Fire Emblem Warriors: Three Hopes Review: I Was Hoping For More

Story:

Three Hopes is a re-telling of the story from Fire Emblem: Three Houses. It diverges from the main timeline by introducing a new player character, Shez, as a student at the academy and having Jeritza fill in as a professor instead of the previous protagonist, Byleth. Solon is outed early and Monica is saved from Kronya. There are three routes depending on which house you side with after the prologue:

A rivalry between Byleth and Shez is set up but awkwardly incorporated and has very little impact on the story.

Blue Lions (Kingdom):

In this timeline Dimitri never goes insane because the Remire Village Massacre, Flame Emperor, and his exile never occur. With Dimitri cognizant, he assumes more of a leadership role and the responsibilities that go along with it. Most of this route's focus is on protecting the Church and the Kingdom lands from the Empire's incursion, which requires a bit of backtracking across the same areas multiple times.

This version felt the most unfinished out of the three arcs and lacked the emotional punches of its Three Houses counterpart. The Agarthans replace Edelgard as the main villain because she essentially becomes a vegetable for most of this route and then turns into a Hegemon Husk in a single cutscene for no discernible reason. The Blue Lions path comes the closest to ending the war Edelgard started, but then Claude plans to continue that war with the Church himself in the future.

Golden Deer (Alliance):

The Golden Deer path goes in a new direction by having them ally with the Empire instead of the Kingdom and by having them actively attack the Church, more so than Edelgard herself. This route makes the Church out to be a bigger menace to Fódlan's safety than "Those Who Slither in the Dark", further downplaying any threat posed by the Agarthans (the "Big Bad Evil Guys" of Three Houses), who were already weak villains.

Claude's past with Almyra is brought up, only to be dropped and never spoken of again. It felt the most padded out of the three routes; lots of attack X territory, but then 'oh no' there is an emergency elsewhere so we have to abandon the progress we've made here to deal with this other threat. It is the only path where all three nations have a chance to remain independent, although that seems unlikely.

Black Eagle (Empire):

This route felt the most grand in scale in terms of its cutscenes, plot twists, surprise attacks and treachery. They are the only group to not fully trust Shez (which is sensible) and had the greatest opportunity to uncover more about Shez's past. They never do though, and the final boss battles are against the same two from the Blue Lions and Golden Deer routes but weaker. The war also goes on with no foreseeable end.

Gameplay:

The gameplay is Dynasty Warriors type hack-and-slash with a handful of button combos. You can pause the gameplay to issue commands to your teammates to perform certain actions in real time, like defending allies, attacking a target, or opening chests and the AI is competent enough to accomplish most tasks. It was simple but entertaining enough to hold my attention. Like in Three Houses you can train units and change or upgrade their class. Supports return but they are restricted to certain characters.

Conclusion:

Three Hopes simultaneously gives too much and too little. After two 100+ hour long games, 7 different paths (10 if you count allying or not with Byleth) and encyclopedias worth of dialogue, I still know next to nothing about Sothis, the Nabateans, Arval/Epimenides (counterpart to Sothis), and the Agarthans/Slitherers. Everything else, be it the land, noble legacies, crests or war history is laid out in painstaking detail. We never even get any proper interactions between Sothis and Arval (her rival?). I did at least sense a bond between Arval and Shez, which I never got with Sothis and Byleth. The Agarthan/TWSITD faction still felt undercooked and in need of a separate route; cut content hints at one having been considered. I was hoping for a little more than the same war fought with the same people but slightly different and unfinished as all the routes conclude with a cliffhanger ending. Why weren't the Agarthan's a playable route? Why wasn't the conflict between Sothis and Arval more of a focus? That's the stuff I didn't get in Three Houses and wanted to know more about. In the end they just generate more questions than answers:

• How did Epimenides loose Arval?
• How did Shez end up with Arval?
• Did Shez's mother (biological or adoptive) have anything to do with it?
• Where did Sothis come from and why did she decide to stay in Fodlan?

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