Fire Emblem Warriors: Three Hopes

As a follow-up to Three Houses, this is great. An alternate timeline makes for some interesting permutations on an already muddied story, and seeing the dalliances taken with the source material makes for good fanboy indulgences as well as mind-bending trips on the well-worn wartime narrative. It's supplementary material that adds actual wrinkles and thought-provoking fare to the fore rather than just fluff, although I have to imagine most people jumping into this without having beaten Three Houses would be totally lost. Still, as a fan of Three Houses who had problems with some of its lost potential, that is mostly made up for here without betraying what made the original experience great, and handily carried the rest of the game...which is more of a slog and a mess than I wanted.

Dynasty Warriors is repetitive by design, but although you'd imagine adding the Persona-esque school system to proceedings would effectively break up the battles, this is counter-acted by the innumerable side missions and extra campaigns, whose luster is quickly lost when you see how recycled maps and objectives are. And though most mechanics from Fire Emblem (class training, social links) make the jump just fine, adding to both the action and strategy elements, others (battalions, some class affinities) are worthless. Left with only the base gameplay, which never becomes completely dull but never rises above okay. Not that Musou was ever a high watermark for 3D action games, but they used to make up for it with larger than life characters (present outside of the filler battles), smooth performance (nope), creative environments (nada) or some other sense of scope to really propel the momentum of these one against a thousand foot soldier battles. It's another outlook at the Fodlan War, and a good one at that, but the game becomes a death march towards the finish line at the two thirds mark, and this is just one route. I jumped at the chance to replay Three Houses instantly, but the gameplay loop of Three Hopes is nowhere near as interesting.

I give this all a mostly pass because the story is just that amazing for fans of the original, and it still has some cool improvements on the Musou formula (owing mostly to that series shitting the bed). Just be sure to either pace yourself if you're going for 100%, or know when to quit once you're satisfied with what you've seen of the game.