No Hopes for a guy named Shez

By LUDWIG VON KOOPA - I can't quite put my claw on it, but that name really bothers me.

Time for another night of Nintendo putting out a game trailer and me talking about it. This time for Fire Emblem Warriors: Three Hopes. I really almost wrote Houses. ...And I almost forgot to write Warriors. Fire Emblem Warriors: Three Hopes is the game that I was about to be excited about when there was a new Fire Emblem game to be announced at the February 2022 Nintendo Direct, only for it to be a Warriors game. Anyway, there's a mysterious mercenary here:

Shez is the mysterious purple-haired person. Are they the mercenary? ...Or is Byleth the mysterious mercenary? I mean, Byleth literally is a mercenary. And they ARE mysterious. The Ashen Demon. It seems like Fire Emblem Warriors: Three Hopes has Byleth as an antagonist that almost killed off this Shez guy (like Byleth has canonically slain several other people prior to the events of Fire Emblem: Three Homes without any emotion)... but Shez survives somehow (it looks like Shez was on the ground and Byleth was about to finish them off... so why is Shez still alive?), got to Garreg Mach Monastery, and all of a sudden the timeline has changed because Shez is impactful for some reason.

Shez's name also can and should be changed. It bothers me.

I like that “Shez” is the only word in the entire trailer in quotation marks.

It seems like you can choose between the three houses in Three Hopes like you can in Three Houses, between Edelgard, Dimitri, and Claude. It doesn't matter which one you pick in that massive quantities of presumably well-trained soldiers are powerless against one person's button-mashing. From the trailer, it seems at least part of the storyline tracks closely with Three Houses, like Edelgard's invasion of the Church of Seiros. Though Shez might be responsible for the characters’ motivations instead of Byleth this time.

The game has some mechanics from its source material, like weapon ranks/boons, classes, battalions, combat arts, adjutants, and battle preparation exploring the monastery (or generic battle camp, which is something Three Houses needed a lot more of because going back to the monastery between every chapter was stupid), including eating at the dining hall. I don't know if it'll be necessary to do all of that in a game where you can button mash to victory, just like it's unnecessary in Three Houses except for maybe the highest Maddening difficulty.

Oh, and Holst finally appears in the flesh. (Pink-haired guy at the end.) That's something! And the music will probably be good.


Ludwig had to go back and correct any gendered references to Shez, because Shez can take a masculine form or a feminine form, just like Byleth, so it'd be wrong to assume their gender. Regardless of Shez's gender, reproductive organs, or chromosomes (however you choose to define a woman... or a man), they are still a loser who should be dead. Consider the title to be gender-neutral.


Shez is actually overpowered in Fire Emblem Warriors: Three Hopes, but absolutely comes across as a fan-fic original character in the actual release.