Fire Emblem: Three Houses Review
Buy the game here: https://www.nintendo.co.uk/Games/Nintendo-Switch/Fire-Emblem-Three-Houses-1175482.html
Introduction
It’s only been a few weeks and I’m already talking about Three Houses again. Expect many more Three Houses articles from now on as I’m borderline addicted to it at this point. Nevertheless, I’ll try to do my best to give an unbiased, fair view of the game. As much as I hate to admit it, it’s far from being perfect and there are lots of issues that drag it down. So far I’ve spent around 100 hours or so completing my first playthrough and subsequently attempting to bruteforce my way through Maddening Mode and I’m still not sure whether I’m qualified enough to do this game justice. But I’m going to try anyway! Otherwise I doubt I’m ever going to finish this review. Anyway, with that said, let’s skip the formalities and go straight into the review.
Old and New
Three Houses keeps the same turn-based permadeath gameplay and adds in some unique twists that help to make it more engaging. You’ve got the same old units that were in previous games. Swift Pegasus Knights, sturdy but slow Armored Knights, glass cannon Mages and weak but lifesaving Bishops are all here. You can still warp skip or turtle your way along. There are still numerous different terrain types each with their own bonuses. But Three Houses has a number of additions on top of these well-established mechanics that I personally found to be quite welcome.
The biggest of these, quite literally, is the new Monster enemy types. These are huge units that take up multiple tiles on the map, usually four but sometimes even more. They are usually strong minibosses or the final boss of a map and can be difficult to take down. Not only do they have impressively high stats, but they also have several health bars. You can’t just have your strongest unit defeat it in a single hit because damage doesn’t carry over between different health bars. Each tile it occupies also has a barrier that reduces damage until it is broken by a powerful attack. On top of that, every other turn they will attempt to perform a special attack that does AOE damage in a huge area. All of these unique traits combine to force you make the most of all your units and have them work as a team.
This is where the next new addition to Three Houses’ combat comes in: Gambits. Early in the game, you get the option to hire Battalions. These are groups of generic NPC’s that you can assign to your units. Once you’ve assigned a Battalion to a unit, they can use its special ability, a Gambit. These have a variety of effects depending on the Battalion. Some damage units and stun them for a turn. Some deal AOE damage in a large area. Others boost your nearby unit’s movement speed so they can travel huge distances. Battalions and Gambits give you a lot of freedom to strategise and customise your army to an impressive degree, and one of their main uses is on Monsters. Gambits can break a Monster’s barriers and draw their attention away when they’re charging up their special attack so you can reduce the damage they do to your units. I had a lot of fun experimenting with different Gambits and fighting powerful Monsters, and I’d be disappointed if these mechanics didn’t return in future instalments.
Three Houses also sees the return of Combat Arts, first introduced in Fire Emblem Echoes. When you attack with any weapon except magic tomes, you have the option to use a variety of Combat Arts. These special abilities use up a larger amount of your weapon’s durability than your regular attack, but are also stronger and more versatile. Some simply increase your damage like Tempest Lance while others are ‘super effective’ against certain enemy types like Grounder against Flying enemies. Some even have special effects like Fading Blow which moves your unit 1 space backwards after being used. At first your students will only have one Combat Art, if any, but as they level up and improve their skills, they will gain access to more.
Personally, I think Combat Arts are a great addition and I’m glad they returned from Fire Emblem Echoes. They give you more options in battle and keep the combat interesting for a long time. Some are predictably better and more useful than others but there aren’t many that don’t have a single use case. In strategy games such as Fire Emblem, I think it’s important that you’re given a lot of freedom in the tactics you can use, and Combat Arts support that. They do a lot to stop the game from getting stale through multiple 50+ hour playthroughs.
Also returning from Fire Emblem Echoes is Mila’s Turnwheel, though in Three Houses it is called “Divine Pulse”. While the name is different, mechanically it is the same. At the start of Chapter 2, you get the ability to turn back time to a previous point in the battle and undo any mistakes you made. This mechanic was controversial for obvious reasons. Being able to undo your mistakes to save your units from permadeath sounds like it gives way too much power to the player on paper. The Fire Emblem series is known for being difficult precisely because one mistake can cost you your favourite unit’s life, so Divine Pulse seems like it would make the game too easy.
In my opinion, I think the mechanic itself is fine. Even veterans of the series lose a unit or two to a dumb mistake or an unlucky 2% critical hit. Permadeath is still scary and changes the way you play even with access to Divine Pulse. It’s mostly a last resort for dealing with extraordinarily bad luck or a lack of foresight. What isn’t fine however, is how many uses of the mechanic the game gives you. Early in the game, you’re fairly limited, only having access to 3 Pulses in a battle. But as you get further into the game, you get upgrades that increases the charges to around a dozen. This is far too many for anything but Maddening Difficulty and on Normal Difficulty, I found it trivialised the game to the point where I could spam pulses without care any time I made a tiny error. At most, you should only get access to six Divine Pulses on any Difficulty but Maddening. This would keep the game challenging while not punishing you too harshly for making the odd mistake.
Difficulty, while we’re on the subject, is one of the things Three Houses struggles with the most. I don’t consider myself to have much skill at all when it comes to strategy games, but Normal Difficulty was still too easy for me regardless. I only came close to getting a game over once on Chapter 6 and didn’t even get down to less than 2 Divine Pulses on any other level. On Normal Difficulty, the game also gives you the opportunity to infinitely grind, and I had to go out of my way to ensure my units weren’t all massively overleveled. Maddening on the other hand is outright unfair. Enemies are almost always around 5–10 levels above your units, have inflated stats and utilise strong skills such as Poison and Pass. Many people can’t even get past the mock battle in Chapter 1 and Chapter 13 has become somewhat infamous for having the capacity to softlock you if you don’t prepare beforehand.
Most of this wouldn’t be an issue if you could freely change the difficulty, but Three Houses doesn’t allow you to do this for some reason. You can lower the difficulty, but you can’t raise it. I started a game on Normal thinking I’d still have a somewhat tough time and by the time I realised it wasn’t going to get harder and I couldn’t change the difficulty, I was already several hours in. It’s for this reason that I recommend you start the game on at least Hard. Even if you find it too difficult, you can always lower the difficulty. But you can’t do the opposite if you start the game on Normal and find it too easy.
The final big change I want to talk about is the unprecedented freedom you’re given to customise your units. There are close to 50 different classes and rather than units being rigidly limited to 1 or a few, every unit can become almost any other class. Characters have their specialities obviously. You’ll have a harder time making Dedue a Priest than an Armoured Knight but there’s nothing stopping you from doing so regardless. So long as you train your units in the appropriate stats and skills they can be almost anything you want them to be. This gives you the opportunity to experiment and try out dozens, if not hundreds of different tactics and strategies. It almost feels sandboxy in nature, especially on the easier difficulties where you don’t have to worry about optimising your army as much.
Four Houses?
One of the main selling points of Three Houses was that you could pick from, well, Three Houses that each have their own story and campaigns. Is this the case? Well, yes and no. The game is split into two parts, the Academy Phase and the War Phase. The main story and maps of the Academy Phase are exactly the same no matter which House you choose, and if you plan to do all four routes, you’ll have to do the same set of maps four times. Yes, you read that right. Despite being named “Three Houses” there are actually four different routes with the Black Eagles having a split between two routes at the end of Chapter 11. While your units and some of the cutscenes in the Academy Phase are different, it’s still similar enough to get repetitive and burn you out quickly.
The Academy Phase also seems to heavily favour the Blue Lion House in terms of story. The villains in Chapter 3 and 5 have strong ties and connections to two of the students in your House as does one of the recurring villains. Doing these Chapters without the additional character conflict can feel out of place on subsequent playthroughs if you do the Blue Lions first. Even if only two or three of the maps in the Academy Phase differed depending on House such as those two I mentioned, it would do a lot to make the Academy Phase more different, interesting and personal.
As for the War Phase? Well, it is different, but not as much as you might expect. Depending on the Route, as many as half or more of the Chapters are shared. Verdant Wind and Silver Snow in particular are almost the same map wise apart from Silver Snow missing the Battle at Gronder Field and having a different final boss. While the story and dialogue is different, the major events and maps are very similar. I understand that due to the scale of the game, having each route be their own completely unique campaigns is a lot to ask for, but I still would have liked it if at least half of the maps of each route were different. Chapter 13–16 are the exact same in three of the four routes and coming right out of the Academy Phase which is entirely the same no matter the route, it gets really easy to get burned out.
This is also a problem with the game’s extra “Auxiliary Battles”. You get multiple opportunities each month to do optional battles for sidequests or just to grind and level up your units. I wasn’t expecting the maps for this to be amazing or anything, but there isn’t enough variety for these either. In my first playthrough, I probably saw a total of 3 or 4 different Auxiliary Battle maps and often got the same one twice or more in a row. Some people have pointed out that the maps are the most detailed visually in the series and it’s pretty cool how you can zoom in and move your units around the map like a Third Person character. However, this doesn’t change the fact that Three Houses reuses the same maps far too much and many of them aren’t that memorable or all that interesting.
What also doesn’t help is that many of the Auxiliary Battle maps are used in Paralogues as well. Paralogues are side quests that have a story focus on one or two of the units in your army. You help them defend their territory and investigate legends among other things and they develop as a character as a result. While it’s a shame a lot of these reuse Auxiliary Battle maps, they still manage to be interesting thanks to most of them having unique objectives different from most in the main story. You may have to race Allied units to take down a commander first, defeat a unique monster, defend an area and complete various other unconventional objectives. For doing these, you’ll be rewarded with powerful weapons that are often most suited to the unit(s) the Paralogue involves. I found the Paralogues to be a welcome distraction from the more monotonous parts of the main story despite the map issue and almost every character having one means you’ll almost certainly run into new ones on subsequent playthroughs.
Persona Emblem
Probably the biggest new feature in Three Houses is the life simulator. While you’ll spend around half the game fighting strategic turn-based battles, you’ll spend the other half exploring Garreg Mach Monastery, the main setting in the world of Fódlan. Fire Emblem Fates did something similar, allowing you to customise your own castle where you could interact with your units and use various facilities, but Three Houses does it a little differently. You can’t customise Garreg Mach, but it’s much bigger and more expansive than Fates Castles were. All of the students and other characters can be interacted with and have something different to say every month based on story events. Each of them has their own places they frequent. Felix can often be found at the Training Grounds for example. The architecture is impressive and generic NPC’s wander its halls as you move around. Garreg Mach feels a lot more alive than Fates Castles ever did and although customisation would be nice, it’s understandable why it wasn’t included.
You’re also given a limited amount of ‘Activity Points’ to use on the Monastery’s facilities. Some activities such as fishing and gardening can be done without exhausting them but most can’t. You can eat lunch with your students, enter them into fighting tournaments, invite them to tea, cook stat boosting food and do choir practice with them. Doing these activities with them earns various rewards such as gold and increases your support points with whoever you interact with. At first, exploring the Monastery and doing these activities is fun. You get to know the characters and eventually earn support conversations with them which I’ll get to later. However, as the game goes on, this becomes more and more of a chore.
When you first start the game you only get 1 Activity Point each week. As you do activities you earn experience to increase your ‘Professor Level’ which rewards you with more weekly Activity Points. Eventually you end up with an absolutely ridiculous 10 Activity Points per week which is just far too much. When your Activity Points are low, you have to think more carefully about what activities would be best to do and who would be most beneficial to invite to participate. When you pass 5 Activity Points a week however, activities start to have less weight to them and you don’t have to think about how you spend your time much at all. By the last few chapters, I was using all my Activity Points more out of obligation than anything. I’d done everything I wanted to do and memorised every character’s lunch quote but I felt obligated to spend every single one regardless.
Pretty much all of these activities increase your ‘Support Points’ with the person or people you invite. Once a certain Support Point threshold is reached between two characters, they are able to rank up their support through a simple cutscene, again like the Social Links in Persona. Not all characters have a support with each other, and while some supports are lengthy with 5+ ranks, others only have 2. This is understandable as even with those reductions, there are just over 300 character support combinations, all of which are fully voice acted. It’s an impressive feat just how much work was put into the characters and their supports and how the voice acting manages to stay consistently good throughout with only one or two exceptions.
However, as you might expect, the writing quality of these supports varies quite heavily. Some like Felix and Seteth, Lorenz and Marianne and Dedue and Ingrid are complex, interesting and/or heartwarming. Some like Lysithea and Felix are dull and exacerbate character stereotypes and some are straight up awful like Leonie and Byleth. Most are just okay, fun little distractions to break up the tension between battles. Despite the flaws with the Support system, I can’t imagine the game without it, and it’s responsible for some truly great story and character moments.
Three Sides To Every Story
But how does the game’s main, overarching story hold up? I’m happy to say that it holds up really, really well. The story and world-building of Three Houses is extremely well-done. The continent of Fódlan feels large and fleshed out without being overly complex or lore heavy. Most of it is split up into three Nations which each correspond with the three Houses you choose between: The Adrestian Empire, The Holy Kingdom of Faerghus and the Leicester Alliance. Each of these Nations has their own issues to deal with that are explored through each of the routes. The Alliance has to deal with the turmoil and disagreements that arise from being a republic and the aggressive neighbouring Kingdom of Almyra. The Kingdom has to deal with the chaos caused by the assassination of their King and the subsequent racism and hostility towards those held responsible. The Empire has to deal with its diminishing strength after parts of it split into the Kingdom and the Alliance and increasing opposition to the Church of Seiros, the greatest religious power in Fódlan.
On top of this, these nations are split into several smaller factions or houses that also have their own issues to deal with. This also carries over to the students you teach, many of which are Nobles from these houses. House Ordelia of the Alliance suffers at the hands of the Empire after lending aid to an Imperial House that tried to defect. Without spoiling much, this causes Lysithea, Ordelia’s heir to work extremely hard in the hopes she can give her parents a peaceful life. Sylvain is the heir to House Gautier, which prizes those with Crests above others heavily as Crest-bearers are needed to defend the borders of their domain from the warrior clans of Sreng. This causes Sylvain to think people only care about his Crest and he becomes an unfaithful flirt as a coping mechanism.
Crests are another new mechanic in Three Houses but I neglected to mention them earlier as I thought it would be better to talk about them in this section. This mechanic is great example of how Three Houses intertwines its story with its gamplay. Most Noble units and some Commoner units have a Crest, a hereditary power passed down from heroes of old. These activate randomly, providing stat boosts or other special benefits that give you a slight edge in battle. Crests are an intrinsic part of the continent of Fódlan. Nobles are known to heavily favour heirs born with Crests to varying degrees or even adopt Commoners lucky enough to have one. They are a bargaining chip for both political and military gain and both the main story and supports explore them and the effect they have. While some characters are indifferent, others such as Sylvain, Lysithea and Marianne have their entire lives affected and ruled by them. Crests are responsible for some of the most interesting and unique characters and scenarios in the game and have uses outside of lore as a game mechanic also.
There are lots of other little touches that tie gameplay with the story and characters and I appreciate the extra mile to which they went with this. This is most evident in your unit’s personal skills. These are unique skills specific to them that no other unit has. Sylvain is a womaniser so he gets an attack and defence boost when adjacent to female units. Linhardt is lazy, so he recovers health when he waits instead of taking action. Lysithea is a hard worker, so she gets double the skill experience in battle. Certain characters also have unique interactions when meeting in battle. These are only small touches but they help to make the world and characters feel alive.
Three Houses also has a large number of cutscenes. Most of them are done in-game, but some of them are fully animated. Both of them are executed pretty well. Each chapter starts with a cutscene of a tapestry along with a narration which goes over what each of the months means in Fódlan. These are great additions and I looked forward to them after each chapter. The other animated cutscenes of in-game events look beautiful but suffer from noticeably bad FPS. I’m not usually one to care or even take notice, but it’s bad enough to put a damper on the experience.
Finally, I’d like to talk about the game’s music. It isn’t good. No, it’s absolutely phenomenal. Three Houses has one of the best game soundtracks I’ve heard in a long time. There are over 100 tracks and almost every single one of them is great in its own way. There are at least a dozen which I’d call one of my favourite video game tracks of all time. Fódlan Winds, Indomitable Will, Unfulfilled, Tearing Through Heaven, Chasing Daybreak and of course, God Shattering Star. If you like games that have great music, you’ll probably like Three Houses a lot as it carries the game hard in places.
Summary
Three Houses is a game that has the highest of highs, but also suffers from a lack of consistency. When it’s good, it’s really good. Pivotal story moments like the Battle At Gronder Field, reuniting with your House Leader after the Timeskip and the final battle of the Golden Deer route are executed extremely well, and are accompanied by what is arguably one of the best game soundtracks ever composed. Almost every single character has great voice acting and has great writing. The freedom it gives you to customise your army is liberating and gives the game a fun sandbox feel at times. The new gameplay additions like Gambits keep the game fresh and provide you with tons of strategic options.
But in between these great moments are a number of tedious, half-baked ones. The same maps are reused an alarming amount and lack engaging traits and gimmicks. Exploring the Monastery devolves from a fun activity into a slog. The Difficulty Modes are unbalanced, especially Maddening which feels like it hasn’t been playtested at all at times. Parts of the game feel unfinished with shared cutscenes that feel out of place on certain routes and one route that lacks a lot of animated cutscenes altogether. Important issues on one route are barely addressed in another.
Three Houses won’t be for everyone, and I doubt many will even play two of the routes let alone all four thanks to the issues I mentioned. But one route alone is more than worth the price of admission in my opinion. £50 will still get you around 50 hours of (mostly) quality playtime, even if you only do one route, and if you can get past the weaker points of the game you can get far more. The sandboxy nature of the unit customisation will also please people who enjoy strategy games with lots of freedom of choice. I haven’t been as impressed and obsessed with a game like Three Houses in a long time.
Pros:
- Combat is tactical and complex, but simple to understand and fun.
- Gambits, Combat Arts and Monsters are all great new additions to the regular Fire Emblem formula and spice up the combat even further.
- You’re given lots of freedom to experiment with your units and try new strategies. While there is probably a ‘best’ way to build your army, there aren’t really any bad ones.
- The soundtrack is absolutely phenomenal. There are at least a dozen tracks that I’d consider among my favourites in gaming.
- Has full voice acting. All of the voice actors give a great performance that makes the characters feel alive and out of all of them, Mercedes was the only one I didn’t really like.
- Pretty much every character is well-written, likeable and fun to interact with.
- The world is fleshed out very well and the story is solid throughout with some extremely well-executed and memorable moments.
Cons:
- First Act is the same for all Houses and the Second Act is different but still too similar, Verdant Wind and Silver Snow in particular.
- The same maps are reused far too much, especially for Auxiliary Battles.
- Exploring the Monastery is fun at first, but becomes a chore by the end of a playthrough. Activity Points should be limited more.
- Support Conversation writing quality varies a lot between characters.
- Normal Difficulty is far too easy and you’re given far too many Divine Pulses by Mid Game while Maddening Mode is extremely unbalanced to the point of being able to softlock you.
Presentation: 8/10 While the graphics aren’t the best, they’re stylish bright and colourful and the world building cutscenes between chapters breathe life into the game and keep it engaging. As long as you don’t mind bad FPS, the animated cutscenes are good too.
Gameplay: 7/10 So long as you don’t hate strategy, you’ll have a lot of fun with Three Houses’ combat. Exploring the Monastery won’t be for everyone and the game struggles with repetitiveness and unbalanced difficulty, but most people will probably have a lot of fun regardless.
Content: 8/10 Your first playthrough alone will probably take you around 50 hours if you don’t rush, longer on the harder difficulties and if you grind. There are four different routes and while there are a lot of similarities between them, it’s still amazing just how much bang you get for your buck.
Story: 8/10 Overall, the main story is solid and well-written. World-building is done very well. Most of the characters are at the very least entertaining even if they’re not complex. Writing quality can vary heavily with support conversations.
Sound & Music: 10/10 The soundtrack is huge and there are numerous tracks that could be called some of the best in gaming. The English Dub is also one of the best I’ve seen and arguably better than the Japanese. All the actors do a great job bringing their characters to life with only one or two exceptions.
