five months of three houses discourse

Particularly eagle-eyed viewers of my website may have noticed the "video game I am currently playing" section of my status cycling between the same three Fire Emblem tiles from August through December. Well, at long last I am free, and thus ready to share what I learned from this experience. Which is, frankly, not much; I don't believe I have anything particularly new or insightful to say about these games. However, I did start this website with the goal of writing about video games, and unfortunately these are the video games I have chosen to devote the last five months of my life to. This is mostly due to the fact that Three Houses is a thankless slog of a game. It probably would not be inaccurate to call this post my review of Three Houses— but I feel like that implies a level of objectivity and a singularity of focus that I am, honestly, not interested in extending to that game.

Instead, you could consider this my review of the Experience of somewhat-simultaneously playing through Awakening, Fates: Conquest, and Three Houses. This is, of course, something that should only be attempted by professional deranged gamers, such as myself. Do NOT try this at home. If, while reading, you feel the urge to replay Three Houses (or, god forbid, Fates), seek help immediately. Also, just to be clear, this review is not spoiler-free for any of the games.

With all that out of the way, let's unpack what just happened to me.

battle data

Even though Fire Emblem is definitely up my alley, I never really got into it. Before this past year, my only firsthand experience with the series was playing through Awakening once and playing the first few chapters of Three Houses on a friend's copy of the game. We actually traded games, since said friend had only ever played Three Houses. I was immediately appalled by how easy Three Houses was, and my friend was similarly shocked at the difficulty of Awakening. This is what some might call a red flag.

Despite the less-than-stellar first impression, I'd heard enough good things that I eventually caved and bought the game for myself. I started up a new Blue Lions playthrough, and upped the difficulty from "Normal" to the very deceptively named "Hard" mode. It was not Hard. I genuinely could not tell you how it differed from Normal. I mean, I assume the enemies have a bit more HP or something, but it wasn't noticeable in the slightest. I quickly realized I was in for a very unchallenging 80 hours, and so, in an effort to stop Three Houses from actively making me lose brain cells, I also started a new playthrough of Awakening on Hard/Classic mode.

I think it's important to stress here that this was uncharacteristic behavior for me. In case you haven't already picked this fact up from my url, I am generally a "story > gameplay" type of guy. I'm not great at optimization, I almost never care about completion outside of the main quest, and I don't usually have the patience for games that are intended to be incredibly difficult. I am also not an experienced fan of Fire Emblem, or even of SRPGs. Ordinarily, all of this would make me feel unqualified to even attempt to critically review Fire Emblem gameplay and combat. And yet.

Regardless of all that...I wholeheartedly enjoyed my Awakening playthrough. What can I say, it's a fun game. Even more so on a replay. Further still when you mod it so your units can be gay. I enjoyed getting to re-experience Chrom being hopelessly in love with me the story, try out new classes and pairings, and finally recruit all the child characters. I also enjoyed the added challenge of upping the difficulty. My personal Classic mode rules were that I wouldn't allow anyone to permadie if they had an unrecruited child, and that no more than one character was allowed to die per map. Given the fact that I am (I swear!) not all that good at Fire Emblem, this meant I still lost about seven units across the whole game. It also meant that, to avoid losing more than that, I ended up reloading A LOT. And I still had fun!

Meanwhile, I was having somewhat less fun in Three Houses. I don't think Awakening totally surpasses every single aspect of Three Houses; the game has its own strengths, to be sure. The character writing/supports are a definite step up, and the premise is surprisingly strong once you get past the absurdity of the Fantasy Pope randomly hiring you to teach Fantasy Catholic School. But overall? Less fun. The calendar system drags out the periods in-between story battles, and then those story battles lack any real difficulty, novelty, or interesting map design. I'll elaborate more on these factors later, but for now, suffice it to say that I was frequently bored out of my mind while playing.

When I got fed up with Three Houses, I would turn back to my 3DS, taking a break from slogging through un-loseable battles by repeatedly reloading the same map on Awakening until I'd successfully made it through with everyone intact. On paper this sounds way more frustrating than continuing to play Three Houses. I really did spend an obscene amount of time on some of those battles. But I never got seriously frustrated. Yes, I struggled, and yes, I eventually had to admit defeat and let one of my soldiers die on a few occasions (AND I MOURN THEM EVERY DAY). But I was genuinely, consistently having fun. Even when I had to reload, and reload, and (man come on not the same-turn-attack reinforcements) reload again, I was still invested. I liked being forced to try out different strategies, to figure out which moves worked and which ones didn't. There are quite a few Awakening battles, especially in the early game, that felt very, very hard. But they never felt impossible. Maybe a series veteran would have more critiques, but personally I felt the game was pretty well-balanced.

So, in-between visits to Chrom and Friends, I made it through all of Azure Moon. It got marginally more difficult in the last few chapters: I think most of my units' stats were probably lagging, due to some combination of my inexperience with the systems, and my lack of NG+ XP boosts. Somehow, the mild difficulty spike didn't seem to make the game any more balanced, but it was at least amusing to send all my units out, let most of them inevitably die, and then watch as the sole survivor somehow solo-ed the entire rest of the map. The fact that this happened multiple times boggles my mind. Surely it's indicative of some sort of design issue, but I couldn't tell you what. Literally makes no sense to me. Anyway, I finished the route.

Azure Moon was definitely the Three Houses playthrough I enjoyed the most, mainly by virtue of it being first. It still felt unnecessarily long and simple, but I did at least find the characters and story interesting. There were points that made me emotional. Hitting the ending, though, felt strangely anticlimactic. Like, that's it? What about [insert any number of plot points that never get resolved]?! A while after that, I finished Awakening, which was much more satisfying.

By this point I had also started my Crimson Flower run. Since Hard mode had been a breeze, I raised the difficulty once again. To its credit, "Maddening" mode at least earned its name. It was indeed difficult and frustrating enough to drive me crazy. But it still wasn't...very fun? The already too-long battles became even longer, drawn-out affairs where a single wrong move could completely ruin me. They also made heavy use of poorly-telegraphed reinforcements. This did make battles more difficult, but it didn't do much to make them more interesting. By the end of this run I was completely exhausted, but because I am sick in the head I refused to turn the difficulty down, even after wasting hours trying to get through the final battle. I did eventually succeed, but what is wrong with me.

Aside from the exhausting combat, Crimson Flower also heavily disappointed me from a story perspective. After Azure Moon left me with a billion questions, I was excited to side with Edelgard and find out all the answers she clearly had. Unfortunately, all the characters in Crimson Flower (and really, the game as a whole) constantly dance around actually discussing important subjects. This was the game's big opportunity to show the darker side of the Church of Seiros, but it weirdly felt like we were fighting Rhea solely because she was a dragon and not, like, any decisions she personally made or upheld. I know this is Fire Emblem, and killing a big dragon is cool and all, but the fact that I gained almost no new information about some of the bigger mysteries in this game was just as maddening as the combat.

So then. Listen. Listen hear me out okay. It's not my fault. Three Houses was driving me to the brink of insanity, and I had already dragged my Awakening playthrough out as long as humanly possible. I needed interesting Fire Emblem gameplay to survive. Even if it came in some truly atrocious packaging. So yes, partway through Crimson Flower, I started up Fates: Conquest.

Now, unlike with Three Houses I had zero expectations of Conquest's writing. It is inarguably written much, much worse than Three Houses, even disregarding its rampant horniness and the fact that a good chunk of your possible romance options are related to you. If we compare them on the basis of story alone, it's clear that Three Houses is the series taking another shot at many of the concepts they first tried in Fates, and doing a much better job of it. Unfortunately, these are still video games, and Conquest's battles are really, really fucking fun. They are also the vast majority of the game's playtime, unlike Three Houses which gives you an ample amount of extraneous shit to do in between story battles. So, despite it all, Conquest did provide some relief for me. It also provided an important point of comparison for Three Houses. But enough about that for now.

At long last, having completed Azure Moon, Crimson Flower, Awakening, and Conquest, and with no plans to complete the Silver Snow route, I found myself facing my final Three Houses playthrough. There was light at the end of the tunnel. I'll be honest, at this point I was sick of it, but I was also determined to finish the game. Part of this is because I'm clearly insane, but I also really wanted to understand both the entirety of the game's storyline, and why it became so goddamn popular. I...am still not sure I really understand either of these things. At least I tried!

My determination to Understand Three Houses only went so far, however: in the end, I never attempted to play this game on Classic mode. Logically speaking, Hard/Classic would probably be the best bet at making the game feel reasonably challenging for me. But, to be honest, at this point I could not bring myself to make the game any longer than it already was. I was running out of patience, and I also really, really did not want to end up playing another Fates game. So I kept Casual mode on, and lowered the difficulty back down to Hard— which was even more inaccurately named now that I had all the boosts from NG+.

It's probably unsurprising that I was ultimately disappointed by Verdant Wind. I kind of wish I'd played it first, since it's the only route that outright explains...basically anything. Maybe then I'd have been less frustrated by the other routes. Even with a lot of plot points finally (FINALLY) being addressed, the story still felt pretty lacking. So did the battles, which, aside from being ridiculously trivial to clear, were mostly the exact same battles I'd already played in previous routes. I barely touched Divine Pulse for the entirety of the game.

Despite how easy it would've been to phone it in for this playthrough, I really did try to keep engaging with the game. Maybe that was a mistake, and I should've used the skip button more. But I didn't, because if I'm playing a game, I want to actually play it, goddammit. I recruited everyone. I made myself change up my lineup to use units I'd ignored before. I tried to unlock as many supports as possible. And yet. There was no escaping the monotony of this game. Even the supports started boring me, which is tragic because I thought those were one of this game's strengths! I'm not sure if I actually like the Golden Deer/Church units less, or if, after already having played the game twice, the novelty of getting to know a new group of characters¹ simply couldn't last.

...This brings us to the present day. Having pushed myself through all three of the titular houses (and two 3DS games), it is time to arrange all my complaints into some semblance of coherent thought. I could complain about a lot of aspects of Three Houses. It's bloated, it's underwritten, it's boring to play, and it's full of half-baked mechanics— and that's just off the top of my head. None of these issues are unique to Three Houses, though. So why, then, did I find it so uniquely frustrating?

have i mentioned how long this game is

One of my biggest issues with this game is, ironically enough, time. Three Houses does not make good use of its time, which amplifies every other issue. This isn't quite as simple as being poorly paced or plotted. It would be a bit unfair to single out Three Houses on the basis of plot alone, since Conquest might be one of the worst written games I've ever played. And while I do love Awakening's story overall, it's not very tightly written, and probably spends more time wandering through Valm than strictly necessary. But regardless of how ridiculous or meandering those plots were, they at least always felt like they were moving. Things were happening. In comparison, Three Houses is a game full of dead air, with a story that is frequently (and sometimes illogically) put on hold.

The main offender here is obviously the monastery. Before I go on, it's important to note that I am not, as a rule, opposed to any of the following in video games: hub areas, downtime, side content, or having "Persona" in the title. I do, however, think Three Houses' execution of those concepts is extremely lacking. The game encourages you to explore the monastery at least once a month, but aside from hearing what your units have to say about recent events (which I liked!), there's not actually much to do there. All of the activities get repetitive very fast, even the side quests². The time-management aspect also becomes trivial after a few in-game months once your professor level has gone up a bit— and once you realize that the best use of your time is almost always eating 10 meals in a row to get everyone's motivation up. Yum.

On top of the monastery monotony, there's also deciding how to spend the rest of your free days (with the possible exception of paralogues, none of the other options are any more interesting than the monastery), and "teaching" your units. Being able to raise a unit's skill levels outside of battle is actually a concept I like a lot, and it works well with the framing of being their professor. Unfortunately, it is still an extremely repetitive process, which gets piled on top of all the other repetitive shit you have to do. Ultimately, playing through the months in-between story beats just felt like a chore.

Being forced³ to spend hours not progressing the actual storyline gives you a lot of time to think about said storyline. Three Houses is a game that, by design, makes you really sit with things. This is, once again, not a concept I am totally opposed to. Giving your audience time to process things can be a very powerful narrative tool. But if you're going to intentionally draw things out, you had better be real fucking sure that the eventual climax is worth the wait. Three Houses' calendar system builds up your anticipation to every single story battle, and then fails to deliver sufficient payoff nearly every single time. In comparison, the 3DS titles are pretty quickly and consistently pushing you from one battle to the next, which feels a lot more engaging, puts a lot less pressure on each individual story beat, and also doesn't give you hours at a time to think about how the game is not living up to its own expectations.

I really do think Three Houses has a strong premise. Sure, it leans heavily on some plot contrivances to get there, but the characters and world are definitely interesting. At first. The thing is, the game is long. Really long. And then you have to play it again. And again. Maybe even a fourth time if you truly want to do every route. This is a game that gives you a lot of time to think about it, and unfortunately its premise alone is not enough to hold it together under scrutiny.

also it hurts to play

I've been putting a lot of focus on the narrative consequences of this issue, but since this is Fire Emblem, the narrative and the "main" gameplay are inextricably tied together. Every plot event has an accompanying battle, and every battle is boring as fuck to play. If you've read this far, you're probably already sick of listening to my many grievances with this game's combat, but not as sick as I was of playing through it. The difficulty levels are absurdly balanced. The map design is incredibly bland. Divine Pulse feels unnecessary from both a story and gameplay perspective. They got rid of pair ups, even though I loved pair ups. And, of course, everything takes way too long.

If you took this game, and simply cut out all the monastery stuff (or just mashed the skip button), that wouldn't fix any of those problems. However, the extended build up to each battle isn't helping anything, either. Every in-game month, I would wait with growing anticipation for the end of month mission— and then be inevitably disappointed. A lot of that anticipation was directed at the story progression, of course. But a lot of it was also anticipation for a new battle. Like, an actual new battle, not just fighting random bandits on a map that was boring even before the game showed it to me 800 more times. The story battles should be more challenging, right? More interesting? Conquest had a new gimmick for basically every single map, so it's not like I'm being totally unreasonable here, right?

And yet, basically every single time, the battle was a letdown. Trudging through each map felt like a chore, which is especially bad when trudging through all the monthly content necessary to even get to that map also felt like a chore. So, the gameplay is bad. It tries to do too many different things, and ends up half-assing all of them as a result. Luckily, as we've already established, I'm a story-over-gameplay person. Unluckily, the story has the exact same issues.

Damn it I have to actually discuss the plot of Three Houses now don't I.

losing the plot

This is a complicated task, because Three Houses has multiple routes. For the sake of my sanity, I'll try to avoid getting too bogged down in their individual details. Azure Moon is about Dimitri processing his trauma enough to stop wanting to kill everybody. Crimson Flower is about Edelgard's mission to destroy the Church of Seiros. Verdant Wind is...less effective at personally connecting Claude to the war, but he gets points for actually wanting an explanation for most of the game's events.

In general, though, the routes share a lot in common. In fact, the entire first half of the story is almost identical. This is yet another way the game wastes your time, but more importantly, means that the story is always setting up the same plot points. Your father warns you not to trust the Archbishop, but refuses to explain his mysterious past with the Church. There's a religious power struggle occurring with the Western Church, maybe. You keep gaining more supernatural powers. Flayn is kidnapped. You learn that Relics can transform people into Demonic Beasts. A bunch of people suddenly go insane. A bunch of students also get transformed into Demonic Beasts. It's increasingly clear that everything happening is due to the machinations of a group of inhuman shapeshifters. Your dad dies, you get more powers. Edelgard declares war, and you finally, finally get to be done with White Clouds and see what the hell all of that was actually building up to.

Except then you don't.

I mean, yeah, sure, fine, after three playthroughs I can at least vaguely understand how all of that fits together. A lot of the answers boil down to "the Agarthans did this evil thing because they're evil", which is an explanation, even if it's not a very good one. Maybe it's good enough for you. Maybe it would be good enough for me if this game didn't take me well over 200 hours.

I would really prefer to understand what, exactly, they were doing with Flayn's blood and Remire village, and those students in the chapel. And how their shapeshifting works. And why Edelgard holds the Church more at fault than the people who literally locked her in a dungeon and experimented on her. And why the Agarthans stay almost completely unknown in Azure Moon despite being tied so closely to the Tragedy of Duscur. I think it's deeply, painfully unsatisfying how little the post-timeskip story does with all of the plot hooks they dangle in front of you in White Clouds.

Instead, everything is about Edelgard's war, whether you're for her or against her. This, of course, makes sense: it's a war in a Fire Emblem game, it's the most immediately pressing issue, we shouldn't not be focused on it. That being said, there is simply way too much Other Shit happening at Garreg Mach for me to be satisfied with the idea of it all being a smokescreen for the eventual war, something to be relegated to the background once Edelgard's mask comes off. I, for one, am not willing to let all those people slither back into the dark. It's just not good writing. Plus, they killed my fucking dad!?

This is another way the game's writing grates on me: the way Byleth is written is honestly baffling. They're the protagonist, but also utterly irrelevant. They're a self-insert that leaves no room for insertion. The game provides you with a whole pile of ways in which you, personally, are connected to the story, and then promptly ignores all of them in favor of having you blindly follow around your favorite house leader. You have the agency to marry whoever you want for no real reason⁴, but not the agency to form any kind of compelling characterization. Which is just sad, because my hot anime wife should be able to love me despite my flaws.

Let's talk about another story, now. Not Three Houses' story, but its less-evolved predecessor. Fates is a game about a royal heir forced to choose between two countries, two families: the one they were born into, and the one that raised them. No matter which you choose, you'll still be fighting people you view as siblings. This is grossly oversimplifying things— I could put a massive asterisk on every single one of those points— but it's still a pretty interesting premise. Of course, it's also a premise that immediately trips, falls down a bottomless pit, inexplicably turns into a dragon, and lands flat on its face.

The reasons for this are many, but one immediately obvious flaw in Fates' setup is that one country is ruled by your kind, loving, and 100% pacifist birth mother, and the other is run by your cartoonishly evil adoptive father/kidnapper. This pretty much kills any theoretical nuance the story could have had. Three Houses, on the other hand, executes the concept of "choosing a side" much more gracefully: despite whatever the Fire Emblem Discourse might say, none of your possible allegiances in the game are definitively evil. Which is great! Improvements were made.

On the other hand, while siding with Nohr is objectively idiotic, Corrin does spend a fair amount of time justifying their decision. Throughout Conquest (which is, to be clear, the game where you side with your evil war-mongering dad who hates you) they constantly wonder if they made the "right" choice. Usually this is followed by King Evil Dad laughing maniacally and then ordering them to kill a whole bunch of innocent people. Which feels like a pretty definitive "no". But however bad the writing is, it still bothers to connect Corrin's decision to their character. The Corrin of Conquest has every reason to hate Nohr, but can't bring themself to turn against the siblings they grew up with. There is emotion, and history, and conflict tied up in that choice. Three Houses is a golden opportunity to replicate that sort of compelling characterization in a way that's, like, actually good.

And the groundwork is there! As I said, Three Houses manages to make a somewhat nuanced conflict, and connect it back to Byleth as a character while they're at it. In the grand scheme of things, you can either choose to ally with the Church of Seiros, or with Edelgard. It's almost ridiculously easy to come up with reasons why Byleth might personally like or dislike either of these factions. Edelgard is your friend and student, but she's also allied herself with the people who killed your father, and committed various other atrocities. Rhea is someone you could see as family, or as a madwoman who experimented on you. And even if you give one of them your loyalty, surely you'd still want to address the possible tension in your relationship.

Yet you never do, because Byleth seems perfectly content to just go along with whatever their favorite student does and not think about anything else. I suppose this is, in a way, a type of characterization, but to be frank, it is a boring one. It's also deeply counterintuitive to how much of a self-insert for projection Byleth is supposed to be. If I'm pretending to be this character, if I'm getting invested in living their life, I'd at least like the option to feel some type of way about my ridiculous backstory.

It's just weird to be given a self-insert protagonist, complete with ultra-rare and special self-insert protagonist superpowers, and then somehow be relegated to being a background character. On a meta level, Byleth-as-the-player can deeply affect the world: it is genuinely awesome how much can change for other characters based on who you teach, and who you recruit, and who you don't. On a personal, emotional level, though, Byleth-as-a-character feels incredibly shallow and insignificant. Sure, everyone loves you and you have a cool sword. But that's not actually all that interesting or relevant.

I don't feel like I'm asking for much here, either. I mean, look at Awakening. It's a game with an almost entirely linear story. Virtually none of the choices in the game actually impact how events play out— but they feel like important, personal choices nonetheless. You decide whether you're willing to sacrifice Emmryn. You decide whether you're willing to sacrifice yourself. You can decide to promise Chrom you'll stay, and then you can decide to break that promise. Hang on, I think there's something in my eye.

My point is, player choices don't have to have huge, world-altering effects to be meaningful. My point is, I love Fire Emblem: Awakening. My point is, I played Three Houses three times and it still feels like only half a story. My point is, I somehow managed to concoct a situation where I actually kind of enjoyed playing Fates, and that just feels wrong. My point is, I have no idea how people managed to argue about Fire Emblem for years, because just writing this post exhausted me. There's probably more I could say, still, but I think my time would be better served elsewhere. Though I guess it's a little late for that conclusion.

So, there we have it. My first five months worth of Three Houses discourse. Let's hope to god there won't be another.