Eliminating enemies endlessly

You lead ridiculously overpowered heroes against thousands and thousands of enemies, over and over again. It’s repetitive but also extremely fun.

FIRE Emblem Warriors is another game in the Musou series (aka the Dynasty Warriors games), which means you’ll control a small group of heroes to annihilate literally thousands of enemy mooks in some over-the-top hack and slash action.

The twist this time is that the game features characters and elements from Nintendo’s Fire Emblem series, which is known in equal measure for its strategic turn-based battles and making you choose which of your loyal battle-hardened soldiers will end up dating one another.

So is it any good? Well, if you’ve played a Dynasty Warriors game before, you’ll know that the Musou series is gaming junk food: it’s not really “good” in an objective sense, but heck, you’ll enjoy it so much that you’ll keep wanting more.

There’s a story mode?

If you’re not already a fan of the Fire Emblem series – and hankering to play as one of the established fan favourite characters (dibs on the shoeless magical dragon princess!) – then it’ll be rather difficult for me to explain the story. Frankly, the story of Fire Emblem Warriors makes little sense, even for a plot-light Musou game.

It starts off as a simple “Good Kingdom A is attacked by Evil Kingdom B so plucky heroes must gather allies”, but then quickly spirals out into subplots involving parallel dimensions, future children from an alternate timeline (Fire Emblem Awakening), samurai fighting knights over their missing shoeless magical dragon princess (Fire Emblem Fates), and assorted fanservice madness.

But to be fair, you’re never really playing a Musou game for its story.

Fighting forever

The main draw – and drawback – of Fire Emblem Warriors is the endless fighting, which is both repetitive and therapeutic. As with most Musou games, the moment-to-moment gameplay mostly consists of you mashing the Regular and Strong attacks ad infinitum, wiping out hundreds of enemy soldiers in the process.

There’ll be bosses and lieutenants who put up more of a fight, but power-levelling is such a core component of the game that you’ll inevitably start killing them before they can finish their opening boasts. “Ha, you dare face the supreme knight of- BLAARGH.”

That said, the Fire Emblem influence actually adds a surprising amount of strategic depth to the hacking and slashing, as team composition and unit matchups matter. For example, flying units can cross chasms but are vulnerable to bows, while sword wielders are strong vs axes but weak vs spears.

This means you’ve got a big decision to make when you choose the four heroes (only one of whom you’ll control at a time) and four supports that go into each battle. You’ll want a team that’s suited to tackle a variety of maps while you juggle between the combat and strategic layers of the game.

You’ll often be switching control between your four heroes, depending on who’s best suited at handling a tricky mission objective, while you simultaneously command the other AI-controlled heroes to attack enemies or capture forts that are weak to their particular abilities.

Friendship is madness

Since the game also features Fire Emblem’s “friendship” and pair-up systems – which reward you with new skills or story scenes for making your soldiers fight together – you’ll often have to make some hilariously terrible team-up decisions. For example, I kept sending my squishy, under-levelled cleric to “guard” my enemy-blitzing Samurai in the middle of battle, just so that the latter can learn the former’s Strength +10 skill. Good luck tanking those hits, tiny cleric!

If you prefer a real world version of the friendship system, however, the Switch version of Fire Emblem Warriors has a local (splitscreen) co-op option.

You can now bring your friend/partner along as you both comfortably descend into the endless vortex of madness as you wipe out a thousand enemies.

Have fun

Fire Emblem Warriors is an extremely enjoyable game despite its repetitive nature. Here’s my recommendation: if you want a dumb, fun game to play – especially on the Switch and especially with a friend – Fire Emblem Warriors will give you hours (and hours, and hours) of enjoyment.

However, if you’re not keen on the aesthetics and characters of Fire Emblem, then look for Hyrule Warriors instead – it’s from the previous Nintendo-Musou collaboration and it’s basically the same game, except there’s Zelda instead of a shoeless magical dragon princess.