Certain kinds of gifts (lost items) provide hints for which cast member they belong to, and if you pay attention to their conversations (and thus their likes and dislikes), it’s easy to match them up.
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I adored watching Bernadetta grow out of her shell, Caspar gain confidence, and Hubert become…slightly less of a condescending asshole. Much of my love is for Three Houses‘ personalities. Some of it is fluff, baked into the backbone of classic RPG bookkeeping, but I love it all the same. It’s all-encompassing and Intelligent Systems really commits. Few modern forays into the genre deal with schools, salaries (I’m getting warm flashbacks for Final Fantasy VIII), and examinations for new class archetypes. You have your own room, there are “days off” where nothing in particular is happening, and activities like fishing or (automatic) gladiatorial combat to partake in.Īll of the RPG elements are very much in your face. Most of the game’s RPG systems are facilitated through menus, with a calendar that dictates when and what actions you can take (roam the monastery, rest, hold a seminar, battle, things of that nature). Hilariously, I even regretted my first house choice (Black Eagles) because a few of its members openly scorned me after learning that I was to become their professor. Socializing is really one of the big focuses, and I found myself resonating with a few characters in particular. To accomplish all this carnage you’ll stomp around in two locations: free-roaming the hub academy to hone your skills, impart knowledge on your party, and socialize, and the grid-based battlefield, home to SRPG combat (with permadeath and a hard mode off the bat, if you wish).
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The story wildly varies depending on which house you sided with at the start, but for the most part, despite a few hand-waved events (and a few exposition-based cutscenes that mostly focus on a map), it does deliver and even provides an epilogue for party members. Without spoiling too much, Three Houses‘ narrative gist involves spending a ton of time with your students (no matter which house you pick, they all kind of hang out), then blowing it all up with a five-year time skip roughly halfway in. Fire Emblem kind of rules, doesn’t it? That’s to say nothing of the introduction of a time lord-esque diety in the first few minutes. Spending a lot of time at a kooky school having tea with your friends is a really easy way to forget about the horrors of war. Me? I dig the harrowingly real, violent anime cutscenes juxtaposed to the absurdity of eating entirely too much tuna fish with your classmates and engaging in silly, jovial conversation. Speaking of anime feel, Three Houses doubles down on the over-the-top nature of the past few entries, which is either a boon or a curse depending on what side of the coin you’re on. The ability to play Three Houses on the go as a bite-sized strategy experience or binge it on a gigantic TV that highlights all of the visual nuances is a microcosm of bliss: a perfect reason why so many people have resonated with the Switch. Man, this game is mesmerizing - not just in the context of its anime sequences, but the way the in-game engine is able to capture that anime feel. The first thing that grabbed me: the stunning character designs and cutscenes that pop. While the school’s houses are indeed three strong, there are also three nations in the picture, all with their own wants and needs. The narrative is far from “basic,” however, as Three Houses takes a decidedly Hogwarts-esque approach in framing everything around a powerful school that has a role to play in the territorial conflict to come. Although I dug the idea of getting two full games and viewing the different perspectives in Birthright and Conquest, the back-to-basics approach is appreciated here. Instead, you’re buying one release in Three Houses, which offers up the typical kingdom versus kingdom intrigue by way of one unified branching storyline. Gone is the “multi-game” concept of Fates. We are now finally at the point where Fire Emblem games are worldwide releases.įire Emblem: Three Houses is a perfect game to usher in that standard.ĭeveloper: Intelligent Systems, Koei Tecmo Games From there, Nintendo did everything they could to spread the word with retro re-releases and timely localizations. Western audiences immediately resonated with the strategy series by genre veterans Intelligent Systems, and they never really looked back. Melee, which sort of introduced the series to the west by way of Roy and Marth, and the rest is history.
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It’s hard to believe that we could be living in a world with no western Fire Emblem availability. And you may tell yourself, ‘this is not my beautiful house’