Topic: User Impressions/Reviews Thread

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Oh boy. I went and did it.

lol

To be clear, I don't blame anyone who wants to "tl;dr" this. And I promise this is the longest thing I'll ever post on these forums.

But I had a lot of feelings I wanted to sift through with regard to the new Fire Emblem, so... uh... I sifted.

Also, minor spoilers. Kind of hard to avoid when talking about the structure of the game.

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Fire Emblem: Three Houses

Platform: Nintendo Switch

Completion: One route completed (87 hours of total game time, Golden Deer route). 10+ hours into the start of my second playthrough, where I've selected the Blue Lions.

REVIEW

Going into mid-2019, there was a lot of anticipation and curiosity building around Nintendo's next-gen Fire Emblem game. Early trailers had some concerned about the direction the series was going with its emphasis on teenagers in a "school life" setting, especially after recent entries had already doubled down on fanservice and relationship building in lieu of the gritty fantasy stories the series had previously been known for. Having completed the game at least once, though, I can reassure anyone still uncertain about the series that developer Intelligent Systems has, if anything, unified these two halves of the series (and fandom).

So a bit of scene-setting for people who have never played this game: Fire Emblem: Three Houses is a fantasy story set on the continent of Fódlan. For hundreds of years, this continent has been home to three civilizations: the Adrestian Empire, the Holy Kingdom of Faerghus, and the Leicester Alliance. Keeping the peace between these civilizations, and binding them together with common ideologies, is the Church of Seiros, which also functions as the primary religious center of belief in Fódlan. At the heart of the continent, where the three civilizations meet, stands Garreg Mach Monastery. Besides having immense religious significance, this institution also houses the Officers Academy, where teenagers (a mix of nobles and commoners, although, like all institutions, the scales are weighed in favor of the rich and powerful), often heirs of major families in given regions, are sent to learn strategy, the manipulation of magic, and the art of warfare. In particular, the nobility and class system is kept in place by the presence of crests, which are like magical inborne potentials that are hereditary in nature. Students are situation into one of three houses based on their nationality: students from Faerghus join the Blue Lions, Adrestian imperials join the Black Eagles house, and those from the Leicester Alliance join the Golden Deer. The head of each house is a powerful heir from their respective region: Dimitri, a prince of Faerghus; Edelgard, an Adrestian princess; and Claude, heir to the House of Riegan from the Alliance.

You play as a mercenary (with the default name of Byleth) with a mysterious past who saves the house leaders from an ambush by bandits (with the help of a supernatural entity named Sothis) and is awarded a professorship at the monastery by Archbishop Rhea, the leader of the Church of Seiros. Throughout the game you learn how to teach and guide your students as they grow into full-fledged soldiers, all while becoming embroiled in an intricate plot involving resurrected gods, ancient cults, ambitious socio-political ideologies, and mass warfare.

Fire Emblem: Three Houses is primarily broken into three different modes of play. You have turn-based tactical battle, which plays out like a game of chess with anime teenagers, visual novel-y story sequences, and then daily life in the monastery. To put it bluntly, the monastery is a revelation. For the first time in a mainline Fire Emblem game (excluding the limited third person navigation segments in Fire Emblem Echoes), you have a gigantic 3D environment for your character to explore. It's sort of like if you took the various city environments in Persona games and put their side activities into one location. You can, variously, dabble with gardening, fish in a pond, cook meals with your students, enjoy cafeteria meals with your students, sing in the choir, read books in the library, engage in private skill-training lessons with other instructors, and more.

Like a Persona game, there's a calendar system. During the week you'll be instructing your students (answering their occasional questions, focusing on improving certain skills, etc.), having private sit-downs with them when they want to talk, and assigning some of them group work, which you'll see the results of at the end of the week. Once Sunday comes, you're able to choose from a variety of options: engaging in optional battles (more on these later), attending seminars to help build certain skills of yours, resting (which helps to refresh your students' motivation levels; but, again more on that later), or exploring the monastery.

When you choose to explore the monastery, you'll have a limited number of activity points to use before you have to retire for the day. Doing things like fishing, eating with students, etc. all require activity points. The number of activities you'll be able to perform in a day will increase through the game as you build your professor level (which you increase through building proficiency as an instructor). On certain days, which will be marked on the calandar, there will be special events. Fishing tournaments, for example, or special events in the cafeteria. You'll want to plan out your monthly activity ahead of time if there are particular events that you don't want to miss.

Hilariously, you can also have tea parties with your students (and, if you build up their support level enough, students from other houses). These segments are nothing to take lightly, though. While they're one of the best ways to build up support points with your students, they're also, arguably, the hardest part of the game, as you'll need to ask questions and give responses that the other student likes. I can't even count how many times I've soft-resetted the game because a tricky question near the very end of the party robbed me of the charm and support boosts that come with having a tea party given a "Perfect" ranking.

At the end of every month, there's a story segment to engage in that'll advance the plot and, usually, plunge you and your students into battle. These range from mock battles and class outings to, later in the game, epic, hours-long conflicts across gigantic battlefields against rival armies. It's here where the tactical aspect of this RPG comes into play.

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PART TWO OF THREE

FE:TH attempts to shake up the established combat system of the series in a number of ways. First is how it reforms the weapon triangle from previous games. To explain, in previous FE titles, characters using certain weapons enjoyed a Pokemon-like advantage over characters using other weapons: swords were super-effective against axes, axes against lances, and lances against swords. Additionally, pegasus knights were balanced by being deathly allergic (emphasis on the word "death") to bow-and-arrow users (the class is completely unbound by terrain limitations, meaning, without this sort of check, they could tear across a map with little regard paid to game balance; so it's not unusual for most maps to feature a number of enemy archers). While this pegasus knight weakness to archers hasn't changed, the game completely dumps the weapon triangle at the outset, meaning, at the beginning of the game, nobody really has a strategic advantage or disadvantage against anyone else. This would be an issue for the chess-like gameplay the series is known for if that was the end of it, but this change is in service of the way Three Houses alters the series mechanics.

Three Houses rather significantly bumps up the number of mechanics and stats to manage in this game. I'll go through the big ones one at a time:

First, the weapon durability from older games is back. In simple terms, this means your weapons have a limited number of uses before they break and become... not entirely useless, but dangerous to use due to how weak they become. There's a good reason for the presence of this mechanic, however. The majority of your melee characters have access to "combat arts"" that they're free to use in battle. These abilities are usually more powerful than normal attacks, and can allow the unit to gain the upper hand against an enemy unit at the expense of dramatically increased wear on the unit's weapons. In this way, you're constantly choosing between inflicting more immediate damage and maintaining your weapon so that your unit remains viable until the end of a battle. Not a huge deal most of the time, as normal weapons are reasonably easy to repair and/or strengthen via the services of a blacksmith. What poses a bigger issue is how often you choose to use Relics, which are essentially ancient, crest-powered super weapons that you'll find by completing dangerous paralogues/side missions/opening chests in the battlefield. These Relics are usually far more powerful than normal weapons, but they also rely on hard-to-find materials harvested from demonic beasts, which means you need to know when to properly use them to the best effect. Wasting valuable Relic durability on some scrub of an enemy soldier isn't advisable.

Since I mentioned demonic beasts, I'll go into them briefly. In certain instances, and progressively more often as you get deeper into the game, you'll come across mini-bosses on the battlefield that take the form of gigantic, ferocious monsters. Now, there are lore reasons for all this, so I won't talk about what they actually are or how they relate to relics or crests, but suffice to say that these enemies take up multiple tiles on the battlefield, with each tile of body space protected by a shield of sorts. You'll use attacks and batallions (more on them in a minute) to break down their defenses as you whittle down their multiple life bars (did I mention these abominations have to be killed, like, five times before they actually die? They do. Which can be incredibly dangerous if they get near a squishier unit). Anyway, if you manage to successfully shatter the shields across all of their body parts before reducing a life bar to zero, you'll gain rare materials that you can actually use to help repair and strengthen your Relic weapons.

At this point, I should briefly discuss batallions. In a war, one would expect armies to actually be composed of dozens of people in a unit. You wouldn't have just a couple of random fighters besieging a castle, for example. FE addresses this by allowing you to equip batallions, which are, essentially, groups of soldiers that you can expend like a limited resource to pull off certain attacks or effects, called "gambits." The utility of gambits is that, by commanding a company of soldiers to attack in your stead, you shield yourself from damage, which is supremely useful when going up against monsters that can take off a solid chunk of your soldier's health points when counter-attacking. If you gather multiple soldiers together who all have batallions attached, you can gain bonuses to the use of gambits, called "gambit boost"s.

I should also mention the adjutant mechanic. In the 3DS Emblems, there was an OP mechanic that allowed your characters to pair up together to become stronger super-units (this also massively helped with grinding support levels for characters). In Three Houses, this has been balanced: you can now set three or so adjutants for a few characters of your choosing, who will enjoy much more modest stat boosts.

Lastly, I want to address the importance of skills and abilities in combat. Abilities are personal skills that your unit comes with by default. You also have skills that go along with mastering the use of certain weapons or magicks and class skills that come with mastering classes. While abilities aren't changeable, you can equip or unequip other skills at will, leading to an incredible diversity of boosts and affinities that can have wonderful synergistic effects in battle. And, to be clear, you'll need to equip skills to be able to use increasingly strong weapons or when mastering black or white magic, in addition to more optional skills that grant bonuses for combat with various types of weapons. And, while I mentioned that the weapon triangle was gone, you can sort of reintroduce it via skills that grant units increased accuracy and damage potential against units wielding certain types of weapons. So the triangle hasn't so much disappeared entirely as evolved to fit in with the more complex and customizable focus of Three Houses.

Finally, I want address arguably the biggest change introduced in this game: the divine pulse.
Fire Emblem had long been a series that terrorized players by combining permadeath and RNG in such a way that death was seemingly always right around the corner for your beloved characters. While this adds tremendously to the thrill of battle, it also led to the annoying phenomenon of often having to restart battles halfway through (or even most of the way through, or right near the end) because you lost a unit, not to bad strategy, but to a critical hit from the enemy, or some other factor that was uncontrollable. The 3DS Emblems attempted to address this by offering a casual mode where your characters don't stay dead after the battle ends, but this always struck me as a sort of cheat. FE games are balanced around permadeath; if you remove the threat of annihilation, strategies would change entirely, as your characters would go from being irreplaceable but highly squishy fighters to expendable pawns whose life or death made no different.

Interestingly, Three Houses actually addresses this with a new game mechanic that RADICALLY changes the equation. Near the start of the game, the goddess Sothis grants you the ability to control the flow of time: gameplay-wise, what this translates to is having a limited number of "divine pulses" that you can use to rewind time to any previous point in the battle to try something else if one of your units fall. The number of pulses you have available to you can be upgraded over the course of the game as well.

In some respects, this mechanic is AMAZING. It maintains the threat of physical annihilation, meaning you cannot treat your units like disposable pawns to achieve a quicker victory, while also eliminating the need to restart, a problem that constantly plagued the series previously. It's a good mechanic, and I hope future entries hold onto it. On the other hand, the game STILL allows you to select a casual difficulty mode, which means new players could unwittingly find themselves in a game where they can't die permanently AND can rewind time at will. Talk about OP! My bigger issue, though, is that, even on the harder difficulties, the game still offers WAY too many pulses as you upgrade your characters (more on that later). You could avoid upgrading the characters, I guess, but it'd be nice to have the other upgrades while being locked out from unlocking more pulses. You get so many that it feels almost impossible to a lose a battle in this game, and it can lead to a recklessness of its own (how many times have I thought: "This seems risky. But, if it doesn't work out, I can just rewind!"? Too many.) What could, in limited supply, merely function as a supplement to normal FE gameplay that eliminates the need for constant restarting instead grants you an almost quasi-immortality. It's an amazing mechanic, but I have issues with how it's balanced.

It also leads to the interesting phenomenon of the game feeling easier than it is (or, maybe, realizing that older games felt harder than they actually would have been without the unforgiving combo of permadeath and RNG shenanigans). Even on the hard/classic difficulty at launch (which was before additional, higher difficulty settings released), I felt like the game was a bit overly easy compared to previous entries. And, in some respects, at the start, it absolutely was. Yet, as time went on, I realized that much of this feeling of easiness was actually a direct result of not having to suffer die consequences for my mistakes due to the presence of the divine pulse. Simply put, if the divine pulse were not in this game, it would feel substantially harder to me, as I would have been resetting quite a bit to save my characters. Does this mean the pulses make TH an "easy" game, or does the presence of the mechanic expose a sort of artificial difficulty possessed by all previous entries of the series. Is it "difficulty" if a game pushes you to keep replaying the same content over and over until you pull it off perfectly? I don't know.

This is actually the first Fire Emblem game I've played where I've not permanently lost at least one of my characters, largely thanks to the presence of the divine pulse mechanic. There's simply no excuse for losing people when you can rewind time and find different paths forward.

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PART THREE OF THREE

While tactical battling is a clear focus of this game, the true strength of Fire Emblem: Three Houses lies in how thoroughly it develops its large cast of characters over various playthroughs. While not every person in this game is equally fascinating, they're all three-dimensional human beings who grow (sometimes not in directions you'd like or even expect) and are realistically embedded in an interconnected political world of power, intrigue, and consequence.

If you're like me, you'll find yourself struggling not to dislike some of them at first. Hilda Valentine Goneril, for example, one of the Golden Deer students, is... shameless. Tremendously so. She does as little work as possible, constantly looks for excuses to shirk the duties she is somehow assigned, and, when push comes to shove, is fully willing to exploit her charms to take advantage of the people around her. A lot of this is derived from a sense of learned inferiority due to her brother Holst ascending to the head of her household and becoming an accomplished general. Through her supports, however, you do learn that she is a genuinely kind and thoughtful person and, as the game went on, it became clear that she was one of my most loyal soldiers, one who was willing and able to show bravery when it really mattered.

Lorenz Hellman Gloucester is another. It is easy, tempting, and somewhat accurate to see him as a snobbish noble who thinks too highly of himself and cares only to engage in relationships that will benefit his family politically. He is also, to put it nicely, unable to take a hint, to the point where my character even had to pull him aside after class and talk to him about not harassing the noble girls around him with persistent dinner invitations. Yet, for all his flaws, he's someone who never even thinks about exploiting his status as a nobleman for personal benefit and views it as his responsibility (and the responsibility of the nobility at large) to protect and defend ordinary citizens. For Lorenz, nobility is an obligation to serve, not a license to misbehave.

And these are two of the less complicated characters in the game. Many of your students will have involved motivations and powerful character arcs: Sylvain and the way his complex about bearing a crest informs his often misogynistic behavior; Bernadetta's struggle to socially integrate with more extroverted peers while dealing with a history of abuse; despite having to spend hours and hours learning about these various characters, I never once regretted having the opportunity to do so. This, alongside teaching them, dining with them, listening to their problems, and leading them into battle really made me feel a genuine bond with most of them.

Going along with this, while support conversations (unlockable conversations between different character) have been a feature of these games going back into the nineties, they've never been so elaborate, accessible, or omnipresent as they seem to be here. In previous games, you'd occasionally be able to have characters exchange a few lines of dialogue in text boxes between one-another during the small bits of downtime when you weren't actively battling. Here, though, the short textbox conversations of previous FE adventures have become fully modeled sequences with extensive amounts of character interaction and backstory development that are, to exacerbate the Persona comparison, MUCH more akin to the "Social Link" scenes you can unlock in Persona 3 and up than they are to the rudimentary conversations found in previous games.

Support points (which allow you to level up their support levels) are earned in a number of ways in this game. The most classic and obvious way to build support between characters is to have them fight alongside one-another on the battlefield. Characters with a space or two of one-another can often engage in joint gambits or enjoy passive stat boosts, depending on which skills a characters has equipped at the time. But you also build support through some of the social activities I mentioned before: going to lunch together, singing together in the choir, etc. Your main character also has the benefit of being able to give gifts to characters (which will grant support points if they like it) and throwing the aforementioned tea parties.

The game is ambitious in a number of ways, but the aspect I found most impressive was the sheer, gargantuan volume of voiced dialogue in this game. Aside from books, quest descriptions, classroom requests, and bits of writing you'll encounter in menus throughout the game, EVERYTHING is voiced in this game. The unique conversations you can have with characters every month on the campus (which changes depending upon which house you're leading and which characters you've recruited from others houses). Battle dialogue. Hundreds of support conversations (276 in total). Flavor dialogue during meals. Certainly all of the dialogue related to plot developments (which again, is different depending upon which house you pick). You wind up with what amounts to almost three full games worth of spoken dialogue.

The game itself, structurally, is just intimidatingly huge. I've talked about the basic structure of daily life and battle segments in the game's first half, so let me discuss the really meaty part of the game. While I won't reveal what happens, things... happen halfway through the game, and it plunges you and lovely students into a massive, devastating war. Does the thought of having to fight and usually kill students you knew, ate with, and laughed alongside for a year sound like a good time? I hope it does, because, of course, with all of the kingdoms at war, the students are forced to fight for their families, leaders, and countrymen. FE:TH could have pussed out and allowed you to only fight generic soldiers, I guess, but a lot of these students are brilliant minds at the top of their field. Of course you'd see them on the battlefield. And it usually ends exactly how you'd think it would. War is hell, and no amount of friendly rhetoric is going to change the fact that, unless you're willing to abandon the cause you've been killing in the name of, the person in front of you is simply another enemy now.

Besides introducing you to a different set of students, depending on your choice of house, the second half of the game will be ENTIRELY different. Different plot. Different motivations for characters. Different battles. Different music. It's like the game has four second halves of the game. There will lead you to learn more or less about different characters and plot points, depending upon the choices you make. The game feels designed to be played many, many times to get the entire plot, and to learn all you can about these various characters. The trouble for a lot of people will be down to how long each run of the game is (probably 40 or so when you're replaying and skipping a lot of the optional stuff, but more in the range of 60 - 80 on your first go: particularly if you choose one of the longer routes).

Some characters are more plainly ruthless and villainous than others, although your perception of certain core figures will shift dramatically depending on who you side with. With that said, even given the heady veins of ideology, fate, and myth coursing through this narrative, if you really dig down into what is motivating these larger-than-life figures, you'll find distinctly human circumstances, with regrets, tragedies, and hopes ultimately driving the sequence of events that sets spear against sword, brother against brother (in one particularly tragic circumstance), student against student, and, of course, former instructor against former student.

Briefly I wanted to discuss, due to the way they inter-relate conceptually, recruiting students, how the plot is structured, and what paralogues are.

Your house automatically comes along with a certain group of core students, but you're not actually limited to just them. Through support building via gift-giving, returning missing items, hosting tea parties, etc. you can actually build up support with students from other houses. Each student has a core stat threshold you need to meet for them to be willing to join your house (a student might require a certain level of specialization with archery, for example, or require you to possess a higher defense stat), but, with every affinity level you gain with them (denoted by support conversations, which always unlock when you go up another level), their stat threshold is lowered. This makes it easily possible for you to recruit most students when you hit B-rank support with them, which allows them to join your house.

Each house's story (in particular, each house's second half) is structured around the core group of students that go with your house. They are, after all, descended from the same nation and have intertwining backstories. This, for obvious reasons, typically excludes recruited students: a story cutscene couldn't possibly account for every permutation of class makeup possible in this game. Since this is an ever-present possibility, character backstories that aren't relevant to the way the main plot evolves overall are explorable via paralogues. Paralogues are like side missions with scripted, story-specific content that will allow you to learn more about the circumstances of specific characters. This allows you to get to know all of your students, even the ones you recruited from other houses.

One criticism I have of this system is that students typically have far fewer possible support conversations with students from other houses. While this is understandable (the hundreds of support conversations would probably double in number if this were the case, which would be... nuts), it can be disappointing to never be able to learn how two characters in your class interact because the developers never intended them to develop a relationship of any sort. In this respect, I do think Intelligent Systems should have put more time into the recruitment mechanic. On the upside, recruiting students from other houses can help even out the XP pool a bit, which takes me into my next discussion: the difficulty level of the game.

FE:TH's difficulty balancing is more than a bit wonky insofar as the default ''Normal" and "Hard" difficulties are actually much easier than the names let on. Even people unaccustomed to the series find themselves blowing through the maps with ease on "Normal" difficulty, whereas "Hard" mode doesn't seem particularly hard, but more along the lines of what you'd expect the game's default challenge level to be like. Even if divine pulses weren't present, there's nothing particularly challenging about this game on Hard mode, and it only requires the player to exercise a bit more caution in battle.

A player of above average skill level won't really find the game to be too difficult until they play through on the "Maddening" difficulty level, which is pretty intimidatingly hard, thanks to constantly overleveled enemies with buffed stats. One change I do like here is that, unlike on the lower difficulties, boss characters will actually move around the map. On previous difficulty settings, the powerful boss units will stay in one place throughout the battle, allowing your characters to gang up on them. On Maddening, though, you're forced to contend with the possibility of being attacked by ridiculously powerful enemies throughout the fight.

Some of Maddening difficulty's changes seem a bit cheap, but another thing I like about it is that it forces the player to really get acquainted with a lot of the systems in this game that they might just ignore on lower difficulties. Boosted stats from cooking meals with the students. Farming stat boosting items. Taking advantage of the extra battles to farm XP. Making use of abilities such as "rally" that buff the stats of allies. The player needs to do everything in their power to simply keep their units alive in this mode.

It's worth mentioning that, even on Hard mode, the game does become a good deal more challenging halfway through the game. In my Golden Deer playthrough, I was steamrolling through maps in Part One, but often found myself somewhat overwhelmed at the start of Part Two thanks to none of my units being overleveled.

Three Houses, more than most other games I've ever played, feels uniquely designed to be replayed over and over. Aside from the dramatically different plots and character development arcs, the game features a well-thought-out and robust NG+ mode that allows the player to streamline certain parts of the experience on a second, third, etc. playthrough.

This is primarily due to the way the game carries over renown. Renown is gained by completing side-quests, story battles, and spending time with your students in the monastery. In a first run, this is primarily useful for investing in magical statues in the monastery that can unlock stat and skill growth bonuses for your class (along with extra divine pulses!). When you finish the game, the renown invested in these statues is carried over, meaning the bonuses transfer, and the large sum of renown you gain for beating it will be immediately available upon starting your monastic life in a NG+ run. Besides being able to further upgrade these statues (because, to be real, you won't max them out in one playthrough), you can use renown to automatically raise your professor level to the highest previously unlocked one (which enables you to immediately have ten actions every time you explore the monastery), recover support levels with characters (which means you can, when replaying the game, grind out support levels for every character in the game), immediately unlock weapon skill levels, etc. It turns NG+ into a grinder's paradise, where you're free to min-max your units and max out relationships that would have been difficult or impossible to max out on a first or even second run of the game. This helps to make the largely samey first half of the game feel fresh again until you get to the second half, which will, of course, be entirely uncharted water for a player if that's their first go with a certain house.

I want to talk briefly about the music in this game, which is, honestly, just superb, with probably the strongest soundtrack in the entire series. There's a lot of fantastic orchestrated battle tunes, which really help to drive the drama of what's unfolding on-screen. Such as the track 'Between Heaven and Earth,' which also has great accompanying vocals:

or the less epic, but still blood-pumping 'Blue Skies and a Battle,' which the first major, large-scale story battle of the game is set to:

Sometimes the music gets downright weird, though. Particularly in the Golden Deer route. Check out this initially creepy battle track which, interestingly, begins to sound very much like dubstep (possibly to reflect the strangely futuristic technology available to the particular villains you fight on this map):

Finally, I'll end with the end credits version of the game's main theme song, which I find quite pretty:

Of course, every game has its flaws. Almost every aspect of this game impresses... except for the visual and performance aspects. While the game features strong art and character design, texture work is often really poor (more than once, I was reminded of a game I might have played on a Wii), backdrops during support dialogues and story sequences range from decent to hideous (some of them literally look like low-res captures of real work locations, flat trees and all), character models in cutscenes are often somewhat stiff or unexpressive, and while the ground level viewpoint of battlefields (you can zoom in so far that you see everything 'to scale' around a particular unit) is really striking in terms of how much it expands the scope of the battle, it really shows off how basic the character models are. Performance, while not terrible, is also underwhelming, with lots of little, brief frame drops throughout the game, especially when you're running around the monastery. The game itself, unlike a number of previous FE games, seems to max out at 30fps. Also worth mentioning is the really limited draw distance, with characters and objects really obviously popping in as you start to get close to them. Pokemon Sword/Shield got a lot of flak for how bad their texture work/draw distance often is, and for not really looking like a modern console game, but it's not uncommon for Three Houses to look even worse than those visually unimpressive games.

Check out, for example, the following screenshot, when the camera happened to dynamically zoom in on some grass during battle. It's... not pretty.

MISC GRIPES:

• Another big con I can think of concerns the class evolution system. Simply put, sometimes previous classes don't transition well to more advanced classes, leaving me in a situation where I ended the game not fully transitioning all of my students to master classes. For example, Petra is a character who tends to have high dexterity, speed, and strength, and who specializes in the use of swords and bows. This made her perfect for the "assassin" class, which is one of this game's advanced classes. However, I found that, to my dismay, there was no good way for a student who has specialized in being an assassin to transition to any of the master classes, because none of them emphasize the same mix of weapon proficiencies that the assassins has been trained to master. The closest I could find to an evolution of the assassin was the mortal savant class, but that requires the student to have practically mastered the use of black magic, and Petra has a naturally low magic stat, so I never bothered to train her in the skill. It'd be a waste of time. And this is hardly the only case in the game where you might find yourself not fully upgrading the class of one of your units.
• Another problem with master classes is the way that certain classes are actually gender locked! For example, if you have a male unit who specializes in black/white magic and nothing else, he's out of luck when it comes to upgrading him to a master class, because the Gremory class (a mage who has mastered the use of all magic) is only available to women. All of the magic classes available to male units also emphasis some sort of weapon mastery, and none of them focus on both black and white magic. Similarly, if you want to make one of your female units someone who specializes in brawling, you're quickly going to find that the top-tier brawling classes are male-exclusive. This is all disappointing in a game that allows you a ton of flexibility in terms of how your units grow and evolve over time otherwise.
• A downside that needs to be talked about the is the way support conversations evolve over the course of the game, though. For whatever reason, support conversations seem to be identical no matter when you activate them. Not a problem in the short term, but, many times, you'll have characters begin a subplot in a pre-time skip support conversation, only for them to pick up like nothing has happened post-time skip (to be clear, the five or so years that pass between parts one and two). It's more than a bit jarring, to say the least, and can sometimes even conflict with character development the characters otherwise enjoy in the main plot.
• Like Fire Emblem Fates, same sex couplings and marriages are possible at the end of the game. Now, on the lesbian side of things, you have a lot of options. Several women are willing to be your gay waifu. On the male homosexual side of things, though, it's... not great. You only really have one same sex option who is around your age and who is actually romantically interested in you. You can get with some older guys, but they're old enough to be your father, and it's really more of a 'life long devotion' sort of thing. It's the best FE yet for gay relationships, but it still needs better gay male representation and options.

Before closing this (very, very long post), I thought I'd have some fun and post some more screenshots I
took. Because Three Houses is the undisputed king when it comes to funny and out-of-context dialogue:

CONCLUSION

Fire Emblem: Three Houses is a massive evolution point for the franchise as a whole. Narratively, mechanically, in terms of scope, writing, character development, musically... it's one of the most ambitious changes I've seen a Nintendo game go through, aside from the truly radically changed The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild. Three Houses still maintains the tactical gameplay and dark(ish) fantasy focus that fans loved about previous entries in the series, but it expands so radically on everything else that it feels like it could belong to a new property entirely. Not my tip-top game of 2019, but absolutely in my top three for the year, and easily a top ten Switch game for me.

9/10

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I appreciate your sacrifice.

And you thought that Mega Man review was a bit on the long side!

You joke, but I still have another 130+ hours or so of unique gameplay to get through if I want to experience everything Three Houses has to offer. I don't know if I could survive something on an even bigger scale.

Definitely. It's not a hugely polished game, but the passion behind it is evident. Which is probably also why so many of the voice actors for the game and the FE community itself were so passionate for the game. The vibe around the game was sort of the polar opposite of the one around the new Pokemon, where angry fans eventually resignedly accepted that the franchise they loved would succeed regardless of how good or bad the games were, and felt alienated from the franchise they grew up with as a result. I FULLY believe that IS has been paying attention to Western criticisms of Fates/Awakening, as almost every major criticism raised by fans about the direction the series was going was addressed to some extent (I mean, not the ones who wanted the series to go back to a linear string of battles separated by short cutscenes, but those people can and should avail themselves of the dozens of classic FE titles that play just like that).

It was also fun seeing the series receive some recognition at TGA and (very briefly) topping sales charts around the world.

Yeah, like Persona 3, it fundamentally changes the structure, tone, and appeal of the series. It turned what was primarily a tactical combat game with light RPG and social elements into a full-fledged JRPG with heavy social sim elements and a massively wider scope. I'm curious to see where they go from here, because you don't just come back from opening Pandora's Box.

It's really interesting. The series kept selling so poorly on GC/Wii/DS that it was almost died. Fire Emblem: Awakening's focus on relationship building and light RPG mechanics made it a surprise hit and allowed the series to claw its way out of the mouth of hell. The Fates games with their three story route structure and Echoes with its limited exploration of 3D environments feel, in retrospect, like they were experimenting with different ideas in anticipation of this radical shift in game design.

6200+ words, sans the image links. It was originally going to be longer, if you can believe it, but I chopped out certain sections that I felt might be straying a bit too close to spoiler territory. It IS a relatively new game, after all.

lol I wouldn't dare post this many walls of text without a lot of audio-visual accompaniment to keep my readers eyes from glazing over.

I think choosing which of my 700+ screenshots to post might have been the longest part of the process.

EDIT:

@Foxy-Goddess-Scotchy

It was already a bit much. Thus the "I promise I won't post anything this long again" proviso.

It sounds like there's a fair bit to dig into with that one. For me, I think most of the sifting was due to the fact that I was already a fan of the series previously, and the changes gave me a lot to process.

The name is a reference to the city, and the names of several of the noble families in the region reference characters from the play King Lear.

In terms of political organization, the Alliance is more interesting than the other two civilizations, which are fairly plain-jane monarchies. Each independent noble family's territory is considered its own region, but they've formed a loose republic to help facilitate trade, mutual defense agreements, and deal with issues that crop up across various territories.

My plan was (and still is) to do a lesbian Byleth run for Golden Deer, a straight male run for Blue Lions, a gay male run for Black Eagles, and a het female run for the Church route. With that said, I actually find I'm really liking Dimitri, so I kind of wish I'd gone with a girl for Blue Lions so I could romance him.

Fem Byleth in my previous run romanced Dorothea, the commoner street urchin who was eventually lifted out of poverty when an opera company employed her as a songstress. She wasn't one of my students by default, but I appreciated her frank nature, light flirtatiousness, and desire to see people as equals, calling out the class divisions between nobility and commoners, with-crest and without-crest, too, as the despicable nonsense that it is.

Thankfully, unlike Fates, this game goes out of its way not to be creepy, so when you do eventually romance them, they're adults and former students. Dorothea was... 25, I believe... when she got together with Byleth at the end of the game.

One carry over from previous Fire Emblems is how, after each run, you get a sequence where the game tells you how each surviving character lived the rest of their lives, who married who, etc. I've always enjoyed the feature of the series, as it brings a sense of finality to proceedings, but since I was especially fond of the cast in this game, I really liked finding out how their lives came together after the fires of war ceased.

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I appreciate you taking the time to read such a long post.

Great! I was hoping my explanation of the plot/characters/setting/mechanics would give something of an idea of what the game is like to people who haven't played it. Fire Emblem isn't really as accessible as a lot of Nintendo's other properties, and, while I do think this game makes a lot of changes that opens it up to non-hardcore players, there's still a LOT going on. It's easily one of their most non-typical series with its focus on character development, politics-heavy plotlines, and (comparatively) complex gameplay.

Don't get me wrong: I think the divine pulse mechanic is probably a great addition to the series. And I certainly don't miss resetting a map I've almost completely mastered because a strong enemy got a lucky crit on one of my units and killed him/her. I just think IS needs to work it into the structure of the game better. It feels like it was bolted on at the last minute, but being able to rewind time and undo decisions fundamentally changes the feel of the game.

For one thing (I don't recall if I mentioned this), recent Emblems, including this one, feature a casual mode that makes it where defeated units don't die anyway. But that feels like way overkill when combined with a time-rewinding mechanic. I'd love to see them remove casual mode entirely (because, IMO, it completely alters the way you play the game; FE games aren't meant to be played with expendable pawns like Advance Wars, for example) and just alter the number of charges you get with the divine pulse. Casual mode could have unlimited divine pulses, whereas higher difficulties could make them extremely limited. Either way, the player would still have to think about their movements, even with unlimited pulses. It'd be win/win.

It's a good idea, but I think the game needs to be designed more with it in mind.

It's not a regional thing: they wouldn't work for me, either.

I replaced the links, so go ahead and give them a listen if you're still interested.

It's disappointing, but they're still getting better with it. The only other game to have same-sex marriage options was Fire Emblem: Fates, and your only gay male option in that was a crazy dude who gets off inflicting pain on others, and I believe, since that game had multiple versions, the lone gay and lesbian marriage options were version exclusive. So, relatively nice and normal male classmate and two questionable (in the sense of: "do they even count?) older options are an improvement on the gay male side, and it's WAY better on the lesbian side.

But yeah, hopefully they continue to improve with this.

Ahaha, I hadn't thought about it. Might just be a cute referential easter egg. In this case, it's visual shorthand that tells you how many uses your battalion has during a battle. I believe full HP is the complete Triforce shape.

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Ok, so I finished up the main campaign of The Witcher 3 (on Switch) and I figured, since this is cutting edge and a brand new game, the world needs a review asap. Also, I have played nothing else since the end of October pretty much so wanted to clear it out.

Firstly, to give context of what I played - I put about 75 hours into the game, completed all main stories, all sidequests that I found (I am sure I missed a few) as well as all Witcher contracts. I have not played the two expansion sets yet and I finished the game at Level 37 I think. I also played on standard difficulty, on the Switch.

Since I played on Switch, I will not bother to focus on graphics etc. too much since I know that graphically it is better on other platforms. I did originally start it on PS4 so have some basis for comparison. Suffice to say that it ran rather well on my Switch though I would have some crashes that occurred every 3-4 hours that required the game to be restarted. Never really resulted in any major time being lost and did not always occur during 'heavy' moments. It did it both docked and handheld and seemed to be sometimes when you were riding or running into an area of the world that was loading in the background.

The game itself is a big open world game and those games have a habit of putting me off as a time starved gamer. In the last few years I have played HZD, Skyrim, BOTW and AC: Odyssey and I find that they take me months to finish in some cases and I need a compelling reason to get into it.

I will admit that I struggled at first with The Witcher 3. You have a sort of mini area of the map that you start in and this is really an extended tutorial where you get lots of types of side missions, discoverables, contracts and then story missions that level you up. I feel the game is at its most obtuse in this opening area. Levels and levellling really do make a big difference in the early part of the game. If you don't prepare and blithely go into combat or missions that you aren't skilled up for, it will be difficult. Depending on your time, you can spend anywhere between 5-8 hours in this area but it really is only after this that the game starts to open up.

This brings me on to one of the areas of the game I found slightly inconsistent and that is levelling. Enemies and missions scale to a certain extent but not entirely. There is a recommended level for taking on missions and contracts. It is possible to undertake levels that are a bit above you and that gives you more XP I believe. At the same time, overlevel too much and the reward is far less. I found this more a pain at the start of the game - after the tutorial area, I found nearly all contracts and a lot of side missions were too high for me to start which made me think I was missing in content and forcing me to do story missions. However, you get more XP for story missions so it actually made sense for to do those first and come back to the side missions later. As the game progressed, I then was in danger of becoming overlevelled, in fact I was for a lot of the story missions. At the same time, I found I kept needing to stop to do side misisons or contracts at a point when I was slightly underlevelled or else they became too easy or gave no real XP. Now I am very poor at learning game systems so I may have been playing it wrong but I did find myself on one area of the map and having to fast travel back to an old area to do a contract because I was in the right XP zone.

What I therefore found was that I found the game tougher at the very start and then easier as it continued. Of course, I could have upped the difficulty if I wanted but to be honest, I was enjoying the story and the flow too much to want to slow it down. Overall, I quite liked the levelling up in that you have limited slots to upgrade your character so you do have to choose your build. You can swap them out but you can't equip everything at the same time. I concentrated on a few signs and mainly sword combat. I felt like I had developed my character in a way I wanted to play and I have seen online lots of variation which works equally well. The other RPG elements didn't do as well for me. There are weapons and upgrades and you need to explore to get the best stuff but I also found that by about mid way, I had good weapons and limited reasons to upgrade them much more. I also found little use for the alchemy and crafting because often. This might have something more to do with the difficulty level. At normal and once levelled up sufficiently, I found that I could get through almost all contracts without needing oils, potions etc. I also found that I was always missing an ingredient whenever I wanted something specific even though I was a big collector of resources. Of course, this is also tied to exploration - the most you explore the more you will get out of the game. It is littered with question marks on the map that signify treasure, monsters, little trinkets or enemies with rewards. I only really did these if I stumbled on them though you could, and I know a few who have, spent ages going through all these.

Combat is, in my mind, a weaker point though it is still fun. It is a semi darks souls feel, in that movement, parrying and selecting when to attack is the name of the game. Hacking and slashing will get you hurt and healing is not automatic in fights and you'll need to run away or use consumables to bolster health during a fight. The use of magical abilities or signs works well in combat and again, you can tailor a fighting style to suit how you play. It is a bit clunky and not as smooth as some games but when you do a fight well, it is pretty satisfying to cleave through some enemies.

The map itself is open world but split into several distinct areas. You can always summon a horse wherever you are which I like, since it means you can navigate freely though the horse controls are a little tank like compared to something like AC:Odyssey (which aped a lot of TW3). Traversing the world is fun and there is also a lot of fast travel points, which to be honest, I used if I was retreading familiar ground. If you do use fast travel a lot though, you will miss a lot of world details and the chance of side missions or characters etc. I have no doubt I have missed some points and missions as I did not 100% explore the map but hey, more to do later if I return.

So I have mainly talked about the mechanics and my niggles but I then want to talk about a few ares where I feel the game truly shined. Firstly, the world. The world itself is fantastical with magic and monsters but it is centred on a few realistic late medieval realm. Peasants are uneducated, poor and often desperate. Nobles via for power and kings wage bloody wars that leave destruction and bodies in their wake. This is really hammered home in the first area. Compared to something such as Skyrim, their are no real thundering vistas accompanied by epic scores. You are more likely to be in a swamp, knee deep in monsters and dead bodies with a sadly haunting melody. This does, in my mind, give the world a unique feel. There is goodness in the world, but mainly there is desperation, evil and a sense that everyone is struggling to survive. People do horrible things in this world, and you are most likely to be tricked. In turn, you can choose how to behaver and this is something else that I liked - there are no obvious binary choices in most conversations and stories. Yes you can be harsher or harder on people or be virtuous but it also doesn't feel like you are being goodie Geralt or baddie Geralt as many RPGs do. The story does branch with multiple endings and outcomes which is great and sometimes your choice can have unintended side effects - being good doesn't always mean the best outcome however it does shape the world and the story behind you. The main storyline is pretty good - maybe not the best every but it moves at a good pace and you have some input on its course. It is more in the side missions that the game shines the best. What appears to be a typical fetch sidequest can branch into a far bigger more complicated story. Some are funny, some are very very gruesome and horrific. There is also a romance subplot where you can choose your way through a love triangle (team Yennefer here). These non mandatory stories and characters also have satisfying subplots that are actually addressed throughout the game, even minor characters have some sort of closure and impact on the ending you see. There are subplots about mad kings, a coven of sorceresses, religious persecutions, evil witches and trade wars. There is even a murder myster thrown in for good measure at one point. The game also fits into a larger narrative and universe, some of which are in the previous 2 games and some of which are in the original books. I actually liked that it essentially starts a story half way through and while you know what is going on, you feel like you are part of a larger world and story which has, for me at least, encouraged me to read the books and check out Henry Cavill's abs.

While the narrative isn't immune from the struggles of large open worlds (where everything seems time critical but you can still spend 4 days digging up treasure and helping locals which NPC's just sit and wait for you) it is probably one of the best implementations of story in an open world game I have seen. Lastly, I can see why gamers seem to love CDPR - this is a game they want you to play and enjoy. There is a lot of love in the world and a celebration when you play it. Just the sound that plays when you finish a mission is addictive and you are rewarded. Also, the game is very large but not really in a time wasting way. There are some cookie cutter elements as you explore but they can also go off in random directions which is, in my mind, a million miles away from the Ubisoft model of huge worlds with standard tasks to do in every area again and again. Anyway, if you like adult fantasy and lots of things to do in a game, I would recommend The Witcher 3. I'll defo go back for the two large DLC story expansions once a bit of time has past.