RE: Fire Emblem: Three Houses

Having beaten the Blue Lions’ campaign in Fire Emblem: Three Houses, I can now confirm that I’m 33% qualified to talk about the game with some semblance of ethos.  Well, 33.3333333333% qualified.  Can’t round up to 34% here, but all of those extra threes have got to count for something.

I mean, I was ultimately successful in achieving my end goal: making Dedue (the best character) into my husband.  

[sweetvictory.mp3 intensifies]

Now that that’s out of the way, though, I have questions about this game.  And this franchise.  Important…ish questions.  Questions that will be asked and (potentially) answered here in this very post.  Chief among them: 

What’s next for Fire Emblem?

I’ll be honest: if you’re skeptical about the game and don’t think that Three Houses is worthy of the hype (and memes), then that’s fine -- but I’ll go ahead and tell you right back to believe the hype.  The game is good.  Quite good.  If the circumstances were slightly different, it would be holding the top spot on my Game of the Year list.  Devil May Cry V is still sitting comfortably on the throne; we’ll see how long that lasts once Astral Chain drops, though.  Because Stand cops.

Let’s get some of the negatives out of the way first.  Chief among them: Three Houses is laughably easy on the standard difficulty.  Well, I say as much, but barely a week ago I watched my brother say the same thing, only to have him blow all of his Divine Pulse charges saving his characters from easily-preventable deaths, only to lose his ace and end up needing to restart the mission from scratch.  So I guess it’s laughably easy as long as you’re paying attention.  With the various units, abilities, equipment, and customization options, you can not only approach battles with an army of supermen, but also have the odds shoved in your favor by way of borderline-broken stat and RNG elements. 

Some units will take zero damage from nearly every type of attack, some will simply dodge everything, and I have a sneaking suspicion that no matter what kind of Byleth you make, you’re going to have a war machine in your pocket.  Mine was.  She had the highest HP, absurd strength values absurd defense, and a crit chance that generally ranged from 40-70% in every battle.  I have screenshots on my Switch of her doing anywhere from 160-240 damage…so in a way, the difficulty is so easy it warps back to being entertaining because of just how hilarious it is.

Also, fun fact: my bro named his Byleth “Carl” after the character from The Walking Dead.  I followed suit, so I went with “Maggie”.  I’m at a point in my life where I’m keen to think of Maggie as the canon name.  Don’t hate me for it.

In any case, this is probably the best-looking 3D FE yet (unless you count Tokyo Mirage Sessions, if only by virtue of its aesthetics).  That’s not saying much, though.  I’m fine with the way the game looks, and it’s not like it’s irredeemably awful, but outside of the character designs and some striking cutscenes, there’s not much to boast about.  Considering how bleak the game can get, it makes sense that, for example, the color palette and visual design isn’t the most vibrant.  But I still remember the hype from the 2D games’ critical animations, and it’s a shame to see anything of that caliber MIA here.  There are a couple of good ones, sure -- get a character on a horse, and he/she may do what might as well be a 360 kickflip atop their steed -- but it’s pretty workmanlike. 

Same goes for a lot of the in-engine cutscenes.  Characters still have some animations, and thanks to the anime stylization they’re all capable of emoting.  On the whole, though?  They’re nothing to write home about, between some pretty uninspired camerawork and stock motions shared across the entire cast.  What gets me the most is that when you have everyone from your house in one place/cutscene, pretty much all of their characterization gets pared down to the most basic outline possible.  Annette will say something earnest!  Then Sylvain will start talking about cute girls!  Then Ingrid will be proper and responsible and tell Sylvain off!  Mercedes kind!  Felix aloof!  And so on, and so forth.

It’s a disservice to the game, because 1) generally the writing is pretty strong, and 2) it’s been a while since I played a game with a cast I like this much.

I don’t know how the other houses fare, but I’m totally satisfied with my Blue Lion crew.  The support conversations do tons to make these characters more than improbably-coiffed students.  That’s not to say that the main story doesn’t help (it does, albeit with a much wider scope), but I’m all right with admitting that at times, the battles and general gameplay are only ancillary compared to the Persona-style content.  Pretty much everyone shows their true colors, and broadens their understanding of the world, and evolves over time, and -- of course -- bonds with others.  Crucially, there’s more to these people than their tropes and quirks; in the right conditions, any one of them could have been the main character of their own game.

Everybody has shit going on in their lives outside of the main plot, Dimitri, and your stand-in Byleth (which is more than I can say about Fates, but I’ll get to that).  I mean, Felix is still my least favorite of the crew, but I can’t imagine going without him even if he wasn’t a ridiculously good unit.  The devs could have started and stopped with a fusion of Sasuke and Vergil, but they didn’t.  Well, they kind of did, but in a way that more or less grounds his character.  He’s rude, standoffish, and effectively unapproachable, but it loops right back around and becomes an interesting, important part of his character.

It’s hard to call Felix anything else besides “asshole”, but it’s worth noting that more often than not, the guy is right.  He doesn’t buy into the idealistic imagery and deified chivalry of knighthood, which he’s not entirely wrong for doing; between the personal losses he’s endured and the fetishization of aristocratic/militaristic/religious dogma, he views things more clearly than comrades who buy into those fairy tales like Ashe or Ingrid.  Critically, he’s able to accurately call out and assess characters’ natures -- Dimitri’s well among them. 

He’s…not wrong for being distrustful.

You can’t spell “characters” without “care”, and Three Houses goes a long way toward making you care.  While I wouldn’t say this is the best-written game ever made (though a lot of the voice acting is shockingly good, IMO), the amount of work that went into making these drawings and polygons feel like real people is worth a round of applause.  Their personalities, their goals, their likes and dislikes, their classes, their abilities, their homes, their friends and family, their histories; again, these guys have more going on than slobbering over “the professor”. 

Not only does it make for better characters, but it also helps the game as a whole feel more mature.  Even if it might as well be (or start off as, at least) Anime Harry Potter, the exploration of its ideas makes it more than mere fluff.  That extends to the main story as well, not just the side content.  Societal pressures, inequalities, lingering grudges, the ties that bind and the frailties therein; I’m extremely satisfied with the way the Blue Lions’ story ended, and the only thing I’m hungry for is knowing how the hell the other two campaigns play out.

I’ll be blunt.  I was worried about this game prior to release because the last one in the franchise I played was Fates (the Birthright version).  To this day, I’ve yet to beat it.  Not because it’s too hard, oh no.  The thing about that is that I’ve got a file with the final mission all loaded up and ready to go -- but I can’t be bothered to slog through a similarly-easy game and beat a one-dimensional villain for a story I’d stopped caring about ages ago. 

I won’t soon forget any of the Blue Lions, and even a couple of guys from the other houses left a strong impression. In stark contrast, I’m struggling to remember the guys from Fates.  I remember some character designs, and I remember some of my stronger units, but very little about what made them distinct.  That’s kind of a problem, because one of those units was literally my time-displaced son.

I’m inclined to believe that Fates was a misstep.  Even though I haven’t played that many FE games, Fates is the only one I have active disdain for these days; I’ve got fond enough memories of the older ones, and felt like trash when I let any of my comrades bite it because of my bumbles.  I lost two guys in Fates and ultimately went “Ah, that sucks.  Well, whatever.”  I lost zero Blue Lions thanks to myriad game mechanics (and having to redo a mission when the timer ran out on me and kept me from undoing Annette’s death by a fog of war-abusing Assassin shitheel).  Had I lost anyone in Three Houses, it would have been an unacceptable, abject failure of an outcome.  I cared.  I was on the hook.  I wanted to protect all the smiles.  Especially Dedue’s, but he’s just one slice of a delicious pizza.

So to go back to my earlier question: what’s next for Fire Emblem?  How do you follow up a game as strong as Three Houses?  I mean, Nintendo -- with backup from Koei Tecmo -- pretty much has to deliver a follow-up.  The game is too popular, accredited, and (presumably) profitable to simply let fall by the wayside.  Granted this is Nintendo we’re talking about, and they’re no strangers to doing what’s bizarre or runs counter to industry trends.  On the other hand, it’s not like they’re completely out of touch.  Arguably, that’s why we’re getting Breath of the Wild 2: Electric Boogaloo.

Yeah, it’s too early to start banging on tables and crying for more FE.  But for a franchise that was on its last legs a few years ago, we’re seeing a resurgence and momentum that’s got to be hard to ignore.  If I had to guess?  I’d bet that there’s more DLC coming down the line -- a stopgap solution until we get a proper follow-up, be it in this universe or starting fresh with a new scenario.  The latter of the latter might be more viable from a storytelling standpoint, because it’ll sidestep the fighting game problem of “which ending is canon”.  But if it’s a hard profit that the devs are after, and a profit as fast as possible?  Getting DLC out there has to be the way to go.  Then again, they already have something planned; there’s an eShop option right there on the main menu, after all.  Will they pump more out?  We’ll see if Three Houses has some legs.

Where should the devs take the game from here, though?  I don’t know who they got to write stuff out, but 1) they found someone good, and 2) that writer or writers wasn’t paid enough.  Someone fish out some extra coins between the couch cushions and toss them over, if you devs are strapped for cash.  So if they follow the trends, pace, and tone set by Three Houses -- and thus throw everything about Fates into a shredder -- then they’ll be better off.  It’ll be the sort of waifu and husbando simulator you can take home to meet your parents.

What about gameplay, though?  That’s a little more complex, I think.  The weapon triangle is gone, meaning that you don’t have to stress as much over optimal/sub-optimal skirmishes between units just because of a bad match-up with weapons.  Note that I said as much; magic users will rip through your heavy units and pure physical attackers, but they’re countered by fliers (Pegasus/Falcon Knight Ingrid is busted), and potentially other magic users -- and meanwhile, fliers are countered by archers.  You can’t just power through every mission with whoever you want…in theory, but my Byleth Maggie, even before reaching her final form as a Warrior, was tanking and soloing whole maps.

I guess what I’m getting at here is that the difficulty in Three Houses comes from properly moving your units into safe and optimal positions.  If you can do that -- staying mindful of their strengths and using them to exploit enemy weaknesses -- then you’ll be way better off.  Unfortunately, that means your victory on a map is less of a challenge and more of a foregone conclusion -- mowing through the opposition until you reach the enemy commander.  Like, you know how in Jojo the battle against an enemy Stand user is pretty much over once the heroes get within attack range?  It’s like that, only the struggle to get there is WAY less interesting.

Getting back on track, though, I hope that there’s something in the next game to buff the difficulty.  And no, I don’t just mean “add a harder difficulty”; obviously the game’s going to be harder if you play on Hard.  I want the decault difficulty to present a challenge that starts off manageable, but steadily and satisfyingly escalates in tune with your character’s abilities and your blooming skills.  The counterargument, then, is “what do you do about it?” 

FE is a stressful franchise because of the pressure behind its permadeath mechanic.  Now that we’ve seen how good the story can get with such a colorful cast, it’s going to be more crucial than ever to keep them alive…but how are you supposed to get those exciting stories if or when one of them bites it?  Moreover, how do you make the game harder after this?  Three Houses features quality-of-life, anti-frustration features that let you make better moves than ever before (you can see who’ll get aggro if they move into an enemy’s attack range, for example).  Would making the game harder mean taking away those improvements?  Probably not, but game devs have done dumber things than that.

I’m not a spy crawling around any game devs’ HQ, so I have no idea what the future holds for this franchise.  I’ll say this much, though: it really says a lot when I’ve only just completed one slice of their latest release -- an effort that took more than 66 hours -- and my first reaction is to stick out my hand and say “MORE PLS”.  Remember, this is coming from someone who gave up on Fates, and didn’t touch another franchise installment until this one dropped.  Now?  Not only am I back in, but it’s actively starting to rub off on me.  I even picked up Ike in Smash Ultimate.  That’s how in I am.

Time will tell what’s next.  But for now?  Nintendo?  Koei Tecmo?  Intelligent Systems?  You did a good job, and I hope you savor the moment.  Keep up the good work, and maybe next time, you actually will put out my Game of the Year.

...As long as you don’t release in the same year as a Platinum game.

I’m not saying this is my GOTY, buuuuuuuuuuuuuuuut…well, it IS a Platinum game…