Gamer Diary: Fire Emblem 3 Houses

Like a lot of people, my first Fire Emblem game was Fire Emblem Awakening. Tons of my friends were into the game at the time, and I was constantly seeing fan art and comics about people’s favorite characters and ships. I can’t articulate exactly why, but I’ve always been a sucker for games with dating features, and the idea of being able to not only romance the character I like most, but also stick together characters I thought went well together, was certainly an incentive to try to game myself. So when I saw it on sale at Best Buy, I took the chance and started playing it.

It was definitely a game I enjoyed. It was much more difficult of a game than I was used to, at one point having to restart on Casual with no permadeath just to get through to the ending. I liked it, but it wasn’t quite enough to turn me into a raging FE fan girl tracking down every game I saw, especially when you’d look into some of the other games in the franchise and saw the ludicrous premium the games sold for. Hell, a year after I bought Awakening I saw it for almost triple the price I bought it for in a used game store.

When the Fates series came out I considered getting it, but the fact that the third campaign was digital-only definitely diminished my interest. When you don’t have internet access like I do, you become especially attached to physical releases, and off-disc or DLC content really becomes a dealbreaker. This is the same reason I won’t play Final Fantasy XV unless they release an edition that actually has the content printed on and not just require an update to play. Not to mention I’d heard that Fates wasn’t quite as good as Awakening, making it pretty easy to skip.

Like Awakening, I started seeing a lot of fan art and comics of Three Houses characters, and I’d been hearing from various sources that the Switch game was essentially what Fates should have been, with all three storylines on the same card at the same time. So when it went on sale during my annual winter game sweep for Black Friday, I bought it.

Since I play the Switch almost entirely as a handheld, I sometimes forget how powerful the system really is compared to a 3DS, and I was pretty blown away by the graphics and features. This game is friggin’ huge with giant fields, loads of voiced cut scenes and tons to do in the game. It was almost overwhelming everything I had to keep track of, from wrangling my students to recruiting new kids to the class, to the mini games of fishing, gardening and tons of side quests. It certainly made the game very flexible, but it also took a while to get used to managing so much.

Like previous Fire Emblem games the tactical battles are pretty fun, with a fairly forgiving difficulty curve as terrain and missions get harder, but not in unrealistic leaps and bounds. And there are lots of features that can make combat even more flexible. Battalions can be assigned to characters, or used by enemies, you can ‘undo’ character deaths with the time reversing ‘Divine Pulse’, and while there is still weapon degradation, broken weapons can still be used as a final gambit, though it does come with a penalty. One major irk I had with battles is that the angle of the battle field is sort of weird, with no way to adjust it, making it hard sometimes to figure out which character I’m moving. I found out later that some maps do have adjustments, others don’t. While the Switch’s screen is very generous, especially compared to the 3DS, it’s clear this game was meant to be played on a TV, making the characters appear very tiny and not very clear. More than once I moved the wrong character to the wrong spot, leaving my magic users and archers right on the front line as sitting ducks.

My other big disappointment initially were the characters. One of the things that made Awakening so memorable was how distinct all the characters were, from Prince Chrom to Tharja to Sully, even before I got to know the characters terribly well, they made a distinct enough impression on me that I wanted to get to know them better. I wanted to see how they would respond to certain characters, and it made it that much sadder if I lost a character and was forced to restart a mission. In Three Houses, the vast majority of the characters don’t make all that much of an initial impression. Once I got to know them a little better their personalities started to show, and I did start to get attached, but until then it made it very hard to invest in the story of the game. And considering that Fire Emblem ‘stories’ tend to be extremely bare bones in terms of plot, that’s kind of a problem. Rather than a diverse group of distinct beings whose stories were just waiting to be unearthed, they were mostly a group of pretty boys and pretty girls who almost felt interchangeable. It made it hard to pick a group, not because I couldn’t choose which house to ally with, but because it didn’t seem to matter. I ended up picking House Golden Deer first just because I hear most people didn’t like that one as much and I wanted to see why. Plus Claude seemed the dreamiest of the three house leaders. If that sounds like an incredibly shallow reason to pick a house, that should give you an idea of how lackluster those first impressions were. The saving grace of that house was Raphael, a rather charming Himbo and one of the most likable characters in the game. Again, once I put the time in I started to really like the cast, but that first impression made it feel more like a slog than a joy to build up those initial character relationships.

And as whizbang as those graphics are at times, it also made some of the aesthetic choices really disappointing as well. For one thing, the palette of most of the game is really, really gray. The monastery (where you spend most of your time), the student’s uniforms and even the class costumes are all muted in color and design. Considering how hard Nintendo fought against the trend of beige game aesthetics with their hyper saturated franchises like Splatoon’s gleeful day-glo colors, Mario’s primary extravaganza and even the softer but still lush adventures in even some of the more toned down Legend of Zelda games, Three Houses’ more muddy tones feel like a waste.

Also, holy crap do I hate the female player character’s costume. The male avatar gets a full suit of armor, while the female gets page 16 of a Victoria’s Secret catalog. Booty shorts, a corset that shows off her midriff and floral pantyhose. Granted, it’s not as bad as a chain mail bikini, but when in Awakening both the male and female avatar wore the identical costume, having an ensemble that not only barely resembles the male counterpart, but be completely and totally impractical is really conspicuous and annoying. I could live with the cleavage exposing cuirass, since all the armor in the game is designed that way, but for the love of god, at least let her have some leg armor and not expose her damn belly button. Even the Dancer class has more coverage. No wonder the girl is so good with a sword, if anyone managed to get past her parries, they’d almost certainly hit a vital organ.

I know it seems that I’m griping a lot about Three Houses, but the fact is I do very much like the game, because once you get past the initially so-so characters and pretty-but-largely-generic styling, and get used to managing all the tasks you need to do, Three Houses becomes less about petty school drama (though there is plenty of that too) and becomes about some very delicious political intrigue, and that was the part that kept pulling me back. Especially with the second half.

Most of the Fire Emblem games I’m aware of are pretty straight to the point, some small, rag-tag country is against the ropes by some larger, more powerful empire until the main character gathers a group of warriors and the ancient power held by the Fire Emblem and beats back the aggressors, who are largely being powered by some evil god/dragon/demon/insert appropriate bad guy here. Three Houses on the other hand is about internal struggle as the country of Fodlan tries to keep it together between its three major powers while other nations detect the weakness and take advantage of it. The only uniting force between these three is the Church of Seiros, which is why the future generation of leaders is being trained at the monastery of Garreg Mach, where most of the game takes place. In addition to the interpersonal issues between the kids, there is also baggage between the nobles and commoners, the houses themselves, as well as problems within the houses as you learn about how even within the same region, various nobles have tried to sabotage and undermine each other, with the fallout landing in the laps of the kids. Add into the fact that there’s also some dubious actions by the Church itself, and there’s a lot to learn even if some of the characters themselves aren’t always that interesting (I’m sorry, but both Ferdinand and Lorenz are basically identical and equally punchable). The main plot is about the main character’s identity and the mystical Hero Relics, but all the good stuff is in that political drama. Especially once you get to the second part of the game and it all really hits the fan.

Getting to that second part is the hard part though, but it really was worth it. Especially since my first play through I sort of screwed up and didn’t recruit enough characters. A piece of spoilerless advice, try to recruit the kids from the other houses as soon as you can by upping your own weapon competency to at least D+ and build the character relationships to level ‘B’. I didn’t, and not only did I screw myself over tactically in part two of the game, it was pretty rough narratively as well. My only real gripe was there didn’t seem to be a ‘good’ ending where you can get all the characters on to your team. Again, Claude was the dreamiest, and by the end of the game, the best of the leaders, it always sucks when you can’t save everyone. Also, there should have been at least one gay character and one lesbian character in each house. The game only had two lesbian characters available, neither of which were in the Golden Deer house, and only one gay character. I know that’s still more than the Fates storyline, plus the fiasco involved with the lesbian character in that series, but it’s the 20s, Story of Seasons lets me marry anyone AND raise angora bunnies, so it wouldn’t have killed Nintendo to have made Sylvain a bisexual disaster hitting on everyone with a pulse like Flayn implies in their character interactions. I’m jus’ sayin’.