Fire Emblem Warriors (Nintendo 3DS) Review

Fire Emblem Warriors opens in the Kingdom of Aytolis, a land that seems to be made up of familiar locales from across the games of the Fire Emblem franchise. The royal twins of this kingdom, Rowan and Lianna, are practising sparring with a family friend, Prince Darios, under the watchful eye of their mother, Queen Yelena, when demons begin to attack through portals. It turns out Darios' father is trying to revive an ancient evil and the Queen sends her children on a quest to restore the power of an ancient artefact, known as the Shield of Flames, to stop the evil from destroying the kingdom. To restore the power, the twins must travel the realm, collecting Gleamstones from heroes from other worlds.

These heroes are, of course, the characters from the franchise's history; they have been somehow pulled through to this world. It's not just the characters, either, as it seems every stage is using locales from other games, too. The twins travel these lands and meet up with the many characters from the franchise history, usually resulting in a misunderstanding that means the new character has to be beaten down before they are recruited to the cause. Frankly, the story is pretty poor, even by Musou standards. This isn't just because of the narrative and beats themselves, but accentuated by some awful writing.

The story isn't the focus here, though; the focus is on the fan-service of the characters for Fire Emblem franchise fans and, of course, on the hack-and-slash gameplay. From a fan-service point of view, this certainly lives up to what fans hoped for, giving a cast of characters from Fire Emblem history in fabulous 3D… at least in the Switch version. Since not everyone has made - nor plans to make - the jump to Switch yet, it's great to see Nintendo still supporting the New Nintendo 3DS/2DS. There is a worry, though, that this will be more the type of cut down port that handhelds have received for many years. Another worry is that this may end up like Hyrule Warriors on 3DS, chugging along with numerous performance and graphical issues.

The good news here is that neither of those are the case. By locking this just to the New Nintendo 3DS/2DS systems, a lot more power is here for the developer to play with, and so it makes for a much smoother experience. Obviously, it can't match up to the graphical fidelity of the Switch and there aren't as many things on screen at once, but it plays as smooth as butter. There's no cut down on the content, either; all the same maps are here, the same ridiculous roster - although with some strange omissions, some offered up to the god of DLC for future charges to the player, but other fan favourite characters are completely absent, with seemingly no good reason. The addition of the map on the bottom screen is a useful addition when taking on stages with multiple simultaneous objectives, too. Multiplayer is missing, which is a considerable disappointment, especially with Nintendo's recent spate of including download play in many titles. The graphical fidelity issue is going to be a big negative here, though, since such a big selling point is fans being able to marvel at their favourite characters in glorious, fully rendered 3D, and they just look rather ugly here when compared to the Switch versions.

The gameplay is a strange amalgamation of Musou with Fire Emblem elements tacked on; for example, there's an option at the beginning to play in "Classic" mode, which means perma-death! Then, when in combat, while the Musou titles have regularly focused on the "one versus an army" approach, Fire Emblem has always understood that it takes an army to succeed, and that has been integrated into the gameplay here. The game tries to encourage using the allied army by adding bonus conditions to the stages, extra objectives that are impossible to pull off alone, and where allies need to be dispatched to capture points, defend objectives, and so on. This can be easily be done simply by pausing the game and giving out orders to commanders. The core Fire Emblem combat system is somewhat recreated here, too, utilising the rock-paper-scissor style swords, lance, axes, along with magical tomes and bows. A little knowledge of this system and balance of teams make for a much more efficient and enjoyable battle.

There are 25 hours or so here in the base campaign, but there's more than enough post-game to give this lots of life, not to mention future DLC, which will obviously start to drop some fan favourite characters who are criminally missing. Completing each stage unlocks free-play for that stage and there is also "History Mode." This will be where players will spend most of their time. This mode offers up numerous events from the series' history as scenarios to battle through, with bonus objectives to meet along the way.