Disclaimer: I played the Black Eagles route (Edelgard stans, we out here!) and sided with the Church, so know my review is coming from that angle. I’ll avoid spoilers for the story.
This is the first Fire Emblem game I have ever beaten. That’s not a knock to the rest of the series, which I’m sure is great, but the games haven’t really been to my taste until now. I did try Awakening for the 3DS a few years ago, but dropped it about ~5 hours in because I was bored out of my skull. I say this for you non-believers out there — even if you don’t like typically like or care about Fire Emblem, I think there’s a genuine chance you’ll like this game.
Fire Emblem Three Houses is a sort of total conversion for the series. If you played Persona 5 (or read my review on it!), you’ll immediately recognize some of the daily life elements in this game. You will control a voiceless, bland Main Character for you to project yourself onto (hooray) named Byleth in canon, but you can name yours whatever you want. I named my guy Dyna Max, for instance.
The story begins with your father, Jeralt, calling for you to come to Garreg Mach Monastery to become a professor. This Monastery is actually more of a University, but basically a prestigious private military academy that happens to be funded by the Church of Seiros. You’ll choose a house to side with (Black Eagles, Golden Deer, or Blue Lions) and become sort of a mentor for the group as a whole, as well as a teacher at the school. The giant fantasy castle that holds a secret magic school deep in the mountains with dragons, unicorns, and other mythical creatures about does invoke a certain Hogwarts feel. I’d venture to say that Fire Emblem: Three Houses is the best Harry Potter game ever.
For you to understand what the actual game is, let’s walk through a typical week at Garreg Mach. On Monday, we’ll set up the lesson plan for the week. This can be done automatically (which is what I recommend) or manually, if you want to really get into the nitty-gritty RPG stuff. You’ll be able to set goals for each of your students, who can train in two skills at a time. There’s about a dozen, including axe, bow, sword, lance, reason (dark magic), faith (healing magic), leadership, and more. The stats of your students will go up during the week of study, but by how much is dependent on their motivation. We’ll get to that in a second.
Throughout the week, you’ll be asked questions by 2 or 3 students about what they’re doing wrong and how to improve. If you get the right answer, you’ll be rewarded with an affinity boost. At the end of the week, you’ll see the fruits of your labor and how everyone has done. And then, Saturday! Saturday is your free day, where you have options to either explore the Monastery (you’ll do this about 75% of the time), do auxiliary battles (side quests), take a seminar, or rest (this maxes out everyone’s motivation for the next week).
Exploring the Monastery is one of the core parts of the game, alongside the actual battles. You’ll be given a certain number of activity points to spend on various things throughout the day. If you meet with one of the other teachers, you can train your MC in whatever skill they specialize in. You can share meals with your students to raise their motivation and affinity for both you and each other, or cook a meal together with whoever you’re trying to romance. You can look around for lost items and return them for affinity points, or do side quests here and there that mostly have you just running around and talking to people. Maybe host a teatime and answer questions about your guest! Affinity comes into play by raising your support levels, both with your MC and just between other characters. Shipping Caspar and Bernie? Try to get their affinity up to an A level! Whoever you want to romance, you’ll need to get their Support Level to an S. I’d check ahead of time when picking a male or female MC, because some characters are straight, some gay, and others bisexual. If you’re set on romancing a specific character, plan ahead!
You can also raise your professor level here, which you need to unlock the ability to do more stuff. Fishing, gardening, training, and tournaments are just some of the options. Overall, there’s a lot to do, and at the beginning you’ll feel pretty shafted about only having 2 activity points. By the end you’ll be desperate to try and figure out how to spend all 8 of them. You can also spend time with students from other houses, and after your affinity is high enough, they’ll join your house! If you want to romance someone from another house (I ended up marrying Mercedes) you’ll need to start on that early. The romance feels a lot more earned after spending 55 hours in the real world and 6 years in-game on it.
This all leads to leveling up your students for TOTAL WAR. These zoomers are getting too soft, give them some real weapons and teach them to KILL! Combat is similar to how it has always been — top down, tactical, turn based strategy. And just like always, if you’re playing on classic mode (and you should), your students will die for real if they die in combat. Luckily, if you lose Lindhart to a rogue arrow you won’t have to restart entirely! Through Sothis, the 3000-year old dragon who has conveniently taken the form of a 9 year old girl, you have the power to control time! You have a set number of Divine Pulses during battle, with which you can turn back time as far as you’d like. You’ll get more as the game goes on, and trust me, in the last few fights you’re going to use all of them.
The weapon triangle from previous entries is gone. No need to learn weapon and type weaknesses and advantages — a pop-up box will let you know how much damage your attack will do, and how much damage you’ll receive as a reaction. Use Y to flip through weapons and see different strategies, and use ZR to flip through your special Combat Arts. Be careful and be sure to consider every course of action before moving. This is a slow-paced game, a bit too slow-paced for my tastes, but it’s all about that feeling of know you’re a master tactician after taking out a big rhinoceros badger, or whatever.
There’s a pretty good balance between combat and social life, but I have to say it wasn’t nearly as fun as the social stuff in Persona 5. I liked the calendar we all followed, but it sort of annoyed me to not be able to manage my time battling and training except on Saturdays. The music is pretty good, but nothing to write home about in my opinion. The art direction is, for lack of a better word, nasty. Everything is gross dark greys, browns, and greens, which you know I hate. The entire color palette of this game could be described as “murky chic.” It just looks bad. It’s like if Fallout 4 had much worse anti-aliasing. The other main negative is that I found the story to be super boring. I ended up skipping almost all of the cutscenes in the last 10 hours because I just did not care about anything happening to anyone in the Church of Seiros. I did care quite a lot about my students though! I was happy to see the little “where are they now” slideshow at the end. And once you hit the time skip, things get real serious, and your students get REAL sexy. Don’t worry, they’re adults now.
Final Verdict: 8.5/10 — Hot Anime Teen Collectathon
Three Houses is a great JRPG if you want some top notch turn-based strategy. For a Nintendo game, it’s pretty damn hard and unforgiving, so it’s nice to have the feature to rewind time when you lose a hot anime teen. The social life stuff is pretty well structured, and almost every one of the characters has an interesting backstory and personality. The wide variety of romance options is nice, but Nintendo really half-assed it providing gay romance options. The integration of social life effects on how your students perform in battle feels earned and satisfying, and the slow pace of the game makes you feel like you really worked towards something when you finally get it. However, this game is ugly as hell. The colors are bland and boring, the graphics are basically enhanced 3DS assets, and the cutscenes run at 30 FPS white the game runs at 60 FPS, jolting you out of cutscenes quite suddenly. I recommend this to anyone who likes RPGs with complex systems, turn based combat, and long, slow battles where strategy pays off. I do not recommend this for anyone looking for a beautiful, fast-paced narrative adventure. FE Three Houses is one of the best games on the Nintendo Switch, and deserves a spot in the Nintendo Hall of Greats for opening the franchise to a whole new swath of players.
