Fire Emblem Warriors Standard Edition - Nintendo Switch

What can I say a new Fire Emblem game that is a great addition to the series, I am really glad I picked this up. The fusion of playstyles is a lot of fun, and you have a great cast of characters to use. This game is an absolute must for anyone who is a fire emblem fan.

The reviews have been generally positive, if not thrilled, about this follow-up to the Wii U's Hyrule Warriors (featuring Fire Emblem characters rather than those from the Legend of Zelda franchise). That said, my experience has been universally praiseworthy. The game includes, from the start, at least a hundred hours worth of content. Some of this could be considered 'grinding,' but the moment to moment gameplay is consistently engaging due to the great performance and strategic twists. Unlike virtually any other Musou/Warriors game, your allies in this one can actually be effective on the battlefield as you direct them to secure key points on a map or defeat specific opponents who are weak to their weaponry. For better or for worse, ignoring your allies and objectives will often result in a lost battle; this does lead to more compelling play, but prevents the kind of mindless battling that the series is known for - adjust your expectations accordingly. Perhaps the most surprising fact is that Fire Emblem fans will find much to recognize in this game despite it more generally resembling standard Musou/Warriors mechanics. Immediately recognizable are the characters - though the roster can reasonably be criticized for focusing on three core games (Fire Emblem Awakening, Fates, and Shadow Dragon) - but small touches resemble Fire Emblem as well. Maps resemble those in the classic strategy games, characters are represented in menu screens by pixel art from the respective titles, and level up moments or special attacks feature sound effects and a pop-up image of the character like one would find in the Fire Emblem series. The most important element is the strategic depth, though, which becomes critical enough in the postgame that the player feels he or she is actually playing a Fire Emblem strategy game in which he or she gets to complete the skirmishes manually. If you can't tell, I love this game. One final detail that reveals the developers' respect for their audience is the inclusion of a choice between playing in Performance or Quality modes when docked; Performance mode presents the game in a 720p resolution at 60 frames per second, while Quality mode presents the game in a 1080p resolution at 30 frames per second. I prefer the former, and don't find that it contrasts poorly with the game's established 30 frames per second in portable mode. Those with a bigger television, less sensitive to frame rates, or more sensitive to resolutions, will likely choose Quality mode. The availability of the choice is a very nice one, though!

Ever since I saw Hyrule Warriors, I thought, Ya Know Fire Emblem would work great with the Musou treatment. In fire Emblem you tend to have a small party taking on a battlefield full of enemies, and that is what the musou games always offered. Lo and behold, the game was made, and it works great! At it's core it plays like Samurai or Dynasty Warriors. Take your god-like party members and cut through hordes of faceless soldiers and lesser monsters while making your way to the captains on the map and other objectives. Strategy comes in the form of ensuring all of your units survival or holding forts by properly switching your units in battle. The blend of fire emblem elements makes this game stand out though. The weapon triangle comes in, you can command your units on a map grid with little fire embelm-esque character sprites, and you play through story beats taken straight from some of the games. It's a lot of fun, but only held back a bit by being a little too easy and feeling kida repetitive as you go through more and more levels fighting more and more faceless hordes.

Hooo this game is a mixed bag... It's your typical Warriors/Muso game, you hack and slash your way through tons and tons of dudes while trying to take/rescue forts or handle other objectives. This game obviously revolves around the fanservice of Fire Emblem, something I'll get into when I talk about the story which ...is a massive negative to me. The combat is fairly shallow, you have a heavy attack + strong attack, special attack and a super mode. You can change characters on the fly and use items to heal as well as manage some gear. Don't expect Devil May Cry 3 level combat, enemies mostly horde around you and stare you down while side stepping left and right and rarely attack. The generals and such are the ones to watch out for, but even then, on hard mode I was finding myself failing only because of map restrictions. I'm making the game sound bad but, with the huge hordes and large war scaled combat the real focus is running around the map completing objectives WHILE killing tons of dudes. Think of it as a beat 'em up but on a massive scale. There's a good variety of characters but they seem to share the same moves depending on the class they are. There is the weapon triangle where some characters weapons best enemies better or worse depending on what/who you're using. Even on hard it's not that impactful I don't feel, especially if you switch characters on the fly. I'll start with the negatives: The 'story' mode is fine enough for gameplay but the actual story connecting all the events together is so comically bad it's like your average or lower fighting game. Characters breaking out into fights for the dumbest reasons only to join up as allies right after. I mean really dumb reasons. You find one character, help them out then their sibling thinks you kidnapped them and now it's a fight to the death. You win the battle and everything is peachy! ....Minus the fact you cut down 1000+ of their army because of this brain dead misunderstanding. Characters that fans probably really like are reduced to one dimensional characters who can't wrap their head around basic situations. Yes, I know it's supposed to be a big fanservice free for all but it's ....paaainful. The english voice acting is pretty bad, some voices are alright and I think I know some of them from the Tales games, Xillia & Berseria and those voices are fine but for the most part voices are either bad to just alright...There is Japanese voices but you have to download them because ...more cartridge space=more money for the dev. So it's a hefty download if you want the Japanese voices and I didn't like much of the voices either. Most of the girls sounded like a cliche desu girl. Lyn being HIGHLY surprising on how they made her sound. I'm not against the girly desu girl voices ...when there's some variety, which I don't feel there is here. The real issue with the voices is they do not, ever, shut up. Every menu action, every upgrade you buy, every item you sell , every menu selection is followed by repeated dialog over and over, and over, and over. I don't care if you like the voices or not, this will grate very fast. I do not know what they were thinking. Anyway, on to the positives. The game has 2 modes for gameplay performance: graphics & performance modes. Graphics is 1080p/30~fps vs 720p 60~fps, being this is an action game the performance mode is the only right way to go. It runs much better than Hyrule Warriors on WiiU because of Switch's superior hardware and these options. This is especially apparent in 2player mode which I HIGHLY recommend you play on performance mode, the framerate stays above 30 this way and honestly with the split screen I don't think you'll notice the visual downgrade on performance mode. There's also more enemies on screen in 2player mode vs Hyrule Warriors which seemed to struggle to get the bare minimum amount on screen to complete the challenge quests. That is not to say that the enemy count/pop in/etc is GOOD in 2player mode, it's good enough to have some fun with a friend. Honestly they should have had a local multiplayer mode at the very least but they didn't go for that. I played a few hours co-op and had a much better time than Hyrule Warriors in co-op at the very least. Honestly, it's probably the best way to play the game. You can cover a lot of ground and enjoy some fairly mindless combat with a friend. There's some good post game stuff here that I think is done WAY better than Hyrule Warriors. The game is pretty good, but do not buy this for the story, do not buy this because you think your character is going to be super cool in the game (they'll likely shock you with how dumb the story makes them act). You get this for hack and slash fun. And its' a good time for that.

If you are someone who enjoys playing hack and slashes this game could be one that you might what to consider purchasing. Like other warriors games you run Around taking down a lot of enemies, but unlike others it introduces elements that make it more about strategy than other things. On the down side the game sometimes crashes when there is too much to process due to the speed some units go at

The Fire Emblem property being applied to the Dynasty Warriors franchise of games works a lot better than Hyrule Warriors, a past Nintendo-DW hybrid. The art-style is gorgeous, the whole game feels charming, and there's a lot more variety in the characters you play as from the source games, rather than six different versions of Link (like in HW). Overall, I just like this game. The voice acting can get a little cringy sometimes, but the soundtrack is interesting and the gameplay is surprisingly fun for a DW game. Decent alternative to the traditional Fire Emblem title, and a good way to spice it up for fans of the franchise.

Game is really fun, taking both from Fire Emblem and Dynasty Warriors. It has the action and combat of Dyansty Warriors mixed with characters and systems from Fire Emblem. For example, weapons matter, like in Fire Emblem, relationships can be built up with characters on your team and characters are from the recent entries in the series. It even has what has become called classic mode, where if a character dies, you lose them for good. The game still is Dynasty Warriors though. It can be fun to play for awhile, but if you play it non-stop can get kind of boring. The environments are still pretty uninteractive with a lot of things still looking the same as others in the series. Good in short bursts, playing maybe one battle before going to play something else.

I have never played a Warriors game until this, so the main draw of this game for me was the Fire Emblem aspect. The hack and slash gameplay can be fun and satisfying but the bosses are just damage sponges that occasionally hit back. There is actual strategy in deploying and giving orders to units across the map and they are fairly competent but they take a noticeable long amount of time to defeat the enemies you assign them to and part of the strategy involves occasionally going back to the map screen in order to assign new orders whenever they are done or have put themselves in danger. All in all, it does feel like a Fire Emblem game, just more fast paced with some over the top animations.