Fire Emblem Warriors: Three Hopes arrives in 2 month’s time, give or take. Ahead of its release, Nintendo and Koei Tecmo shared a 2nd trailer, which offers new insight on the mysterious purple haired character featured in the key artwork.

Lo and behind, they pulled a fast one on us! Previously thought to be a potential rival and/or antagonist, this character–Shez–is actually the protagonist of the game! Meanwhile, Byleth, only referred to as the “Ashen Demon” (his/her title from Three Houses) is the antagonist (so far).

As promised, I’ll be providing an analysis of the trailer. That said, our resident Warriors expert is currently busy and I’m not very familiar with Warriors gameplay, so I won’t be able to comment much about that.

Firstly, let’s quickly go through what we know about the protagonist, Shez.

In case you missed it, here’s their bio (from here):

A solitary mercenary. They sought to become a famed swordsman, but faced Jeralt’s Mercenaries during a fateful mission. They were defeated by the Ashen Demon. While training to seek revenge for their defeat, they met the Officer’s Academy students in the woods.

Like Byleth in Three Houses, you can choose to play as male or female Shez. As we’ve previously seen, Shez dual wields swords, including that suspicious silver relic-like weapon.

We don’t know the name of their sword, but do know their apparent starting class: Fluegel. The meaning of this seems to be “wing” in German, but I doubt there’s too much significance, because FE likes to borrow fancy names all the time.

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