This Game Might Go In My Top 10
[Modern Review] Delving back into the Switch library to discover Fire Emblem: Three Houses.
I think I speak for all Switch 2 early adopters when I say that the wait for Nintendo’s next classic goes on.
There was that initial flurry of quality in the early months: Mario Kart World was without question my favourite game of 2025, Donkey Kong Bananza wasn’t quite as good as Super Mario Odyssey in my opinion but I was still pleased and booting up Tears Of The Kingdom’s Switch 2 upgrade -a game I have to this day not finished- quickly hammered home the dramatic leap in power. There have been quite a few good ports to the Switch 2 since and Age Of Imprisonment ended up overshadowing the impotent Metroid Prime 4 for me… but 2026 has been bleak. Pokopia is a cosy game and I detest cosy games, Star Fox was aggressively 7/10, Splatoon Raiders was much better but nothing I’ve read has had much nice to say about the new Yoshi so I didn’t buy that one.
This drought of Nintendo goodness has had me looking back to the original Switch library for any delights I might have missed, an experience helped by the Switch 2’s ability to run Switch 1 games at 1080p, and (mostly) 60FPS in handheld mode.
If you’ve been reading the Journal since the primordial era of Spring 2025, back when things were a bit more directionless here, you’ll remember that I’ve been making an effort to incorporate JRPG’s into my diet. Last April I had a solid time with Xenoblade Chronicles X but being a masochist, I decided to play it on the Wii-U where the grind is extreme thanks to a lack of online mode; halfway through and 35 hours in, I tapped out but am determined to give it and the wider series another go later on a Switch 2 Edition. Apart from that and a little bit of Final Fantasy XII on PS2 as a kid, which I never really got into and traded in, this genre is an untapped field for me. I haven’t played Final Fantasy 7, Earthbound, Phantasy Star, Chrono Trigger: none of it. To me, JRPG’s have always been that genre that weebs like where the games on original hardware always require an IMF loan to purchase and the completion times on HowLongToBeat.com are always in the triple digits.
I like to think I know a good game when I see one, regardless of the aesthetic, so I’ve been doing my best not to judge the anime games before I try them… even if decades of witnessing weeb cringe both online and in the wild have hardened my heart.
A certain treasured, long-time reader and funder of the Journal has been requesting Chrono Trigger and that review is coming, I promise but until then, I’ve been researching other games under the JRPG umbrella so that when the time finally comes, I actually have the tools to appreciate Chrono properly. This led me to discover Fire Emblem: anime X-COM, sort of. The few snippets of gameplay I saw intrigued me and with an open mind, I bought myself a copy of Three Houses and decided to dive in completely blind. The results have been a pleasant surprise.
Triple Entente
Fire Emblem: Three Houses takes place on the continent of Fódlan during an age of unprecedented peace between the Adrestian Empire: a lush, ancient state whose capital is the largest city in Fódlan, The Holy Kingdom Of Faerghus: a cold, rugged Kingdom with deep chivalric values and the Leicester Alliance: a confederation of nobles who rule over a temperate territory… and presumably a football team in terminal decline as well.
Where once the 3 great states of Fódlan fought each other they now co-exist, sharing a religion, a desire for cooperation, rigid social hierarchy and a spirit of friendly rivalry.
In the middle of all this sits the Garreg Mach monastery which is neutral ground between the 3 empires. Garreg Mach is the seat of the Church Of Seiros and also houses the Knights Of Seiros: the most elite fighting force on the continent who use the monastery grounds as a sort of boarding school/military university for the young men and women hoping to one day join its ranks. The prospective students are drawn from all 3 nations who each make up the 3 separate houses of the monastery: House Black Eagles from the Adrestian Empire, House Blue Lions from Faerghus and House Golden Deer from the Alliance. The 3 houses live, study, train and sometimes even elope together but regular mock battles keep the spirit of competition alive.
Centuries of the status quo, changing attitudes across the nations towards the Church Of Seiros and the suffocation of commoners under the noble class as well as competition between those nobles over the coveted magical crests -inherited through blood- are beginning to threaten the peace.
It’s amongst this backdrop that you take control of Byleth -who can be male or female- a young mercenary of murky origins and the newest, youngest professor and house tutor at Garreg Mach; at the beginning you’ll choose one of the titular 3 houses and experience their version of the story. Each run takes at least 40 hours and there are 4 distinct routes, so that’s a lot of bang for your buck.
For my first playthrough I pledged my allegiance to Black Eagles. I chose this house primarily because my favourite colour is red, Edelgard wasn’t boring like the Blue Lions’ Dimitri or irritating like Golden Deer’s Claude and perhaps most importantly: Edelgard is pretty. Don’t you judge me damn it; I couldn’t pick the Leicester Alliance’s House Golden Deer because I grew up an hour away from the real English Leicester on the train, so I find the name to be really funny.
In 3 Houses you can romance characters including the head of your chosen house, so the Crusader Kings 3 section of my brain imagined my descendants upon the Adrestian throne one day, marching the red banner into the heart of the other 2 nations just as their old man would have wanted.
I’m not the biggest consumer of fantasy, especially not Japanese fantasy; Berserk is one of only a small handful of anime I’ve watched to completion and I am a fan of Howard’s Conan The Barbarian stories; everyone has watched The Lord Of The Rings as well. Other than that? Not much. As someone with an eye more towards the historical though I really enjoy the world of Three Houses. The class divide colours every interaction in the game, architecture is vast and pious, faith is a spiritual centre for some characters but merely an obligation for others instead of an object of mockery for all, like it is in most Western properties today.
It’s probably obvious to some of you who read me by now that I am a Christian, capitalising the word ‘God’ on Substack almost feels like the bit in Inglorious Basterds where the bloke holds up his fingers in the wrong way to order more pints. What kind? Well, I’ll leave that up to you to guess. Anyway, what I’m getting at is, fictional religion or not, it always bothers me when faith is treated as an object of ridicule in media and that breaks my immersion, so Three Houses nails it on that front. The entire game succeeds at immersing me in fact, most anime/JRPG’s I see are full of weapons that are so obviously impractical I can’t take them seriously, characters who the writers try too hard to make cool, ones that have zero goals and etcetera, so it’s refreshing to play Fire Emblem and see that even the game’s mythic weapons are relatively tame and that even minor characters have a little something to discover. A sword that sparks with lightning? A sword that doubles as a whip? I’ll take that over whatever the hell Cloud Strife is holding, even his name is insane.
Tonally, Three Houses can be a bit all over the place. They try to do that Harry Potter thing where the students get older, less idealistic and world-weary, coupled with a darker colour palette as time marches on but this heavy atmosphere is quickly dispelled when you invite Petra for afternoon tea and that same jolly music plays; try as I might, I can’t remain downbeat as Hubert visibly and humorously strangles his love for the food in the Dining Hall as you eat with him, nor when Ferdinand and Spoiler are cleaning out the stables and murmuring about what a shitty job you’ve assigned to them. The characters in this game just ooze charm.
Scoping Out The Field
In terms of presentation, I unfortunately have to say that Fire Emblem: Three Houses is a bit of a mixed bag, I’m not going to be too harsh on it though because this is an early Nintendo Switch game -released in July of 2019- being played by me on the successor console.
The main issue I have with the presentation of most Nintendo Switch games isn’t the framerate or the textures but the lack of anti-aliasing, which is a technique used to smooth out jagged edges. This entire library is plagued with serrated shadows and stepped silhouettes; if it wasn’t for this and a general lack of post-processing and particle effects, I think the gap between the Switch and the competition wouldn’t be as pronounced. A lot of games these days go for a zoomer-y, cartoonish Fortnite aesthetic anyway, so as an owner of a beefy PC, a PlayStation 5 and a day one adopter of the Switch 2 after loving the original, I have to tell any fanboys out there that the Switch was never as behind as you think. Playing Switch 1 reminds me of having a weaker PC back in the day and having to turn the anti-aliasing, shadows and particle effects down to low.
Anyway, I love getting off-topic today, Three Houses suffers these same issues as well as some less than ideal graphical quirks and design choices of its own. Facial animations are horribly stiff and lifeless, there is noticeable pop-in while you explore Garreg Mach between battles and a lot of cutscenes use these panoramic 2D backgrounds that look to be a much lower resolution than the rest of the game, they range from about passable to utterly dreadful.
There isn’t anything too visually impressive to note in Three Kingdoms but I will say that playing it on the Switch 2 makes loading times rapid and a lot of the attack animations in this game are very satisfying; having an enemy attack Edelgard, bounce off her tower shield for 0 damage and then seeing the critical animation trigger before she hit them for a one-hit KO was a persistent source of dopamine in my run. Other highlights include Wyvern or Pegasus cavalry who slam into enemies for devastating damage and Dorothea’s Thoron spell that’s essentially a laser beam, awesome.
The best feature of Three Houses’ presentation is its use of zoom levels and scale. On the outside, this game looks like another X-COM or squad-based tactics title where each character on the grid represents themselves alone but this is just an abstraction, zoom all the way in and you’ll see that every character is leading a band of troops: a band of troops which you can replace with more specialised units, upgrade and who even have their own stats and levelling system. That’s how deep this goes. I routinely enjoyed zooming all the way in during the climactic third act of the game to see rival generals facing off with each other and massive, late-game battalions standing side by side ready for the next wave of foes.
With such a huge roster of characters it’s inevitable that not all of them get the depth, attention and voice direction that you’d see in, say, a Bioware game (back when they knew how to write) but there were performances in Three Houses I loved nonetheless.
Of the 3 house leaders, I found Dimitri’s performance to be the most engaging, in the particular story route I took he almost ends up like a Venom Snake/Big Boss-style character and the actor: Chris Hackney -who I’m just now discovering voiced Rauru in Zelda and Rusty in Armored Core- shows some impressive range. His portrayal of Dimitri in the final act of my run sold me on choosing the Blue Lions on my next playthrough. Other highlights include Hubert: Edelgard’s shadowy spymaster and the best mage in Black Eagles, he’s played like a more murderous Severus Snape; Dorothea: a tart-with-a-heart-type character is one I like too, she ends up as a protective matriarch but starts the game as a bit of a two-timer, there is a wonderful warmth to the way she is played. Finally, another favourite of mine was Petra: a royal hostage in-line to the throne of the archipelagic Kingdom of Brigid who sometimes struggles with the language of Fódlan, she’s played a bit like a fish out of water but also has this funny competitive streak that is played just over the top enough to add some nice comedy, she reminded me a little bit of Worf from The Next Generation at times.
Some of my least-preferred performances in this game were Bernadette: the anime shy-girl trope played with a bit of an irritating cadence and without much change as the game goes on and Jeralt: Byleth’s father. This second performance feels phoned-in and flat which is a big problem because come Chapter 9, Jeralt has to carry a major plot moment and the lack of passion combined with his limited screen time made it fall flat for me. I don’t think I’m dropping a major spoiler here by saying that there is a time skip about halfway through the game -as was revealed in some of the trailers- splitting Three Houses into a Part I and Part II, I found myself impressed with how many of the actors and actresses managed to add just a touch of maturity and age to their performances without altering the soul of their character.
Truth be told, I was too focused during play to hear and to process much of the music in Three Houses: that’s why I love strategy and tactics games so much, they’re engrossing but there were a few pieces that stood out to me. I will be making timestamps out of a single video because I have stumbled across spoilers for routes I haven’t played yet when looking for specific music.
Scales of the Goddess is the music that plays in Part II’s Garreg Mach. The sorrowful singing and militaristic snare drum beats add a weariness to the song that fits perfectly with Part II’s atmosphere and evokes the planning rooms and general meetings that fill your time between paralogues and main chapter battles. The social-sim elements really slow don in the second half and this more sombre tune is a better backing for the myriad of class tweaks and equipment adjustments you’ll get up to.
Paths that Will Never Cross is a combat theme that plays when you cross blades with a prominent general in the enemy’s army. This is a tune you’ll come to associate with anxiety and the need to lock-in, as Zoomers put it; when you hear this an opposing general is within range of your team and will launch -or defend- an attack after some dialogue, as these are the most powerful units on the field you’ll sit with crossed fingers hoping that your unit doesn’t get one hit KO’d. If your archer or mage is the one in the firing line then start praying.
Dwellings of the Ancient Gods plays during missions where you journey to a ruins area called Zanado near Garreg Mach. Fódlan is a continent filled with folklore and heaving with history, especially in this place, so I love how this music evokes the ancient and mysterious; there is a combat variant that plays when the camera zooms in to show your units giving or receiving an attack and not only does this sound great but I find it genius how the sound is mixed in such a way for this transition not to feel jarring.
Should you choose to romance a character in Three Houses, the very last scene before you get your ending stats and see the credits roll will be a sweet encounter with your chosen spouse. I spent somewhere in the region of 2 and a half hours fighting the final boss, desperately trying to keep my team alive but alas, I ran out of Divine Pulse -more on that later- and watched on in horror as my whole team besides my chosen romance and the essentials were wiped out. After being focused for so long I was genuinely feeling a bit drained, the sweet, balmy melody of A Place To Rest and the heartfelt romance was the perfect note to end my first Fire Emblem adventure on.
There is about 3 hours of music in Three Houses, much of it is route exclusive so I’m certain I’ve missed some of the best.
Hammer And Anvil
From a gameplay perspective, Fire Emblem: Three Houses is a mixing pot of several genres; this is part tactical strategy game, part JRPG and part social-sim.
I have read opinions from some long-time Fire Emblem fans lamenting the spillover of school mechanics from Persona into this game and most fans seem to regard Fire Emblem: Engage as the better combat experience but I have no skin in the game, Three Houses has been my first Fire Emblem. I’ve never played Persona and to be honest that series holds almost zero appeal to me so if you didn't like P5R and are on the fence about this game as a result then I wouldn’t worry too much; all the social and academy stuff takes a backseat in Part II of the story anyway.
Gameplay in Three Houses is divided between the academy and battles. In the academy, to the ongoing march of the calendar you’ll grow the bonds between you and your students, try and poach prospects from the other houses, harvest ingredients, share cups of tea, train up your skills and more; battles are played on a grid like most other tactics games but what sets Three Houses apart is the absolutely staggering number of classes and loadout customisation you can get up to.
If you‘re used to Western tactics games like XCOM then let me give you the numbers: in XCOM: Enemy Unknown with full DLC, there are 6 classes, in XCOM 2 that number rises to 9 and in Three Houses, right out of the box… there are 40 classes.
What this plethora means is that there aren’t any terrible characters because with enough effort and a little bit of cash spent on the items needed to put students in class certification exams, anyone can be made useful. Part of the reason why, after somewhere in the realm of 40 hours played and one route already finished, I’m so eager to dive back into 3H is the depth and freedom of this class system. By the time I fully realised the extent of what you could do, my run was almost over. I can imagine experienced players having a lot of fun trying to do cavalry-only runs or a team composed entirely of mages and I didn’t grind levels at all but by the end my Byleth was a one-shotting, fireball flinging demigod on the battlefield. I can only imagine what the min-maxers among you could achieve with careful study of the game’s systems and targeted character development.
There is also a separate levelling system -a running theme in Three Houses- for the academy phase: your professor level. The more activities you partake in at Garreg Mach and lore books you find, the more your professor level rises and the more activity points you get. It’s a strong feedback loop that ensures the more interested you are in the social elements, the more you get to actually interact with them.
While I came to truly enjoy the academy downtime and would encourage you to see all there is to offer in regards to character interactions and paralogues -this game’s equivalent to Bioware’s loyalty missions- there are undoubtably some flaws that need to be corrected in the upcoming Fortune’s Weave.
For one, the menus are seriously lacking on some modern quality of life features: the lack of a repair all option in the blacksmith was a constant annoyance throughout my campaign, I wish incompatible weapons picked up by a character were immediately sent to storage at the end of a mission and there is no sell all valuables option for the bullion you pick up. Additionally, the way the facilities and options available to you at Garreg Mach are conveyed to the player at the beginning is much too overwhelming. I don’t know why all Japanese games think the best way to teach the player are those multi-page pop-up windows full of text and pictures but I wish it would stop. The info dump is so severe I completely glazed over and I only remembered the Advice Box mechanic existed just before the final mission.
Combat in Three Houses is a near-flawless experience with all the tools you need to get the job done readily available. I had a conversation a few days ago where I realised Fire Emblem might be seen as a series of hard games, especially as tactics and strategy titles don’t tend to put much effort into acclimating newcomers but let me assure you that this isn’t the case: I played on Normal difficulty in Classic mode (which adds perma-death for characters) and I only was Game Overed twice, the first was when I sent Edelgard to her death on accident, forgetting I had no Divine Pulse left and the second was against the final boss, which I can’t complain about, it should be the game’s peak of challenge. “Divine Pulse?” You might be thinking, well, that’s another mechanic that makes Three Houses a rather fair experience. Divine Pulse is essentially Forza’s rewind feature put into a turn-based tactics game: you get a certain number of charges -which increases as the game goes on- and with them you can turn back time as many turns as you’d like, even back to the beginning of the level if you so desire; if Byleth or your house leader: the two characters that must survive every mission are killed then you are automatically prompted to use it instead of going straight to the Game Over screen. As well as all that, you can easily check enemies’ ranges before you make your moves, every battle opens with the opportunity to adjust your party’s loadouts and starting positions in case you forgot something and you can even swap weapons and consumables between units in combat and out of storage from Byleth. Truly, if you lose in Three Kingdoms, it never feels unfair.
If you’re intimidated by the genre or are concerned about difficulty though I have a few tips. Firstly: turn off Classic mode, the way perma-death is implemented feels incongruent anyway: Caspar died in combat about halfway through Part I for me yet he was still mulling around the academy before suddenly vanishing; you aren’t missing out on much if you choose not to enable it. Certain missions will have your team start separated or be designed in such a way that you’ll feel tempted to split off into 2 groups to attack 2 separate targets. Don’t do it. In my experience this was a bit of a noob trap and even got my prized healer: Linhardt killed in the penultimate mission and I sorely missed his abilities in the upcoming final boss.
My favourite part of any strategy or tactics game is experimenting with my approach: seeing what works and what doesn’t, any title that allows for me to do that on a large scale is something I’m going to love and Three Houses scratches that itch better than any other game in this genre ever has for me. Eventually, I settled on a sort of armoured spearhead with Byleth and Edelgard: each equipped with shields as the tip of that spear. With their massive health pools and one-shot potential, these two would advance into the thick of dense enemy formations while my 2 cavalrymen: Ferdinand and Spoiler would dash around sniping enemy mages who were a threat to their defences; softer units with high damage potential like Bernadette and Petra were brought in to finish off enemies that survived my two tanks and to keep the heat off Linhardt, Dorothea and Hubert who boasted potent, long-range magic but were almost certainly dead after a single hit in the late-game.
The combat in Three Houses was a pleasure throughout but of course, I do have some nit-picks. For some reason, diagonal tiles are not considered adjacent when launching attacks, so there were times when I was forced to use Byleth’s signature sword: an extendable blade that can only be repaired by waiting out portions of the academy or using a rare material, against enemies centimetres away from me. Something I wish the game made more clear is the rock, paper, scissors system at play regarding the unit types. Generally speaking, in Three Houses, archers beat cavalry, cavalry beat infantry, infantry beat archers and mages are vulnerable to everyone but can hit enemies at extreme range and cut through the armour of heavy infantry more easily than the rest, you’ll work this out eventually but it was the one thing I needed and that information was never included in the mountains of tutorial text. I can’t comment too much because the Black Eagles don’t have their own flying cavalry character (and I wasn’t aware enough of the class system yet to spec anyone that way until too late) but most experienced players consider wyvern and pegasus riders to be overpowered.
Disestablishmentarians
My thoughts on the story of Three Houses and specifically its Crimson Flower route will be split into a spoiler-free and a spoiler-full section with a spoiler-free conclusion at the end, be sure to keep an eye out for the warning.
The post-prologue cutscene where you first arrive at Garreg Mach gives a nice overview of the characters you’ll be meeting throughout Part I.
I have a lot of praise to give for this game’s characters and storytelling so I’ll front load my complaints before we get into the good stuff. The biggest flaw with Three Houses' story -some might say, the biggest flaw with the whole game, actually- is that Part I plays out almost the same no matter which house you pick: the same missions on the same maps and unravelling the same conspiracy. Part I, especially if you go Black Eagles, tends to take longer than Part II as well so this adds some unwanted friction to replaying the game. A way to speed up or skip the early, tutorialised sections of Part I would have been nice but I understand why things turned out the way they did, you have to assume each of the 4 routes will be someone’s first. The slowness of replaying Part I on other routes compounds the second issue with Three Houses’ story: no matter which of the 4 routes you choose, you won’t be getting the complete story in one playthrough. I don’t mind this in principle but there were quite a few loose threads left hanging after I rolled the credits which could have been tied up. Since Part I has you fighting a few different enemy factions and I’m assuming you’ll learn more about the others on separate routes, I ended up thinking “Well, what happened with those people then?”
Like I said, Part I mostly follows the same general setup for each house: the Western Church have some kind of religious disagreement going on with the mainstream Church Of Seiros which is gradually becoming more violent, meanwhile the mysterious Flame Emperor and their loyal Death Knight along with a cohort of soldiers and whatever other unscrupulous allies they pick up are working to destabilise the church and to weaken the long peace. This first 50-60% of the game will see you unravel this mystery as Archbishop Rhea gradually comes to rely on you above the other professors; you’ll learn a lot about the history of Fódlan and of the 3 empires, all of which muddies the water the more you play. If the Church is a moral compass for the continent then why does it readily execute its prisoners? Why are Hubert and Edelgard always hiding something from you? What do other people know about Dimitri that you don’t? The atmosphere of suspicion is nicely written.
The social elements are more prominent in Part I and the cast of characters are younger and more impressionable at this point too: most of them are 16-18 pre-time skip and are young adults in Part II. This makes interactions lighter and allows you to get to know who these characters are before they really get put through the ringer. It would take another 20 minutes on top of this already long review to tell you everything I liked about the entire cast so if you couldn’t tell already, I’ll be recommending you play this one and see for yourself.
Hubert and Petra were my favourites in the Black Eagles, I’ve already spoken about their voice performances but I love how Hubert is a pragmatic and cynical foil to Edelgard: he is a man who knows well the rot that has been allowed to fester in the Adrestian court while she has this idealistic vision for the Adrestian Empire. Petra is endearing and is one of the more subtly tragic characters in this game, the more you learn about her the more you realise she’s been nothing but a tool of diplomacy for her whole life and carries the cross for a country she’s barely even lived in.
Towards the end of the first half you’ll have one big moment and one big twist. The big moment lands with all the impact of an early game Bandit on Edelgard’s tower shield unfortunately but I found the Flame Emperor twist to be quite well done: not KOTOR I level but a memorable moment. I came into the game blind and expected it to be a predictable three-way war scenario but that’s not what happens at all. I still saw the general gist of how things went coming but nonetheless, there are lots of surprises in this story and I wouldn’t be too comfortable in your assumptions if the story doesn’t grab you right away.
Part II is entirely dependent on your chosen route and I’ll leave the nitty-gritty for the spoilers section but it took me about a week to get through part I and just 3 days to finish part II. The pace, the combat, the drama: everything gets taken up a notch post-time skip and it made Three Houses impossible for me to put down; just like a certain other famous Nintendo IP with a sword-wielding hero and a mid-game time skip, I think everything that happens later is when the game really sets you loose and leaves you to it. There was a lot of armies moving on huge paper maps, narration and campaign talk which I must admit is the kind of thing that gets me weak at the knees.
WARNING - SPOILERS BEGIN HERE
Finally, I can stop being vague and give you the full-scoop about what I thought.
The bland voicework behind Jeralt and his lack of screen time meant that I felt absolutely nothing when he was killed off; they ham it up with the sad music in the academy and set up this revenge mission against Kronya but I was more interested in recruiting her for the team truth be told. I’m assuming this is covered in the other paths but I still don’t get what the whole issue with the Western Church was. Another minor criticism I had of the story is that it felt like Golden Deer and the Leicester Alliance don’t really have anything to do. I know their route is very popular and again, I won’t know more until I actually play their house but from a Black Eagles and Crimson Flower perspective, it felt like Faerghus and the Church were the real enemy and the attack on the Alliance was put in there just to get them out of the way.
On the topic of getting people out of the way… what on Earth happened to Manuela and Hanneman? They just vanish at the end of Part I and are never seen again. I never felt Jeritza's allegiance was ever fully explained either.
Frontloaded complains once again out of the way, Part II of Crimson Flower had me hooked, for about 3 days all I wanted to do was play Three Houses. The battles get so much more challenging and therefore more fun: I loved that Paralogue where you have to defend the mountain castle against that army from Almyra and conquering Derdriu almost felt like a Total War siege in its scale and drama. Three Houses never lets you feel like you made the right choice on this route either. From the moment I chose to side with Edelgard against Rhea I was questioning the decision.
And this feeling of unease only grew heavier and heavier as we Order 66-ed Garreg Mach and the church.
This is the first time in years in a video game where I’ve felt genuinely guilty for my actions; I felt misled in games like Spec Ops: The Line and could stand by my controversial decisions in other RPG’s but having Jeritza kill Flayn and then his own sister in battle felt dreadful. I find Japanese games/anime are usually as heavy-handed as possible with their themes and what they want you to feel but the the grimness and the fact that the fallen are rarely dwelled upon after the battle made 3H an effective anti-war narrative for me.
Listening to Hubert wax venomous about the coming internal power struggles and knowing for myself across history the fate of prominent generals with inconvenient sway over the throne, I became disillusioned with the future I’d helped usher in and suspected that once Edelgard died, Fódlan under the Adrestian Empire would descend into the same noble feuding that had dominated politics forever, only with crests removed. For all Edelgard’s trauma and hatred for crests and the upper classes, it’s telling that nobody else in the game really shares her sentiment; by the end, I started to think that the Empire was being wielded as a weapon against Edelgard’s trauma rather than against the church.
Did mine and Edelgard’s great conquest create a better, more equal world like she imagined? I very much doubt it but I suppose we’ll find out the fate of Fódlan and which route was canon in Fortune’s Weave.
SAFE - SPOILERS END HERE
After literal years spent on the battlefield, commanding troops, accruing scars and leaving a bloody trail in the history books, I decided that my Byleth would forsake the long knives and dark shadows of the Adrestian Court and marry not Edelgard… but Petra.
History’s greatest generals -especially the victorious ones- rarely survive the arena of politics: Georgy Zhukov found himself in dead-end postings for the rest of his military career and George S. Patton found himself the single casualty in a low-speed car crash shortly after WW2, considering Hubert implies over and over again he’d like to see you dead in the Crimson Flower campaign… I thought it would be best not to have my Byleth tempt fate.
Narratively, I thought Petra and Byleth are alike in many ways if you choose the Black Eagles’ Crimson Flower route: you are both rootless tools of Edelgard and Hubert, no matter how well treated the pair of you are, neither of you can convincingly claim allegiance to any of the 3 nations without facing scrutiny and in a way, you are both foreigners to the ways of Fódlan; Petra may be a foreigner to the continent but Byleth has no knowledge of the world outside of the battlefield, in essence, you are both between cultures and ways of life.
Apart from all that, well… Petra works for me.
Sorry… one moment.
Alright, I’m better now.
A Dark Horse
I’ve been aware of Three Houses for a number of years but I had no idea the game was this good; I’m kicking myself for not getting over the anime aesthetic and trying it earlier. I don’t say this often about anything released in the past 10 years but truly, Fire Emblem: Three Houses is one of the best games I’ve ever played and has me re-evaluating my top 10… and I’m saying this after having played only 1 out of 4 routes of this quest.
It’s certainly not the prettiest game ever made, older FE fans may prefer a more undiluted experience and strategy/tactics games aren’t for everyone but they are for me damn it, I’d say this is a top 5 game for the Nintendo Switch, maybe even top 3; I replayed Metroid Dread last year and wasn’t as enamoured with it as I was on my first go… but that’s a review for another time.
Anyway: play Fire Emblem: Three Houses. I don’t care if you don’t like strategy games and I don’t care if you don’t like anime, I’m the biggest anime hater you could find but I absolutely adored playing this and I had to impose a curfew on myself to stop playing the game and write this review before the other 3 routes steal the rest of my gaming time this Summer.
TL;DR: Fire Emblem: Three Houses won’t blow anyone away with its presentation and those who want a complete story will have to stomach multiple playthroughs… but that won’t be an issue. This is an amazing video game full of depth, charm and intrigue. Put it in your basket the moment you get the funds.
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As a fellow Fódlan enthusiast, if you can stomach Musou-style action I suggest giving a chance to Three Hopes, too, as the way it reframes the war while reducing its academy section to a prologue and greatly emphasizing politics, lore tidbits and religious differences made me appreciate it quite a bit despite a number of issues. I ended up writing a retrospective about it two years ago since the way it handled its source material surprised me.
On the other hand, if you are interested to delve into more grounded or outright dark fantasy tactical JRPGs, I suggest exploring titles like Tactics Ogre LUCT and Ogre Battle 64, Vandal Hearts 2, Der Langrisser, the Shining Force 3 trilogy, TearRing Saga and Triangle Strategy, not to mention Final Fantasy Tactics itself, since you may end up loving a number of them. Front Mission is another one I would suggest, albeit in the real mecha sci-fi space.
As for Fire Emblem, I feel the Tellius duology (Path of Radiance and Radiant Dawn) is still unrivaled in its scope and world building, and old Seisen no Keifu on Super Famicom is also quite enjoyable while offering a completely different kind of map design.
My brother in Christ, I told you it was good! I'm so glad to see it landed so well! :D
So this is a long post and I really feel like it deserves a long comment to do it justice, but also my gosh substack on mobile isn't great for that. Anyways, aside from Fire Emblem always being fairly grounded as a series (the sacred weapons in this game are actually a touch extreme for the series), you really entered at a great point. Three Houses is unusually customizable for the series. Most titles have characters largely locked into a class route (Echoes and Engage are especially locked in), but 3H really threw the doors open and said have at 'er. Btw, if you buy the DLC and play the Abyss chapter (which I strongly recommend doing), you get access to 4 more classes that were present in Awakening but have been absent since.
It's actually fascinating seeing you make marriage decisions based on political history considerations, because you've got a really good point. Edelgard, Dimitri, and Claude all have reasons to hate the crest system, but only one of them is launching an unholy crusade. And when you look at the background lore... Saying she's really going to war with her trauma is an apt description. There's also no way a victorious Adrestian Empire doesn't ultimately descend back into political backstabbing that's only a little subdued from before. You will really need to play the Golden Deer route to understand what it's about though. IntSys decided that was the route to give us most of the big lore drops in answer to all the questions the game raises but never fully answered.
Also, take everything long term series fans say with a heaping of salt. A LOT of people act like Awakening, the game that did desperately needed numbers, killed the franchise, even though the Tellius games which so many of them praise nearly buried it. Also, Fire Emblem: Fates (Conquest) has the best gameplay in the series as far as tactical challenges go. If you beat it on hard mode, you can basically shrug off anything else the series throws at you. (Except for Echoes and its ungodly accuracy calculations)