Game completed: Fire Emblem Warriors

I was excited when I saw this first Fire Emblem title for the Switch, then I was hesitant when I realised that they had made a hack-and-slash title of my beloved TBS series. But I got the game anyway and started playing. Historically I've been very bad with hack-and-slash games, but I figured this one out pretty quickly.

I absolutely loved it when I was woken up by Chrom and Lissa just like in Awakening. I loved seeing all the old characters again, especially Chrom and my Fates brothers (Xander, Leo, Ryoma, Takumi).

But the more I played the more the game felt like fan service in a pretty package. Aytolis could've had their own bunch of heroes. There was absolutely no need for the devs to include heroes from older FE titles except for the fan service. Except I guess the theme of this kind of game (I'm looking at you Hyrule Warriors).

I missed the strategy element from earlier FE games since most stages in Warriors could be cleared by just running ahead and hacking away. Sometimes use the healing staff which (conveniently) most of the heroes had. (And if they didn't have a staff they had 3-4 healing pots). Mostly you could just run around as one of the main characters, Lianna or Rowan, without thinking about any of the other characters in the group. They mostly managed by themselves, and if they didn't they would tell you well ahead of time so you could run over with a staff-wielding character and heal them. The maps were never so big that you couldn't run straight across them (or make a complete circle) with lots of time to spare. In other FE titles, if you don't think you die. But this felt mostly like midless hacking. Considering it's a hack-and-slash it shouldn't surprise me, but it still disappoints me. One positive is that I enjoyed taking over fortresses and I would spend more time than necessary to just make sure that every inch of that map was blue, and not red, before completing a stage.

The story was extremely straight-forward to the point where absolutely nothing came as a surprise. The bad guy "reveal" made me roll my eyes so hard I was afraid they might get stuck.

The final dragon fight against Velezark was less interesting than the fight against Darios, which was just before. Velezark took longer to beat than the bosses of other stages, but the fight wasn't by far as interesting as the one against Anankos in Fates and it also falls short from the fight against Grima in Awakening.

So tl;dr. Great to see lots of old faces, but the weakest story and execution of the FE I have played this far.