airlock384 | Fire Emblem Warriors: Three Hopes Opinionrama

a few days ago, I finished the Azure Gleam route on FE Warriors: Three Hopes! so here’s me, back at it with all the opinions and takes and criticism and whatnot

and first of all: again, there is ostensibly a bit of a route split depending on if you spare Byleth or not, and again, I have ended up down the route where you just kill them. my approach this time around was to kind of play it by ear, try to bring Byleth in but not try too hard – and still I seem to have ended up in a state of the Hevring map where you simply can’t progress without slaying the Ashen Demon, so as far as playing by ear goes, I figured that meant it was time to pass the buck once again. (on Scarlet Blaze now, though, I’m not kidding around; I’m genuinely not going to stop until I pull it off.)

but hey, back to the ones with less warm hands I guess

annette is SO CUTE in this game I cannot withstand it and it cannot possibly be legal. every cutscene she happened to be in, I was paying more attention to her than anything else. a fair amount of it is just iterating on what was already an absolutely darling design in Three Houses (both pre- and post-timeskip), but it’s also really never been done better than here. I think I especially appreciate the seamless combination of the pretty dress and the heavy ass-kickin’ gauntlets, but of course, the braided loopies also absolutely stand out and must be mentioned if nothing else as a runner-up there. plus, design aside, she’s just as delightful of a character as usual, too – you see, I’ve been through the desert on a horse with a face–
OH right, though, there was some other character who’s the protagonist of this route or something, and I was probably supposed to lead off talking about that (just as I did with Claude in GW), even though he’s not remotely as adorable, right. fine, fine, let’s move on to that

the thing is, though, if GW was finally Claude’s time to shine after being thorougly shafted by Three Houses… AG appears to be the first-ever route where Dimitri is boring. like, he still has a few outstanding character moments here and there and even a little bit of a character arc, if not one that was paced particularly well (that seems to be a consistent problem with this game, huh), but the long and narrow of it is that he just sort of gets everything he wants in this route without much trepidation, which denies us those intense lows and highs that were crucial to making the character as captivating as he is to a lot of people in the first place, even if I’m sure that a lot of these selfsame people must have been far less opposed than I to a storyline where Dimitri has a good time for once-
least I can say about this route, though, is that even if it’s doing staggeringly little with its protagonist (and, as I’ll complain about later, its antagonist as well), it does do a great amount of good by its remaining cast. where Three Hopes was happy to write off if not outright kill Dedue just to finesse Dimitri’s spiral, here we’re instead treated to Dedue as the center of one of the most beautifully indulgent cutscenes ever. Felix, as well, is forced to mature faster as a result of old man rodrigueroo’s switcheroo, which means he gets more time to show off the less unpleasant sides of character. Ashe gets his clash with Lonato redone with very few differences here, which mostly feels lazy, but it’s a surprisingly huge improvement to be taking that moment on with an Ashe who’s there because that’s where he chose to be, rather than because the church sent him there. even Shez seemed to have gotten a lot more room to grapple with their mysteries and anxieties here than in GW. in a way, I guess you could say that we don’t get no full-boar Dimitri on this route because it put the emphasis on what happens when his support network is actually working-
on the flipside though, it is a bit strange how much of their usual characterization a lot of the Lions seem to cast off as just past teenage cringe in this game. like, I do appreciate that Ingrid isn’t providing any further fuel for the “huhuhuhu CEO of racism” crowd even if she’s not really going to win ‘em over no matter what – but come on, Sylvain growing out of being a philanderer? five years of war didn’t beat that out of him in Three Houses at all, so what gives?
but speaking of Shez, this time around I played as the female version (whom I’ve named Shez/her, resulting in my brother doing a spit-take when he saw it), and it’s kind of interesting how she comes across as a somewhat different character despite having nearly all of the same lines, because the voice delivery is just THAT different across the goose and the gander. I’m really not sure if I should consider that a feature or a bug frankly

anyway, I’ve made a note to whing about the antagonist, and this is as good as part as any to move onto that, so let’s have a look. you see… say what you will about Edelgard as a character and as an antagonist – and by Seiros, people have absolutely the fuck done so for the past three years and are still at it right about now, myself included- – but one of the better points she’d always had going for her was the sheer sense of agency. so you can imagine how pleased I wasn’t by the fact that half the plotline on this thing here hinges on completely removing that. I would frankly rather Edelgard had died (by Dimitri’s hand or Thales’s), or been locked away, than been kept around just to be mind-controlled. that does absolutely nothing for her character, and doesn’t even really enchance the storyline either.
not helping matters much is that, once Edelgard is out of her position as the route’s main antagonist, no one steps up to replace her competently in that capacity. Ludwig and Thales try their hands at it, but notwithstanding the initial disadvantage there that Thales is one of THE most uninteresting villains in this entire franchise (and I do not say that lightly), they don’t even terribly much bother to make the pecking order between those two crystal clear. and I mean that less in terms of de facto rank than just in terms of story weight, like… you know the thing where the Empire’s movements in war become laced with pointless cruelty after the switch there? there’s a reason why this would happen because of Ludwig (he’s cruel, selfish, and not bright enough to conduct things less destructively anyway), and there’s a reason why this would happen because of Thales (he approaches the Geneva Conventions as a drinking game). but there are also subtle distinctions in how plunder and misery under either of them would look, and the game just doesn’t care to stick to either possible look very consistently. is the Empire doing all that obvious stupid villainy out of callous incompetence, or because wreaking havoc and destruction is actually the goal? you get a different answer at different times – so, who’s actually flying this eagle, again?
all this put together, I have to say, the latter half of this route is a freaking slog. like, it’s the opposite of whatever people must be experiencing when they complain that GW was over too soon; I felt like we were done with this storyline before the halfway point of it, and everything thereafter was essentially a pallid excuse to keep the game going. every mystery that was going to get solved, gets solved before then. Thales’s intervention in Arianrhod is the dead last plot beat that isn’t completely trite and predictable, outside of a few of Claude’s later stunts which don’t really get all that much attention from the story anyway. and whatever old men Hevring and Bergliez were supposed to be doing around here as Camus types, it’s not panning out, plain and simple.
and while I’m dragging things – man alive, I feel like I’ve gone so high and then so low in terms of the base camp song. I like the idea of each route having a distinct one in theory, but in practice I just missed the GW camp song the entire time I was playing AG- and I don’t think it was just sheer saudosism either, because I’m in SR now and I actually like the camp song again, even if I don’t love it as much as GW’s.

there’s a bit less for me to say overall in this sojourn – not because the route was that much lesser per se, but also because I’m fresh out of first-impression comments to make. like, the worldbuilding is still great, nothing to report there; the gameplay is still enjoyable whenever it’s not a pain in the ass (although at least now I know how to check S-rank requirements and whether I’m currently meeting them in the middle of a battle, which is a vast improvement-). and unlike GW’s Holst and SR’s Monica, here we do not have a heretofore unbuilt character making their debut; Rodrigue more or less takes up the analogous position (at least until he gets killed in a cheap and uninteresting manner that does a disservice to his great death scene in Azure Moon), but he was already a major character previously, so, little change.

(far as gameplay goes, I suppose one thing I can say is that goddamn, just like some of the Lions were among the most busted units in Three Houses, here some of them have the absolute best personal skills around. the only regrets I have wrt running Sylvain’s Gordian Stroke on sword classes are that, one, he kept leveling up way ahead of the rest of the crew, and two, my brain will now never release me from the jokes about Sylvain’s sword getting longer. … I guess that would’ve been even worse if I’d gone with his default lance-wielding class line.)

still, in the end, I have to say I found Azure Gleam to be noticeably inferior to Golden Wildfire as a route – and I don’t just say that out of sheer Claude bias, not when I definitely would not say that of the analogous Azure Moon vs Verdant Wind comparison. but oh well, it’s not as if it was a bad time, per se; if nothing else, I can’t overstate how good it is to see Dedue being treated properly as a character this time.

either way, we’ll have more to discuss once I’m back down from the eagle’s nest – but I think I’m far enough in already to offer up a few things! y’know, just things like “monica good”, “caspar sounds like he just somehow hit reverse puberty”, and “nothing but the utmost awe for Billy Kametz’s absolutely unimpeachable final performance”. oh, and of course, GATEKEEPER REAL.