Fire Emblem: Three Houses - Give Me Orders Daddy

Yeah I do agree with Jay and I think that was a top notch post.

I also grew quite attached to the characters in my house, which I think is a testament to the quality of the overall story for the most part, the better bits of world building done through support dialogue, and of course the engrossing squad building gameplay.

And it's definitely a game where most of the characters have an extra layer underneath the "I'm lazy" or "I'm always hungry" outward appearance. I thought Raphael was a throwaway character at first, but he's actually got some pretty decent support conversations.

It's just that here and there, there are bad design decisions that contradict the world building/character arcs for the sake of... cringe. They're pretty bad when they're there but not enough to mire the whole experience.

Jas brings up the Witcher and it's almost an unfair comparison for me because that game is just so much better at dealing with relationships and morality than just about any game ever in my opinion. But I do think if Fire Emblem is going to introduce more RPG exploration, then it would be better off moving away from the antiquated support convo structure... or at the very least, just make everything platonic. But in the Witcher your choices have consequences, and I would love for something like that to exist in Fire Emblem to make the characters feel less like props - although I appreciate that this would be very hard to implement.

But, like Jay says, I think Fire Emblem has changed for good now and I just have to accept that or move on (although I'll still complain haha). I've still got all the old games.

I've grown to like Bernadetta which is why

I:

Muss wrote:

But in the Witcher your choices have consequences, and I would love for something like that to exist in Fire Emblem to make the characters feel less like props - although I appreciate that this would be very hard to implement.

That was the main reason I brought it up actually since you had mentioned that the dialogue choices in FE didn't seem to matter much but I agree that it could be overkill on top of stuff like the perma death system.

I started my Blue Lions Hard/Classic NG+ run the other day, looking forward to getting to know the squad.

I didn't have any need for Bernie in my GD playthrough as they're stacked for archers, but depending on how things go I might recruit her as a BL. Will definitely read what Shanks has to say once I've had a run that uses her. She seems a bit cringeworthy to me right now, but I'm hopeful there's some good character development beneath the surface.

My first thoughts having gone BL is that I've got no range and I'm a bit scared of magic I'm sure that'll change once I get some class upgrades going, but boy do I miss having Claude and his final unique unit type.

Bernie is best girl, well at least playing as Black Eagles

Are you gearing up for a second playthrough Mas? Am I right in thinking this is your GOTY so far?

It is my GOTY at the moment but found the ending disappointing, so can see it being replaced.

I am on holiday this week, with nothing planned (I didn't even know I was off) that I may start with Golden Eagles, depending on how I feel as it's a longish game to just jump back into.

I'm one chapter off my first play through, my next one is where I'll really be with the Black eagles I think then move on to the next houses

Muss wrote:

My first thoughts having gone BL is that I've got no range and I'm a bit scared of magic I'm sure that'll change once I get some class upgrades going, but boy do I miss having Claude and his final unique unit type.

Mages are definitely the hardest counter to the Blue Lions from my Hard/Classic playthrough - just wait till some of the endgame maps... - but I found that Ingrid as a Pegasus Knight would deal with them nicely and either Annette or Mercedes were good for baiting the mages closer as their resistance was so high. Annette in particular had a monstrous 40+ magic stat by end game so she would destroy any enemy mages with little effort.

I finished my first run of this! I'm quite happy in claiming this as my GOTY so far. The core gameplay loop remained engaging for the majority of the journey, although I did use the auto-teach ability towards the last couple of months as there wasn't much more my students needed to specialise in. The Blue Lions story was a surprisingly human tale for Fire Emblem - Fire Emblem has a particularly boring habit of having an epic, world spanning tale of chivalry and warfare before wrapping up the final chapters with "OOGA BOOGA A DRAGON DID IT OR SOMETIMES IT WAS THE GODDESS". The supernatural elements weren't really there for the Kingdom's story, which was refreshing. Dimitri's arc cemented him as potentially my favourite lord in the series yet.

What's surprised me the most is that with little fatigue I've found myself jumping right back in for NG+. I want to know how the Black Eagles route pans out so I'm already a few chapters into my second run.

Finished my second route today, though it helped that it branched off my previous playthrough so I could re-load an older save to circumvent most of Part 1.

The scope of this game. Wasn't prepared for how fleshed out the world and characters would be. Whenever there's a new month I gladly speak to everyone in the monastery for what they have to say about the current conflict or whatever little tidbit they have about someone or someplace. Was pleasantly surprised that pretty much all the dialogue is voiced.

Did have somewhat mixed feelings about Supports though. Like someone here has said the system is antiquated. Feels almost odd since a lot of features have been overhauled but the Support system has remained pretty much the same since it was first introduced in the series almost two decades ago. I like Fire Emblem games but they're kind of a mess of gameplay layers - in battles not only do you have to worry about the tactical placement of units, but resource management, level management (making sure the right units get the exp/don't overlevel and become exp sinks) and if you bother with it, placing the right units side-by-side to build up support. And I recall the ranking systems of some of the older games not being too kind if you faffed about too much organising your units to these ends.

There are at least a few more ways to raise support between units now. The choir, group tasks and, more fruitfully, meals, which I made a great use of since at some point I had an abundance of activity points. Not even accounting for gifts and tea time, you'll max out the supports between the main character and anyone else this way easily in a playthrough. But between other units, it can feel like a bit of a grind, especially if you recruited a few others to your house and want all the support conversations. Got a bit burned out trying to pursue this - admittedly kind of my fault for trying, but I want the content. Some of the conversations and character arcs are really good. But it doesn't help that some of them are not so interesting or feel a bit too divorced from what's been going on in the game.

When it got to the point of the game where you choose who your main character pairs off with, I was stumped as to who to pick. I had the choice of everyone in my house and the recruits (as well as an extra/special choice), but nobody felt like 'the one'. I liked Shamir, but in the three support convos we had, which capped off a while back, it didn't seem like there was a that great of a connection between the two characters. Same with Bernadetta. In the end, I picked Edelgard since it just seemed to make the most sense.

I think Hubert had some of my favourite support conversations. He's a horrible person overall, but they do a good job of humanising him/showing his lighter side without backtracking on his personality/perspective.

Probably jumping into a new game plus playthrough with a different house soon. Think I'm going with Blue Lions though I am very curious about the Golden Deer route too and I plan to try them all eventually.

Finally bought and started. Gonna go with Golden Deers I think. Claude is great, and I have a thing for fantasy factions that use stags/deer's after Fitz in the Realm of the Elderlings series.

That is all.

I'm really surprised that most of the comments I've read from those that have finished this game are about jumping right back. New Game Plus is usually a mode given little thought by most folks, so I suppose that's a real testament to this game's replayability.

I love new game plus and tend to give it a go, often not long after I've beaten a game. If I leave a game for a long time and want to replay it then I usually do a regular playthrough since I guess I want to experience the game the 'proper' way.

Though whether I bother seeing through a new game plus playthrough to the end is another question and depends on new features or if there's some fun to be had in sequence breaks/beating the game especially quickly.

Here I like how renown, which you're given in bonus amounts and with less of a need to spend it on statues, can go towards progress in a fair few aspects of the game. Opens up a lot of possibilities and makes recruiting and unlocking supports a lot easier - seems like you miss support convos by unlocking them with renown at first, but they can be viewed in the main menu. Then there are the bonus items and little things like changing unit appearances. These additions and the game having four different routes make NG+ pretty attractive.

Two hours in. I'm going to make some bold (/sarcasm) predictions.

Church is clearly eeeeevwil. The green hair on everyone also puts me in line of suspecting that totally-not-evil-leader is Byleth's mother. I'm going to take a wild stab in the dark and guess that Byleth was stolen from the crib by merc-dude because church-lady has some sort of super evil scheme in mind (probably something involving time manipulation if the manakete in Byleth's mind is anything to go by).

But none of it will be dealt with except in the True Route (which with all the talking is clearly Edelgard).

Claude is an MVP. I'm loving the suave amorality oozing off him in casual conversation.

And since the topic of replays is on the agenda, likely won't be doing one for a few months minimum unless the gameplay and map design is Conquest quality. Game's clearly going to be a long-winded affair even by JRPG standards. Which is great if the quality remains that of the first couple of hours.

I picked up my copy last night.I'm excited to settle into the big session.

I too recently got my copy, already picked Claude as he is the prettiest of the boys and apparently the most balanced team(I need all the help I can get). I'm very excited to make everyone bang, the ultimate goal of any fire emblem title.

Okay, which clown at IS decided to make the boss of the second chapter have a heal tile, no movement, and no ranged weaponry so the player can farm archer weapon rank indefinitely?

Shame the promoted avatar outfit isn't reflected in the monastery sections, myrmidon Byleth looks amazing and I was excited at how much classier female Byleth was going to look. Only to be disappointed as soon as the screen went back to the monastery.

Lysithea best gril and Claude best boi so far. Although Ralph is growing on me. Leonie is getting strength-screwed, level 5 and not a single strength gain. She keeps this up she's getting benched. Hilda meanwhile is becoming an MVP, her personality belying her stat gains.

Bloody hell this is a good computer game. I stayed up so late playing last night I was almost late to work this morning.

Kriken wrote:

Here I like how renown, which you're given in bonus amounts and with less of a need to spend it on statues, can go towards progress in a fair few aspects of the game. Opens up a lot of possibilities and makes recruiting and unlocking supports a lot easier - seems like you miss support convos by unlocking them with renown at first, but they can be viewed in the main menu. Then there are the bonus items and little things like changing unit appearances. These additions and the game having four different routes make NG+ pretty attractive.

Yep, I like how renown is used in NG+ too. I immediately bumped my professor level to A+ and it's helped a lot in building my class into war machines.

Athrun888 wrote:

But none of it will be dealt with except in the True Route (which with all the talking is clearly Edelgard).  
 

From what I know of the game, no route gives you all the answers. Each of them delves into different plotlines and different themes too. It's what makes NG+ such a compelling option this time round, like Kriken was saying. And I'd personally disagree on Black Eagles being the "true route", but I'll say no more than that.

NintenDUCK wrote:

I'm very excited to make everyone bang, the ultimate goal of any fire emblem title.

Mercifully, there's very little of that in FE:TH.

Drunkalilly wrote:

Bloody hell this is a good computer game. I stayed up so late playing last night I was almost late to work this morning.

I was in the exact position after release! I couldn't tear myself away from it. Which house did you pick, Drunka?

I've had a very busy couple of weeks - it's summer school, the busiest time in my job. I've been doing 11 or 12 hour shifts on the reg. Shen's back in Japan, my folks visited, I'm tired all the time.

Somehow, I still managed to squeeze in 20 hours of Fire Emblem over just 7 days. It is super addictive - battles are great, being a professor is great, strutting about the school and making friends is great, the characters are great, fishing is great . . . I can't put it down.

I'm playing on Hard but without permadeath, which is the sweet spot for me right now. I might try again on a full XCom run as another house some time, but as it is I want to keep everyone alive and restarting all the time doesn't sound fun.

I'm looking forward to reading through this thread later and seeing people's thoughts. I assume you all behaved yourselves, re: Spoilers?

Jay wrote:

I was in the exact position after release! I couldn't tear myself away from it. Which house did you pick, Drunka?

I'm surprised you have to ask. I actually walked into work Tuesday morning and Matty said "you went with the Golden Deer, right? You're all about fighting the power".

Yeah, of course I went yellow. Red and Blue are both Tory as fuck.

"It will be a good demonstration about what happens to those who raise arms against the church."

Okay now you're not even hiding it Rhea.

Being honest though it makes a change from the lameness that was Emmeryn and Mikoto in the DS games.

Interesting about no specific True Route, might pick Edelgard for the next run then.

Drunkalilly wrote:

I'm looking forward to reading through this thread later and seeing people's thoughts. I assume you all behaved yourselves, re: Spoilers?

Yeah, of course I went yellow. Red and Blue are both Tory as fuck.

As far as I can recall, folks tagged spoilers accordingly but I can have a proper sweep of the thread and tidy up any unmarked spoilers before you read back if you give me a heads up.

I mean, you still end up with the biggest Tory of the bunch in Lorenz so bench the fuck out of him and recruit somebody from the other houses instead. I genuinely regret letting him join me in my Black Eagles run, he's such a prick.

With my Black Eagles/Blue Lions playthroughs out of the way now, I started Golden Deer the other day. Have to say that my first impression of Claude wasn't great, painting himself as the "cool and different from those other two" kind of guy, but I grew to like him from the other playthroughs and have been warming up more to him in this one.

There's a sense of fun to his character that makes the other two feels almost generic by comparison. I like how early on he plays down how good his house is, saying they'll need a lot of work. And they are recently the most rag-tag of the lot overall, which is another thing I like. That's not to downplay the other houses/characters though. They were good in different ways, and I'm not too far into this run yet.

For this one I decided to go for Hard/Classic and without NG+. Also pretty much skipping the monastery for as much as I can, as well as side battles. Not that the monastry stuff is bad either, but I've never been overly keen on the say 'extra-curricular' stuff in FE games, and have exhausted it in my playtime. Did have a lot of fun with it and enjoyed most of what the NPCs had to say.

Kriken wrote:

Also pretty much skipping the monastery for as much as I can, as well as side battles. Not that the monastry stuff is bad either, but I've never been overly keen on the say 'extra-curricular' stuff in FE games, and have exhausted it in my playtime. Did have a lot of fun with it and enjoyed most of what the NPCs had to say.

I could see why you'd choose to do that - I'm fatigued with the monastery stuff roughly about half way through my Black Eagles run. I think I'm going to take a break before going for the Golden Deer as I'm feeling burned out on FE:TH. Maybe after the DLC maps have released.

I'm keen to know more about Claude myself as whilst I've got a good handle on Dimitri and Edelgard's characters, I know next to nothing about Claude's overarching goals.

JayMoyles wrote:

Mages are definitely the hardest counter to the Blue Lions from my Hard/Classic playthrough - just wait till some of the endgame maps... - but I found that Ingrid as a Pegasus Knight would deal with them nicely and either Annette or Mercedes were good for baiting the mages closer as their resistance was so high. Annette in particular had a monstrous 40+ magic stat by end game so she would destroy any enemy mages with little effort.

Ingrid started off pretty bad for me. She wasn't getting any strength level ups, feeding her some stat boosting roids fixed that. By the end of the game she was absolutely incredible. Dodge tank against physical attackers, and an absolute mage masher.

I finished my BL playthorugh a few days ago! Contrary to what I've read online, my Ashe turned out incredible. I lucked out with a lot of strength growths, in conjunction with speed and dexterity ups, which turned him into a punchy long range crit machine. Most of my units were footmen/Cavalry. Only 1 flying unit, which wasn't so bad because it meant my slow units weren't left behind. My Sylvain turned out to be my worst unit, mediocre strength, speed and defence meant he turned into a punching bag for the AI on the frontlines. Serves him right for being a pretty poor character I guess.

First the disappointments: NG+ isn't NG+ enough. The monetary stuff is really great in the first playthorugh, but I wish they'd allowed you to simply wiz through all that stuff in menus in an NG+. I enjoyed talking to my students, but mostly found myself trying to wiz through everything as fast as possible.

It's also a shame that the run is quite similar (until the near end) to the GD route. All the monstrosity stuff is identical, and a lot of the maps are recycled post time-skip. This also has the side-effect of making the plot seem a bit contrived to fit the limited map selection, rather than something more organic. Hopefully this isn't the case with the other routes and I just played through things in an unfortunate order.

I did appreciate being able to spend Renown on ranking up Byleth's proficiency as this allowed me to recruit a few units I wanted early on, but more importantly let me turn Byleth into a different build to last time.

I also liked most of the BL character arcs, and after hearing about the Duscar tragedy in the GD playthrough but not really understanding it, it's nice to get the BL perspective.

I've started my BEagles run and got about half way through the pre-time-jump shenanigans. I'll probably finish that soon because I want to finally have all of the 3 lords' perspectives (turned off all the battle animations now though). My Hubert seems averse to any magic level ups (so I recruited Lysithia) but he's still holding his own. Everyone else is pulling their weight although Dorothea has had about 5 level ups in short succession of only 2 growths This time around I've put almost every physical attacker down the Brigand route with a view towards training a bunch of fliers since I barely had any last time! Even with the fatigue, I still want to see how all my peeps turn out.

And then I'll save the last route for the lunatic difficulty.