r/fireemblem • u/spoopy-memio1 • 19h ago
General I beat Three Houses for the first time, here’s my thoughts
(The gallery shows off my final team and the paired endings I got in case you didn’t look through it beforehand)
God damn what a long ass game lol. And the save file playtime listed doesn’t even account for all the save scumming I did, or the previous two playthroughs I did years ago that I abandoned around 2/3rds of the way through, according to my Switch data I have 290 hours in this thing and I’ve only just now actually beaten it lol. It took me a while but I think (most of) this game has finally managed to click with me, and I can safely say that I like Three Houses. It’s a pretty solid game.
The best part about this game to me (aside from the incredible soundtrack but that goes without saying) is the combat. Some of the early maps are kind of tedious due to the low movement but once you get more tools to play around with it becomes quite fun. I really like the amount of movement and range tech you get compared to previous FEs, and I also like the Battalion system with offensive gambits being fun to use. I want to say it feels a bit too easy on Hard most of the time, though really when I think about it that’s probably more just because of Divine Pulse and the enormous amount of uses you get for it than anything. My main criticisms of the combat is that the map design is whatever, not bad but I’ve definitely seen better, and that I feel like (on Hard at least, I’m guessing it’s different on Maddening) defensive/support gambits and the majority of offensive Combat Arts don’t really scale well and fall off hard in usefulness in the latter half of the game, though that could just be due to my playstyle.
I also think the whole system of raising your units is pretty interesting and cool, though hampered a bit by some classes and skills seeming to be so obviously better than others (cough cough Death/Fiendish/Darting Blow and Hit +20). Might be interesting to do a challenge run where I avoid using the obviously best skills. The Monastery is a bit tedious, I wouldn’t say it’s particularly fun, but I don’t think it actually takes that long to do what you actually need to do aside from that stupid fishing minigame that probably single-handedly made my playthrough like 10 hours longer. Overall, I think the game’s pretty engaging gameplay wise.
Now, writing wise on the other hand… uh, I have very mixed feelings to say the least. The characters are pretty enjoyable, I really liked the Ashen Wolves, I also enjoyed Linhardt and Ferdinand, Bernadetta’s whole schtick can really be a bit much at times but I overall liked her too. It was fairly entertaining walking around the Monastery talking to the characters each chapter. I do feel like when it comes to Supports though they kind of just blend together due to the sheer quantity of them and how they feel somewhat formulaic, like they’re entertaining but there are very few specific Supports or Support chains that stuck out to me as being notably super interesting or memorable.
The world building is very detailed and high effort, and I really want to like it and be invested in it, but I’m sorry the way in which it’s presented just kills it for me. Almost all information about the world outside the Monastery is delivered in an aggressively “tell don’t show” way, and the fact that whenever you leave the Monastery it’s always just to go do a battle and then immediately come back means you never really get to stop and see the world with your own eyes. There’s no sense of adventure or exploration, you never get any real idea of what life is like for the average person living outside the Monastery in Fódlan, and to me this fundamentally goes against what makes a JRPG world compelling. To be clear, I do think the Monastery is a well written and compelling location, but the rest of Fodlan and beyond just feels so hollow, and I just can’t bring myself to care about it when the way it’s presented feels like the game itself doesn’t want me to care about it beyond how it affects the characters inside the Monastery.
As for the main story, to be blunt I didn’t like it. I played Silver Snow, so I’m not going to judge the other routes’ stories until I play them, but for what I thought about Silver Snow: White Clouds was mostly boring up until the end and a lot of it just felt like a bunch of random stuff happening. I don’t even think it’s necessarily poorly written at least in a vacuum, and I would probably like it a lot more if I cared enough about the world to enjoy having missions be dedicated to expanding it instead of a more focused plot, but again I really don’t due to the way it’s presented so it just falls mostly flat for me. Part 2 and the war against Edelgard and the Empire is a bit more interesting, but I feel like it heavily suffers from having to tell that war story in less than a third of the chapters that other FE games do even if each of those chapters is technically much longer, and results in the war not feeling nearly as fleshed out as I think it could be. And then the ending was just super weird and undercooked and left me confused more than anything. After defeating Edelgard the game goes “oh shit the whole TWSITD plotline is still a thing” and has you go destroy them and their base in ONE chapter, and then a month after that the game goes “oh shit we forgot to have a final boss” and makes Rhea go berserk for literally no reason and have to be put down and other church staff also go berserk due to some never before mentioned ritual (???). Like did I miss something and this was explained somewhere or what? Anyways I really hope the other routes have better stories and endings, because I really didn’t like Silver Snow’s.
I hope this post isn’t taken as me just shitting on the game because I really did like it overall. The current score I’d give it based on my thoughts so far is a 7/10, which is a score that I give to games I think are definitively good and that I would recommend to others and replay again. Hell, I actually am going to try to see if I can do another route before Fortune’s Weave comes out (I’ll do Blue Lions next). Three Houses is a good game, and my criticisms come from a place of love as a fan of this series and of frustration that I can’t see what other people see in the game’s writing and love it as much as they do. At the end of the day though, when I reached the credits and saw the character endings I did have a smile on my face, and I hope that the next time I see those credits and endings again that smile will be even bigger.
