Fire Emblem: Three Hopes
As you may recall, Fire Emblem: Three Houses took over my brain for a few months and after ranting at its poorly executed plot twist and commenting - both positively and negatively - on its ambition, I finally moved on. And now Three Hopes got announced. Three Hopes isn't canon - it's a Warriors spinoff, where Fire Emblem meets Dynasty Warriors-style gameplay. But whereas the previous Warriors game had a standalone story, Three Hopes looks like it has a plot meant to explore how things could have happened differently in the main game. For one, you don't play as Byleth. You play as this mercenary named Shez, whose company gets hired early in the game to do...something. Unfortunately for Shez's group, Jeralt's Mercenaries got hired on the opposing side, so Shez's group comes face-to-face with the Ashen Demon, Byleth herself, and Byleth ROFL-stomps them. Playing as Shez, you receive an ass-beating and then watch Shez receive another ass-beating in a cutscene. Then some entity known as Arval resurrects Shez and gives him a huge powerup, whereupon the game hands control back to the player to fight Byleth. Byleth still destroys you and then casually walks away because Jeralt called a retreat, having finished whatever it was his group was hired to do. The fact that Shez survived this encounter has far-reaching consequences. Months later, the three lords encounter Shez when running from Kostas's bandits and Shez kills them, meaning they never encounter Byleth and Jeralt. This means Byleth never becomes a professor and Jeralt doesn't return to the monastery. Three Hopes only continues to diverge from there. The game's not out until next week, so I don't know how the plot will go, but even though I know whatever plot this game has is non-canon, it's still dredging up memories of a tragic story that I can’t shake off. I guess I'll just wait and see. For now, I posted this on Reddit, but this is how I hypothesize the plot will go: Because Shez is alive, the events of Three Houses change drastically, going into the events of Three Hopes. At some point along the way, Shez defeats Byleth/Sothis and Arval reveals she's some sort of Agarthan anti-Sothis and now that Sothis is gone, she can summon some Agarthan mega-dragon to end the world (you know, in classic Fire Emblem style). The entire roster unites to fight the Agarthan mega-dragon, but they can't defeat it, and Shez concocts a plan in which he goes back in time to the beginning of Three Hopes. The final mission is then the exact same as the prologue mission, except this time you play as Byleth, and instead of defeating Shez and letting him go, you kill Shez as this time Shez continually attacks you rather than gives up. With Shez gone, the original events of Three Houses go as normal. I’m not big on trying to guess future game plots, but the last time I did so I ended up being completely correct (predicting that the main character of Pokémon Legends: Arceus is from the future), so…why not. Blizzard games/shrines I’ve been contemplating doing this for a long time, and now… Recently, Diablo Immortal launched. This is the “do you guys not have phones” and “out-of-season April Fools’ joke” game you might’ve heard about. When the game was first announced, some people noted NetEase was part of the developers and predicted the game would have lots of predatory monetization. Oh boy they were right. I’m not going to go into detail on the monetization schemes in this game – they’re stupidly complicated (likely by design) and other people have broken things down way better elsewhere. But to summarize, someone estimated it would cost $100k to max out a character. That is a disgusting amount of money for a game. Someone at Blizzard programmed this thing. Someone at Blizzard designed this thing. Someone at Blizzard thought that making a character in a mobile game cost as much as a fucking house in some parts of the world were acceptable. Blizzard’s been doing terribly in other games. WoW recently had a giant reset button, invalidating all the plot progression and character development in WarCraft III (not that my opinion of WoW was high to begin with). Overwatch 2 is in the works, except it looks pretty much exactly like Overwatch 1. WarCraft III Reforged managed to garner almost universal hate. And, of course, we have the disgusting sexual harassment and discrimination that came up a few months back. They recently had the gall to report that they're totally innocent because of results from an investigation...that they conducted on themselves. I really can no longer in good faith keep an entire section of my site dedicated to this company. So…I’m taking down every last Blizzard shrine on my site. I’ll cherish the memories I had of playing these games long ago, but they’ll stay there – in my memories. Speaking of memories… Final Fantasy VII Remake …is on Steam now. If you’ll excuse me, I’ll be off using all my willpower to keep from buying this thing and sinking all my time into it. Comments are closed.
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