI will behave during battle(It's pretty rudimentary, but it's good enough) although you can pause at any minute and issue direct orders such as 'Guard' this, 'Get' there or 'Fight' this). When the game gets going, don't be surprised if you find yourself frantically switching between characters in order to cover more ground, more quickly. It works great and was much better implemented than in Hyrule Warriors. A new mechanics lets you pair up units, which then allows you to summon the paired character for a guard-breaking assist, collaborate on your Super/Musou attack or have him help you by blocking incoming attacks every now and then. You can freely switch between paired characters and unpair them at any time.

 Besides said new additions, the core of the game remains like any other modern Warriors game, an evading dash instead of a jump button, weak attacks, strong attacks and super moves, they are all here. Defeating enemy generals yields materials which you can then spend on upgrading your character stats. Longer attack combos, being able to equip better weapons, more Super/Musou stocks and even Class Promotion. Class Promotions grant a massive boost to your stats as well as unlocking a new costume for your characters.

 The game is fast and frenetic, there's very little downtime when you play Fire Emblem Warriors... which is exactly what I expect out of these games. The game falls a bit short in the character roster department. Not only is the variety of games covered disappointing, but there are only 23 playable characters and there're many clones. Both archers have pretty much the same exact moveset, and you can find similarities between more than a few others. Having only 23 characters makes that pretty lackluster. There're 9 DLC characters, and, guess what? Even they have a few cloned movesets. DLC characters suck, but DLC clones? How low will Tecmo-Koei fall? On another note, the game might've gone a bit too far with damage sponges. An issue with some of the stages in History Modes that have you fighting against 'Shadow Enemies'. These bastards aren't particularly tough to defeat, but each one can take a solid couple of minutes or more to defeat since you can barely scrape away at their health. This can make some of the latter levels somewhat boring.

 I don't know if I'd say that Fire Emblem Warriors ranks among the best Musou games, but it easily cracks Top 15 for me. The action is fast and furious, the upgrade system is fun and I liked being able to have control of how my CPU generals behave. I would've liked more characters and a bit more variety on the movesets, but otherwise? Top-notch.
 8.5 out of 10