*may contain spoilers for FE3Houses and 3Hopes.
FE warrior Three Hopes demo released and will be available in one week. I like FE but never played any Warrior games so this is something new to try. You can find my sloppy gameplay here...oh boy. I streamed using AVerMedia GC311 and the latency makes it so hard for action games.
I played Neo TWEWY with it and somehow managed to clear the hidden boss Sho -- this is more like a miracle if I looked back. I guess it's the sound cue that helped me a lot, as the delay in sound is very minimal.
Then I streamed Wario. If you look at my streams, they are quite poorly played. Again I can't tell if it's just because I wasn't good enough in controlling the characters in the first hour of playing the game. Nowadays I just clear most Wario cup challenges with gold medals without any difficulties...
Then it comes to FE warriors. The delay is so obvious when you have to constantly realign yourself in the right direction (which is a bigger problem then in Neo TWEWY) and each time it takes like 0.3 seconds...this is no good and I have to find a solution before I can go back streaming again.
But what do I think about Three Hopes?
As someone who have cleared absolutely everything in FE3H (not necessarily the story details but game wise), this is almost like a parallel universe as the story is altered from the very beginning. Let's say that it helps us to fill the background settings of 3Houses itself.
For example the stance of Rhea is very interesting as she is quite anti-science if you search through the libaries in 3Houses so you wonder what she or her race thinks about what ruling people's meant to be. Unfortunately she and the church had minimal role in the war phase so we didn't have the chance to investigate her more. However in 3Hopes she's definitely around -- while the monestary again went fallen under invasion, she have made more vital decisions in the first 4 chapters already than the whole game of 3Houses. If she remained active later in the game we may well find a complete different side of her.
In 3Houses all story paths are based on overground livings and are associated with the heirs of Sothis. In that sense Argarthans are of course the 'evil' one, and all we did is to crack their plans and demolish them at the end. But the gurdge was never properly settled. For some routes Argarthans simply wasn't involved at the end, and for routes where they were beaten some definitely slither into the dark for another revenge maybe in a thousand years. Such feature is shared among all the endings -- the class leaders each found a short term solution for the continent, maybe for a generation, maybe a few. But there are unsolved matters -- crests, Nemesis, underground livings and more -- are sure to be unstabilities in the future. (Maybe we would have seen a better solution had IS saved the removed chapters in the Black Eagle route but we can never tell now).
But technically it's hard to cover these in a game from the perspective of 3Houses. The game is complete in terms of military conflicts and we certainly won't expect some 40 minutes of pure text covering what happened for the rest of the story. This is precisely what 3Hopes serves it purpose: the only way to have things fully resolved is to put someone associated to Arval as the protagonist where communication can happen with the house leaders, then later to the countries/church.
This is merely my expectation, but it's natural to me. I have high hope in IS giving good plots anyhow.
Interestingly I only realized that the academy is only for 1 year. How is that possible? Considering this is an academy for the royals it wouldn't be surprising if it takes 3 (the standard high school setting) years or more, 5 or 7 years would even be fairly standard. A single year course structure would make things much like a master degree in modern real world, but considering the age of some students and how basic things are being taught (well, their weapon wielding skills are like rank E at the beginning) this is simply highly unlikely. This is just a setting that is weird for me to take...
Another thing that I want to point out is how fast did the transition happen. In 3Houses we spend half the ingame time in the academy doing casual things: learning(/teaching), relaxing with other students etc. Listing out the boar route we have the following consecutively:
1) suddenly you are invited into the academy
2) suddenly the first mission you get is so polluted with darkness and conspricies
3) suddenly Dimitri turned into a king
4) suddenly war among the country begins
Even if we count the ingame time (3) and (4) are separated by a year it's still massively short for those students to grow up (vs 5 years in 3Houses), and it brings even more confusion for us the players when they all happened in 3 hours. It is also hard to imagine such sharp transition of the class leaders within 2 years unlike what happened in 3Houses.
But well, I guess we need a reason to raise the wars for the game. Three countries is perfect for a set up similar to the famous Dynasty Warrior series as well. Hopefully Koei will give us a good game this time.