On a weekly day off, I explore the school and spend time with various students, taking them to lunch, sending them to compete in a tournament, or going to choir practice with them. While all of these activities also help to raise various meters, they also improve the relationships with these characters. Better relationships result in combat boosts when the students are standing next to each other.
Support conversations have long been a staple of the Fire Emblem franchise, and they work similarly in Three Houses , providing a deeper understanding of the units in my charge. Marianne, my dedicated healer, is shy, opting instead to talk to animals. Meanwhile, Raphael, my boisterous knight, is gregarious and frequently hungry. That said, the writing for these scenes is fine but far from amazing, feeling a bit stilted and more archetypal than naturalistic.
Thankfully, the voice actors do a solid job of differentiating the dozens of members of the cast, and having thousands of lines of dialogue fully voiced is a nice touch. The relationship portion does feel like it has taken a step backward for the franchise, though. Past games, specifically Fire Emblem: Awakening and Fire Emblem: Fates , introduced the idea of kids being born of couples in the game, and then those kids joining your army through some time-warping fantasy bullshit.
While not profoundly logical, it did give a more tangible benefit to developing relationships between characters, as you could literally play as their progeny. In Three Houses , maximizing a relationship with someone merely offers stat boosts and a coda to their story, and it feels underwhelming in comparison to past games.
Despite all this, I find myself fully obsessing over how I spend my time around the Academy, as it all has direct gameplay implications on the growth of my units. I want to be the master of my army, rather than have an arbitrary algorithm decide which skills my friends excel in. There are times I spend more than an hour between missions, shifting gear around, training up skills, and reforging weapons for my crew.
Obsessing over the nitty-gritty like this is far from mandatory. Most people can cruise through the game on Normal without any difficulty, and features like the ability to rewind time take the sting out of permadeath. Whether I spend an hour poring over menus and cutscenes or I skip past all of them, eventually I have to kill some folks. Many of the turn-based mechanics at play here feel familiar, with archers and casters attacking at range, cavalry having increased mobility, and armored units holding down the front lines.
But the designers made some major changes to established systems. While these big maps do contribute to the scale of the battles, they also have a drawback: Unmounted units, especially in the late game, feel at a distinct disadvantage, often lagging far behind the rest of the gang. While there are a few smaller, indoor maps, they are in the minority, with map design opting more for open fields. This can make maps feel redundant, and they sometimes literally are, with some appearing two or three times in the same campaign with slight variations.
While much of Three Houses is seen from an overhead perspective, initiating combat zooms the camera in, showing off gorgeously animated soldiers in combat. During a particularly tense battle, Claude, the house leader of the Golden Deer, tosses an arrow into the sky before catching it and firing off a critical hit to take out a pesky enemy pegasus moving in on my healer.
Check out his review! Awakening introduced a new way to play with Casual mode that turns off perma-death, and Three Houses has this feature as well. Three Houses is the natural evolution of that idea, and is done even better in this particular entry. At the beginning of the game, your mercenary-turned-professor player character called Byleth is presented with three separate classes you can teach referred to in-game as houses , and which house you select will determine the playable characters you begin with as well as the story path you follow for the rest of the game.
The first 10 chapters of the game are largely the same no matter the route, but once you hit chapter 10 a war breaks out and you wind up siding with your house to turn the tide of battle with the exception of the Black Eagles, which has a hidden route inside of it.
The story is better written than the usual Fire Emblem fare, with some characters seeming irreparably evil or broken on one route, but a hero of justice on another. Each story path also gives different information about the various moving forces throughout the world of Three Houses, so playing through just once only gets you a small chunk of the story. One thing that Three Houses does differently from most FE titles is that it lets you walk through the school and manually speak to students, letting more of their individual personalities shine through as each get a substantial amount more dialogue than they would have in any previous Fire Emblem game.
In many previous FE titles, characters would come in specific classes and only promote to one or two other classes and be done with it- Three Houses is considerably different in this regard.
As the professor, you teach your students to improve upon their various skills so they can be promoted to different fighter classes in the game- so if you wanted a character who has a strength in axes to be a Wyvern Master like Wyvern Rider from previous Fire Emblem games , then you need to train the strength and axe skills to certain minimum thresholds to even have a chance to promote into that class.
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