Fire Emblem: Three Houses
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Bernadetta von Varley was a shrinking violet when we arrived at Garreg Mach Monastery. Painfully introverted, she’d rather shut herself in her dorm room than socialise with her classmates. But look at her now. We’re approaching the end of a hard-fought battle, and the enemy commander mockingly sneers at her as she nocks another arrow. Five seconds later, his breastplate pierced with laser precision, he falls from his horse and croaks his last. Our heart swells. Yes, we might have to do something about her apologising before every shot, but our star pupil has become our deadliest sniper. We honestly couldn’t be prouder.
Transforming apparent no-hopers into one-hitkillers has always been one of the great pleasures of Fire Emblem. But in a series that’s held nature and nurture in balance, Three Houses tips the scales towards the latter. Not for the first time, you’re playing a silent hero of indeterminate age with a hidden past and a mysterious power – but those abilities come secondary to your role as a young professor teaching the art of war. You have a choice over which of the titular houses you’d like to preside, each representing a region within the kingdom of Fodlan. The Black Eagles and Blue Lions are rivals despite leaders Edelgard and Dimitri sharing an unusual connection, while the Golden Deer, led by the easygoing Claude, are basically Switzerland. Three Houses’ story may have been inspired by 1996 entry Genealogy Of The Holy War, which never made it outside Japan, but you can understand the Hogwarts and Persona comparisons.
You may be on the other side of the classroom this time, but fans of Atlus’s RPG series will recognise the agonising – call it Shin Megami Tension – over how to spend your free time. You can take your rest day literally, perking up tired pupils ahead of the following week’s studies. Or you might arrange a seminar from a fellow lecturer to help those studying their particular fields of expertise. Those who’d rather hone their skills on the battlefield can take on paralogues and auxiliary encounters for rewards. But the chance to wander around the monastery’s grounds is hard to resist, with a much broader range of activities on offer – of which, as your lecturer rank increases, you can fit more into your schedule. Seeking out one-to-one tuition from your fellow professors lets you hone your own abilities. Fishing and cultivating crops nets you ingredients for recipes that can boost your party’s stats for the rest of the month. Ask two students to join you for lunch and you’ll strengthen your bond with them and with one another – assuming you pick a meal they both enjoy. And with full stomachs, they’ll show up for lectures all the more eager to learn.
In other words, while there’s a lot of downtime, it has a purpose. Some of it can feel like busywork, whether it’s choir practice, fighting tournaments, or playing agony aunt. But through all of this, even something as
simple as picking up lost items and working out to whom they belong, Three Houses encourages you to take an interest in your students. The more time you spend getting to know their predilections, the more likely you are to develop their skills – whether you lean into their innate strengths or encourage them to pursue latent talents – to your advantage when it’s time to go to war. It’s min-maxing with a more attractive face, essentially, and with such a range of potential approaches you can focus on the activities you find most enjoyable. Not that you’re forced to invest in any of this; an ‘auto-instruct’ option picks out the most motivated students to follow their pre-allocated goals, while ultimately, you can still only level up by fighting. But put in the hard yards and you give your charges a better chance of avoiding a tragic epilogue during the end credits.
With battles always falling on the final week of the month (your opponents are unusually considerate of your schedule) the build-up turns each one into a real event, not least since Three Houses’ tactical combat has benefitted from intelligent upgrades of its own. Though you’ll find familiar scenarios playing out – you’ll still want to put mages, rather than archers, against heavily armoured units – the traditional weapon triangle is absent, placing greater emphasis on the combat arts your students unlock as they rank up. This couples brilliantly with the return of Shadows Of Valentia’s weapon durability: more powerful attacks will dull the edge of a sword or axe quicker, forcing you to visit the blacksmith between battles. But repairing the rarest and best weapons requires scarce ores, preventing you from relying on them too often. In a pinch, you’ll need to weigh up the risk of breaking that crit-boosting rapier, or taking a hit from the beast with three health bars that has turned its attention to your wounded pegasus knight. Meanwhile, recruitable battalions (these, too, have limited endurance) offer extra support with special moves that often inflict status effects, freezing enemies to the spot or preventing them from retaliating – while contributing to a much grander sense of scale.
There’s more; perhaps too much in places. Certainly, Three Houses’ interface lacks the elegant immediacy of the 3DS entries – if there’s a way to optimise loadouts we haven’t found it – while its text is so ludicrously small in handheld mode that the first tear we shed is from squinting at the screen. Nonetheless, we grow as attached to these characters as anyone in Awakening, in a story that matches the scope of Fates without forcing you to pay three times for the privilege. For the teachers among Edge’s readership, the thought of spending time tweaking lesson plans might make it too much of a busman’s holiday. Everyone else should clear their schedule; as Bernadetta’s heartwarming lethality proves, the payoff is well worth the investment.
Put in the hard yards and you give your charges a better chance of avoiding a tragic epilogue