I spent a lot of time in the world of Fire Emblem: Three Houses this Summer. Like, a lot.
I’m a big fan of the Fire Emblem series, and I also love the Persona series, and Three Houses seemed like a perfect marriage of those two game types. Add to that recipe a game that is played on the Switch, and my ability to play anywhere while also enjoying a big screen experience when I wanted it was satisfied.
I want to say it wasn’t perfect, but I’d be lying to you, to myself, and worst of all, to my house leader, Claude von Riegan.
Platforms: Switch
Publisher: Nintendo
Developer: Intelligent Systems, Koei Tecmo
Genre: Strategy RPG + Exploratory RPG + School Simulator + Romance Simulator
Release Date: July 26, 2019
ESRB Rating: Teen
Fire Emblem: Three Houses starts by letting you choose the gender of your main character, Byleth – in my case, I chose the female version – and shortly in, it allows you to choose which school you’d like to be associated with. I chose Claude’s Golden Deer, despite how tempting the other two schools at Garreg Mach Monastery were.
The game starts off slowly – and by that, I mean it starts off as all of the fun, social parts of the Persona series. You’ve been hired as a professor at the school, and at first, you do a lot of walking around, talking to students, and running small errands, as well as getting yourself acclimated to life as a teacher. There are some fights, but not many at first. It’s mostly a peaceful existence, getting to know everyone, gardening, sharing meals, and fishing.
As with many JRPGs, you can automate a lot of what you’re doing, but you can also choose to make each granular little decision as you go. During the teaching phases, I would go in and choose what I wanted my students to learn that week, picking each skill by hand. You can also choose one of three tasks to be done each week, and assign two characters to them. This can improve their relationship together and up their skills. You have the option most weeks of exploring the monastery, fighting, doing extra instruction, or resting, and I rarely rested. (This often got me into trouble, as resting replenishes the motivation of your students, which is what they need to learn, and also replenishes your main weapon, which gets used up when you fight.)
But I’m getting ahead of myself in that I just want to talk about the minutiae of every little system, when what I should say first is that Three Houses is a lovely mashup of strategy RPG, exploratory RPG, school simulator, and romance simulator, with about a dozen extra small minigame-like experiences scattered throughout.
But there are just so many options in this game. There are weapons you can find and repair, weapons you can buy and upgrade, and weapons you can get through special battles. There are other special battles that let you fight rare monsters to get even rarer ingredients to repair and upgrade your weapons. There are meals you can make for special people. There are so many birthdays to celebrate, and you can celebrate them by sending flowers – or hosting a tea party, in which you have to ask the right questions to keep your guest interested in the conversation. There are gifts and lost items that all have the correct people to be given to. There are different classes for each character, and different goals they can focus on depending on what classes they feel are best for them. There are also special boons called Crests that are passed down within families and give their uses enhanced abilities, as well as allowing them to use special weapons thought to have been wielded by ancient heroes known as the Elites.
One aspect of the game I especially enjoyed was the fact that not only do you get to form bonds with the students in your class – you can also form relationships with students in other classes and have them switch over to yours. The students will (usually) let you down politely at first, and then you’ll get a dialogue box that will tell you what stat upgrades you need for that student to consider switching classes. The decisions you make here – which class to be in, and which students you recruit – start to become more and more important as the story progresses. So if there are students you want to recruit, be sure to do it before you lose the chance.
You could spend hours on end just getting lost in the daily lives of these students. And this isn’t even getting into the main guts of the story, which is full of people turning into monsters (on purpose and by accident), conversations with deities, strange blood experiments, and, of course, a huge, continent-sweeping war.
As I’ve already said, I’m a huge fan of the Fire Emblem series, and of the Persona series, so taking a game that has strategic role-playing as well as a sweeping story and the ability to interact with and develop relationships with multiple characters and imbuing it with a compelling storyline and a plethora of choices is basically video game catnip for me. I played Fire Emblem: Three Houses for well over 60 hours, and even after I beat it, I was ready to restart it as part of another class. I don’t think I can recommend this game enough to people like me… though be sure to charge your Switch often.
Review Disclosure: A retail copy of Fire Emblem: Three Houses was purchased by Warp Zoned for the purposes of this review.
