Recently I have finished the Nintendo Switch game, Fire Emblem Three Houses. I have a previous blog about this game, but that was prior to finishing the game. In fact, back when I wrote that blog, I hadn’t even half the story. Now that I have, one route at least, I can now share my throughs on the story.
If you haven’t read my previous blog, let me give a refresher of the story and hopefully expand on it. At the beginning of the story, your player character acts as a teacher for one of three houses. I knew when I first picked up the game this decision would be very important. However, I didn’t know who much it would alter the story. In the end, I chose the Golden Deer house, which by looking at online statistics didn’t seem very popular. Anyhow, the first half of the story is very linear. There is almost nothing that will throw you off the set path. I currently know this very well because I’m playing the game a second time and there hasn’t been any major changes.
After the time skip though, things become much more interesting. It is revealed that one of the students have been behind all the events during the school arc. Ironically, she is the leader of the most popular faction of the game so I wouldn’t be surprised if my reaction was much different to other players. Anyhow, this student takes control of their home faction and declares war against the church (the organization you and the school you teach at belongs too). At this point, this where all the routes start branching out. Like I said in my previous blog, there are four routes you can choose, one for each house and a route for the church. The downside to having four routes is that there aren’t too many chapters. I think in the Golden Deer route their were only around 10 chapters in the second arc. Suffice to say, during my time playing through the second half, I didn’t have fun killing off characters. It really sucks because sometimes you’ve invested a lot of time into a character and they turn on you, and I’m speaking from experience. The example I’m talking about is an archer I recruited during part one. After the time skip, I found it odd he didn’t show up. It wasn’t until I had to face him in the 16th chapter did I figure out what happened to him. Thankfully, my reputation was high enough with him so managed to recruit him into my army. However, things really would have sucked if I had to kill him. It wasn’t easy defeating him either because I over levelled all of my units…
Now that I have talked about the Golden Deer route in depth, I would like to share some of my complaints. After defeating the traitorous student, you then have to defeat another bigger boss and it all just feels tacked on. The last three chapters of the Golden Deer route was fun, but it just felt so weird. For example, Fire Emblem takes place in a fantasy setting, but then there is one entire chapter that takes place in an underground city with robots, neon lights, and techno BGM. To this day, that chapter just left a bad taste in my mouth, it was like I was playing an entirely different game. Another minor thing I wish they could change would be at which point you receive the dancer class, but like I said it’s relatively minor.
In the end, playing though the game in its entirety was really fun. Some of the highlights would probably be the student being an evil mastermind, or that the player character being a god. Mostly I came for the gameplay, but the story was also nice. So far, my Fire Emblem experience has been pretty great so far and I’m looking for the next release in the series.