Why Fire Emblem Warriors: Three Hopes Made Byleth Into an Antagonist

By Rollin Bishop

Fire Emblem Warriors: Three Hopes is now available for the Nintendo Switch. The new Fire Emblem video game is a musou-style spinoff that follows an altered version of the plot from Fire Emblem: Three Houses and pits those characters against hundreds of enemies in action combat. Among other changes to the story from Fire Emblem: Three Houses, the developers of the spinoff at Omega Force decided to turn its protagonist, Byleth, into an antagonist. Fire Emblem Warriors: Three Hopes director Hayato Iwata recently explained in a new interview the reason behind this shift.

"We had the scenario writer of Three Houses also handle the writing for this title," said Iwata in an interview with IGN. "So, when talking to this writer, I did discuss the following point: 'Although Byleth is representing the player, they are simultaneously also one of the appealing characters. So making Byleth an antagonist is a necessary development in order to further bring out the character's charm'."

As part of the same interview, Fire Emblem Warriors: Three Hopes producer Yosuke Hayashi further explained that making Byleth an antagonist and NPC makes for some interesting conflicts. "We'd felt that the main theme of Three Houses was 'the conflicts that arise from the clashing beliefs of the characters' but among the characters," he said, "the only one that had no such conflict was Byleth. This is quite natural as Byleth is the main character and is a character for which the selected route is always depicted as the correct way."

"In Three Hopes, we decided to portray Byleth as the antagonist as we wanted to further explore this theme," continued Hayashi. "In doing so, we thought we could have players experience 'the conflicts that arise from the clashing beliefs of the characters' in both Three Houses and Three Hopes."

As noted above, Fire Emblem Warriors: Three Hopes is now available for the Nintendo Switch. The video game follows a different version of the story from Fire Emblem: Three Houses. You can check out all of our previous coverage of the new Nintendo Switch video game right here.

What do you think of the reasoning behind making Byleth an antagonist in Fire Emblem Warriors: Three Hopes? Have you had a chance to play the video game for yourself as of yet? Let us know in the comments, or feel free to reach out and hit me up directly over on Twitter at @rollinbishop in order to talk about all things gaming!

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