5 Reasons Why Fire Emblem Warriors: Three Hopes Will Flare Up Your Completionist Instincts

When Fire Emblem Warriors: Three Hopes officially landed, I thought I’d be okay and wouldn’t even attempt to put in the 300+ hours I did for the original. The demo was a great palette wetter, but I thought “surely THAT won’t happen again”. How wrong I was.

I tried to convince myself “just ONE more facility upgrade, and then bed”. Meanwhile, the sun is peaking over horizon on Monday morning, and my entire work week is screwed. (RIP to my attention span and productivity for the week. I’m now plotting how I can snooze a bit while everyone is on a lunch break).

You see, Fire Emblem Warriors: Three Hopes is a completionist dream (read: nightmare). Only wade into these waters if you’re in it for the longish-haul.

For my first outing, I chose the female version of Shez and sided with Edelgard and the Empire

1. Facility Upgrades

What I didn’t expect was how weak my constitution would be when introduced to facility upgrades. Maybe I should have been given how the original Fire Emblem Warriors grabbed me by the throat with similar skill tree upgrades. Koei Tecmo thankfully reeled in the resources you need to upgrade everyone (you don’t need character specific items to upgrade…phew!)

Luckily, for sanity’s sake, one only has to complete the facilities during a single playthrough. Every one you completed is available from the start during subsequent playthroughs should you choose. You can always select masochism and start the facilities over if you want, but the way my time is set up…

2. Gotta Recruit ‘Em All

Of course you start out with all characters from your chosen ‘house’ similar to 3 Houses. However, similar to that game, you can recruit other students from different houses, this time directly from the battlefield.

Starting with a certain story checkpoint battle, you get to select tactics before you start your campaign. Among those tactics you can choose to recruit certain characters. Be aware that you may have to have certain characters with you to recruit new ones.

This is actually pretty low on the completion time management list because recruiting is fairly straightforward with the exception of Chapter 10’s mind-screw (pay attention during that battle to recruit certain characters).

3. Reclassing and Upgrading

Now that you’ve recruited a bunch of characters, that itch to reclass, train, and upgrade skills for EVERYONE sets in. Koei Tecmo probably doesn’t expect you to do this, but the obsessive need to farm money to buy crests for EVERY character is powerful. The Training Master in this game gets a workout — if only those Training Points were distributed more liberally.

4. Three Routes to Choose from

Like Fire Emblem: Three Houses you can choose to back the Adrestian Empire, Holy Kingdom of Faerghus, and The Leicester Alliance, each with distinct motivations for why they are going to war. I won’t cover the story, but I’ll note that each route is different even at the points where the story intersects, so no worries about retreads with the exception of some paralogue battles.

Completionists are going to want to complete each route, and likely more than once to make sure they’ve seen everything.

5. Character Conversations

Ah yes, character conversations. Yet another reason why I lose sleep at night.

Trying to get everyone who has conversations together and to their highest ranking is a time consuming process. There are many different ways to get this going thankfully: taking characters into battle, using Activity Points efficiently through chores/meals, having two characters train together, etc.

Luckily not every character has an A rank conversation with another, but there are enough to keep a completionist busy for quite a while.

There you have it. Some reasons why Fire Emblem Warriors: Three Hopes will keep you busy and set your completionist heart aflame! It’s a great game and worth the price of admission, so get to it!