Fire Emblem: Three Houses (2019)

I really enjoyed the story of this game, or the larger meta story, I should say. One thing I really like in any game, movie or story is a rich and well designed backstory that isn’t necessarily explicitly explained in the main story but touches on it in numerous ways. This game has that. I did watch a lore video when I was about halfway through part 2 and it made me appreciate the story so much more.

The trouble is that I realized once I got to part 2 that my students were way under level. The result is that I felt the need to engage in battles on every few day. As a result, the story only unfolded to me in those few cutscenes after main mission battles. The rest of the game became repetitive as I was often battling the same group of enemies on one of 4-5 battle maps over and over again.

I probably won’t replay it to try a different storyline but I think I’ll check out some of the cutscenes on YouTube.

Wrapping up an infantry-only challenge run on Maddening, and it's probably my favorite way to replay Three Houses so far!

Losing the ability to retreat with Canto while gaining the bonkers damage output of gauntlets shifts the demands of the game away from pure stat checks and towards tests of positional awareness and lateral thinking. Overall the campaign is less punishing, but several maps which are usually rote wyvern sweeps gain interesting new wrinkles, and most of the already good maps demand more creativity to untangle. Definitely a recommended run for a second playthrough!

(The obnoxious sexism of women being locked out of all the standard gauntlet classes does really grate, though.)

It's a solid strategy game but somehow less than the sum of it's parts. I found the combat somewhat dull after a while though, the move sets are somewhat limited. I liked the monastery/social aspect but again didn't feel fully fleshed out by the end of the game I was out of quests and there wasn't enough to do, I mostly just ate meals with my students in order to refill their motivation gauge so I could teach them more. I wish there was more opportunity to focus on which students you wanted to progress in particular skills. Forming bonds had little discernible impact in the combat as far as I could tell. I wish the two systems fed into each other better like social/battle systems in something like Persona 5. The class system also left something to be desired, especially the final set which didn't have final forms that utilized a lot of the skills, and some classes were inexplicably locked to a gender.

There was also an extremely frustrating part where if you select the "wrong" house to play as you can potentially lose two characters 2/3 of the way through the game. So I wasted tons of time and points leveling these two up and they were snatched away mid game.

The story was delivered well with some nicely animated cutscenes but I didn't find myself particularly invested in the overarching main plot, only paid attention to the students I liked. I did enjoy my time with this game but there's a lot of room for improvement, hopefully they can refine this formula in the next iteration.

I recently finished Fire Emblem after 85 hours (though a couple of those were probably idling). I played it on Classic Mode on Hard Difficulty (and frequently scoffed at the Divine Pulse rewind function, but I later ate humble pie and ended up relying on that mechanic quite a lot in some of the riskier levels). I learned a lot of things along the way that I wish I had known from the outset, and when my brother picked up the game a few days ago I rushed to share my wisdom with him. It ended up being a pretty comprehensive list, but I still wasn’t compelled to share it publicly. Until this morning.

Having finished the main story, I booted up the game again to look at the DLC Side Story, and as I was preparing for the first battle I was having an extra-thorough look through the menus. I discovered in that moment that you can only have three Combat Arts equipped at any one time, and these were usually the first three that your character learned (and therefore most basic/weakest). I rushed back into my final chapter save file and went to the same menu, and then… I just started laughing. I laughed and I laughed so much I scared the cat, and I wiped tears of mirth from my eyes as scrolled through the most powerful Arts in the game that my high level, master-class characters had unlocked hours ago. Arts that would have won me many battles and saved many lives, ridiculously powerful abilities that would have made all the difference (especially in that final stage, which took so many hours to conquer).

I don’t think I’ll have the heart to play the game on New Game+, so here, good reader. May you learn from my mistakes and benefit from my experience. How To Min/Max the Shit Out of Fire Emblem: Three Houses

1. Don’t worry too much about classes – every House has access to all of the classes pretty early. You can make pretty much anyone a mage or a thief by the time they’re level 10 if you level them carefully, but of course some characters are more inclined towards certain classes than others.

2. Think about what classes you want your units to be well in advance. Got someone who will make an excellent Wyvern Lord by the time they’re level 30? Make sure their goals are set to learn Flying early so that they’ll ace the exam by the time they get there.

3. You can change classes at Level 10, 20, and 30. Unlike previous Fire Emblem games, it’s best to change classes as early as possible to learn new abilities.

4. You can only use a handful of abilities at a time, but you can swap between them. Once you’ve started learning useful abilities, make sure you swap out the useless ones. You can do this by going to the Inventory menu and choosing Abilities. This way you can, for instance, have a Bow Knight who can also steal items from enemies because they once trained as a thief. The more you battle with a particular Class equipped, the more Abilities you unlock until you “master the class” and unlock their super class-based skill, which is usually pretty good. This means that it’s sometimes worth mastering more than one class of the same tier, if there are really good abilities you want a unit to be able to use at will. (I only discovered this before the final chapter of the game T_T)

5. Half the game is spent in the monastery and half on the battlefield. For the monastery, press the R button to fast-travel. (I only found this out about halfway through the game >.<) Quests and quest items will also appear on the map. The latter will be visible as yellow glowing dots, and conversations to increase support levels between Byleth and their students will appear as little chat bubbles.

6. The most important goal in the monastery is to raise your Professor level as quickly as possible. Do everything you can to raise it early so that you have more actions per free day.

7. The only actions I would recommend are Explore and occasionally Battle (if you’re feeling your units are under-levelled, or when there are special events or quests).

8. When exploring, I used to spend all of my Action Points increasing units’ motivations so I could teach them more during lectures. This is good to start with, but as soon as you unlock the Merchants, start buying gifts to increase motivation that way instead. I recommend looking up guides for what gifts will have the biggest effect.

9. Lost Items are also excellent for increasing motivation, so make sure you scour the monastery carefully each time you Explore. Try not to double-up: if a unit already has maxed Motivation, hold onto their Lost Item until the next free day.

10. So what should you use your Action Points on? Either things that will increase support levels between students, or raising Byleth’s own skills through training.

11. Training Byleth’s skills is particularly important because if you want to recruit students from other Houses you’ll need to have certain levels of skills as well as a baseline level of support. If I had to estimate, you might be able to recruit half of the students from the other houses if you focus on nothing other than gifts and tea parties with them (but this will of course limit your ability to build support relationships and increase motivations of your own students). I would find the balance by picking a handful of your favourite students from other houses and working towards recruiting them.

12. Use the Sauna as early as possible every month to maximise benefits for Byleth and any students who really need to increase their levels in particular skills (e.g. Riding, because their current class doesn’t actually give them Riding experience). Don’t be afraid to save-scum: it’s super important that both parties feel “well-rested” and are glowing by the end, and it’s completely random how much the Steam or Stay Longer buttons effect the participants. Sometimes you’ll get lucky and get it in one, other times you might need to replay the sauna 5 times to get the levels to align.

13. If you get a perfect Tea Party, both participants receive +1 to CHA. This isn’t really useful because CHA is for gambits which I rarely use, but I just didn’t find that out until end-game and wanted to mention it.

14. As soon as you’ve unlocked the merchant, stop fishing (unless you really need to raise your Professor level) and save up your bait for special events. In my opinion, the best one is Fistfuls of Fish, because you can max your Professor level super quickly by catching multiple fish with the one bait (giving you bonus xp as well as extra fish).

15. As early as you can afford to, give any excess fish to the cats and dogs around the monastery: they’ll give you smithing ingredients in exchange. Just feed them fish of the same value over and over until they’re full. By the end of the game I had hundreds of four-star fish that I couldn’t offload because all the animals were full all the time.

16. If you catch two Silver Fish, hang onto those: you’ll need them for a quest late-game. Otherwise you can sell fish by opening the menu, going to the Storehouse, and pressing A on anything you want to sell.

17. When fighting Monsters (who take up four spaces on the board), do your best to break all four pieces of their armour in order to get rare ore for smithing rather than killing them right away.

18. Breaking a monster’s armour will also keep them stunned so they cannot counter attack during your turn. You can keep them perpetually stunned if you just keep breaking their armour in the same turn. Just make sure you finish them off before it’s their turn and they recover and start moving and attacking normally.

19. If you have a piece of equipment that you need to Repair, consider Forging it into an upgraded version of itself instead. If it takes 700g and 2 smithing stones to repair, it might be worth spending 1000g and 6 smithing stones to turn it into the next tier of weapon.

20. Unlike previous FE games, there’s no limit to the number of support relationships a unit can have, so there are no disadvantages to having as many as possible. They increase the stats of units when they’re near each other on the battlefield, especially when using Gambits.

21. SWAP OUT YOUR DAMN COMBAT ARTS. Just like with Abilities, you can only have a few equipped, and they’re always the first (and therefore worst) ones in the game. Master classes, learn new Arts and Abilities, equip the best ones.

You’re welcome.

Passei das 20 horas e continuo amando o jogo! :)

É bem raro eu jogar um jogo por "tanto tempo" sem enjoar e parar um pouco, mas esse jogo tem tanta coisa que não dá vontade de parar! Pelo menos por enquanto, eu sinto que cada minuto que jogo estou aprendendo algo novo sobre o mundo e os personagens.

Nessas últimas dez horas eu fiz várias batalhas e estudei um pouco mais sobre os status e os battalions, já que até então estava os ignorado, mas continuo fazendo um 'explore' por mês pra melhorar meu relacionamento com os personagens e não perder nenhum item de chão. Ah, e estou focando para recrutar o Lindhardt, o Felix, a Dorothea e o Caspar, foram os que mais me interessaram, nem sei se tem como fazer com tantos, mas vou descobrir haha.

Última coisa a notar é que eu não aceitei fazer nenhum dos chás de aniversário, não sei por que haha, vou testar agr, já que se não usa um Activity Point, não tem por que não melhorar a relação. É isso (:

Passei das 10 primeiras horas e estou curtindo bastante o game!

Fiquei surpreso de eu curtir tanto a parte "sims", que se você quiser pode ser beem grande, apesar de que é meio merda o Lindhardt ser a única opção mlm, então preciso aumentar minha interação com ele só pq n quero casar com uma mulher no final haha, pelo menos eu estou gostando do personagem. :)

Sobre a parte de estratégia, não tenho muito o que falar. Adoro esse estilo de jogo, e está muito bem implementado aqui, inclusive nos treinos individuais, é bem interessante e termina sendo menos estressante e mais divertido do que eu achei que seria.

Third attempt to play through this game. This time I am planning to try to beat it before Mass effect remastered comes out, as that will 100% distract me!

I went with the Golden Deer again, because Claude seems awesome, and I like several of the other members. Even though I haven't beaten the game ever (or even hit the time skip), I am noticing how differently Golden Deer have responded to some events vs the Black Eagles.

Trying to recruit a few people to my house to fill some gaps.

Really enjoying the game, though the management in between main missions at times is still a lot, but its nice to train up skills without having to just grind through combats.

The base combat system of Fire Emblem is great. I started playing this series with the release of "Fire Emblem" for the GBA and played through most of the handheld versions up to Three Houses.

Three Houses has a lot of promise. The school setting and ability to train your group as professor to increase their stats and improve relationships works well. My major problem with this game is that all these set-ups in Part 1 are forgotten by Part 2. The ability to recruit, the building of relationships, the side quests in Exploration mode - all disappear halfway through the game. I found myself at that point just button-mashing my way through support conversations as I became less and less involved with my characters. The second half became an exercise in resting through weeks, skipping events and going straight to the battles, which remained the sole pull for me.

To be honest, this is the weakest mainline Fire Emblem I've played since that GBA North American release in 2003.

4/5

This game had a great character progression and customisation system. It was extremely satisfying to plan out a run, taking into consideration the characters different affinities, stat growths and what classes you want in the future. That part of the game was almost mandatory on my first run which was a no NG+ maddening run. I didn't enjoy the cathedral parts of the game running around and talking to students, fishing, all that stuff. It felt like busywork that I had to do to make my team powerful enough.

The game's writing and story was pretty weak, maybe just passable. The map design was pretty uninspired as well. May come back for a Blue Lions NG+ run in the future.

Fire Emblem: Three Houses is a fantastic turn based strategy game with social sim mechanics. The series has been kicking along for more than two decades but hasn’t garnered much interest from the West until FE: Awakening. The FE games have mostly been iterative, making minor tweaks to each subsequent game. That paradigm changed with FE: Path of Radiance for the GameCube. It was Intelligent Systems’ most ambitious Fire Emblem release at that time: it was the first Fire Emblem game in 3D. The game featured animated cutscenes and a more in-depth plot than its predecessors. Unfortunately the game was mostly forgotten due to being on the GameCube and being released near the end of the console’s lifecycle.

FE: Awakening was the booster shot the series sorely needed. It helped reinvigorate the series and introduced a whole new legion of fans to Fire Emblem who might have only been previously familiar with the series due to Smash. Finally we get to Three Houses. Three Houses feels like that ambitious leap forward that FE: Path of Radiance once made, but this time with a much larger fan base and on an overwhelming popular console.

The setting of Three Houses is reminiscent of a religious medieval version of Harry Potter blended with the social sim aspects of a Persona game. There are three houses which represent the different regions in the land of Fódlan: the Black Eagles, the Blue Lions and the Golden Deer. At the land’s center sits Gregg Mach Monastery, part church, part elite military academy. You play as Byleth, a mercenary of mysterious origin suffering from a case of typical JRPG amnesia. After assisting the three house leaders with some bandits, you are invited to Garreg Mach Monastery and are quickly hired as a professor. As a professor, you are given the opportunity to teach one of the three houses. Each house has their own interesting cast of characters. The Golden Deer for example are filled with misfits and weirdos, such as Raphael who only cares about food or Marianne who would rather talk to animals than to people.

The story of Three Houses is rather unique in that it wholly depends on the decision of which house you select. The three houses have their own B storylines that feature unique characters and maps making the multiple playthroughs of the game feel fresh. The A plotline for all three houses remains fairly similar however, so the same events and battles take place albeit from different viewpoints. The initial premise of the game is intriguing. There are the political ramifications of having the heir to the emperor, future king and duke’s son all students at the monastery. The religious organization, the Church of Serios has odd vibes as the leader of the church, Rhea preaches about peace and unity but has no issue executing those who rebel. Byleth is also a strange one as only she/he can see a mysterious girl that has the power to turn back time.

The game is split into two halves. Strategic turn based battles like previous Fire Emblem games and free-time exploring the monastery.

On the subject of battles, it is classic Fire Emblem turn based strategy without the Weapon Triangle. In past Fire Emblem games, the Weapon Triangle was a rock-paper-scissor-like system where wielding one type of weapon yields an advantage over another weapon. Three Houses replaces it with Combat Arts, Abilities and Battalions. Combat Arts are moves that deal bonus damage and grant special effects like extra range or higher hit rate at the cost of using more weapon durability. Abilities are passive buffs, that can range from simple stat increases to enabling an advantage when using a sword against an axe wielder (just like previous Fire Emblems with the Weapon Triangle). Battalions are akin to equippable squadrons that grant AOE attacks/buffs for a limited number of times.

The last big addition to the combat is the introduction of monsters. Monsters take 4 times as much space as a regular enemy. Each monster has a shield that can be chipped away with regular attacks or by employing a battalion. Once the monster’s guard has been completely broken, they are vulnerable and can be felled easily. There is also an aggro mechanic where monsters will always attack the unit who hits it with a battalion, so it’s important to strategize having your tanks draw the monster’s attention away from your fragile characters.

This game is time consuming, but in a good way. Between each major battle, Byleth has the opportunity to explore the monastery. Byleth can chat with the students and faculty, she/he can also share meals with them, invite them to tea parties and grow plants in the greenhouse. The free-time at the monastery is a great way to learn more about the history of Fódlan as well as bond with students from other houses. It is easy to spend hours exploring the monastery, helping students find lost items and planning what the students should learn so they can qualify for a specific class. It is also possible for Byleth to recruit students from other houses and faculty members to join your party once Byleth is proficient in a specific skill like being good at axes or having a high Charisma stat. If you don’t feel like doing this after every main battle, the game does provide an option to skip all of this and proceed to the next major plot point. However doing so completely robs you of all of the character interactions and special events that take place in the monastery.

Three Houses is far from perfect and suffers from a litany of technical issues. Character faces, hair and accessories are nicely detailed but their clothes are in very low resolution with pixelated stitching and blurry sigils. Backgrounds during key events are just plain ugly with low quality panoramic screenshots that warp the geometry making things like tables and benches unrecognizable. There are framerate issues when walking around the monastery or going into battle with many flying units. Quick traveling from one spot to another in the monastery will sometimes load you into an area where characters are invisible and can take up to 4 seconds to completely load in.

The gameplay side is also far from flawless. To be frank, the game on Normal difficulty is too easy. Normal mode allows you to grind endlessly to completely outlevel any opponent in the game. This ease also makes your characters so insanely strong that basic attacks are significantly more effective than using combat arts and battalions even though it was designed to be the other way around. Normal difficulty is so easy that you can choose the Auto-Battle option for most fights and not lose a single character. The Hard difficulty is a bit more challenging but still too easy in my opinion. While you do have to play more carefully and use combat arts more often, the AI in Hard difficulty is very basic and can easily be cheesed by positioning your units to lure one enemy at a time. Maddening difficulty in the meanwhile swings the difficulty slider in the complete opposite direction. This difficulty introduces rage-inducing scenarios with reinforcements that can spawn and attack on the same turn. Experience is so hard to earn in this mode that it is necessary to stick to one lineup. Lastly, it’s a mode reserved for FE veterans and can only be unlocked after the first playthrough.

Other than the game’s difficulty, it is a shame to report that a lot of the battle scenarios are fairly vanilla. There is little variety in main objectives and usually it’s to eliminate every enemy or defeat the enemy commander. Most of the maps are open fields, with little terrain variety other than forests that provide cover or desert that slow movement. The game introduces Fog of War, but it rarely gets utilized. In my entire playthrough, I only experienced a total of three Fog of War maps. There is one map that introduces warp tiles and switches, but this map mechanic only gets used once and then promptly forgotten. There are also maps with environmental damage such as lava or traps but I only encountered this type of map twice in the game. The side quests and paralogue quests (akin to Mass Effect loyalty missions) recycle maps found in the main story. Previous Fire Emblem games did better with maps with more interesting layouts such as featuring castles and forts with tight corridors.

The initial promise of the story starts to wane in the second half of the game. Without spoiling too much, the second half of the game is when the three houses are at war. You play the B storyline of the house that you’ve chosen. Because your perspective is limited to one house, it is hard to understand how some major characters you’ve encountered in the first half of the game undergo such dramatic transformations. The game does little to explain these characters’ motivations and the only way to learn their backstory is to choose their house on the next playthrough. Unfortunately the plot threads that were delicately started in the first half are wrapped up in a convenient and unsatisfying manner.

With all those nitpicks aside, Fire Emblem: Three Houses is still a phenomenal game. The world building, the characters and the plot all merge into an unforgettable experience. Each house features a unique perspective on the story and a cast of characters to fall in love with. There are clear problems with this game. The graphics are lacking and pale in comparison to other Nintendo first party Switch titles like Zelda: BotW or Super Mario Odyssey. The battle scenarios are very generic. And due to the nature of the second half of the game, it is hard to comprehend the entire story with one playthrough. Is Three Houses still worth it? Absolutely, there is a narrative and a lineup of interesting characters worth experiencing and after almost over 280 hours (according to what my Switch says) I don’t regret the time I spent with it.

1st Playthrough: Blue Lions / Azure Moon

• Difficulty: Hard / Casual
• Finished 22 chapters + all paralogues that I came across
• Recruited: Dorothea, Catherine, Alois, Shamir, Cyril
• Maxed out all Support besides Flayn / Cyril

2nd Playthrough: Golden Deer / Verdant Wind

• Difficulty: Hard / Casual
• Finished 22 chapters + all paralogues that I came across
• Recruited: Catherine, Alois, Shamir, Cyril
• Maxed out all Supports

3rd Playthrough: Black Eagles / Crimson Flower

• Difficulty: Hard / Casual
• Finished 18 chapters + all paralogues that I came across
• Recruited: Hanneman, Manuela, Lysithea, Shamir, Ashe, Mercedes, Lorenz
• Maxed out all Supports (except Lorenz)

Decided to not play Black Eagles / Silver Snow and DLC, and will just watch the cutscenes.

It took me a while to get into this game. There is a LOT of extra content beyond what I found in other Fire Emblem games, and I found that overwhelming. However, after investing some time in it I am really liking it. It feels like Persona 5's social system and fire emblem combined, which has been a blast.

I still find some of the extra details and what not confusing, but for the time being I am just enjoying the ride.

Fire Emblem: Three Houses is the definition of the perfect game to represent the series. It is a culmination of all the lessons learned of games past and presents everything Intelligent Systems has learned about game design and lays it on the table. It's been a while since a game recently has drawn me in with its characters and story, and with one playthrough completed out of a potential four-playthrough adventure, my time in the land of Fodlan isn't complete yet. However, I've played enough of the game to know the ins and outs.

You play as Byleth, son of Jeralt, former leader of the Knights of Seiros, the military force behind the religious head of Fodlan, the Church of Seiros. As a mercenary with your father, you come across the three heads of the titular Three Houses of the Garreg Mach Monestary, an academy where future heads of the three kingdoms of Fodlan, and due to the requests of the church for your father to come back and lead the Knights of Seiros once again, you're appointed as the new professor of the Officer's Academy, where you can choose which house to teach, the Blue Lions, Black Eagles, or the Golden Deer. I chose the Blue Lions as my first playthrough, since all houses' stories diverge into their own paths and entirely different story events for the second half of the game.

The first half of the game has you training your class during the downtime. During this time you can explore the monastery, complete quests to increase the stats of your character and your student's, and can spend time with them to increase their motivation, which is then spent to teach them new skills and abilities during the school week. On your days off you can explore the monastery as mentioned above, have your squad train in auxiliary and paralogue battles, hold seminars from other professors to increase their stats even further, or rest to have their motivation increase for the next instruction period. There are even special events on some days; tournaments to gain gold, recitals in church, and also partaking in meals with your students, all of this leads to increasing your bond with them.

During the instruction period, you can set goals for each individual member in your house. During the course of the game, their goals will change and it's your decision whether or not you want them to focus on a specific set of skills. You can always say no to these, but it doesn't hurt for your units to become proficient in some skills that are outside of their expertise. For example, my late game Dimitri, staying as a Great Lord for the entirety of the second half of the game, came to me during the last instruction period of the game and asked to be switched to sword skills instead of lance skills. Skills can either be trained automatically, or you can choose them manually for each student. There are also group activities which 2 people from your house can do to strengthen their bond and also increase their abilities.

Once the month is over, the last date of the month is always exclusively the main story mission. There are 22 major battles in each storyline, and the activities you do makes a huge difference on your squad during battle.

Battle during Three Houses is your standard Fire Emblem fare, if you've played it before, I don't think I need to explain it. Along with that, there are supports and all the typical pieces that a FE game holds, along with the new changes it brings to the table.

A standard playthrough of a "house" would typically be between 35-40 hours if you take your time. The Golden Deer, Black Eagle, and Church of Seiros routes all vary in length, with Golden Deer being as long as the Blue Lions, and the Black Eagle and Church lines being a bit more shorter than the others, but in order to get the entire story, I would say it will be probably be a game which is more than 130 hours to get everything done and over with.

To keep this short and sweet, I heavily recommend this game to anyone who is interested in a FE game but have yet to get into the series. The story is gripping, the gameplay is thoughtful and well crafted, and the soundtrack is absolutely divine. If you have a Nintendo Switch in general you're doing yourself a great disservice if you don't pick this game up ASAP.

I'm about to start a new game + with another house and might end up having to kill my best friends from my previous playthrough on this path.

I went with Golden Deer and ended up loving most of my students (except you Lorenz, I'm looking forward to not recruiting you).

I highly recommend playing it on Hard/Classic Mode, as the base game is apparently far too easy on Normal (that is if you have already played a tactic game). I really loved playing this game and cannot recommend it enough, game of the year for me so far.

       After around 46 hours I have to say that there is absolutlely no game this year that has held my attention like Fire Emblem: Three Houses.  Not sure that this can be quantified explicitly but I will say that this is about 80% story and 20% battle.  Which is odd considering that in the game, I would say that it turns out to be about 50/50 with story and battle.  Which is partly why I’m not able to 100% able to recommend this game to EVERYONE.  If you don’t mind the stragetic battling of older Fire Emblem games then all the rest of the stuff will fall into place.  If not, then you probably won’t be too interested or excited about the game by around half way through.  Which is around 25 hours.

         The relationship stuff is drastically toned down from previous games.  You can marry any character you have reached S relationship rank with at the very end of the game.  But that’s it, you get a cutscene and little more.  It’s a nice cutscene but….  They could have done so much more with the system.  In fact, they HAVE done so much more with it in previous games.  This is definitely “Fire Emblem Lite.”  Which is fine, the story is engaging and the battles are fun.  But it just doesn’t have quite the complexity and some of the other games in the series might have.  Also, some of the decisions you make throughout the game are uninformed and seem more to do with chance than a calculated decision.  Also, from time to time, the game simply takes a seeming choice away from you by overriding your decision with someone elses.  Which seemed silly, why give me a choice if there really isn’t one?

          If have never played a Fire Emblem game before you are probably the target audience for this game.  Play on Beginner and Casual and you will probably be both challenged and treated to an excellent story.  I would not recommend Hard or Classic for beginners to the series as you will probably be more frustrated than interested by the time you’ve played the game for a handful of hours.  There are ALOT of things the game doesn’t teach you.  Which is probably another mark against it.  But with the internet and some exploration I found most of the things it skipped by the end(the VERY END, but even so).

         Even with all my criticisms of the game, I have to admit that this game, in my opinion is the best game on the Nintendo Switch right now and definitely my Nintendo Switch game of the year.  Also, this is only the third game on the Nintendo Switch I have EVER finished.  Considering this is a 40+ hour game that I have already New Game plused.  I can say enough good about it.  But just know it’s not perfect.  But then no game is.

         Finally, just a cautionary note.  The Final Battle is beatable, but it is terrible.  To end a game on such a crappy drawn out fight, almost kept me from giving the game five stars.  It also, almost kept me from finishing the game.  It it by far the worst part of the game and a terrible reward for playing the game for over 40 hours to get there.  But all that being said, I did finish it and I did figure out how to do it without grinding away with a cheesy strategy.  So I loved the game but…