Fire Emblem: Three Houses Review

A House Divided

Fire Emblem: Three Houses, the latest entry in the storied strategy franchise from Nintendo, is going to be an incredibly divisive game — and perhaps aptly so, as it itself is a very divided game.

I’m not going to spend too much time here talking about mechanical changes and upgrades the the combat and strategy layer. It plays very much like Fire Emblem Echoes: Shadows of Valentia — meaning that you can rewind time, and the weapon triangle is barely present. Other reviews will handle the detailed breakdown of mechanics. I’ll speed past it to say that the game is very Fire Emblem (a good thing,) very easy (good depending on who you ask,) and that I wish I could permanently toggle on the enemy attack range view. I assume that will come in a patch because people will want it. At least Intelligent Systems has promised that a harder difficulty than Hard is coming in a patch.

Instead, I want to talk about the school system. Your character, Byleth, is a new professor at Garreg Mach Monastery’s Officer’s Academy, teaching one of three classes — Black Eagles, Blue Lions, or Golden Deer. This choice is crucial, and will determine just how the game plays out. More on that later. You spend a lot of the game teaching students and running around the monastery grounds interacting with characters and points of interest. For the first few hours, it’s easy to feel overwhelmed by how many things you can spend your time doing, especially since the game limits the number of time-passing actions you can take per day. That said, over time I fell myself falling into a pattern: once a month I’d talk to everyone to get their new dialogue for that month, then I’d go to other professors to train Byleth (almost the only way you can teach Byleth,) then spend the remaining actions shoveling down food with anybody that wouldn’t hate it.

What’s interesting is that at first everything feels fresh and new — you sing in choir practice with your students, invite them to eat their favorite dish or cook with them, do unlabeled fetch quests (there are hundreds and most are meaningless,) go fishing, or go gardening. The machine becomes incredibly apparent pretty early on though: characters really only have one line each per interaction type, unless paired with a specific other character (in which they have only one exchange.) Eating is an easy way to build your bond (support link) with other characters. If I’m trying to build a bond with both Dorothea and Petra, from the Black Eagles class, it’s to my benefit to eat with them every time I’m exploring the monastery — meaning the same dialogue. You see the stat boosts for each thing, which led me to game what would get me things the fastest. I found myself removing their layer of abstraction and instead trying to min/max the stat sheet, which…at that point, just give me the stat sheet.

But that’s what teaching is! For students other than Byleth, you can teach your students to build their weapon proficiency. Any character can build up any stat, though some are predisposed to like or dislike certain weapon types. You set a focus for each character and they study on their own throughout the week, and you can manually instruct a few students each week. This requires they have Motivation (another meter to keep track of,) and introduces RNG to the stat sheet: think of it as a dice roll to see if their stats go up less than expected, as expected, or more than expected. Almost all of the gameplay that isn’t combat related or on the main story progression is essentially a GUI for a stat sheet. It’s a good GUI! I had a lot of fun with it when I was playing it my first time! The problem was, towards the end of my first run I started getting impatient with how slow things were for simple tasks, as I no longer needed to set characters in new directions — I just wanted them to execute my plans. You can let the game teach automatically, but it almost completely ignores your preferences and just randomly teaches students whatever the game wants, which isn’t useful at all. In subsequent playthroughs (which the game strongly encourages, seemingly,) I had way less patience for the surrounding fluff.

The other set of actions you can undertake in Three Houses are to build your Support links between characters, a returning feature from recent entries. Characters that fight together in battle or bond in daily activities will get new cutscenes of them interacting that you can view. The cutscenes are usually good, funny, and surprisingly queer, but I have two key issues with them.

1. They completely and totally de-emphasized relationships, regardless of whether characters act flirty with each other or not. The only character that can S-Rank (marry another character,) is Byleth. Byleth can only S-Rank at the VERY end of the game, after the final boss, which yields one short cutscene and a piece of art per character. No other characters can form relationships.
2. The contents of the support conversations may be incredibly context-reliant, but there aren’t different supports for different contexts. An example: as I’ll discuss later in the piece, and has been marketed, the game is split into two sections, separated by a five year time skip. In my first playthrough, two characters hadn’t seen each other during those five years, and so the support conversation made sense — they were talking about where they’ve been during that time. In another playthrough, I had those same characters in my army, and canonically they had stuck together for those years. They had the same support as if they hadn’t. It really took me out of the experience and didn’t make sense.

I will say that building supports with characters from outside of your class is a good shortcut to getting them to join your class, so it’s not as if they’re not useful in this game, but they can only join your class in Part One, pre-skip.

I’m now going to talk about the second half of the game, which is somewhat spoilery as it talks about the game’s structure and other things that Nintendo has not officially said in the marketing. I will do my best to not spoil specific plot points. If you want to stop reading at this point, the summary of the section is that I think the second half of the game is extremely inferior to the first half, and the fact that some of the routes in this game are bad and have bad endings is an incredible disservice to a game about choosing routes.

MINOR SPOILERS FOLLOW!

Once you enter Part Two, separated by the Five Year Skip, the routes truly and fully diverge. The first half of the game is almost identical between each house, which is frustrating for replays, but Part Two is pretty different. There are four routes in the game (one of the houses splits into two routes,) and are of differing lengths and qualities. For example, a vague description of the house that splits:

One of the two splitting routes has 24 chapters (each chapter is a month of gameplay,) with many animated cutscenes, plot surprises, and a somewhat satisfying (if not fully satisfying) ending. Character motivations are explored and you learn a lot about the state of the world.

The other is 18 chapters, suddenly ends, kills major, major characters without even a cutscene (just a still image and voice acting,) does not explore the world, and doesn’t even address major plot points.

They both branch from the same house.

One of the other houses also has an ending similar to the second described structure, and does NOT split — choosing that house just won’t give you a fully satisfying ending in the same way as another route.

This leads to the question — does the game expect you to play all four routes to get the full story? Well, the game DOES support a New Game+ feature that allows you to unlock some things earlier on subsequent playthroughs, but it doesn’t do things like skip tutorials. As I said earlier, the first half of the game is almost identical across all routes as well, so it’s not like you’re going on different missions for the first number of hours (Part One took me 18 hours my first playthrough; my second, it took me 9.)

But if the game doesn’t expect you to play it 3 or 4 times, why are major, major story beats only alluded to in some routes, or not even mentioned in others? One of the characters, the Death Knight, only has his identity revealed in a missable Paralogue that’s unlocked if you have a high enough support with one of the characters from one of the houses. There are enough really frustrating story structure decisions around this game to leave a sour taste in my mouth after sitting on it for a few weeks. When I played my first playthrough and (luckily) got a satisfying (to me) ending, I was very positive on this game. When I started replaying it, my opinions changed dramatically.

Part Two keeps many of the same game mechanics as the first half (monastery exploration, etc.) but removes characters that aren’t in your army, meaning that the huge space becomes incredibly empty and uninteresting to navigate through. Thank goodness for fast travel. It’s a weird irony that the more you’re allowed to do in a given week as you get more activity points, the fewer people there are to do things with.

This is not to say the game doesn’t have great qualities! The characters are mostly well-designed and well written (if I don’t like a character it’s not because I think they’re a bad character, I just don’t like their well-defined personality,) the lore of the world is rich, and combat is fluid and dynamic with many, many options at your disposal. The music is a little sub-par by series standards (but decent by comparison to the industry average,) and the English voice acting is by and large pretty excellent (with some problematic voice actors aside.)

I’ll be honest though, my feelings are really conflicted. Did I have a lot of great time with this game? Yes. But is the thing I remember going to be the frustrations of the story? Also yes. There’s also a lot of weird jankiness to the game itself that is rare in Nintendo-published games that I hope gets patched out. You can walk through pillars and certain other objects in the game world for some reason; characters walk through walls; in combat animations, some characters run away into the ground, etc.

Plus, the story DLC isn’t planned until next year, and I have a really good idea of what it’s going to be about and I’m very frustrated that they don’t really address it in the game itself. Key word: slither.

Addendum

If you want to know which houses have decent routes and which don’t, read below in ROT13 (rot13.com). That said, this spoils which house splits, so fair warning:

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