YMMV / Fire Emblem Warriors: Three Hopes

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Tropes A-D

• Angst? What Angst?:
  • Shez's entire mercenary company is wiped out within the opening chapter of the story, and what little we have seen indicate that Shez and they shared an at least cordial relationship. Arval notes Shez doesn't seem too broken up about it, and Shez explains that the group was really only held together by money, and that they haven't actually been all that close to anyone since their adoptive mother's passing. Further, as a merc all too accustomed to death, Shez states the only way they know to honor their old company is to get stronger and defeat Byleth as revenge. That they decide to live for that now is the only real sign of mourning they give, and even then, the road to the best ending on all routes involves Shez dropping said revenge and recruiting Byleth instead. The incident is mentioned in Jeralt's supports, where Shez mentions having gotten over it over time, though they were quite attached to Berling's group, with the supports with Byleth themselves instead focusing on how similar they are.
  • In chapter 14 of Azure Gleam, Count Bergliez will survive no matter how the player does the battle while Caspar will die unless the player seizes Duke Aegir's escape route before he gets there. If the player takes the normal path which involves killing Caspar, then Leopold doesn't react at all to the fact that one of his sons just died. Even when he's confronted after the mentioned killing, he keeps on focusing on the battle with no mention of Caspar.
• Anti-Climax Boss: The fight at the end of Azure Gleam has caught flack with fans for being a repetitive slog fighting Edelgard and Thales and being easy compared to other final bosses partly due to no monster break mechanic like the other routes. Not only is there no Hegemon Edelgard, but Thales himself is just a frail old man who isn't imposing enough to be a believable threat to Dimitri. The player has to switch back and forth between fighting Thales and Edelgard at least 7 times with no changes to their strategy, made especially worse as Edelgard is weak to Shez's swords, a unit you are likely to have leveled up and upgraded as much as possible up to this point, and the end result is what's considered the most disappointing and unsatisfying of the three routes' final bosses in terms of difficulty as well as gameplay.
• Ass Pull: At the end of Part 1 in Azure Gleam, after Edelgard is defeated by Dimitri and Shez at Arianrhoad, Thales shows up to mind control her via the power of her Crest stone to transform her into the Hegemon Husk, and then proceeds to take over the Empire with Edelgard acting as a literal Puppet Queen. This plot device comes out of nowhere (particularly since he never did so to Edelgard in the original game), but fans are particularly against it taking away Edelgard's agency and reducing her to a mere puppet, leaving a much less interesting villain to take her place as the Big Bad.
• Audience-Alienating Ending: The endings of all of the routes have been heavily criticized for not resolving the plot and leaving the audience hanging, with Golden Wildfire's ending being particularly ambiguous. They all end in such a way that suggests a continuation is coming, but as the game received no DLC, instead each ending just happens and leaves the story feeling incomplete. Azure Gleam's ending has additionally been criticized for leaving Edelgard in a brainwashed state with no indication that she will ever recover, and Dimitri leaving her behind in a way that some feel is out of character for him, turning some fans off from playing the route entirely.
• Awesome Music: The last installment showed us just how great Musou remixes of Fire Emblem soundtracks can be, and now all of Fódlan gets the same treatment.
  • Byleth's new theme, "Ashen Demon", emphasizes how terrifying Byleth truly is when you're at the other end of the sword, being chaotic and desperate while still matching their emotionless personality, as well as incorporating elements of Edge of Dawn in a different key, making it a sort of Dark Reprise for the prior game's Leitmotif.
  • The iconic "Fódlan Winds" gets an orchestral rock remix that gets your blood pumping.
  • When going into Awakening, each faction gets their own theme each one of them just a good as the previous Warriors game:
    • The one exception to the faction rule being Shez's Awakening, where it plays a rendition of the main theme to spur on a comeback. It almost feels like Shez's theme, a mercenary that started on the brink of death only to rise up to become their faction's strongest warrior.
    • The Awakening theme for Scarlet Blaze has the most energy and tempo to its theme, which is fitting for the ones that started the war, they will end it as fast as they can.
    • The Awakening theme for Azure Gleam is heroic, similar to the previous Fire Emblem Warriors, it even adds the main Fire Emblem theme to its music (Shez's theme also does this).
    • The Awakening theme for Golden Wildfire doesn't match the high tempo the others do, but it still communicates well the solidarity displayed by the Alliance, as they wave their banners high and united.
  • "Abyss", the unbelievable and climactic fast-paced orchestral battle theme of Epimenides. The song kicks in right as Shez and the Three Lords confront him directly and give it their all to put an end to him for good and free themselves from his realm of Zahras.
  • "Funeral of Flowers — Part II", which serves to intensify an already grand and epic Final Boss theme from the previous game as the Imperial forces take on both Thales and Rhea at the same time, with Thales being vanquished only for Rhea to become the Immaculate One mid-battle in the center of the church. Once she’s forced to return to human form, Thales returns for a surprise attack and Edelgard’s forces are forced to fight both him and Rhea simultaneously until the two decide fighting each other is a higher priority.
  • The Golden Wildfire final battle is set to "Melody of Clarity". It's basically "God-Shattering Star" but for Rhea herself! Complete with an operatic female vocal akin to the male vocal in Nemesis' theme.
• Base-Breaking Character:
  • Claude, as well as his actions in this game, has ended up becoming extremely controversial among the fandom. Many dislike this version of Claude due to how different he is to his Three Houses self, and Claude's assertions about Rhea often times having very little evidence to support them as well as evidence that goes against what he says. Others feel that while his ideals make sense, his route is too much of a Missing Steps Plan to bring viable change to Fodlan and undermines his reputation as a brilliant Chessmaster. Not helping matters is that critics of his route have noted its similarities to the already divisive Crimson Flower route in Three Houses. However, there are others who like this change as it makes him as morally gray as Edelgard, Rhea, and Dimitri back in Three Houses since he is forced to make some tough choices and brings him more in line with what Three Houses pre-release footage said about him. Some fans point out his actions makes sense in this timeline as Claude is already not a huge fan of the church even back in Three Houses, and him not spending time in the Garreg Mach Monastery makes him not as motivated to figure out the truth this time.
  • Monica is incredibly contentious. Many fans love finally getting to know and recruit the real her, along with her dynamics with other characters, while others see her as nothing more than a Flat Character whose defining trait is a borderline unhealthy obsession with Edelgard, not helped by Edelgard's own base-breaking status.
• Big-Lipped Alligator Moment: For some, the secret chapters involving Epimenides are this, as they're a brief detour which have nothing to do with the main plot of the routes in exchange of exploring Arval's origins, Shez's powers, and giving the three lords the chance to team up against a common enemy, and the stories progress as normal after the situation's dealt with. Its implementation has been mostly sharply criticized on the Azure Gleam route, as Edelgard's mind control is undone after arriving in Zahras with little more than a Hand Wave from Epimenides (and some theorizing from Claude), and, unlike in the normal ending where the details behind her predicament is kept under wraps from Dimitri, she is able to explain to him in no uncertain terms that she was brainwashed by Thales into becoming his puppet ever since her defeat in Arianrhod, getting context on why her Empire changed so drastically in six months. In spite of this, the plot resumes after that's over with no actual changes, meaning Edelgard goes back into being mind-controlled and Dimitri and Shez are forced to fight her to get to Thales, and Dimitri leaves her alone in the cathedral as he leaves with Shez, which for some is a huge Out of Character moment when factoring in the addition of Epimenedes's chapters.
• Broken Base: The story in general has proven to be highly contentious. While some enjoy it for exploring what could have happened if someone other than Byleth had stumbled onto Kostas' attack on the House Leaders that fateful night, others have lambasted the fact that each route ends on an ambiguous note where the war is still ongoing and it's unclear if your chosen Lord will finish it. This was not helped by how, shortly after the game's release, the developers admitted in an interview that the primary reason they chose to write the routes and their endings the way they did was that they feared that giving them a conclusive happy ending would have "invalidated" Byleth's arc in Three Houses and the struggles they went through to win the war in the main game. All three routes are contentious for different reasons, but the specifics behind why they've provoked such fierce argument merit further elaboration:
  • Fans of Scarlet Blaze point readily to how the route very much feels like an Improved Second Attempt of Crimson Flower in Three Houses. Some of the more disappointing elements of that route, such as Edelgard's seemingly-unequal alliance with the Agarthans, the fact that the Agarthans are dealt with completely offscreen, the diminished presence of the Black Eagles after the timeskip, and the absence of a Mêlée à Trois (which Azure Moon and Verdant Wind both had), are addressed directly or indirectly in Scarlet Blaze: Edelgard splits with the Agarthans almost immediately, they are fought multiple times over the course of the story (including as part of the Final Boss), characters beyond Edelgard herself (such as Ferdinand and Caspar) are given more opportunities to stand out, and not only does Scarlet Blaze finally give the Black Eagles a chance to participate alongside Edelgard in a Mêlée à Trois, but they're the only route to get that opportunity, and can get the chance to do it twice if Claude betrays Edelgard. Detractors, however, point to how, for all its improvements, Scarlet Blaze is still very similar to Crimson Flower structurally, as both routes focus on Edelgard declaring war on the Central Church, which takes shelter in the Kingdom, and then has her try to invade and conquer the Kingdom and Alliance: furthermore, the increased prominence of the Agarthans as enemies means that Rhea herself has much less presence as an opposing force, and the juggling of the Kingdom, the Alliance, the Central Church, the Agarthans, and rebellious Empire nobles as foes has made some feel as if the route lacks a focused antagonizing force, weakening the story's coherence as a whole. Additionally, many of the same arguments regarding Edelgard's character, justifiability, or portrayal within her route have continued from Three Houses, and whether or not her depiction in Three Hopes has addressed them (or whether there was even anything to be addressed) remains a topic of considerable debate in the fandom.
  • Golden Wildfire has proven to be incredibly controversial, as detailed in the Base-Breaking Character entry on Claude. Proponents of Golden Wildfire praise how the route finally allows Claude to be the schemer that he was purported to be in Three Houses and thus allows him to meet the moral ambiguity of Dimitri and Edelgard in a manner that was lacking in the original game, how it focuses more on his character and his struggles compared to Verdant Wind, how it makes explicit and provides more detail on Claude's connections to Almyra (as well as more information on Almyra itself), how it gives a spotlight to the Leicester Alliance's internal politics (including finally depicting Holst and Count Gloucester in-game), and how it gives Claude and Edelgard a chance to team up in light of their ideological similarities. Detractors argue that the route doesn't actually provide much on Almyra content since it's dropped after Part I, that Claude's new emphasis on morally-murky decisions and backstabbing cross the line to Unintentionally Unsympathetic or don't follow any consistent logic, that the route lacks focus or coherent antagonists^note particularly since Rhea only shows up twice and can wind up coming off as a Designated Villain to some players, and that Claude and Edelgard teaming up makes no sense since she was recently invading him and makes abundantly clear that she doesn't intend to drop her plans to conquer Fódlan. Critics argue further that Claude's newfound antipathy towards the Central Church comes out of nowhere, as, for all his criticisms of it in Three Houses, he winds up becoming the Lord who sympathizes the most with Rhea since he's the only one to learn her full history, while fans of Golden Wildfire argue that he wants her dead even in Verdant Wind, pointing to the fact that his support goes up if Byleth asks him if he hopes Rhea is dead. A middle ground exists for people who think that Claude's opposition to Rhea makes sense, but that the degree of it is excessive, especially since it unnerves even Edelgard.
  • Azure Gleam is praised for exploring more of the internal politics of both Faerghus and the Empire, giving more of a spotlight to popular characters such as Rodrigue, revealing details on Sreng and Duscur that add lustre to both Azure Moon and the setting as a whole, and finding a way to have Dimitri be far more mentally stable than in Azure Moon without robbing him of a true character arc. However, others take issue with how the route taking a very different approach to Dimitri's mental state robs him of some of his more serious character flaws (and thus can be seen to make him less interesting overall), and how his primary flaw, his obsession with living for the dead, is not only not resolved by the end, but is barely even brought up throughout the story despite it having been a core aspect of his character in Houses, how the Church characters are Demoted to Extra compared to Azure Moon (or even Silver Snow and Verdant Wind in the original game), and how Edelgard spends the second half of the route as a brainwashed puppet of Thales, with her fate being left ambiguous in the ending. This last point has been especially poorly-received: fans of Edelgard dislike it for reducing her to a mere puppet of Thales with no ability to play an active role, while people less fond of Edelgard dislike it for how it allows the narrative to shunt off responsibility for Edelgard's actions away from her, while also propping her up as a pseudo-antagonist with no real agency. Relatedly, the complete absence of Hegemon Edelgard outside of a single cutscene is another point of criticism.
• Catharsis Factor:
  • As is the case with all Musou games, getting to control your favorite Three Houses character and have them mow down thousands of mooks like grass is incredibly satisfying.
  • On a meta level, after Crimson Flower's abrupt ending, seeing Edelgard near immediately mobilize to completely oust those who slither in the dark from the Empire, seize power, and prepare to go to war for her ambitions without their help, wasting no time in doing so is made even more satisfying.
  • In Scarlet Blaze, fans of Bernadetta who are familiar with her supports in Three Houses can get some sweet satisfaction from Edelgard and Hubert mentioning how Count Varley was targeted for assassination after the Time Skip after being assigned the bishop of the Southern Church for acting as a mouthpiece for the Empire, which gives him a new kind of Laser-Guided Karma, except this one likely happens on all routes. While he was not killed, Hubert and Edelgard make it plain they quite enjoy the stress placed on him. Naturally, Bernadetta is also content about no longer having to put up with him.
  • The above gets amplified for Azure Gleam players, when Count Varley ends up on the wrong end of the player's blade during the final battle^*Chapter 15 or 17, depending on Byleth recruitment status. Bonus points in that Bernie herself can be recruited before this point, meaning not only can her fans kill the Abusive Parent, but the abused child can do it herself. Scarlet Blaze provides an alternative in that Count Varley (being nominally on your side) is the objective to protect when attacked by church soldiers, but all the same there is nothing stopping you from simply letting him bite it since the worst that happens is some additional reinforcements for extra K.O.s and that there is no game over should you fail to keep him alive—not to mention Hubert and Bernadetta's positively golden responses to it; thus, this particular mission is starting to be known as the sole one in the whole game in which players are more than happy to fail.
  • The fact that you can kill Kronya on Azure Gleam and Scarlet Blaze is one thing, considering Byleth was robbed by the chance in the original game. In addition, you can use Byleth themself to do it, or Jeralt or (in Scarlet Blaze) Monica, Kronya's would-be victims in the original story.
  • For some Blue Lions fans, having Dimitri personally beat the crap out of Thales while aware that he was responsible for the Tragedy of Duscur at the end of Azure Gleam can be this, due to their only fight on Azure Moon being stripped of its context in-universe and generally being rather anticlimactic thanks to Thales still being disguised as Arundel.
• Cliché Storm: Part I of Azure Gleam has been postively recieved for its focus on Faerghus' politics and Dimitri and his friends' discoveries about the Tragedy of Duscur. Part II on the other hand has been much more negatively recieved because of where the story goes. Because of Thales and the Agarthans taking over Adrestria, the story becomes a traditional "Good Kingdom against an Evil Empire" that lacks some of the flair Azure Moon had to help it stand out. It doesn't help that stuff like Edelgard being brainwashed, several other Empire characters continuing to fight for their doomed homeland, and important members of the Empire like Hubert and Ferdinand disappearing from the rest of the route with no explanation is needed for the story to function as it does.
• Complete Monster: Thales and Solon return, see this page for details.
• Continuity Lockout: Players coming in having not played Three Houses might find some of the plot elements confusing, such as the Tragedy of Duscur or why Bernadetta would want to see her father arrested. Simply put, if someone has not played Three Houses, the game's story becomes practically impossible to properly understand due to the game assuming the player has played the original game.
• Designated Villain: Rhea can come off as one in Golden Wildfire. Compared to Crimson Flower of the original game, where she has undergone serious Sanity Slippage, takes an increasingly uncompromising and extreme approach to the war, and appears more explicitly responsible for the mismanagement of Fódlan, Golden Wildfire's conflict between Claude and Rhea is much less convincing in the eyes of many fans. This is because, despite Claude's assertions that Rhea keeps Fódlan shackled to the past and isolated from the outside world, the game does little to demonstrate this in practice: in fact, much of the detail on the setting and surrounding countries that was added in Three Hopes to flesh out the world shows ample evidence to the contrary. This is not helped by the fact that Rhea has essentially no presence within the route and thus has no opportunities to provide evidence to support Claude's arguments. Furthermore, in the endgame, rather than enacting punitive vengeance like in Crimson Flower, her last speech has her sorrowfully elaborate on her desire to protect humanity and beseech Seteth to flee with Flayn rather than expect them to fight to the death. Combined with Claude's morally dubious actions throughout the second half of the route, certain players can wind up sympathizing with Rhea more than Claude.
• Difficulty Spike: Chapter 4 enables Permadeath in Classic Mode and gives the enemies a massive boost in levels (they start off at level 16 when you're stuck at around level 6 or so), making it the point where the kid gloves come off. Since manually raising a character's level is capped to the highest level of any character you have, if you don't have one character like Shez level up enough, the rest of your party will be behind even if you spend gold to fix it.
• Draco in Leather Pants: Those who aren't fond of Monica (see Base-Breaking Character) will sometimes, jokingly, suggest that Kronya's Kill and Replace of her in the original game might not have been so bad after all.

Tropes E-H

• Epileptic Trees:
  • Many fans began speculating that the new purple-haired character (later revealed to be Shez) fighting Female Byleth in the trailer is in fact an alternate version of Male Byleth. This is due to the character wielding an unknown Hero's Relic that seemingly has no Crest Stone, his clothes and hair looking similar to Jeralt's, and with the box art showing them together with Sothis and what appears to be a counterpart to her in the background. Not to mention the fact that on the Three Houses box art, it has Female Byleth on the left and Male Byleth on the right, which may add fuel to the fire. At the same time, however, other people believe it's a mere coincidence, and that these similarities are a result of the character being Byleth's Evil (?) Counterpart. The second trailer, however, reveals that Shez is the Player Character of Three Hopes and Byleth is an antagonist of some sort in this game (and that their male form can be chosen, despite Female Byleth being the main one featured in promotional material).
  • Sothis' narration, timed with a scene that looks like it takes place at the point where Jeralt dies, and the reveal art showing a figure positioned as something of an opposite to Sothis, quickly caused speculation that part of the game's narrative involves Byleth attempting to undo past events like Jeralt dying, only for Shez to intervene to try to stop them. In particular, this has lead to numerous guesses that Jeralt will be playable as a result. While Jeralt is indeed playable if you chose a certain path, Byleth is more oblivious to the events regarding Arval and most of their powers come to play because Sothis chooses to take control over their body.
  • Three Hopes has brought about a lot of comparisons to Age of Calamity, bringing to mind one possible idea based on that game's twist: instead of being a Doomed by Canon entry which would depict the fall of Hyrule leading to the events of Breath of the Wild, the game retroactively undoes said events by preventing them from ever happening via the use of time travel. As such, fans have now caught onto the idea that Three Hopes may allow them to achieve a Golden Ending to unite all factions, whereas Three Houses notably lacked one amongst its myriad endings. Alas, they forgot the reason why a Golden Path wasn't made for Three Houses.
  • During the "Mysterious Mercernary" trailer, we briefly see an unknown man with pink hair and eyes, who also appears to have the Crest of Goneril on the back of his cape. As such, some fans speculate that this man is Holst, Hilda's older brother, who was mentioned, but unseen in Three Houses. Likewise, the blue-haired man he fights is believed by some to be Caspar's father, Count Bergliez. Both cases were confirmed with the release of the game’s demo.
  • Prior to the game's release some fans believed that Byleth's true motives in this game are that of a Well-Intentioned Extremist who seeks to create the best possible timeline for everyone involved due to having tried every possible path. One specific line by Arval^Explanation"The cycle of this world... I will not allow it to perish with you." might support this, but Divine Pulse has been stated to have its limits, with Sothis noting when the power is first introduced that she cannot turn back time very far, and thus it never being used for anything except undoing recent events.
  • Some fans believe Shez's adoptive mother to be Anselma/Patricia (Edelgard's mother and Dimitri's step-mother), owing to the former's Vague Age and appearing to be around the same age as the Lords, and by their own admission, knowing very little about her beyond the fact that their adoptive mother was skilled in magic and is implied to be a former noble since she taught Shez how to read and write; something few commoners have as Ashe notes in his C-Support with Shez. This is despite Anselma having disappeared only four years before the start of the game's main events, whereas Shez implies she died some years earlier than that. There is also the question of how she could have had time to raise Shez while also being a mother to Edelgard and then a stepmother to Dimitri. Thales also pretty much states his people killed/sacrificed her, as opposed to Shez's adoptive mother getting sick and dying (assuming you trust his unsupported word).
• Even Better Sequel: To the original Fire Emblem Warriors, making up for what it was lacking in the story department while keeping its gameplay that people praised.
• Fandom-Specific Plot:
  • Many fans who were fond of shipping the three main Lords and Byleth (especially Female Byleth) have made stories or comics about Shez being absolutely exasperated by their Lord's suddenly falling for Byleth, refusing to kill Byleth despite Shez's vendetta, to even outright turning against Shez in favor of Byleth.
  • Alternatively, there's the concept of Shez showing up in the original timeline as a student at the Officers Academy while Byleth is a teacher, with the two struggling to work together or, more comedically, Shez threatening their teacher and Byleth simply giving them detention or a failing grade.
• Fan Nickname: "Shesez" for "Shez", due to the similarity of their name to the popular Youtuber/streamer behind Boundary Break. It helps that one of Shez's lines is even possibly a reference to the name of the channel.
• Foe Yay Shipping: With the reveal that Shez is the protagonist of the game with the previous protagonist Byleth being the antagonist, fans began pairing the two up. Interestingly, the more popular version of the pair is Male Byleth with Female Shez, neither of which are the gender options that the marketing focuses on. Female Shez is characterized by fans as a Tsundere that is frequently Distracted by the Sexy, while Male Byleth is either the emotionless or unwitting object of her affection. When it comes to their counterparts, fans like to characterize Male Shez as being driven by blind hatred towards Female Byleth, who in turn is either potrayed as being indifferent towards him, or in more comedic scenarios sees their battles as them flirting with each other.
  Spartangerm_212 (Reddit Comment): Really seems like the community has made it so M!Shez and F!Byleth are the serious and dramatic rival pair and F!Shez and M!Byleth are the horny pair. Not that I’m complaining!
• Game-Breaker: See here.
• Harsher in Hindsight:
  • Everything involving Monica in Three Houses becomes this as of Three Hopes. Not only does this game heavily suggest Edelgard had been planning to rescue her from the Agarthans by setting up Jeritza as Garreg Mach's third professor before Byleth's surprise involvement killed said chance, the game shows Edelgard and Monica have already known each other for a while before the events of the game, and the latter displays a lot of affection and admiration towards her future emperor, calling her formally like "Lady Edelgard". Meanwhile in Three Houses, Kronya makes a blatantly wrong impression of Monica by remaining close to her for seemingly no reason and instead calls Edelgard "Edel", essentially rubbing in her face how a complete stranger is essentially now using her dead friend's skin. In an even more tragic light, Monica and Edelgard's B-Support reveals Edelgard was more than prepared to let Monica die just to keep her alliance with TWSITD going had things gone differently, which is what comes to pass in Three Houses' timeline.
  • At one point in Three Houses' Azure Moon route, Gilbert defends Dimitri from Cornelia by claiming the prince would never be capable of murdering his uncle due to sharing the same blood. Come Three Hopes, and in all routes, Rufus' surprise coup in Fhirdiad leaves Dimitri no choice but to actually put Rufus down for good for the sake of restoring the Kingdom's peace once and for all. That said, Dimitri was executing Rufus in a much different scenario than the one Gilbert was commenting on.
  • A popular Three Houses fan theory claimed that the final bosses of Silver Snow and Verdant Wind (the Immaculate One and Nemesis, respectively) were swapped around at some point during development, due to how out of place both fights felt^note Nemesis has no real reason to be fighting Claude besides him being a threat, while the Immaculate One just kind of comes out of nowhere on Silver Snow and felt out of place. Swapping both debatably made more sense, narratively speaking. In Three Hopes, Claude and Shez actually end up fighting the Immaculate One.
  • Two aspects of Edelgard from Three Houses fall into this in Azure Gleam:
    • In Crimson Flower and Azure Moon, Edelgard states that the childhood friend Dimitri remembers is long gone and isn't coming back. Thales proves her wrong in the worst way possible by bringing back her past self via mind control for the sake of having Edelgard submit to his will.
    • In Verdant Wind and Silver Snow, Edelgard requests Byleth to kill her after defeating her for good under the reasoning her death will bring a swift end to her war, and it's implied this mentality is why she forces Dimitri to kill her in Azure Moon when he tries to spare her. In Azure Gleam, Dimitri ends up sparing Edelgard in the end after killing Thales and takes her into custody, and in spite of him hoping this would end the war right there, the ending makes clear her Empire is not giving up anytime soon.
  • Claude's overall character became this as of Three Hopes:
    • A common complaint about him was how his supposed scheming and shady behavior came up as Informed Attribute in regards to his involvment in the plot. In this game it isn't, and the general reception to Claude's scheming both in the story and out of it can be divisive.
    • One of Claude's goals in Three Houses is uncovering the truth behind Fódlan's many mysteries, and in Verdant Wind he even confides to Byleth that Rhea's survival is important to him for that very reason, despite clashing with his other plans. Because Three Hopes events prevent Claude from gaining interest on Fódlan's secrets, this no longer applies in Golden Wildfire, and instead of saving Rhea and learning the truth about Fódlan's past, he becomes the only Lord to kill her, preventing him from ever learning any of her secrets.
    • Upon learning the truth about Heroes' Relics in Verdant Wind, Claude notes that the citizens of Zanado were killed by the remains of their own brethren and comments on how atrocious that is. Guess who ends up killing Rhea (the Sole Survivor of the massacre in the Red Canyon) in Golden Wildfire using his own Heroes' Relic?
  • The entire plot with Miklan and the Lance of Ruin in Three Houses becomes even bitter thanks to Shez's Support with Linhardt where he tells Shez that they say even those who have a Crest will have portions of their life drained away by their Hero's Relic, something that seems to be a follow-up to his support with Catherine. Even if Miklan got the worst of things due to him not having a Crest, even a Crest bearer like Sylvain would suffer if he were to use the Lance of Ruin.
  • Ferdinand and Lysithea’s A-Support conversation where they discuss her untimely death due to her twin Crests becomes much harder to sit through after the untimely death of Billy Kametz from Stage IV colon cancer before the game was released.
• Hilarious in Hindsight:
  • The "Do not pursue the Ashen Demon" meme, given that, in the final game, following this advice is exactly how you get the Golden Ending.
  • Holst's asking Claude if Hilda will have to marry a member of the Almyran royal family, becoming Queen of Almyra, to improve relations between the countries is made much more amusing when one remembers that Hilda is one of only three characters ^note the others are Leonie and Ingrid who explicitly becomes Queen of Almyra in her paired ending with Claude.
  • One of the popular fanon ideas, was the idea of two of the three lords working together against the last, with the most popular involving Dimitri and Claude against Edelgard in the war. This exact scenario ends up happening in the second half of the Azure Gleam route, with Claude sending Lorenz, Marianne, Ignatz and Raphael to join the Kingdom army and showing up with Hilda and the rest of the Alliance army to help during the final battle. However, the Scarlet Blaze and Golden Wildfire routes instead have Edelgard and Claude team up, sharing an alliance that has the opportunity to last for the rest of the game on Scarlet Blaze and always holds out on Golden Wildfire if you achieve the Golden Ending.
  • On the darker side of "hilarious" is Claude's potential fate in Scarlet Blaze in relation to Three Houses. In Three Houses, he was famously the only Lord guaranteed to survive every route, with a sole exception: you could choose to not spare him during the Empire's invasion of Derdriu while on Edelgard's side.^note His fate in Silver Snow is not confirmed but per Word of God he survived, and his death as an ally unit in Chapter 19 of Azure Moon is a lose condition. In Three Hopes, Claude is the only Lord who can die prior to the game's ending, still on Edelgard's route, should you fail to recruit Byleth.
  • Solon's defining moment in Three Houses is to tear out Kronya’s heart to use her as a sacrifice to cast Zahras. This makes it all the more ironic in Three Hopes when Solon himself ends up becoming the sacrifice for Zahras (if Byleth is recruited), and at a berserk Shez’s hand, no less.
• Ho Yay:
  • While Monica canonically is in love with Edelgard, her supports with Dorothea have her express her admiration for Dorothea's singing in a way that makes her come off as a Loony Fan and possibly even a Stalker with a Crush.
  • Sylvain's support with Ashe can come off as Accidental Innuendo:
    Sylvain: I'd love to find some reason to steal you away to my territory after the war.
  • Catherine and Shamir. Continuing on from Three Houses the two's support conversation shows them to be very close to a near romantic degree, with bickering bordering on Like an Old Married Couple. When Shamir left the monastery Catherine was very close to going after her. Hearing that Shamir jokes that next time she should bring Catherine next time. On Scarlet Blaze, Shamir can be convinced to join by a promise that, if she does so, Catherine will be spared.
  • Shez's A supports sometimes straddle the line between this and Ship Tease since there is no explicit confirmation. Since the dialogue is largely unchanged when switching genders, characters of the same gender can come across as incredibly flirty with some even all but flat out stating that they want to spend the rest of their lives with them like Lindhardt (who is bisexual and thus makes sense with both male and female Shez). There are sometimes small differences in the supports depending on if Shez is male or female (such as Ignatz blushing with female Shez but not male, Manuela noting she wishes a female Shez were male), but they are the exception. It should be noted that the developers stressed in an interview that they did not want Shez to be seen as replacing Byleth in any sense including romantic, so its entirely possible some fans are reading more into these moments than is intended.
  • Have Shez and Byleth be the same gender, you have both this and Foe Yay Shipping at the same time.

Tropes I-R

• I Knew It!:
  • After Persona 5 Strikers seemingly marked a shift in the gaming IP-licensed Dynasty Warriors spin-offs from full-blown Intra-Franchise Crossovers to more specific spin-offs of individual series installments, with this direction followed by Hyrule Warriors: Age of Calamity, many speculated that the next Fire Emblem Warriors game would go in this direction as a Three Houses-specific spin-off. Sure enough, the February 9, 2022 Nintendo Direct confirmed this to be the case.
  • A common headcanon among the fanbase for Three Houses was that Edelgard planned on having Jeritza become the Black Eagles' teacher before Byleth's intervention threw a wrench in her plans. As it turns out, Three Hopes shows a variation on this idea was likely the intended outcome; not only does Edelgard mention she, Dimitri and Claude intended to end up on Remire Village before meeting Shez, after Kostas' death, she comments that everything fell exactly where she needed as a result, before subsequently taking advantage of Jeritza's teacher position and of the remnants of Kostas' bandits fleeing to Kronya's stronghold (as opposed to Zanado). And while he can teach the Black Eagles, Jeritza always becomes the teacher of whatever house Shez joins, not just the Black Eagles.
  • Many fans correctly guessed that Arval was created by the Agarthans as a weapon against Sothis.
  • In Three Houses on the map of the Sealed Forest you can find a ancient structure with the Crest of Flames on it that seems to lead underground. This went wholly unmentioned in that game in terms of dialog, leading fans to speculate on its meaning and importance. In Three Hopes it is confirmed to at least be somewhat important, though what it is exactly is still not entirely clear. Scarlet Blaze at least suggests it may having something to do with the tombs below the monastery.
• Improved Second Attempt:
  • Fire Emblem: Three Houses was criticized for the abrupt ending of its Crimson Flower route, since Edelgard never properly got to hunt down major antagonists those who slither in the dark during gameplay, and it merely assured the player it happened later on, leaving a loose end hanging within her story, potentially undermining Edelgard's onscreen efficiency and, as a result, making Adrestia's victory less satisfying. In this game, Edelgard switches gears the second she gets an opportunity, handily double-crossing those who slither in the dark and playing a game of Xanatos Speed Chess to earn more allies for her invasion and pull off her plan brilliantly. This restores more of Edelgard's credibility as a character and a planner, and lets Black Eagles players deliver satisfying payback to the Agarthans. And by the end of the Scarlet Blaze route, all of the main members of those who slither in the dark (with the possible exception of Solon, who only dies if the player recruits Byleth and Jeralt) all end up dead, and thus, players finally are able to see Edelgard and the Black Eagles taking down those who slither in the dark on-screen.
  • For fans who were let down by Byleth's status as a Heroic Mime and not being able to speak in spite of their dialogue options, they and Shez both get fully voiced dialogue, and while you can choose dialogue options for Shez, it serves as more of a guideline for their responses, allowing them to display much more personality. Likewise, Byleth in particular has several players praising the voice actors for being able to show the personality of the Ashen Demon in the short but direct lines they do have.
  • Despite his machinations ruining Edelgard and Dimitri's lives and being considered by many the main antagonist, Thales back in Three Houses was received in the fanbase with indifference at best and disappointment at worst due to various factors, such as: lack of presence in the overall story; being killed with little fanfare in Azure Moon as Lord Arundel; being dealt with offscreen in Crimson Flower's epilogue; and not being the Final Boss of both Verdant Wind and Silver Snow, as each invokes their own Giant Space Flea from Nowhere after his defeat. In contrast, Three Hopes' timeline forces Thales to take a more proactive role in the story, promotes him to final boss in two of the game's three routes, and his actions on the Azure Gleam route firmly solidify him (and his faction) as the main antagonist of Dimitri's story.
  • Some fans lament that several characters had potential to have a support chain with each other (such as Dorothea and Hilda) in Three Houses but they cannot support each other in said game. In Three Hopes, new support chains are added between characters who didn't have a support chain in the original game along with support chains with existing same faction characters such as the popularly wished Dorothea and Hilda support chain along with new ones like Hubert and Hapi, Yuri and Sylvain, Ferdinand and Lysithea, Bernadetta and Marianne, and more.
  • Many fans complained back in Three Houses about how most of the characters who had shared paralogues in Part 2 had no obvious connections to each other, making it hard to guess that you were supposed to recruit one of them into your house in order to get the paralogues. Out of the support chains Three Hopes added, all of the cross-house paralogue characters are included (Leonie and Linhardt, Caspar and Mercedes, and the above-mentioned Ferdinand and Lysithea).
  • One of the big examples of They Wasted a Perfectly Good Plot in the original game was the idea of two of the three lords working together against the last, with the most popular involving Dimitri and Claude against Edelgard in the war. This exact scenario ends up happening in the second half of the Azure Gleam route, with Claude sending Lorenz, Marianne, Ignatz and Raphael to join the Kingdom army and showing up with Hilda and the rest of the Alliance army to help during the final battle. However, the Scarlet Blaze and Golden Wildfire routes instead have Edelgard and Claude team up, sharing an alliance that has the opportunity to last for the rest of the game on Scarlet Blaze and always holds out on Golden Wildfire if you achieve the Golden Ending. And you can go as far as having all three of them working together with Shez in the secret chapters.
  • A common complaint about Three Houses is that Raphael and Ignatz's paralogue raises suspicious circumstances surrounding the deaths of Raphael's parents and Claude's uncle, but this is never followed up on. Three Hopes gives them a paralogue with Lorenz which goes into detail on exactly what happened.
  • In the original game, many were upset that the Mêlée à Trois at Gronder Field was unavailable on either Black Eagles route, despite what trailers suggested. In this game the Black Eagles, and only the Black Eagles, get a similar battle at the Valley of Torment, and it's possible for the fight to be Adrestia vs every other faction.
  • After the DLC in Three Houses revealed that Count Varley beat up Yuri for trying to assassinate Bernadetta, some felt that the game was trying to make the Count seem more sympathetic while ignoring his other abuse towards Bernadetta. A new support conversation between Bernadetta and Dorothea (which serves as a follow-up to Bernadetta's original supports with Dorothea and Yuri) confirms that these revelations don't change her opinion of him much, as her issues with her father go way beyond that incident, and that the Count wasn't trying to protect her out of love, but because he needed her. With Count Varley also showing up in the flesh, the game doesn't even try to portray him sympathetically, showing him as a sniveling coward that even his own allies barely tolerate and only tries to keep alive for political convenience (and it's implied he got promoted to Bishop of the Southern Church for the dual purpose of both filling a position and painting a target on his back to torment him). In the final mission of Scarlet Blaze, he's also one of the only main protection objectives in the game whose death doesn't result in a Game Over, with Hubert and Bernadetta treating his death as not a tragic loss, but an inconvenience for the former and a relief for the latter.
• It's the Same, Now It Sucks!:
  • Some fans have taken issue with the Golden Wildfire route for its Lord invading the Kingdom to destroy the Central Church, committing some morally-questionable actions to do so, and killing The Immaculate One as the Final Boss feeling too similar to the original game's Crimson Flower route.
  • Some fans feel that Scarlet Blaze doesn't really break any new ground compared to Crimson Flower. Both routes focus on Edelgard declaring war on the Central Church, which takes shelter in the Kingdom, and then trying to invade and conquer the Kingdom and Alliance.
• Jerkass Woobie: Edelgard falls hard into this in the Azure Gleam route, to the point many who didn't sympathize with her back in Three Houses feel bad for her. Over the course of the story, her best friends can be recruited to fight against her. Her body ends up hijacked by Thales and she has her mind regressed into her 12 year old self so she can be his Puppet Queen. Then Duke Aegir is installed as the new Regent of her Empire who undoes all her reforms and runs her territory into the ground by sheer incompetence and corruption. Her right-hand men conveniently "disappear" after Thales' takeover, and her closest allies are reassigned elsewhere, thus leaving no one in Adrestia capable of doing something about it, and no friends to care for her. In the endgame, her child self ends up watching Dimitri kill the man whom she believes is her uncle and is unable to stop him before being captured. And finally, the secret branch of the path reveals Edelgard's present self still exists but was essentially put in a comatose state after Thales' mind control had her younger self take over, meaning Edelgard by the end of the story ends up becoming a prisoner inside her own mind and is unable to do anything about it, with it being unclear if she will ever return to normal.
• Karmic Overkill:
  • There are some who don't necessarily find Rhea to be a Designated Villain, but instead think that while she did do a lot of things wrong, she gets way too unfairly treated by the game for the type of character she is, especially on Golden Wildfire. Aside from her backstory that explains a lot of why she committed her actions not having as much presence as it did in Houses, this game tells the player more about how much damage the current system and Rhea's rule has brought to Fódlan and how she is keeping progress back^note Even if the game never shows this to be true, it isn't either shown to be false, making it easy to believe that it's true. And at no point does any defense towards her come up or any major chances for her to act heroic so that the consequences of her actions can be countered, not even on Azure Gleam where she is an ally. So for those who are familiar with her backstory and actions, they are likely to feel even worse for her.
  • Edelgard's treatment in the second part of Azure Gleam is something so harsh that even some of her detractors from Houses think it's too much. She gets brainwashed by Thales and is regressed into the mind of her child self with no personal control, her empire is driven into oblivion by Duke Aegir, her two closest allies are presumably Killed Offscreen, and her other allies are either unable to help her or are unaware of her condition. Then, when Thales has been killed, she remains in her child-like state, and the only people who are around her leave her behind with no indication they will help her outside of some easily-missed dialogue from Dimitri earlier in the fight. In general, the route ends with less immediate change brought to Fódlan (from what we see), rendering her war and all her sacrifices All for Nothing when the result is the slower changes that may have happened anyway under Dimitri's leadership. Despite all the terrible things she has done, many people think that having her be this punished is something that goes against her character, and generally that it's just very a cruel fate.
• LGBT Fanbase: Monica, who is openly sapphic, is one of the big beacons for this, plus the fact that several explicitly LGBTQ characters, such as Yuri and Dorothea, have lines that more explicitly discuss their attraction to the same gender. Other characters who were not same-sex options for Byleth and had very few, if any, same-sex romantic endings in Three Houses, such as Sylvain, Shamir, and Hilda, also received dialogue confirming or very strongly suggesting that they are bisexual.
• Low-Tier Letdown:
  • Monica's "Wicked Impulse", Rodrigue's "Martial Prowess", and Shamir's "Cold Calculation" are considered to be rather mediocre unique abilities, requiring precise timing on button presses to enhance their attacks with shockwaves, bonus damage and range, or ice effects, respectively. The main problem, though, is that these all unnecessarily penalize Button Mashing in a Warriors game. In Monica's case, the shockwaves are not strong enough to justify the precision demanded to keep up the chain, and in Shamir's case, the ability is almost strictly inferior to Ignatz's "Dreamer's Paintbrush," which also has a chance of applying either lightning or fire in addition to ice. Rodrigue arguably gets it the worst out of the three, as his ability is outclassed by Sylvain's unique ability that only requires combo count. Sylvain also has more regular availability than Rodrigue, even though both are unique to the same route, and based on your actions, Rodrigue can get killed off via storyline and become permanently unusable for the rest of the game. Expect builds of these characters to have their uniques replaced via Merc's Whistle.
  • Rodrigue in general has the potential to be this in an Azure Gleam playthrough: while he has strong growths in relevant stats and is hardly a weak character, his underwhelming unique ability, when combined with the fact that he's unavailable for extended portions of part I, and then has the potential to be killed of permanently in part II, means that it's often better to simply rely on Sylvain for your mounted lance cavalry needs.
  • The Dancer's class action, while rewarding if done properly (resulting in higher damage, faster attacks, and a longer attack range for you and your closest allies), can also slightly screw you over if you fail to get the timing on even one button press in the chain, resulting in your character stumbling and being vulnerable for an extended period. The Dancer class also suffers from being obtainable so late into the game that it isn't worth investing in the classes to get someone to use it, since nobody in the game specializes in it, making it take too long to master unless you really level grind, though at least it has a niche of being the only class with Tome Buster that females can get.
  • The Mercenary class is rather clunky. While it does hit hard, it has a very slow attack speed and very short range, which makes it almost necessary to pair it up with speed boosts with Felix, Ferdinand, or Annette. On top of that, it has to compete with the Thief, another fellow sword-wielding class with excellent speed, mobility, and better range on its attacks to compensate for its lower damage output. Its saving grace is that it's one of the most reliable classes to trigger abilities that "send enemies flying", as many of its combos can launch them and it's a mandatory class if you need to promote to the much more powerful Swordmaster class.
  • The Armored Knight and Fortress Knight (and to a lesser extent, Edelgard's Armored Lord/Emperor) are once again quite slow and clunky to use, with slow attacks and a mechanic that completely relies on precise guarding in a game where dodging is generally considered the superior option for avoiding damage. Like the aforementioned Mercenary, it's a mandatory class to master in order to reach the much more powerful and reliable Great Knight and Emperor in the case of Edelgard. ^note As for Armored Lord and Emperor, while still slow movement-wise, her attacks chain together much easier and the damage that you can obtain as Emperor is absolutely explosive.
• Magnificent Bastard:
  • Dimitri Alexandre Blaiddyd is the Crown Prince of Faerghus. After fighting off his uncle's rebellion and executing him to take the throne, Dimitri becomes a wise and fair king to his people, defeating all rebels and rivals, no matter the collateral damage. After choosing to harbor Rhea and the Church of Seiros to secure his kingship and repay old debts, Dimitri begins fighting off the Adrestian Empire with unique tactics such as trapping dangerous foes rather than fighting them, pointing out flaws in his allies' plans and forming makeshift alliances, even willing to ally with Edelgard herself to fight their foes behind the scenes. Opportunistic with a tendency for escaping by the skin of his teeth and hiding a surprisingly dark side, Dimitri will do anything to keep his kingdom and defend his beloved subjects. Should the need arise, Dimitri even proves willing to sacrifice Rhea and the Church of Seiros to withdraw his people from the war.
  • Claude von Riegan is the duplicitous head of the Leicester Alliance, and secretly the Crown Prince of Almyra. Enacting schemes and constantly plotting to undermine his enemies psychologically, politically, and strategically, Claude proves his mettle as a leader by repeatedly fooling his enemies in the Empire and foiling an invasion by his Almyran brother Shahid by recruiting one of Shahid's generals under the table and hiding it for months, before personally killing Shahid. Claude then joins whoever would benefit his people most, whether they be the Empire or Kingdom, to continue his goals of strengthening his nation. Claude displays his sheer pragmatism, whether it means abandoning his supposed allies to save his own troops, plotting to assassinate Rhea and dismantle the Church of Seiros to eliminate their regressive ideals, or destroying Leicester's ideals by getting rid of its oligarchy to take over himself. Rarely hesitant to trade lives yet eternally relaxed and charming, not to mention earnest at heart, Claude proves willing to betray anyone to save the things he loves.
  • Hubert von Vestra remains the same brilliant right hand he was in the original game. Always loyally serving Edelgard and suspicious of any newcomers, he shows no hesitation in resorting to amoral tactics yet proves excellent at providing support, saving the life of Ferdinand von Aegir through his inference of the noble's actions and intentionally being rid of nobles who don't suit his goals, whether they be through direct purging or putting them in a position to die at enemy hands. Saving Edelgard's life by using a contingency to get her out, he is even capable of coercing her would-be assassin into serving his own side in the middle of battle. Consistently loyal and with genuine soft spots yet outwardly cruel and ruthless enough to try to kill his own allies should it be convenient, Hubert is among the key players of Edelgard's conquest.
• Memetic Badass:
  • Dorte the horse instantly rose to this level after the Golden Deer trailer, which showed Marianne summoning him to devastate a horde of enemies.
  • Of all characters, Myson, a generic Agarthan enemy with the Bohr X spell, has received this treatment among certain fans. He's jokingly called the best boy out of all the Agarthans, treated like the most badass and competent Agarthan who could totally conquer Fódlan if it wasn't for Thales being incompetent and the plot stopping him, or treated as a redeemable Agarthan who could defect and have a redemption arc. There are also jokes about how his stubble that differentiates him from other generic warlocks makes him stronger. This is helped by the fact that he's an Ascended Extra and actually interacts with the heroes on Azure Gleam and Golden Wildfire more than Thales. And in the latter route, he's been jokingly praised for having the brilliant plan of just hiring Byleth to kill Claude and the Golden Deer, which, if certain choices are made, can actually seal the deal and end in Byleth's death at the end of the game.
• Memetic Loser:
  • Male Byleth not getting featured in the premiere trailer or the box art of the game had the side-effect of this. Come the "Mysterious Mercenary" trailer, it was confirmed that Male Byleth is available to choose in the game the same as Female Byleth is, which, along with his later appearance in Fire Emblem Engage, has helped to improve his reputation. And while they don't appear in the game's cover art, Male Byleth and Female Shez were both featured in the official artwork for the cover of Nintendo Dream magazine◊.
  • Thales already had this reputation among fans back in the original game, and he arguably has it a lot worse here. The fact that part of the premise has him getting exposed early doesn't help, and other Agarthans such as Cornelia and Anaximandros repeatedly badmouth him, with the former calling him a doddering old fool, and the latter complains that all Thales is good for is cracking the whip. Even on Azure Gleam where he takes center stage as the Big Bad, he's still mocked for relying on a plot device to mind control Edelgard, not having much appearances with the likes of Myson and Cornelia having more screen time, being an Anti-Climax Boss, and overall being a lackluster Big Bad compared to Edelgard on Azure Moon of the original game. Not helping his reputation is that on Scarlet Blaze, he never manages to salvage the situation at all and remains on the backfoot for most of the route before losing to Edelgard and getting killed by Rhea. Even worse on Golden Wildfire, Thales never even shows up.
• Memetic Mutation: Lots, as can be seen here.
• Misaimed Fandom: Continuing from Houses, the Agarthans were unironically considered by some as the good guys against the Children of the Goddess ^note despite the Agarthans attacking first out, burning the continent to the ground in the process, and even after Sothis retaliated they blamed her for their actions. due to Sothis being much more aggressive against her enemies when taking control of Byleth, and that the Agarthans get an Epidemendes-focus paralogue taking place during the War of Heroes.
• Narm:
  • Some fans find themselves unable to take the scenes with Byleth seriously when using the female version, due to her clothing design and big eyes, something that was also present in the original game.
  • Like with Three Houses, the fact that Shez and Byleth are never referred to with a name returns. While Shez is generally not referred to often in a title way, Byleth is always simply called the Ashen Demon. This is fine for most of the game, where nobody knows who Byleth is beyond the title, but it becomes outright silly if you manage to recruit Byleth and Jeralt, because everyone calls them the Ashen Demon despite now having the chance to get to know them, which makes it hard to take seriously.
  • The “Persuasion” mechanic, which enables you to recruit optional characters, becomes silly when implemented for ally NPCs — specifically because they will die if you don’t use it. Along with essentially strong-arming you to add them to your roster if you want them to survive, if you choose not to use it an NPC with a decently-full health bar abruptly drop dead: for one example, the moment on Azure Gleam Chapter 9 where you open the doors to help Shamir, only for her to immediately perish, is as aggravating as it is absurd.
  • On the Scarlet Blaze route, the cutscene that plays for the battle at Ailell late in the route is a well done cutscene, but what somewhat undermines it is that during the scene of the army marching, Shez can be seen marching in the middle near Edelgard, Hubert, and Monica, which thanks to Shez's extremely bright purple hair being so noticeable in the shot, sticks out as being unintentionally funny.
  • In Chapter 9 of Scarlet Blaze, Leonie gets poisoned and has to be escorted to safety or else she'll die. On the special route, the player can recruit her no issue as long as she is healed, but on the normal route, when trying to help her, she refuses aid because Shez killed Jeralt a few chapters earlier and succumbs to poison and dies. Obviously it's meant to be a What the Hell, Hero? moment, but the game handles it by having her die right after she refuses help with no build up, even if the player heals or uses Restore on her, making it look like Leonie childishly offs herself because Shez killed her beloved mentor instead of her dying because she refused aid from someone she has a vendetta towards like it was meant to be.
  • If Byleth kills Randolph in Scarlet Blaze, the aftermath where Shez is consulting a grieving Fleche is appropriately sad. That is, until she looks directly into the camera doing her "angry talking" animation while she's supposed to be crying her eyes out. The dissonance between her voice acting and body language turns what should be a heartbreaking scene into something that's just plain silly.
• Narm Charm:
  • Bernadetta's hairstyle in this game looks absolutely ridiculous and messy, with her just tying back her bangs and calling it a day. Yet many fans agreed that it was 100% in-character for her to do that, and loved her hairstyle.
  • Marianne's special has her summon a horse (Dorte) to charge the enemy. Incredibly funny for her just calling a horse out of nowhere, but given Marianne's love of animals, and her specific attachment to Dorte being a beloved aspect of her character, it's both hilarious, and also heartwarming at the same time.
  • Caspar's hair is extremely spiky, like he popped out of a Shonen series. But at the same time, Caspar's personality is exactly like a Stock Shōnen Hero, so having that ridiculous hair actually fits him.
  • While avoided when picking Female Byleth, Sothis speaking through Male Byleth's body feels extremely awkward, but at the same time it just shows how scary and off putting it actually would be to anger Sothis enough to make her take control of Byleth's body.
• Nightmare Fuel:
  • Byleth in general is a terrifying sight to behold.
    • In the first battle, things seem to be going well with Shez and their fellow mercenaries as they take on Jeralt's forces. A few slightly stronger enemies appear, but it's still nothing that bad. That all changes in the blink of an eye, as an ominous bell sound rings with the message: "Byleth, the Ashen Demon, has arrived." Suddenly, all of Shez's fellow mercenaries are killed almost instantly by Byleth and their elite forces, and Shez themselves are quickly overwhelmed and defeated. And even with Arval's intervention, Shez's empowered form still isn't able to defeat Byleth. Byleth's utterly cold and emotionless tone throughout the fight just adds to the sheer dread, reinforcing exactly why they are called the Ashen Demon.
    • Adding to the scare factor is how the game coldly subverts the usual trope of "desperation-induced Super Mode Curb-Stomp Battle" found in other games. So Shez is at the brink of death, and Arval's intervention grants them some really cool and flashy superpowers! Naturally, you'd think Shez would be able to actually defeat Byleth with this newfound power, right? Nope. Byleth still crushes them like before, only relenting when Jeralt calls off the attack. They don't even sound winded by the fight, and merely walk off as if the fight didn't happen.
    • Not only that, any mission afterwards that lets Byleth loose sees them claiming any strongholds they walk into within seconds. Even a nation's army cannot stop the Ashen Demon.
      Bernadetta: Wait... That fortress fell so quickly like- Oh no! INCOMING!
    • Their first notable rematch starts off with Shez and Byleth being surprisingly even that is until Sothis enters the battle by possessing Byleth and activating her Divine Pulse. As a result, the fight turns back into a Curb-Stomp Battle in Byleth's favor with Sothis about to kill Shez until Byleth regains control. In the aftermath of that fight, Byleth ends up looking like their Enlightened One phase.
    • Finally, there's the decisive battles where you either complete your objective and recruit Byleth and Jeralt, or attack Byleth and kill Jeralt. If you go for the former, very little of this happens except when Epimenides possesses Shez later in the story. If you do the latter, however, Sothis possesses Byleth and kills either Randolph (Scarlet Blaze), Rodrigue (Azure Gleam), or Judith (Golden Wildfire) should you kill Jeralt, and there is nothing you can do to save them.
  • The scene where Epimenides possesses Shez if you did recruit Byleth and Jeralt is rather creepy, partly due to how sudden it is. It starts out pretty normally, with Byleth and Shez complimenting each other on their performances in the last battle (Golden Wildfire) or helping each other search for retreating enemy forces (Azure Gleam and Scarlet Blaze). Arval even makes a comment suggesting they're okay with Shez burying the hatchet since things are turning out well. Then Shez suddenly starts shouting in Epimenides/Arval's voice about how they need to kill Byleth/Sothis. Shez regains control just long enough to tell Byleth to run before Epimenides takes over again. The next mission is all about saving Byleth, and once Shez wakes up in Zahras, they're extremely confused on what just happened and don't seem to remember much of it.
  • After capturing the forts at the beginning of Scarlet Blaze Chapter 11, the enemy soldiers outside beg to be let in the castle, screaming that it's a bloodbath out there. The empire is massacring the enemy troops. And Hubert's reaction when Baron Dominic tries to save them?
    Hubert: Yes, throw the gates open wide. Let that bleeding heart get the best of you!
• Play the Game, Skip the Story: While the story can be mixed for people, especially in regards to things that were better or worse when compared to Three Houses, the gameplay is very strong in this game. Of all of the Nintendo Warriors spin-offs, this game probably gives the player the most mileage. It adapts Three Houses customization system to allow players to optimize characters and fit them to their liking. Likewise, added systems like Combat Arts and Spells tweaks the familiar gameplay enough to make it fresh and interesting while the rewards for completing the game multiple times allows you to unlock secret characters.
• Player Punch:
  • Similarly in Three Houses, characters will potentially be killed in battle after the timeskip, but at least they could be saved from such a demise by simply recruiting them to your class. However, Three Hopes has more characters that cannot be recruited in other routes, meaning there are unavoidable deaths such as Ingrid in Scarlet Blaze and Catherine in Golden Wildfire.
  • Not recruiting Byleth has more consequences than just not having another character in your roster. First off, killing Jeralt results in Byleth murdering Randolph, Rodrigue, or Judith in retaliation, costing you a playable character in Rodrigue's case. And since their recruitment is crucial to achieving the Golden Ending, the war ends up going on without an end in sight and more characters end up dying as a result. And in the Scarlet Blaze route, it also locks you out of recruiting Leonie, as she refuses to accept aid from Jeralt's murderers and dies of poison.

Tropes S-Z

• Scrappy Mechanic:
  • Carrying over from Three Houses is the fact that some supports will become locked after passing a certain point in the story, with no warning. The worst example of this is with Leonie during Scarlet Blaze, as not only is Leonie the last character you recruit, you recruit her on Chapter 12, long after Leonie's support with Shez locks out. This means that outside of a New Game Plus, Shez and Leonie can't support on Scarlet Blaze. Further exacerbating this is that there are several supports, particularly on Azure Gleam, that have both time lockouts and are dependent on getting other, related supports before they can trigger.
  • The mechanics by which the "Persuade Character" strategy functions can be very grating. If there is other dialogue that is triggering, then the strategy will not activate until no character is talking: on lower difficulties, this means that it's entirely possible to kill the character you're trying to recruit if you're already engaging them, because the strategy won't activate in time due to backlogged dialogue. If there are multiple characters that can be recruited in a single map, the strategy must be manually selected and activated for each of them individually: furthermore, the strategy for the first character must be fully triggered before you can start to activate the second, exacerbating the dialogue-backlog problems. This makes it even more likely that you might accidentally kill the second character you're trying to recruit. This is most commonly seen with Hapi and Constance on Scarlet Blaze and Golden Wildfire, as both characters become active and recruitable in the same instant, and their appearance is bookended by a lot of talking, making it frighteningly easy to accidentally kill one of them even if you're trying to recruit them both.
  • The imbalanced distribution of route-exclusive characters has been noted as being problematic for both roster sizes and gameplay diversity. Azure Gleam has four starting lance users (Dimitri, Sylvain, Ingrid, and Rodrigue), which can be repetitive for players who wish to use their whole roster but don't want to be playing as lance classes all the time. However, Scarlet Blaze has it even worse, with five starting mages (Hubert, Linhardt, Dorothea, Monica, and Manuela): furthermore, in the very first post-prologue mission, players recruit two more in the form of Constance and Hapi, meaning that by the start of the second post-prologue chapter, Scarlet Blaze players are carting around a whopping seven mages. The end result is that, in Scarlet Blaze, players are likely to get very sick of constantly playing mage classes, to a much more severe degree than even Azure Gleam's overrepresentation of lances. Golden Wildfire, by contrast, enjoys a more balanced starting roster, with the crucial exception of a derth of sword-users save Shez (a problem quickly solved by the recruitment of Holst) and axe users (as Hilda is the only native axe user in Golden Wildfire's starting roster). Golden Wildfire also has the benefit of being the only route with a starting unit who is natively biased towards Brawler, Grappler, and War Master (Raphael), which the other routes lack until they recruit Balthus or Raphael himself. The main issue with Golden Wildfire's roster balance, however, is that this diversity comes at the cost of a severly curtailed roster size: Golden Wildfire has both the fewest route exclusives (at three, despite the fact that one unit, Shamir, is an auto-recruit after the prologue much like Manuela and Rodrigue, who are exclusive to Scarlet Blaze and Azure Gleam respectively...except Shamir isn't exclusive to Golden Wildfire) and the fewest opportunities to recruit other characters.
  • While it's reasonable to expect that characters will not have their unique Warrior Specials when playing as classes they aren't biased towards, the fact that many characters lose access to their unique Warrior Specials once they reach their Master Class, even when playing in their default class lines, has been a sore spot for fans of these unique moves. Assuming all characters are in their default class line, about half of the whole 44-unit roster will stop using their unique Warrior Specials once they get to their default Master Class^note  Bernadetta, Ignatz, Ashe, Caspar, Dedue, Hilda, Shamir, and the Gatekeeper will still use their unique Warrior Specials when dismounted, even once they reach their Master Class, but they otherwise lose access to them when mounted, which they will be most of the time. It's particularly irritating in the case of characters who don't transition from infantry to mounted at their Master Class, such as all of the Holy/Dark Knights^note Ferdinand, Sylvain, Rodrigue, Lorenz, Leonie, and Jeralt, who are mounted started at their Intermediate Class and all of the Gremories/Dark Bishops who promote from Priests and Bishops^note Linhardt, Mercedes, Marianne, Manuela, and Flayn, who stay unmounted the whole class line, since there shouldn't be anything stopping the character from using the same animation that they did in their Intermediate/Advanced Class stages.
  • Setting the camera on a target can be screwy when there’s multiple strong enemies on the screen. This can become especially annoying when the game prioritises targeting the Outpost Captains, whom merely stick around their area and typically take a bit of effort to defeat, over the far more important Enemy Commanders or Bosses.
• Strawman Has a Point: Dimitri makes several valid points to Claude in the bonus chapters of the Golden Wildfire route, despite being presented as an antagonist there. In particular, he notes that Claude's plan suffers from a major case of And Then What?, as Rhea's death could cause major social unrest in the Kingdom and among church believers, and that the people he seeks to remove have feelings and value that Claude is dismissing, but the route ends before these concerns could potentially come into play.
• Surprise Difficulty: Like the first Fire Emblem Warriors, this game isn't your usual Musou mowdown fest, and actively requires you to direct and control your other allies to fulfill objectives all around the map. Players expecting to casually stomp everything in their way with only one character are in for a nasty surprise, especially on the higher difficulties.
• Tainted by the Preview:
  • For starters, the reveal that the game would focus exclusively on Fodlan rather than being a crossover like the original game soured some fans, especially those of characters who did not make it into the first game, such as Roy, Ike, Sigurd and Hector.
  • While the fact it is a Hack and Slash game already set some people this way, the implications that the game's story would be similar to Hyrule Warriors: Age of Calamity, and possibly result in a Golden Ending despite the original Three Houses actively avoiding one, resulted in some expressing concern and skepticism at the game's existence.
  • The second trailer revealing the main character was a new character named Shez instead of Byleth was this for people who liked Byleth, as they wanted to play as them again.
  • The fact that the story is once again being split into three different routes has drawn ire from fans who weren't fond of how route splits were handled in previous games, with some wishing that the writers would focus on a singular, cohesive narrative instead.
  • The plot summaries released caused some push back from people for this reason, as the Scarlet Blaze summary more or less read like a copy and paste of the Crimson Flower plotline ("conquer the world and deal with the hidden villains"), which was a very contentious storyline for being relatively wasted, while the plot summary for the Golden Wildfire route focuses on fighting Almyra, which some felt could have potentially racist or xenophobic implications.
• That One Sidequest:
  • Any challenger mission that bans dodging is guaranteed to be a pain in the ass. As dodging is how you quickly dash and keep the damage condition low, every encounter with an enemy commander becomes a hell of a lot more annoying. Even more difficult is if you have to defend certain key points of the map in the process, making it a mad race against time to actually get there in the first place. While this can be mitigated with generous use of Shez's unique dash, other characters aren't so lucky. While these levels are marked as optional, given the rewards the player get are usually good, it makes trying to complete them and also S rank them really hard.
  • Side missions that involve stopping a courier, messenger, or other enemy from reaching an evacuation point can be frustrating, mainly due to how they can sometimes be Unintentionally Unwinnable since, due to the nature of map layouts, it is possible for an enemy to spawn close enough to their evacuation point that you cannot reach them in time. While failing such side missions never results in a total failure and simply means you miss out on some common goodies, it can be incredibly frustrating to watch a fleeing foe escape to safety when you had no ability to stop them. The only solution is to reload the map and have units positioned where you know the foe will spawn ahead of time.
  • On occasion, one of the Survey Points required is completing all Sidequests during a mission. Not all Sidequests on the map, but all Sidequests that appear during a level. This requirement is widely disliked because often times a player simply isn't able to complete every objective that appears on a map due to factors such as the primary objective being something like "protect a base" or "help escort someone". While most maps telegraph when it will end by having the main objective change to make clear doing so will end the mission, some don't change and remain the same.
  • While recruiting Byleth and Jeralt is a difficult endeavor on every route, the specifics differ depending on the path chosen:
    • On Scarlet Blaze, you first have to convince Baron Mateus to surrender, which you can only do if you take out all the available strongholds except for his during the first objective. You must then trigger the Strategy Resonant Lightning after completing the first major objective, which can only be done once you rescue the three mages on the field. If you capture the second set of objectives too quickly due to being overleveled, on NG+, or otherwise very speedy, the window to activate the Strategy disappears. The third major issue arises near the end, when Byleth is isolated by the destruction of a bridge (which is where Baron Mateus comes in and only happens if he surrendered) and you have defeat Alois and then take out Rodrigue before Byleth catches up. Not only do you have a very limited amount of time to do this, but the last sidequest of the map (eliminating a stronghold near Rodrigue), as well as its chest, will only trigger at this point, requiring you to choose between potentially failing to defeat Rodrigue in time or losing out on the sidequest and the chest. Furthermore, unless you have a unit with Locktouch, the enemy that carries the key will not spawn until after the timer begins, meaning that you'll have to take them out too.
    • On Azure Gleam, Randolph will have several Jeralt Mercenaries stationed throughout the battlefield, and if they spot you, they will immediately notify Byleth, who instantly reinforces Randolph's position. The problem is that these Mercenary lookouts are completely invisible unless you have a certain Strategy equipped and used. And even once you successfully sneak past the lookouts, Fleche will appear and order the Mercenaries to assault the allied stronghold, and you can't let a single one enter the base or else Byleth will spawn too early, requiring you to both take out the main targets while on a timer and actively defeat reinforcing Mercenaries that are attempting to enter an instant-failstate zone, forcing you to split your units as you race the clock.
    • On Golden Wildfire, you first have to seize one of two specific Strongholds to make Alois spawn, defeat him, and also take out the enemies surrounding a friendly Messenger (who also only spawns when a different specific Stronghold is seized) within the same short time window. Unless you know to advance on one of the two Strongholds that trigger Alois while you're already helping the Messenger or seizing the Stronghold that makes them spawn, then you'll lose the chance to defeat him in time. The next step is to lead Claude on an Escort Mission to the northern part of the map to lure Byleth out: the way there is uneventful, but on the way back, while being pursued by Byleth, Claude will be ambushed by enemies that you must defeat before Byleth catches up to him. Taking them out isn't too difficult, but Claude's AI is prone to glitching out and can get him caught up fighting basic enemies that he's supposed to run past, meaning that Byleth will almost certainly catch up if Claude doesn't keep up the pace. Finally, you have to race to kill Fleche before Byleth reaches her...except you'll likely have all your controllable units on the exact opposite side of the map from where she is because you'll have been escorting Claude, so you'll not only have to get to her, but also beat her in the same time window.
  • A number of paralogues can fall into this category:
    • Raphael, Ignatz, and Lorenz's shared paralogue is, on the surface, very straightforward: you need to defeat a small number of commander units, advance into a base, and defeat other commander units as they try to flee to an evacuation point. The first time you need to catch fleeing enemies, it's fairly reasonable (the enemies flee to the south, and your units will be positioned between them and the place they're trying to get to). However, on the second wave of interceptions, the enemies will flee to the northeast, which is a problem since you will most likely have your units positioned in the center or south of the map while you were catching the units trying to flee in that direction. Of particular note is a mage who spawns almost DIRECTLY next to the evacuation point, so close that if you don't already have a unit positioned there ahead of time, you've essentially already lost the map, since even a single enemy escaping counts as a failure.
    • In a very similar vein is a late game paralogue that has Jeralt, Shamir, Catherine, and Shez raiding and attempting to gut the remainder of those who slither in the dark, who are attempting to flee. The problem is that there are four of you, and many of them, and if one gets to an escape point (yes, more than one), you lose, which makes the Paralogue an even more frantic version of the above chase sequence with Lorenz, Raphael, and Ignatz. The battle becomes a frantic chase with a lot of switching between the active characters and even more panic, and you can expect to lose at least once before getting the timing down.
  • Recruiting Dorothea in Golden Wildfire. Not only do you have to do the standard "recruit with the Persuade Strategy equipped" step, but you also have to escort her to an extraction point, and the path is crawling with enemies and officers, including a Demonic Beast. Oh, and she's also poisoned during this scenario, meaning you're on a very strict time limit as her health ticks down. Thankfully, that last part can be greatly mitigated by bringing a healer to stay by Dorothea's side, but there's no way to know ahead of time that Dorothea will get poisoned, so it's very probable that you'll simply not have such a healer on hand when the time comes to recruit her.^note If you are sticking with just Golden Deer units, you have two potential healers, Marianne and Lysithea. However, Lysithea is your primary mage and will probably not be equipped with a heal spell, so chances are it will fall on Marianne to take up that role, and there is no way to know that a healing spell will be necessary before starting the map, so it's entirely possible that, even if you have Marianne deployed, you might not have a heal spell on her when starting the map.
  • Recruiting Leonie in Scarlet Blaze. It is similar to the above and in a few ways is considered to be "easier", she is a mounted unit and multiple characters are healers in the route, however, there is just one warning that could screw you over. She is unrecruitable if you fail to recruit Byleth and Jeralt. Leonie would rather lose her own life than join the army that killed her "mentor".
• They Changed It, Now It Sucks!:
  • Some of the new character designs (particularly Sylvain and Ingrid's new hairstyles, to name a few) have not sat well with some fans. Particularly strong criticism has been directed at the choice to have almost all of the new portraits simply be edits of the students' Three Houses timeskip portraits, rather than entirely new art. The result is that a number of hairstyles feel ill-fitting for a student's portrait, despite looking better on the actual character model.
  • The fact that Three Hopes has far fewer opportunities for recruiting characters from other factions compared to Three Houses. The most egregious case goes for the Blue Lions, where Ashe and Mercedes (the latter only in the Scarlet Blaze route) are the only ones who can be recruited in other routes. While justified from a lore standpoint, as the Blue Lions students have little reason to fight for the nations that are banding together to invade them you're still out of luck if you wish to have the same mixed class party that you had in Three Houses outside of New Game Plus and non-canonical Record battles. Golden Wildire, in particular, suffers from the double misfortune of being able to recruit only one of the Blue Lions and only four of the Black Eagles ^note Linhardt, Bernadetta, Petra, and, right near the end, Dorothea, while Scarlet Blaze can at least get Ashe and Mercedes and can recruit the entire Golden Deer class, except for Claude and Hilda. Exacerbating this issue is the wildly uneven distribution of exclusive characters: while Azure Gleam having exclusive access to Seteth, Flayn, and Catherine makes sense, as they are the only route where the Church is an ally, the end result is that, since only two of the Blue Lions are recruitable (and one of them only onto Scarlet Blaze), Azure Gleam has ten exclusive characters. Scarlet Blaze also has a decent amount, with six exclusive units ^note since Jeritza is actually recruitable onto Azure Gleam if Mercedes is deployed, but Golden Wildfire only has three exclusive characters in the form of Claude, Hilda, and Holst. This creates an imbalance in both roster size and gameplay diversity.
  • The removal of the ability to use any weapon regardless of class from Three Houses, while understandable from a design perspective, was a change some didn't like. It results in some awkwardness from both a gameplay angle due to some units being a Magic Knight, or it makes some character not able to use weapons that are specifically meant to be used by them; Annette for example cannot use Magic and Crusher at the same time in this game, making her a lot weaker, while Seteth, who has a unique Lance, cannot use it gameplay wise due to Wyvern Rider being locked to Axes. Worse, all of the non-Fighter classline physical Master Classes allow the player to use Magic Combat Arts, yet the player cannot use other weapons or their Combat Arts.
  • Though minor, the lack of Valkyrie, War Cleric/Monk, and Dark Flier has been a dislike from fans, the reason being that it basically makes all magic focused units end up as a Gremory/Dark Bishop without any real unique differences beyond the units unique playstyles or abilities. Anette, Constance, Hapi, and Balthus in particular, are most hurt by this (ironic given how the latter three are meant to be those classes), because if the player recruits them, with the exception of Balthus on Azure Gleam, each route has other units who can do the same job as them (though not necessarily a better job). Worse is that the Trickster class, aka Yuri's class, was included despite this, which results in there being three different Sword based classes that all play very similar (Trickster, Mortal Savant, and Dancer).
• They Wasted a Perfectly Good Character:
  • Prominent NPCs like Randolph, Fleche, Ladislava, Judith, and Nader still not being playable in this game has garnered a fair amount of disappointment; while each route has one Promoted to Playable exclusive (Monica, Rodrigue, Holst), both Scarlet Blaze and Golden Wildfire have smaller playable character rosters than Azure Gleam, due to not having access to almost any of the Blue Lions and none of the members of the Church of Seiros. It’s particularly egregious in the case of Judith and Nader, as they are major characters in the Golden Wildfire route in relation to Claude, and even take to the battlefield multiple times (including for the Final Boss)^note  and, as related to the roster diversity issues in Scrappy Mechanic, their playability might have alleviated the dearth of exclusive sword and axe users in Golden Wildfire. Not helping is that every route has a potential Sacrificial Lion whose death can be avoided; at a minimum, Randolph and Judith being playable would have demonstrated thematic symmetry with Rodrigue.
  • Due to the differing timelines, there are characters who actually survive into the timeskip, such as Miklan and Lonato, but although they get some increased importance in specific routes, even these characters, despite technically joining your side, barely have any relevance after you get them.
  • The fact that Rhea doesn’t have her own route, nor is she usable outside of New Game Plus exclusively in battle replay mode, and as a result has no support conversations, nor very much story relevance (despite subduing or killing her being a major goal of two routes, while the third has her as a major ally) was a cause of much disappointment for Rhea fans. Much like in the original Three Houses, it results in Rhea having very little in the way of exploration or attention compared to the other faction leaders, which is arguably even worse here due to Rhea's lack of supports with anyone at all (whereas Three Houses at the very least gave her supports with Byleth). This was also her chance to talk to characters that have a good reason to speak with her, such as Seteth and Flayn (two of her oldest friends); Catherine and Shamir (two of her most loyal knights); Cyril (who has had very little interaction with her onscreen despite her being so central to his character); Dimitri (who would have ample desire to discuss the future of the Kingdom and the Church with her); Ashe (due to Lonato's hatred of the Church); and Sylvain (who is abrasive towards the Crest system). Furthermore, Rhea is in a known location (Camulus) for nearly every chapter of Azure Gleam outside of the prologue, and she is present the base camp several times (and is as an NPC ally on a few missions): thus, her lack of interactions can seem like a wasted opportunity.
  • Several of the characters from the original Three Houses were Demoted to Extra and aren't even playable. While all the students are playable, characters like Hanneman, Alois, Cyril, and Gilbert are just left out of the roster despite being bosses or allies in some routes. While some of this can be chalked up to a case of having too many of the same class and fighting style (for example, Scarlet Blaze already has five playable mages by default without factoring in potential recruits), the fact they aren't playable, yet characters like Rodrigue, Shamir, and Manuela are, feels like a waste of the characters.
  • Byleth and Jeralt as a whole are massively underutilized by the plot despite the deliberate choice by the writers to make them antagonists. They play relatively minor roles within each story (mostly as recurring bosses) and even when you go for the good ending by recruiting them they don't really do much afterwards outside of paralogues. In fact, after the part of fighting Epimenides, Byleth's plot relevance outside of supports and camp talk with Shez disappears entirely, not to mention that their support conversations are limited to only those with Jeralt and Shez, making the protagonist from the original game little more than a bonus character at that point. Not helping is how Epimenides summons a phantom of Byleth late in the second bonus chapter (alongside Shez's phantom), but since the actual Byleth can't participate in the chapter, they don't get to have a reaction to fighting their clone like the other main characters do.
  • Sothis is even worse off than Byleth. Apart from the route where she takes a fully antagonistic role, if Shez killed Jeralt, Sothis simply vanishes from the plot altogether if Byleth and Jeralt are recruited and can be only unlocked as a Bonus Character, just like Rhea. She is not even shown reacting to Shez being willing to side with Byleth despite their past problems, or suddenly attacking Byleth throughout the first secret chapter. Moreover, Sothis is implied to have her memories back in this game, and thus knows that she is Rhea's mother, and is possibly the only one that knows the origin story of Shez and more contexts in Arval's nature), according to Byleth's monologue, but because Sothis never speaks up at all after Byleth is recruited, she never gets the chance to share her thoughts, or give any information, on the revelations connected to the secret chapters, or the fact that Byleth is fighting against Rhea in two of the three routes.
  • While Edelgard is a fully realized character in Azure Gleam route, the same cannot be said about Hegemon Edelgard. When Thales takes control of Edelgard with the Crest Stone, she is seen transforming into Hegemon Husk and laying waste to soldiers before the mission ends. This should be a tease towards a potential battle against Hegemon Edelgard, but this is the only time she transforms into this form. She otherwise only assists Thales as an Emperor, taking away a potentially cool boss battle against a Demonic Beast: this absence plays into the reception of Azure Gleam's final battle as an Anti-Climax Boss
  • As a consequence of the Golden Wildfire route not doing much with the Almyra conflict, Shahid ends up feeling like an afterthought. He only shows up twice, doesn't show off much of a personality beyond that of a smug jerk who no one likes, and he's killed off at the end of his second encounter with little fanfare. While his death seems to be one of the main things to trigger Claude's newfound ruthlessness, their relationship as brothers isn't given any real amount of focus.
  • Cyril's exclusion from even a cameo or cutscene role on Golden Wildfire has been noted for how it is connected to Golden Wildfire's abandoned Almyra conflict. Cyril has supports with the majority of the Golden Deer in Three Houses, many of which focus on Cyril's connection to Almyra, and he enjoys something of A Day in the Limelight on Verdant Wind. Thus, his absence can seem particularly odd since the prologue focuses heavily on Leicester's eastern neighbor, and several openly Almyran characters of importance make multiple appearances. Conflict with Almyra is completely dropped after Part I in favor of fighting the Central Church, so Cyril not being present means he can't give any input on people like Shahid, Nader, or Claude himself.
  • A minor example, but neither Shamir nor Ashe have any supports with any of the Scarlet Blaze exclusive characters, or, indeed, any of the Black Eagles, despite being recruitable: this means that they can only support with other units that have been recruited into that route (as well as Shez themself), robbing them of the opportunity to enjoy supports with characters that they couldn't in Three Houses or explore alternative support chains with characters they could support in Three Houses (such as Petra, who both Ashe and Shamir could support with).
• They Wasted a Perfectly Good Plot:
  • Shez gets instated as a student at Garreg Mach, but that's really only to justify allowing you to choose which house you're going to follow during the war as Shez being a wandering mercenary means they are unable to be assigned based on their country. You do two missions as a student, and then the time skip happens. You don't even get to see the grounds of the monastery. There was lots of potentially interesting story and mission opportunities during the school year, like the Mock Battle (which is mentioned to have taken place, but is never seen outside of the Gatekeeper's paralogue) or the Battle of the Eagle and Lion as well as the Flame Emperor arc; all of that gets skipped due to the for-want-of-a-nail effects in play and the vastly different political climate that Three Hopes had from Shez surviving a battle that they aren't meant to survive.
  • Shez's transformation whenever they draw upon Arval's power is noted by a few characters, and Shez themselves are vastly concerned when they realize it shares disturbing similarities with those who slither in the dark's own shapeshifting capabilities, raising the possibility Arval is of Agarthan origin. Given how they're attending Garreg Mach, it would only be a matter of time before Rhea, Seteth, or Flayn took notice of this. Nothing of the sort happens, though, due to the above where the rapidly changing political climate forces Rhea to close the Officer's Academy before she could even possibly suspect something. She doesn't even react to seeing Shez's transformation herself in routes where she's an antagonist, further disappointing fans. That's not even going into the fact that Rhea has met Arval, or rather Epimenides before during the War of Heroes and Arval was created specifically to kill Sothis.
  • A vast amount of Shez's supports draw attention to Shez's adoptive mother and how mysterious her past was, with various characters trying to find out more about her or directly implying things about her. Shez and Hapi's support, for example, sets up the idea that maybe Shez's adoptive mother had connections to those who slither in the dark, while their support with Ashe implies she may have been a former noble in exile. Despite many support conversations asking questions and teasing things, nothing ever comes of it (their support with Ashe, which is very directly focused on the identity of Shez's mother, ends on a cliffhanger which is never resolved), especially with a lot of Shez's past being purposely vague and kept hidden and not really being properly explored. While her being dead prevents her from appearing, the fact the game draws so much attention to her, and yet does nothing, makes it feel like an Aborted Arc.
  • The Almyran invasion on the Golden Wildfire route is mostly dropped after Chapter 8 and amounts to not much more than a temporary Outside-Context Problem, and the country and its relations with Fódlan never get to be explored deeper, as previews suggested.
  • Byleth's supports are also limited to just Jeralt and Shez, when many would have liked to see the Lords interact with their would-have-been professor. And despite being required for it, Sothis and Byleth do not assist at all with fighting Epimenides, when it would have been the perfect chance for exposition on who Arval is, or an opportunity for Sothis and Epimenides to exchange words
• Too Bleak, Stopped Caring: The original Three Houses turned some off with its Grey-and-Grey Morality and its endings being bittersweet at best, but at least to some fans, Claude being more conventionally heroic than the other Lords prevented it from becoming too bleak. This time however, Claude is more in-line with his initial manipulative schemer impression, and it's left some fans with no one to root for among the main lords, an issue which is exacerbated in Three Hopes as it forces you to side with one of the three because there's no Silver Snow-like analogue this time around. Yet, on the other hand, both Edelgard and Dimitri receive a case of Adaptational Heroism on their respective routes (as Edelgard never dons the Flame Emperor guise and cuts all ties with TWSITD early, and Dimitri never goes insane and becomes a violent monster), downplaying the bleakness.
• Unexpected Character:
  • While some minor NPCs like Judith and Randolph returning wasn't a surprise, nobody was expecting Monica of all people to be not only back, but also be made a playable character and reveal her having a Crest; Macuil's, which only one NPC^note Who is the Wind Caller, aka Macuil himself in Three Houses naturally had.
  • No one would have expected that Hilda's brother, Holst, would not only be seen onscreen but would be a playable character.
  • While the Ashen Wolves were very highly requested, fans lamented that they would probably be DLC and not part of the main story. The Awakened Rivals trailer reveals that not only do they play a part in the main story, but are also part of the base playable roster.
  • While Byleth was an expected character to eventually be playable almost nobody expected to play as Jeralt, Rhea, or Sothis.
  • The Gatekeeper of all people being revealed as a playable character was met with equal parts of surprise and delight, thanks to him being such a fan favorite.
• Unintentionally Sympathetic: Viscounts Albany, Burgundy, and Siward aren't supposed to be likeable, with many characters in the Golden Wildfire route considering them to be slimy backstabbers on par with Acheron. And they do in fact attempt to abandon Leicester in the wake of the Roundtable voting to turn the Leicester Alliance into a Federation and crowning Claude as its king. But some fans have a hard time blaming them since this invalidates the entire reason why Leicester was founded in the first place: to be a nation without a king or other ruler with absolute power. And since they barely had a presence at the former Alliance's roundtable meetings to begin with, they don't think they'd have any sort of voice in Claude's Federation. Not helping matters is that when they try to defect to Faerghus, Claude's response is to crush them with his military might, making them come across as victims of tyranny instead of troublemaking traitors being put in their place like the game presents them as.
• Win Back the Crowd:
  • Due to the slow release of new information regarding the playable cast, a number of people were worried the cast would be small, or that the majority of the original Three Houses cast would not be playable. The Kingdom of Faerghus trailer completely undid that concern by confirming that, yes, all the original students are playable, much to the relief of many. By the time the third roster trailer came out, many people admitted they went from not wanting the game, to now wanting it. The Awakened Rivals trailer went even further and confirmed that the Ashen Wolves, previously DLC in Three Houses, are part of the base roster of this game.
  • Beliefs that the Scarlet Blaze storyline would be a carbon copy of the original Crimson Flower were quickly abated by the demo when Solon and the Agarthans are revealed early on in all routes, with Edelgard turning on them early. The demo also won over some of Edelgard's detractors in the original game, as here, she's allowed to fight those who slither in the dark directly from the start of the story, instead of keeping up their Enemy Mine for 5 years and only dealing with them offscreen.
  • Fears that Golden Wildfire was going to rely on stereotypes given how Almyran invaders are the focus were also abated when it turned out that the Almyrans as a whole are not at all happy with this situation either, having been forced into it by their Smug Snake prince and quite clearly wanting to leave as much as the Leicester Alliance wants them to.
• WTH, Costuming Department?:
  • Shez's purple hair was mocked by fans for being in an unusually bright shade compared to the duller hair colors of other Three Houses characters, often comparing said shade of purple to the ones from highlighter markers, or the cough syrup/sprite drug, lean. Shez's artworks for Fire Emblem Heroes were thankfully much better received.
  • When the Black Eagle roster was revealed in their trailer, Bernadetta's hair style received some curious looks. One reddit post even compared it to a broom head. Amusingly, In-Universe she actually messed up cutting her own hair and so pulled it up into the new style, as revealed in Expedition.
  • Ingrid's new hairstyle, which happens to be a Joan of Arc style bob with bangs, became a source of laughter to some people when the Blue Lions roster was revealed in their trailer. As a result, they've compared her to an Obnoxious Entitled Housewife.
  • Caspar's new post-timeskip haircut looks out of place compared to his other hairstyles, insofar as they seemingly went for some kind of Shonen-like spiky hair.
  • Similar to Caspar, Sylvain’s new spiky hairstyle has also not won much favors with fans.
  • Rounding out the trio, Holst's haircut got some mockery as well. While it's semi-joking in some cases, there's a reason why the spiky hairstyle got immediately nicknamed "The Holst Cut."
  • Dimitri's spotted fur collar in his new costume has gotten its share of mockery for looking silly and being considered a significant downgrade from his more regal-looking one in Three Houses.
  • Edelgard's outfit has also received some flak due to looking more like a cheerleader outfit than proper armor compared to most characters in the game, and even her Three Houses war uniform, though it thankfully removes the often mocked horned hair ornament of her previous timeskip design.

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