Now Playing: Fire Emblem: Three Houses

Because I (mostly) enjoyed Fire Emblem on the GBA (via NSO) I decided to pick up and try a more recent entry in the long running series – Fire Emblem: Three Houses. Once you’ve chosen your character type and played through a short tutorial battle, you’re given the choice of ‘teaching’ one of the three titular Houses in a sort-of-but-not-quite military school.

Well, it’s actually a ‘monastery’ which is part of a Church that rules everything in the land and is happy to use violence to keep it that way. And your job is to train your students in the art of war – including the future rulers of the three empires of the land (all subservient to the Church, of course). In other words, your students are also your soldiers.

Each House has eight unique students that form the core of your ‘army’ and each House is led by one of the aforementioned rulers. You do get the option to recruit additional students and characters into your House, but I’ll touch upon that later. The game is split into two distinct parts – Part 1 plays out largely the same regardless of which House you choose as you focus on developing your students, improving their skills, picking their classes and boosting their ‘support’ levels with you and each other.

Part 2 is where things start to diverge as the plot will vary quite significantly depending upon your chosen House. You do continue to develop your students, but this section of the game is more streamlined so you’ll spend less time ‘teaching’ and more time progressing from battle to battle. And it’s the battles that I was always more interested in during my time with Fire Emblem on the GBA and the same is true here.

 

    

What kind of surprised me though is how instantly familiar everything felt. From the pre-battle map screen, to weapon types, classes and terrain bonuses it really doesn’t play any differently to that 20 year old GBA game. And that’s . . . kind of disappointing? I guess I was expecting a little more of an evolution to the formula. Don’t get the wrong idea – battles are still fun to play – but I thought there’d be a lot more new systems, weapons or classes to play with. There is some new stuff, but I don’t think the game pushes that stuff hard enough.

Maps, for example, really aren’t great. Some are quite big but the action is often contained to a limited section. And your unit count is oddly small – only a maximum of 12 characters – which when combined with the big maps, also makes the battles feel very small. Frankly, the GBA game had a more varied selection of map types and battle scenarios than Three Houses does.

There’s little in the way of new terrain effects or interesting layouts to be found. The game also recycles the same maps for the optional quest battles and it doesn’t even mix up the enemy placements – so you’ll sometimes fight the same enemies, on the same map in exactly the same configuration in several different quests.

From a strategy point of view, it doesn’t feel – at least to me – that Fire Emblem has really evolved, expanded or improved in any significant way. And maybe it doesn’t need to. Maybe fans of the series don’t really care. Maybe they’re far more interested in the character management and ‘relationship’ aspect that has evolved considerably from the GBA days.

Characters and their relationships was an important part of Fire Emblem on the GBA but it’s taken to an entirely new level in Three Houses. You’ll spend as much time – if not more – managing your students than you will on the battlefield. You’ll be buying them gifts, finding lost items, improving their motivation (making it easier for them to learn skills), inviting them to tea parties (don’t f**king ask) and speaking to them regularly to increase your ‘support’ level that does play a (somewhat minor) role in battles but is more about reaching S rank with certain characters so you get the option to marry them at the end of the game.

Which is a bit weird considering you’re their ‘professor’ but the game does feature a time skip at the start of part 2 – your character falls asleep for five years because . . . actually I don’t having a f**king clue why – so I guess it’s not as weird now that they’re older? But you won’t just spend your time grooming . . . I mean building your support with your students between main missions, you’ll also be busy building your own stats and ‘professor rank’.

You can go fishing, grow plants, flowers and vegetables, cook various dishes, invite characters to dine with you and visit shops. It’s . . . kind of a lot of busywork that does get a tad irritating as you go. Thankfully you can fast travel around the monastery once you’ve unlocked each area and that means you can avoid the terrible frame rate that dips quite a bit when you’re running about.

You can also ‘instruct’ your students which levels up their stats in the skills you’ve chosen for them to focus on. And you really need to decide early what kind of class and skills path you want everyone to take because grinding up those skills takes quite a bit of time and trying to switch classes or weapon skills later in the game will only be detrimental to your progress.

You also probably won’t want to recruit too many extra characters into your House because like I said, you can only a take a maximum of 12 into battle and you’re not going to evenly level everyone up if you’re constantly swapping people in and out – not unless you’re willing to do a lot of grinding per character.

I can’t say it wasn’t satisfying seeing my students get stronger, rank up their skills and develop into the cold-blooded killing machines I desired, but I probably didn’t need so much ‘social’ stuff mixed in and honestly, I reached a point quite early on when I just ignored most of it and skipped any ‘support’ cut-scenes between characters because I just didn’t care.

Three Houses feels like a game caught between two player bases – one that wants really engaging tactical battles and the other that just wants a relationship simulator – and it feels like this game is leaning more heavily in favour of the latter.

Thankfully, the battles in part 2 of the game are a little bigger and more engaging, and a lot of the other ‘social’ aspects take more of a back seat. And I do think I made a mistake when choosing the game difficulty because I set it to the default and that ended up proving just a tad too easy which probably made some of the tactical nuance related to terrain, support levels, special abilities and battalions less important than I’d like.

Or did it? Because I’m also wondering if all that bumping up the difficulty would really do is just make battles take longer. I won’t really know until I start another run with another House, and that’s thankfully going to be much easier as you can jump into a New Game Plus mode in which you carry over various skills and can quickly boost up your own stats and the levels of your students. And I do want to do that, because I really did enjoy my time with the game and I want to see how things shake out with the other two Houses. That said, whilst splitting the unique content across the three different Houses does give the game good replay value, it’s also something of a weakness.

Why? Well, it means that the story – which I did, overall like despite some really dumb and silly shit – feels like a puzzle with a lot of pieces missing if you only play as one House. You only get the full picture if you’re willing to play through them all. I probably will – eventually. Given it took me about 40 hours to finish one House, I’m not eager to jump straight into another just yet.

Oh, and the performance kind of sucks! Don’t tell me ‘it’s the Switch, what do you expect?’ because the game really doesn’t look good enough to have such a piss poor frame rate.

Overall, I did enjoy playing Fire Emblem: Three Houses and maybe if I’d played through every House I’d have a better appreciation of the overall package. But when a game locks so much unique content behind multiple paths and expects you to replay a lot of the same content to reach the new stuff, I don’t really see that as a good thing.

And from a strategy point of view, there’s nothing here that’s all that exciting. The battles are mostly okay and sometimes really good . . . but never great. The game felt more like a relationship simulator at times than a tactical strategy game and maybe that’s what the fans really want? I’m not going to say I didn’t enjoy the social aspects at all but I guess I just wanted more from the other side of the game. It’s certainly a unique kind of experience though and something I will be going back to in the future.

7/10