The embargo just lifted on Fire Emblem Warriors: Three Hopes, the musou-based follow-up to Nintendo’s critically acclaimed strategy game, Fire Emblem: Three Houses.

And then there’s the combat, perhaps the game’s most divisive element, which may not be that surprising if you’re familiar with the history of critical responses to the musou genre.

And while other reviewers were satisfied by how the developers added more strategy to Three Hopes, a lot of critics found the combat itself to be repetitive.

Fire Emblem Warriors: Three Hopes is a perfectly reasonable game.

The more investment any given player has in Three Houses in particular, the more likely it is that the good moments in Three Hopes will outweigh the bad, and the mysteries of the game’s slow-burn story will doubtless keep some people interested enough to power through some of the more boring, busywork-like combat maps.

You come to any musou game for the combat, but Three Hopes packs in too much filler even when you ignore everything optional, leading to some obnoxious repetition over the course of its 25-ish hours.

Fire Emblem Warriors: Three Hopes threatens to break new ground for the Warriors series, and is a solid new venture for the Fire Emblem series at large, but the melding between the two concepts isn’t as seamless as it could have been.

For what the game is — a sequel to Three Houses with real-time Musou combat — it delivers what it promised.

There’s a mystery to Three Hopes that can only be unraveled with dozens of hours of combat and cutscenes, and the game assumes substantial preexisting knowledge of Three Houses.