Fire Emblem Three Houses the new record set up as the number one best-selling fire emblem game shifting the series further into the mainstream and becoming my entry point into this series. What we're going to be talking about is what made Fire Emblem 3 Houses reviews so special and in turn discovering how it gained.
The first thing i wanted to discuss that really helped in bringing three houses to the front is its marketing fire emblem three houses was not only marketed well. But marketed everywhere at least from what i saw you know that thing that crunchyroll does where it plays five ads in that one little ad slot and they all happen to be the exact same ad repeated and you can't skip it so you keep hearing the same thing over and over again.
When i was watching jojo's the out of that time was an ad for Fire Emblem Three Houses. So if i didn't know what a fire emblem game was before i definitely knew now three houses marketed itself as a tactical jrpg which allow the player to have a choice in how the story will progress.
Which house you you'll stand behind from an outsider's perspective to the series. I can already see two aspects that will really draw someone into this game the first is that the house system may remind you a little bit of harry potter.
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A lot of people love harry potter and the second more important aspect being that of choice people love choice people love to choose a side and make a story go the way they want it. If you couldn't tell how much people really do love having choices just take a quick look at youtube or twitter polls.
You'll see a very good example there with how much interaction those get. So what the marketing for three houses did. So well is play into that desire for choice. Do you want to follow edelgard and the black eagles dimitri and the blue lions or perhaps clawed in the golden deer the branching narrative and choices the player has to make is absolutely fantastic and outside of the marketing things it leads me very well into my next point the story.
The gameplay there's no doubt about it fire emblem 3 houses is simply fun to play and has an absolutely fantastic story to boot that's it. That's all there really is to it. I'm just playing of course i'm going to talk about the story and gameplay a bit more starting with the gameplay. Because i think it's easy to go over Fire Emblem Three Houses Seasons of Warfare Edition - Nintendo Switch Seasons of Warfare Edition is a turn-based jrpg with extremely fun game mechanics moving your units around like pieces on a chessboard with a close-up view of the battlefield.
You can have that i didn't even know existed and you should honestly check that out and take advantage of it. Because the maps are actually really beautiful and designed for that the progression system is very straightforward. Easy to learn and really rewarding watching your units go from little students to a flock of women lords.
Because what else would you master class as grinding some maps does get
a little bit repetitive. But that's just the nature of the game it took me all
the way up until my third playthrough to actually get sick of this grind.
So it's not that bad we also get a little hub world to play around with in the monastery where we can talk with our students and partake in activities with them to raise their motivation for battle and learning also unlock support conversations. But we'll get more into those a little bit later for now. Let's get into the story it can be told from four different perspectives that being edelgards dimitri's, claudes and rayers.
This will depend on what house. You choose and for the black eagles it depends on if you side with edelgard or reya at a certain point in the story. So let's delve a little bit further into each of these routes and discuss some of their strengths and their weaknesses.
Starting with my personal favorite route is edelgard's route crimson flower within. This route you are very proactive and the plot is pretty straightforward the world's corrupt edelgard does not have a lot of time left to live.
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She wants to make the world a better place using the time. She has left most effectively thus declaring a war on the corrupt church and in turn anyone else that happens to stand in her way you know i'd always compare edelgard to lelouch.
But sometimes she starts to feel a little bit more like aaron. Nonetheless i am oversimplifying this to the max. But i'll be doing this for all these routes. Otherwise this article would be probably over an hour long. Unless you guys want something like that and if you do let me know i can make separate article all of these routes.
But anyway let's continue crimson flower features some amazing unique supports to the route and has in my opinion the most interesting lord being edelgard again. I've made a whole video on her too if you wanted to check that out and out of all the roots.
Personally i find crimson flower to have the most fun and interesting map design now for some cons crimson flower is the shortest route of all available options in fire emblem 3 houses and to some.
It is a little bit unsatisfying there's also not much law on foldline
or a church really present in this route which all things considered. I think
actually makes sense for the route. But i can see why some people would be
disappointed in that next up. We've got claude and reyes routes those being
wind and silver snow respectively.
I'm grouping these together. Because of how similar they're both reactive stories rather than proactive and focus a lot more on the law of faldlen in each of these routes. We as the player uncover many secrets about the church and reya and learn much of the reasoning as to why foldland is in. Its current state we also have the pressing matter of the war animal god started.
But this time we're on the other side of it. We also get to see a bit more of those who slither in the dark who kind of disappear in crimson flower the real strong point of these routes are their focus on law and understanding the setting. They have plenty of their own fun maps and claude is a really charismatic leader that definitely won't disappoint you as far as entertainment goes.
But for me here are the cons the rats feel dragged out and particularly in claude's route. You feel almost like a bystander in the massive war that's going on. But i feel as though at least claude really carries verdant wind whereas in silver snow bile has a lead. It just really suffers from that as we all know bile isn't the most interesting character in the game lastly.
We've got dimitri and the azure moon rail from what i've seen this is the fan favorite route. It's a lot more character driven than any other however i do like azure moon. The fact that dimitri has history with edelgard makes that war a little bit more personal.
So he doesn't feel like a bystander in the war in the same way that claude does in this round dimitri goes to a real. Let's call it a tough spot and has to grow as a person to move on from the past face his inner demons and come out a better person that can stand up to idol god in order to end the war its pacing is better than verdict wind and silver snow in my mind and shows a lot more lore than crimson flower does.
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So it has a very good balance of story and lore. But it's not without its flaws for me the maps in azure moon just weren't as fun as some of the others. The route starts to feel a little bit more pandering and tropey towards dimitri with bileth quite literally coming to his aid and pulling him out of the darkness.
It's a bit cliche and too direct for my liking at least and almost feels like it starts to tip over a fine line into what feels like fan fiction writing. Basically i get why people like azul moon. But it's just not for me the final cut scene was amazing though and deserves all the credit it gets.
I can only wish we had something like that in crimson flower when edelgard cuts dimitri down in the pouring rain imagine how amazing that could have looked anyway. No matter the route the reason for each lord's success in their respective routes is.
Because of the presence of bileth to keep them
grounded without bileth. They all end up lost and seeing the effect not having
bath around has on each of the characters during your subsequent playthroughs
is really cool to see you really are seeing firsthand what nobel does to him
no.
But seriously after finishing crimson flower and moving on to verdant wind, it was crazy seeing edelgard from a whole different perspective. It's like i didn't know her anymore. Because i played crimson flower first. I had a preconceived perspective of what kind of character. I thought she was and it made me really conflicted in having to fight her in a war with inverted wind. Because in my head i'm kind of like hey wait a minute doesn't she have a point like why am i stopping this war.
A lot of feelings like this will depend on what route you chose to go down first and have i ever seen. A lot of different perspectives on certain characters and aspects of these stories the fact that you can actually see things. From so many different perspectives and the fact that everything is.
So morally gray makes Fire Emblem Three Houses a game that is able to bring about some amazing discussions. But unfortunately it can also have the side effect of bringing about a whole lot of toxicity. But we'll get into that later now. I want to get to the supports and the characters this is an interesting one for me.
Because i was so heavily invested in crimson flower and replayed it multiple times whereas the other routes i only played once. So i could talk to you for a long time about the amazing supports in crimson flower. All the characters in the black eagles. But in terms of the other routes.
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The other houses if i'm completely transparent with you. I don't remember a lot of the supports there are some that stood out. But for the most part they've kind of just gone over my head to be fair though. A lot of the characters in this game are really interesting and have a lot more to them than just their surface level tropes which really helps them grow on you throughout, your playthrough even with characters.
You didn't even think you were going to like at the start for me the character that embodies this the most is hubert he's still not one of my favorite characters. However i started off my black eagles play through really disliking him only to see him eventually grow as a person throughout the war and his supports realizing that he can actually rely on.
All of his classmates within the black eagles and comes out a much better person. Because of it another character i really enjoyed of course was edelgard she has some really great support conversations with hannemann manuela. Of course bioluff that see her perspective actually be challenged and really let her see the bigger picture her whole character arc as a whole is really great and like i said.
I've done a whole video on her if you want my explanation on that and want to hear me go more in depth other standard characters of course are the other lords caught on dimitri. They both have a very good amount of depth to them and have interesting mentalities with really great supports throughout their routes notable ones for dimitri include marianne and felix and for claude notably.
I really enjoyed he supports with shamir flain and bileth outside of the main lords other really great character supports that i enjoyed include dorothea with manuela, ferdinand felix, annette hubert, petra ash, mercedes, ingram hilda, caspar bernadetta, linhart ferdinand and hubert and many more.
Honestly i think you can get genuine enjoyment out of almost any support chain in the series which is a lot more than i can personally say i got from awakening the supports in that game felt like such a chore to me there's only one character in three houses that i genuinely dislike.
But still appreciate and enjoy what they do for the plot that character is raya this is of course completely subjective and biased. But she always just gave me a bit of a creepy vibe and felt like someone even more stuck in the past than dimitri was all in all though i think she plays a really great role as the villain especially in crimson flower.
I really liked her in that route. But outside of that i can't say, i'm a big fan now. I've talked about how fun the gameplay is how great the story, characters are and a few downsides to each route to keep things grounded. But a major gripe i have with three houses at times is the illusion of choice within the dialogue throughout the story while some dialogue does offer genuine change in the supports of certain characters.
A lot of dialogue choices change absolutely nothing and you can see
that in the replies that you get that sounds like they could have worked either
way. I can see where this might have been coming from as giving the player many
dialogue choices makes bioth work a little bit better as a player insert
character as you can pick the option you think you would personally say.
But really i feel like these fake choices really just do a disservice to the game and make it feel really shallow at some points as a whole. I don't love or hate bioluff as a character. I think they're fine and service their player insert role adequately. I much prefer them to robin in awakening.
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But there are definitely much better examples of play insert characters out there. So the last thing i want to touch on is the toxicity. I can't write a video about fire emblem 3 houses without quickly touching on the toxicity found in the fan vase. However i don't want to give it too much attention. Because let's be honest it doesn't deserve it. But it is something that needs to be addressed the game has been out since 2019.
It's crazy to think that it's coming on being nearly two years old now and yet you still see some people go on absolutely massive rants about which route is better and which characters are better and absolutely tearing other people down for no real reason now.
I think we can all agree that every single route has its redeeming qualities and every single right has its flaws and the game itself is just that good that no matter what route you play. You're gonna have a fun time we're all here. Because we enjoy the game and a lot of us seem to really enjoy the conversations that the game brings about at least i know i do. It would be amazing to just keep it that way there are a lot of us that are playing fire emblem that are adults and quite frankly there's probably.
A lot of people that aren't. However i think i speak for everyone when i say there's nothing wrong with everyone acting like adults and having a mature light-hearted conversation about a video game and not getting all riled up about it fact of the matter is everyone is going to have their biases.
Especially with a route you've played first. Everyone is going to have
characters they're attached to and everyone's going to have characters that
they dislike. But at the end of the day i think. It's important that we can all
have fun and interesting conversations about this game without absolutely going
off on people for no reason.
Let's close up this article with a lighter note in summary Fire Emblem Three Houses did a lot right. It nailed the marketing aspect and the sales volumes reflect that and the finished product of the game is absolutely deserving of those sales numbers if you're watching this. Because you've never played fire emblem before and want to know if three houses are worth your time and money, i can say with confidence that the answer is yes.
Otherwise if you just really enjoy fire emblem and wanted to watch someone else talk about how amazing of a game three houses was, then thanks so much for reading this article and sticking around to the end.
Let me know in what your first route in three houses was and what your favorite route of three houses ended up being. Because i'd love to hear about that and discuss it nonetheless. I hope you all enjoyed this article, hope you'll have a great day. I'll see you all next time another switch game before.
