Fire Emblem Warriors: Three Hopes is looking to be one of Nintendo's most anticipated yet unexpected releases of this year. This game took many by surprise with it not only being a follow-up to 2017's Fire Emblem Warriors but also being set in an alternate timeline of 2019's Fire Emblem: Three Houses. More importantly, it features all three of the game's titular house leaders going on a new adventure without Byleth, the professor and playable avatar character of Three Houses.
One of the recent trailers for Fire Emblem Warriors: Three Hopes makes a point that instead of Byleth becoming a professor at the Garreg Mach monastery, they instead remain a mercenary like at the beginning of the game. In their place, a new purple-haired player character known as "Shez" will be taking up the reigns as the game's protagonist. They were defeated by Byleth, who has been christened as "The Ashen Demon" with Shez training up and swearing revenge against them. This loss against Byleth in the woods also leads to Shez meeting the three house leaders.
With Shez's role as protagonist, they will have their own unique class that they start with. In a tweet on Nintendo's Japanese Twitter account, it highlights the details of this new class in Fire Emblem Warriors: Three Hopes. According to Twitter user SatsumaFS, this class is exclusive to Shez, and it is known as Flugel. It specializes in using fast and quick attacks, using a dual-wielding sword style.
This class is similar to Fire Emblem's Thief Class, which specializes in quick movement around the battlefield and high-speed attacks. Shez is also described to have a hidden power, much like Byleth and other Fire Emblem protagonists. It's possible that this new power is tied to the other newly introduced character Arval, though the tweet states more details about it will be shown later.
The Twitter account also revealed the voice actors for both the male and female versions of Shez, Tasuku Hatanaka (Yuma Tsukumo from Yu-Gi-Oh! ZEXAL, Gorou from Genshin Impact), and Miyu Tomita (Riko from Made in Abyss, Miko Iino from Kaguya-sama: Love is War). Players can also select between male and female versions of both Shez and Byleth at the beginning of the game, meaning that neither character is gender-locked. The player will also be forced to align with one of the three houses right at the start of the game, this choice being the branching point of Fire Emblem Warriors: Three Hopes' story.
Fire Emblem Warriors: Three Hopes launches for Nintendo Switch on June 24.