Tip: If you’re playing Fire Emblem Warriors: Three Hopes, follow the “classic” mode, no matter what. We go. Despite its musou attractions, Three Hopes is still a Fire Emblem game, with all the life or death bets and high-minded strategies that entails.
To be clear, this is not an assessment of the level of challenge inherent in the game. Three Hopes, released last week for Switch, is a spin-off of the 2019 Fire Emblem: Three Houses strategy game, and can be played with three difficulty levels: easy, normal, and hard. More than a measure of health and damage values, these settings also dictate how many enemies attack you at once and the speed at which your various special attack counters fill up. All settings are fully valid. (I personally play normally.)
Three Hopes can be played even further in two game modes, which will be familiar to longtime fans of mainline tickets:
- Casual: When a group member runs out of HP, it cannot be used for the rest of the battle, but will resurrect at the end of the mission.
- Classic: When a party member runs out of HP, he is dead forever. Sorry!
The actual branching of your choice will take effect during the fourth chapter of the game, and you can switch from classic to casual in the game’s setup menu. Just warning, though: you can’t switch from casual to classic. (During the first three chapters, fallen units will come back to life even in classic mode.) So there’s a bit of a boost to start a new game in classic, see if it works for you or not, before you decide which mode do you want to play at the end of the third chapter. If you’re just looking to play YYYX to get through some frantic battles, casual mode will serve you well. But if you want to reproduce the torment by biting your nails from the traditional stages of Fire Emblem, the classic is the way to go.
Screenshot: Nintendo
Three Hopes is apparently set in an alternate timeline of Three Houses, but stars most of the same characters. At first, you can ally with one of the three factions: the Blue Lions, led by the stoic Dmitri; the Black Eagles, led by Edelgard, who desperately wants to make fascism fashionable; and The Golden Deer, which has Claude worthy of fainting as a leader. And like Three Houses, you will soon get to know — and take deep care of — the people who make up these factions.
In a tactical game, it’s one thing to send a nameless and nameless “banding” unit into the fight. It’s another way to send Hilda, your reliable, pink-haired, ax-warrior warrior, into the same fight. You know she likes to sing and dance and the colorful flowers. You know she’s lazy as hell, hates responsibility and will go hungry at any opportunity. You know she’s very close with Raphael, the most hungry member of the golden deer, and he’s a close confidant of Claude. If she dies, it will sting her. The same could be said of all the members of the golden deer who are not called Lorenz.
In the classic mode, this devotion is reflected in the battles. At any time, you can press the plus button to stop the game and pull out a grid-based battlefield map, and then direct the group members to attack the enemies over whom they have an inherent advantage. (Three Hopes makes use of Fire Emblem’s classic “weapon triangle”). You can also use the D keyboard to swap characters, giving you more control over any particular group member who may be in trouble. When the battles get tense, when the members of your group start to lose health, start doing these moves more intentionally, because any shit means losing a favorite character, forever. This feeling is not possible when played in casual mode.
What if you end up losing a character you like very, very much? Hey, that’s why rescue juggling serves!