VideoGame Deep FE game with a few missed opportunities
Being a hardcore Elibe and Magvel fan, the fact that this won over an old-school guy like me the way it did says alot.
The Good:
The amount of flexibility you can have in a unit is amazing; anyone can practically use weapons (while magic and fists are limited to some classes) and there are more hybrids than just Dark Knights and war monks. The characters are filled with a lot of backstory (especially Seteth and Flayn), and the fact that DLC was released for the game expands some of the characters. Plenty of activities too!
Story wise everything is very poignant, especially the Blue Lions route known as Azure Moon. Nintendo wasn't afraid to get dark with Dimitri's story, and his redemption arc makes his story seem all the more realistic compared to the other. Granted, he becomes uncomfortable to watch at times but he's still the most fluid character in all of Three Houses...and it involved indirectly crippling TWISTD in a way they deserved.
Really just how many comparisons I can draw between this game and the Elibe saga is endless, and I love that.
The Bad:
Honestly I feel like the game was too short in terms of chapters. I mean, granted, I did say they give periods of time before a mission to make it feel more realistic (which are shortened in any mode outside of Normal), but not enough DLC zones like the Abyss. I also noticed skills were kinda downgraded compared to what they were in Awakening, which was a bit disappointing but not too big a deal.
And...honestly, the animations for supports felt stiff at times; some moments should have had a CGI cutscene but unfortunately didn't get them, especially with the Black Eagles in a certain route.
Where Nintendo really messed up big was with the Golden Deer route in particular, Verdant Wind; they got the shaft big time in terms of character and story development. It's bad enough that it pushes the "power of friendship" cliché and Hilda is a quasi-retainer who almost anyone can recruit unlike Dedue or Hubert, people playing this route don't get any route-exclusive characters to use which was a major waste of opportunity given two characters you meet, everything in that route seems out of left field and forced, including the cutscene of Edelgard's death and especially the final battle...and its fans attempts to paint it as a Golden Ending when it really isn't given how many die compared to Azure Moon. It's basically Silver Snow turned into a bad Shonen series.
There's alot I could complain about but honestly, its major spoilers so I cannot.
Conclusion:
Overall, on a scale of 1-10, I'd give this game an 8. It's done alot of things right and very little wrong, and I highly recommend this to anyone who loves a Gray-and-Grey Morality story where there is no such thing as a happy ending (which drives me up the wall, but in a rare good way).
But anyway...long live the Holy Kingdom of Faerghus!
VideoGame Raising the FE Standard
After a GRUELING wait since its announcement in 2017, I am pleased to say Three Houses has met and exceeded all my expectations. The world of Fodlan is rich with intrigue and life - as are the stars of the show, the playable units. The music is breathtaking with surprising techno touches, and the Switch visuals are the best the series has looked. These elements come together in harmonious cohesion on the familiar canvas of sword and magic chess that Fire Emblem has made its signature.
Building on the vision Fates had, but perhaps could not perfectly realize, Three Houses features a branching story with four routes, each providing their own thought provoking themes and heart wrenching consequences for the player. I liked that no path is considered objectively "correct," and all routes are purposefully written in a way that the whole tale can only be fully understood after playing all four. However, this is a lengthy undertaking - each route took me no LESS than 80 hours to complete.
Stepping away from the 3DS's established Pair Up systems, Three Houses introduces a host of new strategic elements. I'm a big fan of the new Battalions and Gambits that further customize and empower units, aggro lines that relay the enemy AI's next moves, and Divine Pulses to allow the player to rethink their blunders. Add in highly flexible combat arts and skill customization, and combat is not only rich in strategy and depth, but also perhaps the most quality of life the series has ever been. Three Houses is also very welcoming to newcomers with a forgiving difficulty curve, but a significant spike in difficulty on Maddening for hardcore fans.
The new Monastery sequences take up half of the gameplay, but was a Three Houses addition that really impressed me. Aside from being able to flexibly dictate the growth of your units, the Monastery allows the player to interact with them in fun ways that expand on their characters, showcase their charm, and keep them relevant in the ongoing story - something previous entries have often struggled with.
Three Houses has my praise, but I do have some nitpicks. While combat and customization is more convenient than ever, the UI seems a bit behind. Minor annoyances such as not being able to easily see the Supports of characters when dining with them in the Monastery or when selecting them for battle are gripes that result in many, MANY trips back and forth through menus. When buying at a shop, the player also cannot see how much of an item they already have in possession, a standard in any other game (including past FE games). Three Houses also has some model loading and cutscene frame rate issues that I expect to be improved upon in future entries.
Despite this, with a mix of brilliant strategy gameplay and a captivating narrative and cast, Three Houses establishes itself as a proud vanguard among the Switch's first party line up, and I eagerly await in anticipation for Intelligent System's next entry.
VideoGame A Choice Worth Making
Fire Emblem: Three Houses, the first Fire Emblem game on a home console since the Tellius duology, does not disappoint, and is a worthwhile game for series veterans and newcomers.
In the game, you play as a mercenary who takes a job as a professor at an officers' academy, and can choose one of three houses to teach. This might sound innocuous enough, but your choice will determine your allegiance when war breaks out, as well as the fate of the continent of Fodlan.
By joining a house, you take on its students, who are generally a colorful and interesting bunch with fascinating personalities and relationships. Their supports not only reveal more about them and show them interacting with students who are quite similar to (or different from) them, but can also help shed light on the background and setting, which is one of the best-developed I've seen in the series. As such, it's well worth replaying the game and completing all the routes.
Each of the routes has its own individual story, with separate themes and revelations about the setting that are not found anywhere else. The characters in your house (including those you recruited from other houses) react realistically to the different events in each route, and those you did not recruit may end up becoming enemies you must defeat and kill. As you can expect, this game is fairly dark, since it deals with the horrors of war and operates on Grey and Gray Morality, but it manages to be appropriately serious without being hopeless.
The gameplay is also quite deep and engaging. The series' strategic combat is as well-done as ever, and the addition of battalions to assign to units, as well as "Gambits" (area of effect attacks or support skills with limited uses) gives a great deal of depth to the game. The ability to manage your free time, from honing your own skills to increasing your students to engaging in optional battles, makes the game significantly deeper, and gives you greater freedom when it comes to developing your units' skills, which ties in to my next point.
The class system is also more elaborate and flexible, featuring multiple tiers of classes that are unlocked by passing a certification exam (which requires you to develop related skills), each of which has an unlockable ability and several other inherent abilities. The ability to choose your characters' progression paths and which abilities they have equipped enables a good amount of flexibility when it comes to building your characters, and it's user-friendly enough that you won't feel lost.
If I had to name a flaw, it's that level-wise, the routes are a bit too similar. All but one the levels in the first half are functionally identical, and in the second half, all but one of the routes have similar missions to each other. Similarly, a lot of the random skirmishes used for Level Grinding use the same maps over and over again. While the maps are fairly well-designed, you'll probably get sick of fighting in the same maps all the time. On the story side, while I enjoyed most of the supports, there were a few characters I wished could spend time with each other for various reasons (for example, Marianne and Mercedes are both highly religious and don't have good relationships with their adoptive fathers).
All in all, Fire Emblem: Three Houses is perhaps the best Fire Emblem game I've ever played, featuring a compelling story and engaging gameplay, and is a must-have for tactical RPG fans who own a Switch.
VideoGame Fire Emblem meets Persona, for better and for worse.
Should I be posting a review of this game before I've even beaten it once? Maybe not, but the fact that it's taken literal years for me to even make as much progress as I have is itself a bit of a damning indictment I can make against no other title in the series before or after Shadow Dragon, itself a thoroughly unflattering comparison.
Three Houses has, in my mind, attained the successes it has because it mixes together two popular titles I both like into one whole, integrating both traditional Fire Emblem style tactical-grid gameplay and Persona-style time management character building mechanics. This is often a strength; while I can see how replaying the game over and over might be frustrating after a while (I often have to take breaks when for various reasons I feel the need to replay one of the non-combat sections and realize nearly half an hour of replayed content lies before me), the non-combat sections are themselves fun and engaging to a point, with interesting minigames and colorful (if broad) characters to interact with.
Meanwhile, the combat sections, while occasionally not without their own frustrations, are fun and well-designed, occasionally challenging even on the middling difficulty settings. You do enjoy thinking about how you'll use the stuff you get in one gameplay type in another. And I personally appreciate that some effort went into eliding some of the inherent frustrations of this combined gameplay model, like greatly increasing the level cap to remove the frustration of Fire Emblem's random-stat leveling system, greatly restricting roster size and allowing for recruitable cannon-fodder for people like me who're always tempted to try to keep everyone at the same level, and easing the burden of Fire Emblem logistics with ready access to stores and blacksmiths to repair important gear. Finally, I appreciate the new "battalion" system, adding both scale and intricacy to battles and serving as a fun mechanic, even if I almost always just use them as glorified Stat Sticks and never touch gambits.
But, unfortunately, in the process the game doubles down on many of both series' weaknesses, and they feed into each other in the worst possible way. The crushing pressure of Persona's opportunity-cost approach to conversations and non-combat sections and stats combines horribly when all of said stats are combat-critical. Social minigames are invariably a frustrating guessing game, but not playing means giving up on desperately needed relationship points, so playing with a guide open next to you is seemingly vital, despite the devastating start-stop effect it has on pacing. Fire Emblem's random growths make every single attempt to improve skill points an infuriating crapshoot, with vital rewards for success and punishing mediocrity on failure. The "build your own units" system encapsulates every one of these issues, from refusing to let the player see the skill growth targets they need to hit on the screen where they're selecting what skills to train, to refusing to let the player know what rewards they'll get for mastering various classes, to generally punishing the non-mobile classes through huge open maps with enemies that run away with their arms full of treasure even more than usual, to making the main character feel like they need to train everything despite the system generally punishing evenhanded growths in favor of specialization. And in general, the first playthrough being a begrudging fun tax I have to pay so that I can actually enjoy myself through New Game+ benefits that sand off the worst problems with the game's design is one of my least favorite parts of any given Persona title.
Finally, story-wise, I admire the ambitious attempt to tell a darker, more morally-murky story that takes obvious inspiration from the Jugdral games in many ways, another chapter in the Fire Emblem series that I liked but didn't love. There are some problems here for my personal tastes, mostly in playing up the unsympathetic sides of two major characters a bit too far, and in using a cast of characters that're themselves fairly broad and comical stereotypes to start with. But as is often the case I still appreciate that the cast has more depth through the use of Supports, and that the story is full of twists and turns that aren't apparent at first blush. And while some of those twists are a bit predictable, I've come to realize that I personally prefer "predictability" over an incoherent attempt at swerving into oncoming traffic to avoid it any day of the week.
In conclusion, would I recommend Three Houses? ...Sort of? But I wouldn't recommend it above and beyond Persona 4, Fire Emblem: Awakening, or plenty of other titles from either franchise it's drawing on. There are simply too many frustrating missteps in the actual moment-to-moment design of the way the two genres are combined, and again, it took the release of Three Hopes and the realization that I'd probably have to finally knuckle down and beat Three Houses to appreciate it to get me over the hurdle of actually digging into the game where the experience of actually playing the title failed.
If that opinion dramatically changes by the time I've actually beaten it once, I promise I'll come back here and do some extensive and fancy editing. But I'm far enough in by now that I'm pretty sure it will not.