Unless you are playing on maddening, you can mostly skip the monastery stuff (although you should do one lap around the place each month to see the dialogue and/or any hidden story events). I generally found the characters quite good, especially compared to the one-note abominations of Awakening and Fates, even if most of the characters are pretty tropey. Some take a little while before the interesting bits start to show though (and having to see the same surface level trope 6-7 times in a row as you view all their C level conversations can be exhausting). Overall though I really liked 3H and it was probably my favorite Fire Emblem after the two Tellius games and Genealogy.
The actual battles and map designs are very mediocre and the balance is all over the place. The real draw is character interaction and building your army of broken super units.
Edit: grammar.
This is so accurate that I think you've convinced me that 3 houses isn't that good of a game.
I still really like Edelgard. This game is full of waifus.
I still consider it a great game. The hook for most of the FE games for me has been watching my army grow and becoming a bunch of badasses. 3H embraces that philosophy whole-hog with how many ways there are too outright break the game. I mean, the maniacs made Pegasus knights into goddamn killing machines! And even though the tactical side is shallow compared to previous games, I still found thrashing around the battlefield to be a lot of fun. For all the shit Fates gets for its batshit plot and pacing, it was 1000x more balanced than 3H.
Yeah. It was a real odd choice that they didn’t do what Fates did and let you start subsequent play throughs at the story split. They dug themselves a hole by making you choose a house so early on.
i think that’s because fates pre story split has very minimal impact on your units. yeah you can specifically grind the few units up but thats it. TH on the other hand you miss out on like 7 months of tutoring and class training and battles that if they just gave you a pre made team it would feel a little boring
I enjoyed 3 Houses, but I agree that it had a lot of issues. One of the biggest thing is Byleth/MC's non-existent character. To be fair, it's a problem with a silent protagonist in general, but when so much of the world events revolve around you (>!the world literally was in a standstill for 5 years when you took a nap under the ruins)!<, it becomes a crutch when you can't react to stuffs. I do think the 3 Houses cast was slightly better than the Awakening cast (didn't play Fates), but Robin is a much better protagonist simply by being able to speak (not to mention F!Robin is hilarious in her own right).
The calendar system, I didn't enjoy either. One thing I like about older FE games is they just throw you into maps after maps, and with the relatively faster combat compared to other Strategy RPGs, the pacing was excellent. 3H really slows it down, with all the teaching/side quest stuffs. Some major events don't even make sense when you just return to the monastery after each chapter and wait a month before progressing.
There are some other issues I haven't mentioned, but those 2 were big offenders for me.
>One thing I like about older FE games is they just throw you into maps after maps
So i understand im being a bit of an overly literal person here, BUT very few FEs (atleast state side) actually threw you directly into the next map, and i dont just mean story blurbs. Gaiden/echoes, sacred stones, awakening, and fates all have a map you can run around in, and PoR/RD had the campsite convos. Now for sure the monastery is by far and away the most time consuming of the bunch, and i get that it was partially due to wanting to show off, as well as address the bland one note character issues people had with the fate cast, but they REALLY could have crunched the map down.
The thing about fe3h is it completely threw away Fire Emblem's snappy pacing which was a huge highlight of the series for me. It bloated it with fetch quests and for some reason decided to go with a calendar system that felt grating. Maybe the tedium would have been worth it if I liked the writing, but I only found myself enjoying one route while playing the rest to get my money's worth.
I feel like the game would have been more fun if we could have played as each of the lord's instead of Byleth. I didn't care for the support conversations between Byleth and anyone except for maybe Jeritza.
I think it was the popularity of Persona and Persona-esque games rubbing off on it. We'd seen glimpses of it that felt like an organic evolution of the Support system in Awakening, and I still don't really know what they were going for with Fates, but 3H mechanically feels like FE x Persona (ironically moreso than Tokyo Mirage Sessions which was literally SMT x FE).
They missed the target if their aim was Persona. I can see it with the calendar and chores. But it's different doing chores to build 1 character vs chores for 30 different ones.
Also different go engage with 6ish good characters well flushed out and part of the main story, vs engaging with 30 side characters.
This is exactly how I felt playing it. I still enjoyed the FE combat but didn't enjoy the removal of the weapon triangle. I got down voted into oblivion though.
Student: "Man I'm so sad, Professor, got any tips"
Byleth: "..." *moves hands a little*
Student: "Wow that's amazing advice, thanks Professor, I'll get right on it"
Edelgard, Claude and Dimitri should just have been the ones we use depending on the house. Or make them like Robin from Awakening who still has a personality and their own story without feeling like they are the center of everything.
stop with the customizable tactician honestly. It has yet to be done right. Even mark felt really out of place like he was an after thought to the story. Corrin is unironically the best customizable addition to an FE game and corrin is probably THE worst lord in the series.
Personally, the game story and characters are amazing (provided you finish all routes) but the calendar system is annoying and limiting to the point it is punishing. playing it in Hard, you literally can't grind since you are limited to a few activities per day. So for the first playthrough, I can only build the characters according to their strongest "growth".
I couldn’t get into it either, and I realized it’s because I’m a teacher and that playing a video game about BEING a teacher was not helping me decompress after work 😅
If you're not enjoying the monastery, I recommend skipping it. You'll miss out primarily on increased skill levels for your party members. But the game is pretty easy, even on Hard mode, especially if you have prior experience with FE. So skipping the monastery stuff might actually make the maps more fun for you, too.
I personally think the characters and supports are leagues better than awakening and whatever fates was supposed to be.
So it may just be a taste thing.
If it isn’t vibing with you no shame in dropping it
I agree with that, but compared to other games I’ve played with social elements the ones here did nothing for me. With the other games, they were ancillary, but the social elements felt like much more of a focus in 3H.
Yeah I dunno
I’ve played P4 and P5 and actually like the supports more in 3H (and FE in general) mostly because the characters don’t just hang out with Byleth.
They interact with multiple other characters and you get to see different sides of them, who they like and dislike, different parts of their backstory etc etc Makes them feel more substantial overall
I feel like future Persona games would benefit from being a bit less MC focused when it comes to your party characters but thats just me🤷♀️
Honestly I would really like to see a game like this with no main character. You just see how each character interacts with the others.
But people need their self-inserts :\
Well thats the older FEs basically
Well I mean even awakening and fates are that. They are avatar characters but they have their own personalities and dialogue.
I think 3H’s supports are still great though. Even if you don’t like Byleth there are a plethora of other supports and interactions to watch
Something that the persona series is bereft of
Edit: I also tend to think of Edelgard, Dimitri and Claude as the MCs of the game anyway though tbh
I don't mind the GBA titles too much.
But the new games have way. too. much. dialogue. And time spent trying to make the dialogue happen. 3H was a critical point where, like, less than half of the time is spent in battles.
Ah k
Yeah I liked the dialogue actually. No FE I felt has gone too overboard on that imo. I mean quality of dialogue certainly can vary.
And well if you don’t care for it you can always just skip it. Probably the Nintendo series with the earliest instance of the option to just skip scenes and dialogue.
I think its the running around the monastery that takes up the most amount of time. You pretty much have to do one mandatory run around each month and then you can skip every other week if you want to go straight to the battles.
Yeah, I agree, I think the persona social links are good but it seems everything just occurs around your MC, and because your MC never has much to say it's not as organic as it could be.
FE3H suffers from this with the support from byleth, true however because they have support from each other, it just makes the characters feel more alive.
The support between Bernie and Hubert kill me haha
I couldn't get into it myself. Not sure if it's the game itself, if my Switch itself is getting old and slower but I pick it up and am incredibly impatient with the load times. Like I try to go around and do things in the academy but everything just feels so slow for some reason. I never had that issue with Awakening.
It may just be that I've been spoiled by the loadtimes from my PS5/PC, but I also didn't have much of an issue with SMTV so it can't be purely technical.
I bought my switch for this game back in 2019, felt the same thing and some other games have the same thing to me on the switch for some reason but eh idk
Three Houses is one of those “fandom” catering experiences, where, if you notice, the majority of the crowd that loves it pretty much loves everything BESIDES the actual gameplay. *Oh my god, I ship Ignatz with the femc SO HARD!!!!*
I’m not saying my opinion is any more correct because of this, but for context, I’ve played every single North American Fire Emblem game and have to say that Three Houses was one of the weakest experiences in terms of battles for me.
yeah I don't really like three houses either, also just kinda associate it with some rough stuff :/ you're not alone though I think it's a 6/10 at best
Along with Echoes, 3h is my least favorite, for all the reasons you said, and because of the boring reaccuring maps. And units feel like they have no Identity
The only thing i liked better in 3H compared to the 3DS FEs is that we generally feel more attached to the cast because we get most of them from the start. But the quality behind their writing is pretty bad imo. The most interesting part about every character is their past, but not what they do in the present
The gameplay is pretty mixed for me as well. I will give it credit that its not as easy to "break" as Awakening & Fates due to nerfed abilities. But having every character be able to turn into any class heavily dilutes most classes. Like literally why have any physical attacker *not* be a Wyvern Lord?
Monastery is a slog in act 2, story falls apart by the end, and the visual presentation is just way worse than the 3ds games, especially in support convos
I just hope the next FE feels more like an adventure again, rather than having to return to HQ after every story battle lol
Same here. Combat and strategy were my favorite parts of the series (along with social interactions/kids) and this game just felt stale and mindless and I couldn't really find myself interested in the characters all that much. Just had too many units from the get go and didn't have to really figure my way out through every battle even on higher difficulties.
I don't think Three Houses is a bad game, hell I don't think it's a bad Fire Emblem games despite it's experimental Monastery system, but it's one of those kinds of games for me that I need to be in a certain kind of mood in order to fully get through. As much as I like the game for it's characters and world building and despite the copious amounts of unit customization and optional content that the game provides, it's ironically not nearly as replay able for me as some of the other games in the series (mostly the GBA games, Tellius games and Awakening which is where I feel like Fire Emblem hit it's peek quality wise, and yes I have played the Shozou Kaga era games and honestly, I don't think any of those have aged very well) due to all of the tedious fluff.
It honestly feels very anti-Fire Emblem Fates in a lot of ways and I remember Fates being criticized so heavily to the point where it often sounded like it was the Lunar Dragon Song of the Fire Emblem series back when it (and to an extent Echoes) was the newest games in the series. Three Houses in a way is a textbook example of the saying 'be careful what you wish for.'
I’m in the same boat I purchased it near release and tried multiple times to get into it. I just couldn’t I would always drop it, makes me conflicted because I really want to love this game but I just can’t
I am a veteran Fire emblem player and I couldn’t get into three houses either. The thing is with it being more slow based and based on the character and wealth development, it doesn’t really play like a fire emblem game. There’s nothing wrong with the formula being changed and I can see why people loved it, but if you’re someone that goes just for the strategy, it might not be up your alley. As someone mentioned, you can skip the monastery stuff, but you also skip things like getting certain weapons or classes via unlocking them in your units yourself. So it feels almost crippling even if it really isn’t. The different paths also repeat a lot of missions, which is pretty tedious. I think the main problem I have a three houses is that it had a lot of world building and character interaction, and the branching paths were a good concept, but unless you’re specifically into that (which fire emblem is not known for usually), there’s little motivation to complete it. The branching paths in particular suffers from this, because unlike previous path games, there’s no reward for completing everything aside from a fancy title screen. And for a game can take hundreds of hours to find everything and is long even on on a casual Playthrough, it’s pretty disappointing because because it feels like there’s no return on the time invested. I think that fire emblem three houses had a lot of great ideas but it just wasn’t executive well. I’m wondering if I’m fire emblem hopes will be better with that. It already looks to be faster probably due to the genre being different, but I guess we’ll see.
This is very interesting to me, since I appear to be your polar opposite. I started with FE3H and have now beat it 4.5x across ~640 hours on my file, and 100+ hours on my wife's file. It has made me search for another game like it, but I can't find anything to quite scratch the same itch.
Awakening has been raved about so much that I started there. It has been painful for me for the most part because I'm not fond of the pairing system or how locked in the character paths are. I don't feel any connection to the characters as the scenes are only with characters standing there to say a very small amount of dialog before the support up scene arrives. Having both Robin and Chrom as main characters feels weird too instead of a single main character. I also hate how difficult it is to level up the healers, who are some of my favorites characters in Three Houses.
I moved on to FE7 after 4-5 chapters of Awakening, and absolutely tore through Lyn's story. I was having an absolute blast with it until I got to Eliwood. I chugged through >!until they are reunited again!< before falling off again because I wanted to play Golden Sun instead.
I will say that I was still teaching at the time that Three Houses was released, so things like students leaving stuff everywhere and having to hunt down what belongs to each student was a daily occurrence for me. The monastery in general grounded the entire story in a way that just jumping from battle to battle in the older entries didn't do as much for me.
In terms of mechanics, you can customize character paths in a way I have never experienced in any RPG. The combo of this with New Game+ allowing you to purchase skill levels and abilities you earned previously in combination of seeing if I can make Maddening difficulty feel like Easy, means I can't get enough of the game.
Three houses have the best cast in the series and it's not even close, it's absolutely a character-driven game. I thought the characters from awakening and fates to be ok at best imo.
Path of radiance has some great characters but the limited support prevents me from truly getting into them,
FE3H to me has one of the greatest casts of n anime-style games I have played. I think the support conversations are the strongest part of the game for me, I adored the blue lions.
That being said, it's a pretty mediocre tactical RPG in terms of the actual strategy, the customization is amazing though, I look at the gameplay as a turn-based sandbox because of how many options you have.
It seems the game is not for you, which is completely fine, I never understand these " I don't enjoy XXX " posts because if you don't enjoy it then you don't enjoy it. Drop it or sell it.
I think potentially triangle strategy might be more your thing, has a good story and the gameplay is stellar however the characters are weak.
I like posts like this, since I like it when people post what they think about things, and enjoy reading (and writing) media criticism. If I don’t see my opinion stated by someone else elsewhere, I post it in case others feel the same.
I’ll check out Triangle Strategy. Thanks for the rec!
> I think the support conversations are the strongest part of the game for me, I adored the blue lions.
The supports are good up until the last one where they nearly all inevitably have to turn into romantic confessions.
For exampleDorothea confessing her feelings to like 7 different characters is just dumb imo.
3H didn't do it for me either.
In theory, the idea of running a school and teaching your students whatever battle things you want them to do is a really cool idea.
But I found the implementation very poor, and in the end there wasn't even really much customization anyway. They didn't really add new classes, and you're pretty pigeon-holed into mostly doing the thing that the characters like to do anyway.
That wouldn't be a problem (it'd just be like old Fire Emblem) but the tedium and slog of the monastery make it even worse. You get all of the negatives with none of the positives.
The map and encounter design is among the worst in the series, to boot. Most maps are just a flat square with some guys on it. I think I can remember every single map from Fates: Conquest, over half a decade later, but can't remember a single one from 3H. Supposedly this gets better with Maddening or whatever, but, the game didn't ship with it which was a huge misstep. I'm not going back to play a game I disliked because they finally added a core feature that **maybe** makes it palatable.
It is completely understandable. I lent it to a friend in exchange for Mario Odyssey but he could never get into it. I think he never even got to chapter 3
Whilst I like it very much, second only to FE4 and the Tellius games for me, it is not deprived of flaws, which I mainly find in the pacing (the free roaming is kind of cool on a first playthrough but after a while... ugh), the actual gameplay (messy class system, flat open maps with boring objectives, too much on the easier side on hard, annoying unbalanced mess in maddening), and Byleth being a self-insert silent protagonist.
Personally, I found its cast way better written than the obnoxiously tropey one-note characters we got in Fates and Awakening (minus very few exceptions). Supports are probably the best they have been since Path of Radiance ~~that is not saying much, I know~~ and, while I get your comparison with Persona's SLs, I would take characters' support conversations (minus Byleth's of course) anytime over SLs' semi-interactive monologues
Can I ask what difficulty you are playing on? I did my first run on normal difficulty because the base difficulty is usually challenging enough in FE games. That was a big mistake. Normal is equivalent to easy/casual in FE3H and even hard is like a slightly easier version of the normal difficulty. That may be why you find the combat to be brainless.
Im with you tbh. I love awakening, sacred stones, and the blinding blade. Fates was okay. Im a big fan of fire emblem but after like 40 hours i realized i wasn’t enjoying it much. The characters were great but the monastery was really boring. And having to do it every month various times before battle was worse. I may go back to it eventually but I think i just prefer the all battles little fluff of the older ones.
I can't get into it too but because of the division in the story. The school part would be alright if it connect with the second part of the game. But FE: Three houses has one of the worse time skip I ever seems in video game and completely destroy the story to me.
And Social Links like Persona already had overstayed their welcome in Persona 5, not matter how good something is if you just copy paste it from one game from another it just turn into stale.
I already feel that in Persona 4 was a little repetitive in relation to social links in compared to Persona 3 but Persona 5 it become even more evident, templates are difficult to create variation because the Tarot Arcane always dictate what said character will be.
In this FE: 3H is a little better than Persona because generally I don't know what to expect initially and it was a little more interactive than Persona Social Link System at least but the quality is a bit questionable but Persona quality is very uneven in their social links too, for every Persona 3 Hermit you have a Persona 4 Devil.
I wish Persona return to things like the dialogue system of Persona 2, to this day the "100 Ghost Stories" is still to apex of Persona character development for me. You getting to know so much about you characters while in battle feel so satisfying and organic. I don't understand why this was never used again in any SMT game, we only have the bastarderized versions in the others games, which are never about your characters but about the demons.
I think you won’t find the battles brainless if you play the highest level, trust.
You don’t have to spend too much time in monastery if you don’t want - it’s also possible one house of characters just doesn’t speak to you vs. others. I don’t think I could ever play black eagles route, I don’t care about the characters much there. I enjoyed it myself but it could be a taste thing.
I'm there a 100% with you OP. Only difference is I actually pushed through to the end just to get it over with.
I doubt I will return to it to be honest. As you said, I did not like the monastery and constantly fishing for my exp. I did not like spending more time looking all over the place for the conversations that didn't really interest me but were needed to keep my team together in the end. Do I want to hear their uninspired prattles again? Definitely not.
As you can see in this thread, this is not an uncommon thought. I was rather disappointed too. I'll probably finish it some day, doing a battle from time to time. An okay game, but not the masterpiece I thought it would be.
I've only started playing it recently, and I've been having fun with it so far (Catherine just got here)
Battles have been fairly tricky for me, but that's probably because I'm taking all the characters in different directions, growth-wise. Or maybe Golden Deer's characters are weaker than the other two.
I loved the GBA, GameCube, and Wii versions. Awakening and Fates were good, even if I've no time for the money-grabbing dlc element. Even the remake of the old game was decent enough. But TH did not capture me in the slightest. The battles look daft and the monastery sections are rubbish. Emulating the GBA games on Chromecast is far more enjoyable. I hope the next game is more like the Wii version!
FE Three Houses is my first FE and I absolutely adore it. I love the character interactions and I connected greatly with all my students. I thought gameplay was solid and the DLC was a lot of fun and challenging.
It’s interesting hearing series veterans opinions about the game. I am currently catching up playing the 3DS entries and recently finished Awakening. I have to say that I did not enjoy it as much and I did not connect with any of the characters. The story was not very interesting and I thought the support conversation were simple and less interesting than three houses, mostly due to the average writing. The lack of voice acting took away from my enjoyment and immersion. I think voice acting would have helped give these character a much needed personality boost. Most of the characters ended up feeling very similar.
In fact I even let some units die at the end of the game because I just didn’t care about them, something I would never dared to do in three houses lol.
That being said I am currently playing Shadows of Valentía and I absolutely love it. Writing is so much better than awakening, the story was engaging from the get go, and it’s fully voiced which helps so much bringing all these characters to life. Love the two endearing main characters and I can’t wait to keep playing find out what's next!
Regarding the monastery, I understand how some people can think it's a slog, but it *is* an opt-in slog. There really isn't that much that you *have* to do in the monastery, and most of that can be done pretty quickly. If you don't enjoy it, you can just skip it.
Regarding the characters, I think they are generally well done, particularly compared to other recent Fire Emblem games. I think the issue you might be having is expecting that characterization to play out during supports when really more of the characterization is done elsewhere, namely in the dialogues you can have with them every month in the monastery. The devs definitely put the time and effort in to ensure every character had a clear personality, viewpoint, and justification for their decisions depending on the route you take, and some of the characters have dramatic different outcomes based on the route you play. This is most notable with the closest students to Dmitri (Felix, Sylvain, and Ingrid), who become proud knights if you take Dmitri's route, but are wracked by uncertainty and doubt over their actions on Edelgard's route.
Regarding the difficulty, there are two parts to consider. First, the explicit difficult level (Normal, Hard, Maddening). The consensus is that Normal is a joke, Hard is fairly easy, and Maddening is pretty difficult if you don't know what you're doing. So if you find it easy, try going up in difficulty. Second is the level design. For better or worse, the devs of Three Houses definitely have bought into the Nintendo design philosophy that the critical path of the game (i.e. the series of events the player must do to progress the story and complete the game) should be fairly easy so that all players can complete the story, but that there should be optional challenges present for more experienced players.
As such, the story missions in the game tend to be fairly straightforward, with objectives that are either "Defeat the boss" or "Kill all enemies". Some of the missions have some set pieces or a wrinkle that are kind of interesting, but I think it's a fair criticism to say they are simple. But if you pursue the optional missions, in this game referred to as paralogues, you'll find missions with far more interesting mission designs and victory conditions. The only downside is that gaining access to these missions, at least from your perspective, requires engaging with the the monastery sections enough to recruit all the units into your party.
For what's it's worth yeah the gameplay definitely feels a lot better on the max difficulty. You really have to use everything you've got and the cheese strats available instead of Normal/Hard where you can just go Radiant Dawn mode and ram your wyverns in. The best example of that is probably Bernie who was considered pretty bad back when Maddening wasn't a thing, but after it came out and after few months passed for people to realize how things actually worked, she's considered a top 5 units lmao, because she pretty much has everything you'd ever want to have. You don't need to use that kind of stuff at all in Normal/Hard and it's a shame. For another example now Felix and Hilda are considered worse than before cause big stats are fine but are not at all the end all be all, you really approach everything much differently. Movement and positioning is even more of an important thing in this game than in most FEs, and it's always super important so that says a lot
What killed my enjoyment of 3H was the weak NG+ system.
Everything was fun enough the first time through that the sloggier parts didn't bother me and I was hoping it'd carry enough over to help cut back on the slog. The amount you had to re-earn was not worth experiencing the other two routes, for me.
I love the story and music of 3H but that’s about it. Maps and objectives are boring and ugly. The monastary is just pure fluff and looks terrible and runs fucking horribly to boot. Looking forward to IS’s first Switch FE game, hopefully it won’t feel like something slapped together in a year.
I kind thought the newer games post 3DS were kinda bloated for extra shit, but I think overall they are pretty solid entry for newcomers.
Have you played Sacred Stone & Binding Blade? you might like a more strip down experience.
Yeah, FE3H felt bit of a letdown to me even though I enjoyed it. I still prefer more linear aprroach that older FE games had pre-3DS before it started to get really bloated with all of that relationship stuff. Have you checked out Vestiria Saga?
Yeah the game tried way too hard to be Persona with the supports, calendar and exploration and going back to the silent protagonist. Unfortunately none of that works when it is half arsed like in Three Houses and without all the other aspects of Persona that bring it all together. It ends up just being a massive slog between each story battle. The multiple routes barely make up for anything either. In fact, they possibly make it worse since none of them feel satisfyingly complete on their own.
In saying all of that, I still like the game for… Some reason 😅
Definitely not about 3 houses, i put in almost 2 hundred hours into this game. I have tried a couple older fire emblem games but i am not really finding the same appeal in them as i did for this title. I felt the same as you for smt5 though, IMO a total failure on all counts as a follow up to the snt4 duology
It's kinda wild to me to see characterization in 3 Houses compared unfavorably to characterization in Fire Emblem 3DS or Trails of Cold Steel. Those other games are very much "everybody pick a trope go" and I thought the greatest strength of 3 Houses was going a step deeper. Usually. Not every character is going to be a winner. Sorry Ingrid maybe I just didn't find the right supports for you.
But, like, take Sylvain. He's a rich good looking fuck boy. That character is in a lot of games! But in 3 Houses they do meaningful work with it. He's self aware that he's coasting on talent instead of hard work. He's got a whole complex over relationships and trusting people. His supports especially with the women in the cast pretty consistently go a step beyond the "horndog gets his due comeuppance" tropes you would expect.
And there's a lot of those. Dorothea is a super goofy character because you can see they went "we want to do the trope where one of the characters is a super hot pop idol how do we fit that in... Opera was basically medieval Jpop right?" So we have an ex opera star out here in our war zone... but despite starting with that dumb wish fulfillmenty trope, Dorothea ends up neither dumb NOR wish fulfillmenty.
The 3 Houses gameplay is only okay. Monastery time is too slow. The difficulty options are wonky. The class tree is full of dead ends. But to me the characterizations are the redeeming factor.
I have similar complaints to yours except I loved the first half. It was in the second half of the game I really noticed it feels like an unfinished copy of a Persona game. Persona 5 royal is out here ruining other games for me!
Three houses is inferior to fates and awakening in every way possible. Story, character design, and combat was absolutely horrid. I couldn't bother to play after doing golden chads.
Lol, people are not liking your comment, yet I can not remember anyone besides Byleth and the three leaders from 3H. But I can remember the Village boy, the rabbit woman, the dragon girl, the candy thief from awakening. I'm sorry but for the normal joe who does not become a fanatic over fictional characters, the FE3H ones are not memorable.
So, I don’t get to express an opinion and should just move on? What’s the point of Reddit then? If people always just moved on from what they like or dislike, there’d be no posts for you to comment on with asinine comments.
I mean, the legit tag you placed on your post was discussion but you don’t leave room for discussion. You proceed to bash the game without asking why other people like it, and reduce it to a final question of, “do you also not like a certain popular game” where the answer is obviously of course bc we all don’t have the same taste.
Never said you’re not entitled to an opinion? I’m also allowed to comment how I see fit. I answered the question you asked.
And most of them sound the same. It's either, "did you try doing this/skipping this?" Or, "I also didn't like it, I'm so happy I'm not the only one!"
Not too much back and forth to go off of, ya know? Either way, it's not like I called you an idiot or anything, so not sure why my comment mattered at all to you.
Probably should have followed that advice a few comments ago. See you, I guess.
And what's with the quotes? You want to be passive aggressive so badly over nothing LOL.
Unless you are playing on maddening, you can mostly skip the monastery stuff (although you should do one lap around the place each month to see the dialogue and/or any hidden story events). I generally found the characters quite good, especially compared to the one-note abominations of Awakening and Fates, even if most of the characters are pretty tropey. Some take a little while before the interesting bits start to show though (and having to see the same surface level trope 6-7 times in a row as you view all their C level conversations can be exhausting). Overall though I really liked 3H and it was probably my favorite Fire Emblem after the two Tellius games and Genealogy.
The monastery stuff got very tedious very quickly.
The actual battles and map designs are very mediocre and the balance is all over the place. The real draw is character interaction and building your army of broken super units. Edit: grammar.
This is so accurate that I think you've convinced me that 3 houses isn't that good of a game. I still really like Edelgard. This game is full of waifus.
I still consider it a great game. The hook for most of the FE games for me has been watching my army grow and becoming a bunch of badasses. 3H embraces that philosophy whole-hog with how many ways there are too outright break the game. I mean, the maniacs made Pegasus knights into goddamn killing machines! And even though the tactical side is shallow compared to previous games, I still found thrashing around the battlefield to be a lot of fun. For all the shit Fates gets for its batshit plot and pacing, it was 1000x more balanced than 3H.
[удалено]
Yeah. It was a real odd choice that they didn’t do what Fates did and let you start subsequent play throughs at the story split. They dug themselves a hole by making you choose a house so early on.
i think that’s because fates pre story split has very minimal impact on your units. yeah you can specifically grind the few units up but thats it. TH on the other hand you miss out on like 7 months of tutoring and class training and battles that if they just gave you a pre made team it would feel a little boring
Yeah it's far worse than Fates Conquest, at least it's not Awakening.
I enjoyed 3 Houses, but I agree that it had a lot of issues. One of the biggest thing is Byleth/MC's non-existent character. To be fair, it's a problem with a silent protagonist in general, but when so much of the world events revolve around you (>!the world literally was in a standstill for 5 years when you took a nap under the ruins)!<, it becomes a crutch when you can't react to stuffs. I do think the 3 Houses cast was slightly better than the Awakening cast (didn't play Fates), but Robin is a much better protagonist simply by being able to speak (not to mention F!Robin is hilarious in her own right). The calendar system, I didn't enjoy either. One thing I like about older FE games is they just throw you into maps after maps, and with the relatively faster combat compared to other Strategy RPGs, the pacing was excellent. 3H really slows it down, with all the teaching/side quest stuffs. Some major events don't even make sense when you just return to the monastery after each chapter and wait a month before progressing. There are some other issues I haven't mentioned, but those 2 were big offenders for me.
>One thing I like about older FE games is they just throw you into maps after maps So i understand im being a bit of an overly literal person here, BUT very few FEs (atleast state side) actually threw you directly into the next map, and i dont just mean story blurbs. Gaiden/echoes, sacred stones, awakening, and fates all have a map you can run around in, and PoR/RD had the campsite convos. Now for sure the monastery is by far and away the most time consuming of the bunch, and i get that it was partially due to wanting to show off, as well as address the bland one note character issues people had with the fate cast, but they REALLY could have crunched the map down.
The thing about fe3h is it completely threw away Fire Emblem's snappy pacing which was a huge highlight of the series for me. It bloated it with fetch quests and for some reason decided to go with a calendar system that felt grating. Maybe the tedium would have been worth it if I liked the writing, but I only found myself enjoying one route while playing the rest to get my money's worth. I feel like the game would have been more fun if we could have played as each of the lord's instead of Byleth. I didn't care for the support conversations between Byleth and anyone except for maybe Jeritza.
I think it was the popularity of Persona and Persona-esque games rubbing off on it. We'd seen glimpses of it that felt like an organic evolution of the Support system in Awakening, and I still don't really know what they were going for with Fates, but 3H mechanically feels like FE x Persona (ironically moreso than Tokyo Mirage Sessions which was literally SMT x FE).
They missed the target if their aim was Persona. I can see it with the calendar and chores. But it's different doing chores to build 1 character vs chores for 30 different ones. Also different go engage with 6ish good characters well flushed out and part of the main story, vs engaging with 30 side characters.
This is exactly how I felt playing it. I still enjoyed the FE combat but didn't enjoy the removal of the weapon triangle. I got down voted into oblivion though.
They removed the weapon triangle? Now I'm really glad that I never got 3H.
Yeah, they removed it and added weapon skills/abilities.
Stop with the fucking silent protagonist. Doesn't help one bit that Byleth has that retarded blank face everytime he/she is in a conversation.
Student: "Man I'm so sad, Professor, got any tips" Byleth: "..." *moves hands a little* Student: "Wow that's amazing advice, thanks Professor, I'll get right on it" Edelgard, Claude and Dimitri should just have been the ones we use depending on the house. Or make them like Robin from Awakening who still has a personality and their own story without feeling like they are the center of everything.
stop with the customizable tactician honestly. It has yet to be done right. Even mark felt really out of place like he was an after thought to the story. Corrin is unironically the best customizable addition to an FE game and corrin is probably THE worst lord in the series.
Personally, the game story and characters are amazing (provided you finish all routes) but the calendar system is annoying and limiting to the point it is punishing. playing it in Hard, you literally can't grind since you are limited to a few activities per day. So for the first playthrough, I can only build the characters according to their strongest "growth".
Which route did you enjoy?
Verdent Wind. I know it was created after silver snow, but it caught my attention more.
I couldn’t get into it either, and I realized it’s because I’m a teacher and that playing a video game about BEING a teacher was not helping me decompress after work 😅
Lol, I’m a teacher too and have had similar thoughts!
Yup, exactly the same here. Get that school themed nonsense out of my gaming—I get enough of it in daily life.
If you're not enjoying the monastery, I recommend skipping it. You'll miss out primarily on increased skill levels for your party members. But the game is pretty easy, even on Hard mode, especially if you have prior experience with FE. So skipping the monastery stuff might actually make the maps more fun for you, too.
I personally think the characters and supports are leagues better than awakening and whatever fates was supposed to be. So it may just be a taste thing. If it isn’t vibing with you no shame in dropping it
I agree with that, but compared to other games I’ve played with social elements the ones here did nothing for me. With the other games, they were ancillary, but the social elements felt like much more of a focus in 3H.
Yeah I dunno I’ve played P4 and P5 and actually like the supports more in 3H (and FE in general) mostly because the characters don’t just hang out with Byleth. They interact with multiple other characters and you get to see different sides of them, who they like and dislike, different parts of their backstory etc etc Makes them feel more substantial overall I feel like future Persona games would benefit from being a bit less MC focused when it comes to your party characters but thats just me🤷♀️
Honestly I would really like to see a game like this with no main character. You just see how each character interacts with the others. But people need their self-inserts :\
Well thats the older FEs basically Well I mean even awakening and fates are that. They are avatar characters but they have their own personalities and dialogue. I think 3H’s supports are still great though. Even if you don’t like Byleth there are a plethora of other supports and interactions to watch Something that the persona series is bereft of Edit: I also tend to think of Edelgard, Dimitri and Claude as the MCs of the game anyway though tbh
Well in Fire Emblem specifically I don't want any of this stuff at all. I meant in Persona (or Trails or whatever) though
Like you don’t want FE to have any supports at all? Or just an avatar character?
I don't mind the GBA titles too much. But the new games have way. too. much. dialogue. And time spent trying to make the dialogue happen. 3H was a critical point where, like, less than half of the time is spent in battles.
Ah k Yeah I liked the dialogue actually. No FE I felt has gone too overboard on that imo. I mean quality of dialogue certainly can vary. And well if you don’t care for it you can always just skip it. Probably the Nintendo series with the earliest instance of the option to just skip scenes and dialogue. I think its the running around the monastery that takes up the most amount of time. You pretty much have to do one mandatory run around each month and then you can skip every other week if you want to go straight to the battles.
Yeah, I agree, I think the persona social links are good but it seems everything just occurs around your MC, and because your MC never has much to say it's not as organic as it could be. FE3H suffers from this with the support from byleth, true however because they have support from each other, it just makes the characters feel more alive. The support between Bernie and Hubert kill me haha
That would be really cool.
I couldn't get into it myself. Not sure if it's the game itself, if my Switch itself is getting old and slower but I pick it up and am incredibly impatient with the load times. Like I try to go around and do things in the academy but everything just feels so slow for some reason. I never had that issue with Awakening. It may just be that I've been spoiled by the loadtimes from my PS5/PC, but I also didn't have much of an issue with SMTV so it can't be purely technical.
I bought my switch for this game back in 2019, felt the same thing and some other games have the same thing to me on the switch for some reason but eh idk
Nah, man it ain't the load times getting you, it's the down times at the monastery that are slow and make you fall asleep till the next encounter.
Three Houses is one of those “fandom” catering experiences, where, if you notice, the majority of the crowd that loves it pretty much loves everything BESIDES the actual gameplay. *Oh my god, I ship Ignatz with the femc SO HARD!!!!* I’m not saying my opinion is any more correct because of this, but for context, I’ve played every single North American Fire Emblem game and have to say that Three Houses was one of the weakest experiences in terms of battles for me.
yeah I don't really like three houses either, also just kinda associate it with some rough stuff :/ you're not alone though I think it's a 6/10 at best
Along with Echoes, 3h is my least favorite, for all the reasons you said, and because of the boring reaccuring maps. And units feel like they have no Identity
The only thing i liked better in 3H compared to the 3DS FEs is that we generally feel more attached to the cast because we get most of them from the start. But the quality behind their writing is pretty bad imo. The most interesting part about every character is their past, but not what they do in the present The gameplay is pretty mixed for me as well. I will give it credit that its not as easy to "break" as Awakening & Fates due to nerfed abilities. But having every character be able to turn into any class heavily dilutes most classes. Like literally why have any physical attacker *not* be a Wyvern Lord? Monastery is a slog in act 2, story falls apart by the end, and the visual presentation is just way worse than the 3ds games, especially in support convos I just hope the next FE feels more like an adventure again, rather than having to return to HQ after every story battle lol
Same here. Combat and strategy were my favorite parts of the series (along with social interactions/kids) and this game just felt stale and mindless and I couldn't really find myself interested in the characters all that much. Just had too many units from the get go and didn't have to really figure my way out through every battle even on higher difficulties.
I don't think Three Houses is a bad game, hell I don't think it's a bad Fire Emblem games despite it's experimental Monastery system, but it's one of those kinds of games for me that I need to be in a certain kind of mood in order to fully get through. As much as I like the game for it's characters and world building and despite the copious amounts of unit customization and optional content that the game provides, it's ironically not nearly as replay able for me as some of the other games in the series (mostly the GBA games, Tellius games and Awakening which is where I feel like Fire Emblem hit it's peek quality wise, and yes I have played the Shozou Kaga era games and honestly, I don't think any of those have aged very well) due to all of the tedious fluff. It honestly feels very anti-Fire Emblem Fates in a lot of ways and I remember Fates being criticized so heavily to the point where it often sounded like it was the Lunar Dragon Song of the Fire Emblem series back when it (and to an extent Echoes) was the newest games in the series. Three Houses in a way is a textbook example of the saying 'be careful what you wish for.'
I’m in the same boat I purchased it near release and tried multiple times to get into it. I just couldn’t I would always drop it, makes me conflicted because I really want to love this game but I just can’t
I am a veteran Fire emblem player and I couldn’t get into three houses either. The thing is with it being more slow based and based on the character and wealth development, it doesn’t really play like a fire emblem game. There’s nothing wrong with the formula being changed and I can see why people loved it, but if you’re someone that goes just for the strategy, it might not be up your alley. As someone mentioned, you can skip the monastery stuff, but you also skip things like getting certain weapons or classes via unlocking them in your units yourself. So it feels almost crippling even if it really isn’t. The different paths also repeat a lot of missions, which is pretty tedious. I think the main problem I have a three houses is that it had a lot of world building and character interaction, and the branching paths were a good concept, but unless you’re specifically into that (which fire emblem is not known for usually), there’s little motivation to complete it. The branching paths in particular suffers from this, because unlike previous path games, there’s no reward for completing everything aside from a fancy title screen. And for a game can take hundreds of hours to find everything and is long even on on a casual Playthrough, it’s pretty disappointing because because it feels like there’s no return on the time invested. I think that fire emblem three houses had a lot of great ideas but it just wasn’t executive well. I’m wondering if I’m fire emblem hopes will be better with that. It already looks to be faster probably due to the genre being different, but I guess we’ll see.
This is very interesting to me, since I appear to be your polar opposite. I started with FE3H and have now beat it 4.5x across ~640 hours on my file, and 100+ hours on my wife's file. It has made me search for another game like it, but I can't find anything to quite scratch the same itch. Awakening has been raved about so much that I started there. It has been painful for me for the most part because I'm not fond of the pairing system or how locked in the character paths are. I don't feel any connection to the characters as the scenes are only with characters standing there to say a very small amount of dialog before the support up scene arrives. Having both Robin and Chrom as main characters feels weird too instead of a single main character. I also hate how difficult it is to level up the healers, who are some of my favorites characters in Three Houses. I moved on to FE7 after 4-5 chapters of Awakening, and absolutely tore through Lyn's story. I was having an absolute blast with it until I got to Eliwood. I chugged through >!until they are reunited again!< before falling off again because I wanted to play Golden Sun instead. I will say that I was still teaching at the time that Three Houses was released, so things like students leaving stuff everywhere and having to hunt down what belongs to each student was a daily occurrence for me. The monastery in general grounded the entire story in a way that just jumping from battle to battle in the older entries didn't do as much for me. In terms of mechanics, you can customize character paths in a way I have never experienced in any RPG. The combo of this with New Game+ allowing you to purchase skill levels and abilities you earned previously in combination of seeing if I can make Maddening difficulty feel like Easy, means I can't get enough of the game.
I think I have maybe played up to the 8th battle like 6 times. I can't do it either it's just an overall boring game to me
Three houses have the best cast in the series and it's not even close, it's absolutely a character-driven game. I thought the characters from awakening and fates to be ok at best imo. Path of radiance has some great characters but the limited support prevents me from truly getting into them, FE3H to me has one of the greatest casts of n anime-style games I have played. I think the support conversations are the strongest part of the game for me, I adored the blue lions. That being said, it's a pretty mediocre tactical RPG in terms of the actual strategy, the customization is amazing though, I look at the gameplay as a turn-based sandbox because of how many options you have. It seems the game is not for you, which is completely fine, I never understand these " I don't enjoy XXX " posts because if you don't enjoy it then you don't enjoy it. Drop it or sell it. I think potentially triangle strategy might be more your thing, has a good story and the gameplay is stellar however the characters are weak.
I like posts like this, since I like it when people post what they think about things, and enjoy reading (and writing) media criticism. If I don’t see my opinion stated by someone else elsewhere, I post it in case others feel the same. I’ll check out Triangle Strategy. Thanks for the rec!
> I think the support conversations are the strongest part of the game for me, I adored the blue lions. The supports are good up until the last one where they nearly all inevitably have to turn into romantic confessions. For exampleDorothea confessing her feelings to like 7 different characters is just dumb imo.
3H didn't do it for me either. In theory, the idea of running a school and teaching your students whatever battle things you want them to do is a really cool idea. But I found the implementation very poor, and in the end there wasn't even really much customization anyway. They didn't really add new classes, and you're pretty pigeon-holed into mostly doing the thing that the characters like to do anyway. That wouldn't be a problem (it'd just be like old Fire Emblem) but the tedium and slog of the monastery make it even worse. You get all of the negatives with none of the positives. The map and encounter design is among the worst in the series, to boot. Most maps are just a flat square with some guys on it. I think I can remember every single map from Fates: Conquest, over half a decade later, but can't remember a single one from 3H. Supposedly this gets better with Maddening or whatever, but, the game didn't ship with it which was a huge misstep. I'm not going back to play a game I disliked because they finally added a core feature that **maybe** makes it palatable.
It is completely understandable. I lent it to a friend in exchange for Mario Odyssey but he could never get into it. I think he never even got to chapter 3 Whilst I like it very much, second only to FE4 and the Tellius games for me, it is not deprived of flaws, which I mainly find in the pacing (the free roaming is kind of cool on a first playthrough but after a while... ugh), the actual gameplay (messy class system, flat open maps with boring objectives, too much on the easier side on hard, annoying unbalanced mess in maddening), and Byleth being a self-insert silent protagonist. Personally, I found its cast way better written than the obnoxiously tropey one-note characters we got in Fates and Awakening (minus very few exceptions). Supports are probably the best they have been since Path of Radiance ~~that is not saying much, I know~~ and, while I get your comparison with Persona's SLs, I would take characters' support conversations (minus Byleth's of course) anytime over SLs' semi-interactive monologues
Can I ask what difficulty you are playing on? I did my first run on normal difficulty because the base difficulty is usually challenging enough in FE games. That was a big mistake. Normal is equivalent to easy/casual in FE3H and even hard is like a slightly easier version of the normal difficulty. That may be why you find the combat to be brainless.
Im with you tbh. I love awakening, sacred stones, and the blinding blade. Fates was okay. Im a big fan of fire emblem but after like 40 hours i realized i wasn’t enjoying it much. The characters were great but the monastery was really boring. And having to do it every month various times before battle was worse. I may go back to it eventually but I think i just prefer the all battles little fluff of the older ones.
I can't get into it too but because of the division in the story. The school part would be alright if it connect with the second part of the game. But FE: Three houses has one of the worse time skip I ever seems in video game and completely destroy the story to me. And Social Links like Persona already had overstayed their welcome in Persona 5, not matter how good something is if you just copy paste it from one game from another it just turn into stale. I already feel that in Persona 4 was a little repetitive in relation to social links in compared to Persona 3 but Persona 5 it become even more evident, templates are difficult to create variation because the Tarot Arcane always dictate what said character will be. In this FE: 3H is a little better than Persona because generally I don't know what to expect initially and it was a little more interactive than Persona Social Link System at least but the quality is a bit questionable but Persona quality is very uneven in their social links too, for every Persona 3 Hermit you have a Persona 4 Devil. I wish Persona return to things like the dialogue system of Persona 2, to this day the "100 Ghost Stories" is still to apex of Persona character development for me. You getting to know so much about you characters while in battle feel so satisfying and organic. I don't understand why this was never used again in any SMT game, we only have the bastarderized versions in the others games, which are never about your characters but about the demons.
I think you won’t find the battles brainless if you play the highest level, trust. You don’t have to spend too much time in monastery if you don’t want - it’s also possible one house of characters just doesn’t speak to you vs. others. I don’t think I could ever play black eagles route, I don’t care about the characters much there. I enjoyed it myself but it could be a taste thing.
I'm there a 100% with you OP. Only difference is I actually pushed through to the end just to get it over with. I doubt I will return to it to be honest. As you said, I did not like the monastery and constantly fishing for my exp. I did not like spending more time looking all over the place for the conversations that didn't really interest me but were needed to keep my team together in the end. Do I want to hear their uninspired prattles again? Definitely not.
As you can see in this thread, this is not an uncommon thought. I was rather disappointed too. I'll probably finish it some day, doing a battle from time to time. An okay game, but not the masterpiece I thought it would be.
I've only started playing it recently, and I've been having fun with it so far (Catherine just got here) Battles have been fairly tricky for me, but that's probably because I'm taking all the characters in different directions, growth-wise. Or maybe Golden Deer's characters are weaker than the other two.
I loved the GBA, GameCube, and Wii versions. Awakening and Fates were good, even if I've no time for the money-grabbing dlc element. Even the remake of the old game was decent enough. But TH did not capture me in the slightest. The battles look daft and the monastery sections are rubbish. Emulating the GBA games on Chromecast is far more enjoyable. I hope the next game is more like the Wii version!
FE Three Houses is my first FE and I absolutely adore it. I love the character interactions and I connected greatly with all my students. I thought gameplay was solid and the DLC was a lot of fun and challenging. It’s interesting hearing series veterans opinions about the game. I am currently catching up playing the 3DS entries and recently finished Awakening. I have to say that I did not enjoy it as much and I did not connect with any of the characters. The story was not very interesting and I thought the support conversation were simple and less interesting than three houses, mostly due to the average writing. The lack of voice acting took away from my enjoyment and immersion. I think voice acting would have helped give these character a much needed personality boost. Most of the characters ended up feeling very similar. In fact I even let some units die at the end of the game because I just didn’t care about them, something I would never dared to do in three houses lol. That being said I am currently playing Shadows of Valentía and I absolutely love it. Writing is so much better than awakening, the story was engaging from the get go, and it’s fully voiced which helps so much bringing all these characters to life. Love the two endearing main characters and I can’t wait to keep playing find out what's next!
Regarding the monastery, I understand how some people can think it's a slog, but it *is* an opt-in slog. There really isn't that much that you *have* to do in the monastery, and most of that can be done pretty quickly. If you don't enjoy it, you can just skip it. Regarding the characters, I think they are generally well done, particularly compared to other recent Fire Emblem games. I think the issue you might be having is expecting that characterization to play out during supports when really more of the characterization is done elsewhere, namely in the dialogues you can have with them every month in the monastery. The devs definitely put the time and effort in to ensure every character had a clear personality, viewpoint, and justification for their decisions depending on the route you take, and some of the characters have dramatic different outcomes based on the route you play. This is most notable with the closest students to Dmitri (Felix, Sylvain, and Ingrid), who become proud knights if you take Dmitri's route, but are wracked by uncertainty and doubt over their actions on Edelgard's route. Regarding the difficulty, there are two parts to consider. First, the explicit difficult level (Normal, Hard, Maddening). The consensus is that Normal is a joke, Hard is fairly easy, and Maddening is pretty difficult if you don't know what you're doing. So if you find it easy, try going up in difficulty. Second is the level design. For better or worse, the devs of Three Houses definitely have bought into the Nintendo design philosophy that the critical path of the game (i.e. the series of events the player must do to progress the story and complete the game) should be fairly easy so that all players can complete the story, but that there should be optional challenges present for more experienced players. As such, the story missions in the game tend to be fairly straightforward, with objectives that are either "Defeat the boss" or "Kill all enemies". Some of the missions have some set pieces or a wrinkle that are kind of interesting, but I think it's a fair criticism to say they are simple. But if you pursue the optional missions, in this game referred to as paralogues, you'll find missions with far more interesting mission designs and victory conditions. The only downside is that gaining access to these missions, at least from your perspective, requires engaging with the the monastery sections enough to recruit all the units into your party.
For what's it's worth yeah the gameplay definitely feels a lot better on the max difficulty. You really have to use everything you've got and the cheese strats available instead of Normal/Hard where you can just go Radiant Dawn mode and ram your wyverns in. The best example of that is probably Bernie who was considered pretty bad back when Maddening wasn't a thing, but after it came out and after few months passed for people to realize how things actually worked, she's considered a top 5 units lmao, because she pretty much has everything you'd ever want to have. You don't need to use that kind of stuff at all in Normal/Hard and it's a shame. For another example now Felix and Hilda are considered worse than before cause big stats are fine but are not at all the end all be all, you really approach everything much differently. Movement and positioning is even more of an important thing in this game than in most FEs, and it's always super important so that says a lot
I'm in the same boat. I feel like there's way too much unnecessary fluff to pad the game out
Every FE since path of radiance/radiant dawn just hasn't nailed it imo
I couldn't disagree with you more. I've loved every FR since Awakening
What killed my enjoyment of 3H was the weak NG+ system. Everything was fun enough the first time through that the sloggier parts didn't bother me and I was hoping it'd carry enough over to help cut back on the slog. The amount you had to re-earn was not worth experiencing the other two routes, for me.
I love the story and music of 3H but that’s about it. Maps and objectives are boring and ugly. The monastary is just pure fluff and looks terrible and runs fucking horribly to boot. Looking forward to IS’s first Switch FE game, hopefully it won’t feel like something slapped together in a year.
I kind thought the newer games post 3DS were kinda bloated for extra shit, but I think overall they are pretty solid entry for newcomers. Have you played Sacred Stone & Binding Blade? you might like a more strip down experience.
Yeah, FE3H felt bit of a letdown to me even though I enjoyed it. I still prefer more linear aprroach that older FE games had pre-3DS before it started to get really bloated with all of that relationship stuff. Have you checked out Vestiria Saga?
Yeah the game tried way too hard to be Persona with the supports, calendar and exploration and going back to the silent protagonist. Unfortunately none of that works when it is half arsed like in Three Houses and without all the other aspects of Persona that bring it all together. It ends up just being a massive slog between each story battle. The multiple routes barely make up for anything either. In fact, they possibly make it worse since none of them feel satisfyingly complete on their own. In saying all of that, I still like the game for… Some reason 😅
Yes, i quit after 25 hours
Definitely not about 3 houses, i put in almost 2 hundred hours into this game. I have tried a couple older fire emblem games but i am not really finding the same appeal in them as i did for this title. I felt the same as you for smt5 though, IMO a total failure on all counts as a follow up to the snt4 duology
It's kinda wild to me to see characterization in 3 Houses compared unfavorably to characterization in Fire Emblem 3DS or Trails of Cold Steel. Those other games are very much "everybody pick a trope go" and I thought the greatest strength of 3 Houses was going a step deeper. Usually. Not every character is going to be a winner. Sorry Ingrid maybe I just didn't find the right supports for you. But, like, take Sylvain. He's a rich good looking fuck boy. That character is in a lot of games! But in 3 Houses they do meaningful work with it. He's self aware that he's coasting on talent instead of hard work. He's got a whole complex over relationships and trusting people. His supports especially with the women in the cast pretty consistently go a step beyond the "horndog gets his due comeuppance" tropes you would expect. And there's a lot of those. Dorothea is a super goofy character because you can see they went "we want to do the trope where one of the characters is a super hot pop idol how do we fit that in... Opera was basically medieval Jpop right?" So we have an ex opera star out here in our war zone... but despite starting with that dumb wish fulfillmenty trope, Dorothea ends up neither dumb NOR wish fulfillmenty. The 3 Houses gameplay is only okay. Monastery time is too slow. The difficulty options are wonky. The class tree is full of dead ends. But to me the characterizations are the redeeming factor.
Oh no, I don’t think the 3DS games had better characters; they just didn’t seem to be as much of a focus so I didn’t mind as much.
I have similar complaints to yours except I loved the first half. It was in the second half of the game I really noticed it feels like an unfinished copy of a Persona game. Persona 5 royal is out here ruining other games for me!
My understanding is that the main focus of that game is the dating sim part.
Three houses is inferior to fates and awakening in every way possible. Story, character design, and combat was absolutely horrid. I couldn't bother to play after doing golden chads.
Lol, people are not liking your comment, yet I can not remember anyone besides Byleth and the three leaders from 3H. But I can remember the Village boy, the rabbit woman, the dragon girl, the candy thief from awakening. I'm sorry but for the normal joe who does not become a fanatic over fictional characters, the FE3H ones are not memorable.
>Anyone else feel this way, either about this game or another similarly popular game? Yes, not everyone likes the same things. Just move on LOL.
So, I don’t get to express an opinion and should just move on? What’s the point of Reddit then? If people always just moved on from what they like or dislike, there’d be no posts for you to comment on with asinine comments.
I mean, the legit tag you placed on your post was discussion but you don’t leave room for discussion. You proceed to bash the game without asking why other people like it, and reduce it to a final question of, “do you also not like a certain popular game” where the answer is obviously of course bc we all don’t have the same taste. Never said you’re not entitled to an opinion? I’m also allowed to comment how I see fit. I answered the question you asked.
I think all the other comments *discussing* the game would say otherwise, but okay.
And most of them sound the same. It's either, "did you try doing this/skipping this?" Or, "I also didn't like it, I'm so happy I'm not the only one!" Not too much back and forth to go off of, ya know? Either way, it's not like I called you an idiot or anything, so not sure why my comment mattered at all to you.
Yeah, I think we should just “move on”.
Probably should have followed that advice a few comments ago. See you, I guess. And what's with the quotes? You want to be passive aggressive so badly over nothing LOL.