Month after month, the Nintendo Switch lineup is enriched by high-quality independent titles, portals from other platforms and pearls such as Splatoon 2 and Mario Kart 8 Deluxe .
Fire Emblem Warriors does not belong to any of these categories, wanting to make flips, since it was developed by Tecmo Koei and the Ninja Team and only distributed by the big N, but expectations are high however, because the Fire Emblem brandis one of those on which Nintendo is focusing more convincingly for a few years to this part and because every opportunity is good to try and make the western crowd of musou in love.
The crossover problem
As with all the crossovers that we have been able to play in our long videogame career, the storyboard at Fire Emblem Warriors is a coincidence of unlikely excuses and climbing mirrors to justify the presence of so many heroes on the same battlefield.
It is not the fault of the development teams, in short, but the result is that little is known, and after a couple of hours there is no more attention: the two protagonists on paper are two twin principles, Rowan and Lianna, ready to take the swords to save their kingdom from the assault of enemy forces, but in reality, the dozens of known faces, coming from almost all of the franchise episodes created by Intelligent Systems, immediately take the scene.
Marth, Chrom, Ryoma, Xander, Corrin and many others, many of which we will not even reveal in a review so as not to spoil the surprise fans, will cross the swords on the battlefield, between interdimensional portals and jumps.
What loses consistently (again, like all crossovers, by definition), Fire Emblem Warriorsgains it in fan service, placing great emphasis on the presentation and characterization of heroes, whose polygonal models represent the pinnacle of production, especially during intermezzo scenes.
The operation is not unlike the one implemented with Hyrule Warriors , Wii U before and on New 3DS then, but here the number of suitable characters and their relevance to war issues has made it much more natural to switch from a franchise to a more, and, we are sure, will put the franchise’s most aggressive fans at ease when choosing the hero to impersonate.
Hybridizations and choices
We’ll go into gameplay dynamics with greater depth only in review, coming next week on our pages, but for now we anticipate two aspects that hit us and could have some influence on product playability: the presence of a selector that allows you to focus on graphic appearance or fluidity and that of a handful of tactical elements typical of the motherboard.
The first is an absolute debut on Switch and promises to make games easy. By opting for quality, Fire Emblem Warriors privileges textures, setting ambitions as well as characters, light effects, and overall image cleanliness, blocking framerate at thirty frames per second.
Surely a nice show, especially in TV mode, but we’re almost certain that most of the fans of the genus musou will prefer to favor the fluidity, although there is a “yes”: the promised 60 fps are not always stable, even if the they have been dramatic either by quantity or frequency, and the visual quality of the product comes down a step when opting for this mode, which remains, however, in our view, the ideal one to enjoy the most frenetic battles.
The option to choose is always welcome, and we hope to see this feature even in the future on many Switch titles because, given its hybrid nature, the console would benefit from flexible software and capable of adapting to the various Game mode offers.
The presence of the usual weapon triangle, a trademark of the vast majority of the Fire Emblem on the market, and the ability to pair two heroes to fight as one are two of the elements taken on by the original franchise, and, as seen so far, they integrate well into the gaming mechanics, giving depth to the usual gameplay that for years characterizes musou.
