(dramatic music)
- [Brendan] Before its resurgence in popularity
on the 3DS,
the Fire Emblem series once lived on home consoles
12 years after Radiant Dawn on the Wii,
Fire Emblem has finally returned to the living room
with "Three Houses" on the Switch,
and it's better than ever.
With a vast and open base hub to explore,
new ways to customize your fighters,
and a story that's as brutal
as the choices you'll have to make on the battlefield,
Three Houses is everything I've ever wanted
in a turn-based strategy game.
Following just one of the paths of its titular three houses
took me over 70 hours and still left me hungry for more.
Battles take full advantage of the relative power increase
from 3DS to the Switch
to create some impressive looking maps.
With new battalions that you can equip
to enhance and support your units,
armies actually start to look like armies
as the map zooms right into the fight
to show the opposing forces slam into each other.
Even with Fire Emblem's traditional weapon triangle
all but missing, training up units unlocks
many custom moves and abilities to counter certain enemies,
serving as a great replacement.
There's a bigger emphasis on choosing the right weapon
for the right person,
and units have more options than ever
when trained the right way.
That's a great reward for thinking ahead.
Having battalions to equip on troops
meant new strategies too,
like the ability to stun attackers in place.
With the enemies able to use these tactics as well,
it challenged me to rethink my defensive strategies
and kept things fresh.
All of these new changes,
coupled with the ability to customize your team how you want
makes battles all the more fun and satisfying.
(dramatic music)
Three Houses provides a welcome respite
from battle after battle
by introducing the Garreg Mach Monastery,
a huge explorable fortress that's home to both a church
an officer's academy for the three main nations of the land.
As a newly hired professor,
you'll pick one of those houses to teach,
each with a set group of student soldiers
to command and customize.
Imagine Harry Potter's Hogwarts,
except teens come to learn how to do battle instead of magic
and Dumbledore is the archbishop
of a powerful militarized church,
who routinely orders teachers to lead students to war
against bandits and blasphemers.
(grunting)
Before you can launch yourself into a war for dominance,
you'll spend the first half of the campaign
acclimating to life teaching at the monastery.
Instead of becoming monotonous,
the process of instructing and building up
your students' abilities in combat arts
is quick and efficient.
Training becomes a very satisfying way
to alter the makeup of your army
and adapt to new confrontations.
And in you don't want to waste time
agonizing over each character's goals,
you can even automate the entire process.
Aside from teaching, you're smartly given multiple options
on how to spend days off.
There's something for everyone, from optional battles
to attending specialized skill seminars,
though you'll have to be strategic
with the limited amount of activity points
you have to spend.
A favorite of mine was exploring,
which lets you walk around the impressively sized monastery.
It's practically bursting at the seams
with students and faculty wandering the grounds,
so it's no surprise that I encountered a few areas
of minor slowdown when trying to sprint through crowds.
There's a lot to see and do that's gradually rolled out
during your first year at the school,
though I found myself wishing
that they had saved a little room
to reveal some fresh activities
in the second half of the story.
(exciting music)
Bonding with characters is still a major feature
in Three Houses, and there's more opportunities than ever.
The writers and voice actors have done an impeccable job
of making each character believable.
- Our professor is with us again.
Welcome to the back!
I mean, welcome back.
- [Reviewer] And since only your character
can pursue romantic pairing,
other conversations feel more focused and nuanced,
since they can explore topics
that don't just end with dating.
- Why do you reserve such cold treatment for me,
and me alone?
Do you hate me, Dorothea?
- [Reviewer] The only thing that really hinders
all the conversations are the backdrops,
which are all warped static images,
instead of actual 3D rooms.
They can look really bad
and can distract from the actual conversations at hand.
The story of Three Houses is expertly woven
into the world that builds up,
one that's filled with political intrigue, deception,
and even religious dogma.
I ended up joining the Blue Lions on my first playthrough,
and I'm very glad I did.
Walking their leader Dimitri's character arc
unfold through the first and second act
was incredibly engaging,
as was seeing my other characters adapt and grow
over the course of the story.
It's safe to say that any expectations I had
about how the story would progress
were definitely subverted multiple times.
While Three Houses has a definite conclusion
to the events of the war that dominates Act II,
it never truly reveals its full hand
in a single playthrough.
It wasn't until I joined another house
in my second playthrough
that I truly realized how much more story content
the other routes had to offer.
These paths may retread some familiar ground
in their missions, but the new contexts, surprises,
and characters make each of the four total routes
worth investing in.
(dramatic music)
Fire Emblem: Three Houses succeeds
in its ambitious telling of a land at war,
helmed by captivating leaders,
in which no side has all the answers.
Its tense battles are made all the more harrowing,
thanks to new strategy elements,
and the colorful cast of troops you send into the fray
are incredibly charming.
With a new take on training and unit bonding,
and the many activities available to you between fights,
it's absolutely begging to be played multiple times.
And boy am I excited to do just that.
For more on Fire Emblem: Three Houses,
be sure to check out our full written review on IGN.com,
watch all three houses collide in battle,
or check out a quick montage
of all the different unit classes.
For everything else, stick with IGN.