Parents' Guide to Fire Emblem Warriors: Three Hopes

It may be an alternate history version of a tactical gem from 2019, but this action strategy game packs more than enough content to keep players interested for weeks. Fire Emblem Warriors: Three Hopes dives back into the intrigue, the drama, and the warfare that engulfed the land of Fodlan in Fire Emblem: Three Houses, with a heavier focus on action instead of tactics this time around. But players can easily spend hours deciding how to best spend the limited resources they have on their favorite warriors, deciding on which characters are the best ones for combat, and discovering the facilities needed to make your soldiers unbeatable. But this is just the tip of the iceberg, because between all of the secret missions, side quests, limited time battles, and more, you can fly through more than 30 hours of play before you roll the end credits (and that's assuming that you're simply trying to charge through the main storyline of one faction, which leaves the other faction's plots waiting to be explored as well. There's a ton of depth that was clearly borrowed from the Fire Emblem side, and it shows, because you'll be very engaged when you're not taking down thousands of enemies.

In battle, your hero is more than a match for any of the generic soldiers charging towards your army's checkpoints or holding mountain passes. You'll frequently kill three or four with a combo maneuver, and fifty or more with special attacks. Button mashers can easily clear whole regions without an issue. But given the sheer number of enemies, along with rival lieutenants and commanders that may block or counter your strikes with attacks of their own, even button mashers will have to mix up their approaches to be completely successful. Players can also choose to order their colleagues to attack their position or target as well, giving support against dangerous opponents, such as when monsters are summoned by the enemy. Plus, before hacking your way through thousands of enemies feels stale, Three Hopes tosses things up with dynamic victory conditions and side quests that gauge how committed you are to a particular course of action. Sometimes it'll be an enemy general that's staging a retreat, or a messenger trying to call for reinforcements by reaching a location before you do. Successfully completing these tasks will often result in bonus items and experience both in and out of battle, while also testing your flexibility in combat. But while you can order your allies around, they're not always the most effective in battle, even if they happen to have a statistical advantage against a target. In fact, you could deploy someone, only to have to run to their side minutes later because they're suddenly on the verge of being defeated. It reduces their effectiveness as a trusted friend if you have to babysit them all the time, and it's worse if you discover that the troops you were deployed with are actually the wrong ones for that particular fight. Plus, some side missions are destined to fail, so if you're not in the right place at the right time to accomplish your goal, you'll either have to deal with the change, leave some other area exposed as you sprint to complete that task, or restart the map over again from the beginning. If you can deal with these frustrations though, and are looking for a challenge with plenty of twists and turns from start to finish, Fire Emblem Warriors: Three Hopes will keep you entertained for a very long time.