Fire Emblem: Three Houses is very focused on decisions, both big and small.
Which of the three groups of students will you choose to lead?
What will you have them individually focus on?
How will you spend your days with them?
You're constantly faced with choices and must decide how to best manage your time.
Character growth is more satisfying because of how much control you're given over the path forward
and the fascinating individuals you get attached to.
Despite the sometimes fantastical nature of the game, the characters feel remarkably believable,
with deep motivations that are properly explored
and arcs that are rewarding to see through to the end.
The game's structure is a big reason why the character development is so engaging.
You play as a mercenary who through circumstance quickly becomes a professor at the Officers Academy.
Once there, you're asked to lead one of three groups of students: the Black Eagles, Blue Lions, or Golden Deer.
The three groups are all concerned with different places of power across the world, meaning that
while they're in comparable circumstances, each has their own interests at heart.
For us, choosing the Black Eagles felt meaningful
because of how effectively we got to know each and every student in the group.
There's a commendable amount of variety in background and personality.
Dorothea is a singer who is aggressively looking for a suitor that will support her;
Bernadetta is an anxiety riddled shut-in;
and Caspar is always so eager to get in a fight.
At first, they seem to be little more than these short descriptions.
Yet over time they really do become difficult to reduce so easily.
The reasons for why they act the way they do are convincing,
and characteristics that appear shallow at first become very sympathetic.
The characterization wouldn't have been nearly as effective if Three Houses didn't pace it out so well.
Through small chats, known as support conversations,
the individual stories build bit by bit throughout the course of the game.
Some of the students are initially apprehensive or even dislike the person they're interacting with.
Yet because the game gradually changes those perspectives,
it's always easy to buy into a specific interaction.
There’s reason to appreciate every member of your house
and to care enough about each of them that no one feels disposable.
It's also possible to recruit many of the students from other houses
if that's something you want to put in the work to do.
While the playable characters are undoubtedly a strength of the game,
that doesn't mean the story is always consistent.
There are things it does well, such as moments that genuinely surprise
or build up mystery about particular aspects of the world.
Yet when it's time to follow up on those foundations,
the story can fall a bit flat.
More specifically, villains in Three Houses can feel disposable,
causing trouble only for you to quickly deal with them and move on.
However because the game focuses so much on its core playable characters
and spends the time to do them justice, the story is investing and worthwhile regardless.
The conviction students show for their own goals
makes it easy to want to push ahead to see what's going to happen.
Beyond getting to know them, you're also responsible for building up the combat prowess of each student.
Every chapter of Three Houses represents one month of in-game time, and although
you don't experience every single day of a given month, there are days allocated to specific activities.
At the end of the month, you'll do the main story mission for that chapter,
so everything that comes before serves as preparation.
On some days, you're free to choose how to spend time, either by exploring the monastery,
battling in side missions, conducting seminars to raise specific skills, or even resting.
Typically, these more open days are followed by days of instruction.
What this means is you have a certain number of instruction points
to spend on increasing whichever skills you want for a particular student,
like raising their proficiency with axes, archery, magic, and so on.
Because you're limited in the number of students you can instruct during any given session,
it's important to think about what you want to accomplish, not only with one particular person
but with the army as a whole.
Students can't be instructed if they have no motivation.
The more motivation someone has, the more you can raise their skills during an instruction session.
Motivation is raised through different avenues, such as eating a meal with two students or
by giving someone a gift.
It's an effective system of progression partly because everything feels interconnected in meaningful ways.
Players should spend their days efficiently so students have motivation to learn as much as they can.
Even simple things like fishing and gardening
connect to the ultimate goal of getting stronger, giving activities weight and purpose.
The side effect of this system is that you always feel close to some sort of breakthrough,
like a new class for a character or new abilities to mess around with.
There's constantly a carrot in front of your face,
and it makes it exciting to participate so heavily in activities and plan ahead for the future.
The progression also helps solidify the monastery as an actual place
as opposed to a simple hub between missions.
Because you spend so much time there,
it goes a long way in selling the idea that you're a professor committed to the growth of your students.
Unfortunately, the monastery does eventually become a little too routine.
You get to know the rhythm of activities, and it feels predictable
even though what you're doing is still useful in a practical sense.
Considering the size of the monastery,
it does seem like there's room for it to be a little more dynamic and surprising.
There are also a couple of small but noticeable performance and visual problems like
frame rate stutters while exploring the monastery
or odd backgrounds that don't look placed correctly, leading to things like weirdly-bent benches.
Much like the monastery and character progression,
battles themselves have many small components that make up a fairly complex whole.
The rock, paper, scissors aspect of the weapon triangle doesn't really exist in Three Houses, so
you don't have to be as stringent about which units are attacking the enemy, but
the game still requires a thoughtful approach.
Flying units are again obliterated by archers for instance,
and magic is still very effective against slow, heavily armored units.
Combat arts can also turn the tide.
These are special attacks that do things like increasing damage, expanding range,
and making you more effective against certain types of units.
The trade-off is that combat arts cost weapon durability,
and if you're not careful, that durability can be chewed through very quickly, even during a single fight.
You need to evaluate the benefits versus the costs pretty regularly.
Similar decisions must be made with battalions.
You can assign a small troop of units to assist your characters,
and that troop will provide certain stat increases
as well as an additional effect, such as doing damage and preventing the opponent from moving
or healing units in range.
Battalion abilities, called gambits,
can only be used a very limited number of times,
but because the troop is attacking instead of a specific character, that character is safe from a counterattack.
Both combat arts and battalions make battles feel like there are still many important decisions to wrestle with,
even with the absence of the weapon triangle.
Not only do you have to utilize the available tools, but properly navigating the map is important,
such as taking advantage of defensive terrain and avoiding tiles that cause damage.
There's a tremendous amount to consider, especially on the hard difficulty.
On normal, you don't need to rely on things like combat arts or battalions nearly as much,
whereas on hard, they're extra valuable.
Because characters can die more easily,
the added safety of something like a battalion is crucial.
Plus, pairing units together is not as effective or as easy as it is in past games
like Fire Emblem Awakening or Fates.
You can assign what is called an adjutant to a character, which does pair them up,
keeping the assigned unit safe from damage and providing occasional support
such as follow-up attacks or healing.
Still, the number of adjutants that can be assigned is very limited, so it's a hard thing to rely on.
When taken as a whole, combat seems meticulously balanced
to always make battles interesting in one way or another,
constantly throwing in small wrinkles to evolve your approach.
The only major exception to this are the giant beasts, which have multiple bars of health.
They feel similar from when they're first introduced until the end of the game,
which hurts the sense of menace they're meant to exhibit.
Like Fire Emblem Echoes, it is possible to rewind time in battle,
potentially saving a character who’s otherwise doomed or just fixing a simple mistake.
On one hand, it does help the momentum of the game, preventing you from wanting to restart an entire battle
just because something went terribly wrong.
On the other, at least on the normal difficulty,
your characters don't feel much at risk, preventing true fear from ever really settling in.
Although you’re limited in the number of times you can rewind, the system is usually quite generous.
Thankfully, the different systems underpinning combat keep it enjoyable all the same,
but the ability to rewind may disappoint those hoping for a more classic experience.
There’s no competitive multiplayer in Three Houses, but there are still benefits for playing online.
The first is that during battle, you may see Spirits of the Fallen, spots where other players died,
leaving behind a shade that when moved to, will give you a benefit like a very basic weapon,
bonus experience, or renewed weapon durability.
It's a small feature, but one that can benefit you enough to actually want to interact with it.
Characters sent from other players can also visit your monastery with items for sale,
and it's possible to play a hide-and-seek style mini-game where you hunt them down for rewards.
However, both of these things are underwhelming in terms of usefulness
as well as entertainment, so there’s little need to participate.
Scanning amiibo will produce items you can pick up within the monastery,
and scanning Fire Emblem-specific amiibo produces better items.
It's not essential in the slightest, but it’s easy enough to do if you have the amiibo lying around.
In a lot of ways, Fire Emblem: Three Houses is exactly what you would want a well-respected series to do
when transitioning to a new console.
It pushes the series in a discernible new direction with purpose.
The game's problems are relatively minor
and Three Houses largely nails the most important aspects,
namely having excellent characters and tactical combat that contains depth without being overwhelming,
leading to a strategy game that's very easy to feel connected to.
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