Yeah, Yori, you’re ALRIGHT in my book!
I’m TRYING not to let Mario Odyssey and Fire Emblem Warriors consume my life. The first is the best game I’ve played this year that doesn’t involve a sword, and the second is a super rad army murder simulator with a massive roster of characters I love.
Mario Odyssey is like pure magic! I do think the camera is not great, and controlling the T-Rex isn’t nearly as fun as one might hope, but those are some super minor nitpicks among the pure platforming ecstasy that is this game. The soundtrack is also quite fantastic and eclectic, and I already have a hard time imagining playing a Mario game without Cappy the sentient cap. (I really love that long distance jump move.)
I don’t know when it happened, but at some point Fire Emblem became my second favorite Nintendo franchise (Metroid being the indisputable first), pushing Zelda down to third. Having said that, I loved Hyrule Warriors, which was the only Musou game I’d played outside of Samurai Warriors on the ps2. HW was a pure fanservice game, and ended up having deeper gameplay mechanics than I’d expected.
The common conception of Warriors/Musou games is that all you do is mash the X button to win, but, at least in these Nintendo spinoffs, there’s a good amount of strategy that goes into managing the battlefield and properly timing your combos. I was initially worried when I found out that the weapon triangle would be a factor in Fire Emblem Warriors, specifically that it would make playing as a favored character for each mission impossible, instead forcing you to switch to characters you may not like or may not be in a good position. But it turns out the weapon triangle and the ability to order your companions around the battlefield and switch playable characters on the fly ends up turning the game into a real time version of the Fire Emblem Franchise’s 3DS progenitors. Desperately scrambling to position your troops where they can make use of their weapons advantages in map overview mode and then switching to your boots on the ground to wipe out countless soldiers with super rad flashy animations, all to killer electric guitar mixes of Fire Emblem themes is basically pure FE fanservice, and a great time.
Published on by Alex Kolesar