Fire Emblem: Three Houses – When Innovation and Juice Get In the Way of Gameplay

I’ve always enjoyed the Fire Emblem series. Like many, I was fascinated by Marth and Roy when they were introduced in Super Smash Bros. Melee. I wanted very much to know who these mysterious characters were, and what Japanese exclusive series they came from. When Fire Emblem came to the West in the form of Fire Emblem (GBA) I was instantly hooked. And the series just kept getting better. However, lately it feels like the series is starting to slip, with each new entry adding way too much to a tried and true formula. All in the name of innovation, all in an attempt to appear fresh and different. While Fire Emblem: Three Houses (FETH) doesn’t err as much as say, Fire Emblem: Fates (in which you had to buy three different freakin’ games just to get the full story…), I’ve found that it has added a baffling amount of extra stuff, which, for me, distracted from what the game and series should be.

That said, let’s briefly discuss what Fire Emblem is as a series, then discuss the many, many ways in which FETH differs, and not for the better, more often than not.

As the description up top noted, Fire Emblem is a tactical RPG. What this means (in this case at least) means that you are given control over an army consisting of a number of unique characters/units (in the case of FETH it’s usually around 10 per battle). These characters are placed on a tactical, grid-layout map. Your goal is to maneuver your units around the battlefield map in an attempt to fight the enemy, kinda like chess, if you’re thinking about it in the simplest of terms. You take turns between yourself and the AI controlled enemy. You move your units, then they move theirs. If two opposing units are within range, you have the option of initiating combat. Each unit gets one attempt to attack the other unit (in some special cases dependent on character/enemy stats or weapons, a character can attack twice or four times in one combat scenario). Each unit can only move/attack once per round. The map is finished when the player has eliminated the enemy army (or reached a special condition) or if the enemy has eliminated all of the player’s units (or, again, if a special loss condition has been met).

At the heart of it, that is what Fire Emblem is all about. That’s how the game plays. It’s simple. But all the greatest games are simple at their core. Now, there are and always have been complexities and nuances in Fire Emblem gameplay to keep things interesting. Such as player units/characters.

In games past, Fire Emblem units were wonderfully unique and varied. There were cavaliers, horse mounted units that could move farther than any other unit, wielding lances and swords. Archers, who could uniquely attack enemies from a distance of two and on rare occasion, three spaces away. And then of course, magic users, able to decimate their opponents with powerful ranged or close up magic spells; naturally, they had the trade off of very weak defense. And so many others. All units were unique, special. They had strengths and they had weaknesses. Be it movement, range, defense, offense, weapon choice, etc.

However, in FETH, one of the first thing I noticed was that uniqueness was almost completely gone. Every unit given at start was either a commoner or noble (difference being in name alone). The two units were capable of using any weapon type or magic. Some characters clearly had a preference with their weapon proficiency being slightly higher in one weapon or magic type, but that hardly stopped them from using whatever you wanted them to use.

Eventually, at a high enough level you could upgrade your nobles and commoners into simple starting classes such as the lance wielding soldier, the sword swinging myrmidon, the ax and bow wielding fighter, or the magic using monk. But even those simplistic classes did nothing to stop a unit from using any other weapon at their leisure (aside from magic, only specific types could use magic, but even then, their ability to wield the three different types of magic: white, dark [formally elemental, because dark is soooo much clearer], or black). The only differences is that the growth rate in certain weapon proficiency types is higher in certain classes, and it is weapon proficiency that allows you to change into even more powerful classes.

This is all such a radical change from the core series. What’s more, it largely destroys the tactical aspects of the game. You could build an army of nothing but all powerful magic wielding, horse riding holy knights and dark knights, if you so chose. Or, you could differentiate things, and have a varied army, but a varied army that can use any weapon it wants in any situation. An archer with an ax, a cavalier with a bow, a healer with a sword.

You might be wondering, why does this matter? Well, Fire Emblem has always relied on a rock paper scissors approach to combat. Lances beat swords, swords beat axes, and axes beat lances. Bows don’t figure in because they were always special, they attack at a range, but cannot attack or counter attack up close. Magic had it’s own weapon triangle, white beat black, black beat dark, dark beat white (clear as mud?). But when anyone can wield anything, tactical planning goes out the window. Even the disparity in bows seems to be a moot point in FETH, as if you get the smallest amount of proficiency in the bow, you gain the ability to counter at close range. More proficiency increases the bow’s overall range, allowing you to hit anywhere between three and five spaces ahead. Can you say OP?

Speaking of proficiency. Weapon proficiency has been around since day one, the more you use a type of weapon, the better you get at it (by rank or E, D, C, B, A, and S). In the old days, this simply meant you could use better quality weapons. In FETH, this means that and so much more. In addition to accessing better quality weapons, you also get special attacks and abilities. The attacks can increase damage, hit rate, crit rate, range, etc. at the cost of using more of a weapon’s durability (all weapons have a durability limit, use them too much and they’ll break).

Abilities, however, are another beast. And the effects vary so greatly it would be difficult to explain it all. needless to say, they make your characters very powerful, as described above.

Going back to weapon types, I will note that they’ve muddled things even more by adding a new weapon type: the gauntlets. Gauntlets don’t seem to factor into the weapon triangle at all (how could they?). But they seem to be slightly weaker weapons than normal, but there is, of course, a huge trade off. They are capable of hitting four times in a single combat encounter. Twice before the enemy attacks, and twice after. I cannot tell you how broken a well trained gauntlet fighter is.

Granted, these are all huge changes, and some might welcome them. It is certainly innovative. But to me, it completely destroys the tactical aspect of the tactical RPG genre. It’s incredibly ironic too, for in many of the game’s paths, the characters are obsessed with creating a world where no one is special. Well, on a meta level, that’s already been accomplished.

All of this conversation so far has been based soley on how the changes made to FETH have affected the core gameplay. But I would be remiss in not discussing the overwhelming amount of extra crap they added to this game, even though it affected true gameplay very little.

In a traditional Fire Emblem game, it often plays out as such: Small bits of conversation and narrative, maybe a cutscene, followed by gameplay, set out the units, prepare for battle, fight, win, more conversation/narrative, rinse and repeat.

It’s all fairly fast paced, and you never go too long between fights, between actual playtime. Needless to say I was shocked when first playing FETH that in the first TWO HOURS I had seen only two, very small battle maps. It was baffling to me that it was even possible. But it was so. Why? Because of Garreg Mach Monastery…

In FETH you take control of a very boring, very ugly (I have to say, FETH features some of the most dull, and downright ugly characters I’ve ever seen in the series… there are exceptions, but they are few), emotionless silent protagonist. Who, for reasons unexplained, is suddenly thrust into the role of professor at Garreg Mach Monastery, a school serving students of three rival nations. As professor, you are given the task of teaching your students, and fulfilling a number of other pointless tasks, with actual, important battle scenarios only taking place at the end of each month (called moons in this game, because why not…).

What do you do the rest of the month? Well, buckle up, because there’s a lot! Most Mondays are spent actually teaching the students. This happens by way of selecting a student and increasing their weapon proficiency by a small amount based on how motivated they are feeling. This struck me as painfully tedious and pointless. Yes, they got more weapon proficiency, but that could easily happen in battle as well, and even if you wanted to do it outside of battle, this hardly seemed like the most efficient way of doing it.

As said earlier, certain students will have preferred fighting styles, but in teaching, you can decide what they focus on. In reality, you can raise whatever you want, whether they like it or not.

Speaking of students, before I get too far down this rabbit hole, I will point out that which school house you choose to teach decides which students (character units) will be available to you to use. You can recruit other students of other houses, but it is a difficult, and not always guaranteed process. This ticked me off. In old fire emblem games, you started with a small base number of units, and as the game progressed, you gained more, and were able to meet certain conditions to recruit others. That’s not so much the case in this one. You’re given a set, and that’s what you get, unless you spend all your time and energy trying to “woo” other students into joining your house. All of which is set to a strict time limit. At a specific point in the game, any non recruited students are lost forever. So work fast if you want them all…

Okay, back to the dang monastery.

Aside from teaching on Mondays, you have a “free day” on Sundays. On Free days, you have four options: Explore, where you explore the monastery; Seminar, a pointless waste of time, where another professor instructs you an a small number of students, slightly increasing proficiency in the two weapons that professor knows; Battle, an option to head out on optional “auxiliary battles’ where you can grind xp playing the same maps over and over; and Rest, which just raises all your student’s motivation halfway.

All of those are fairly self explanatory, except Explore. There is so much to the Explore option… So very much…

When exploring the monastery, you’re suddenly thrust into a 3rd person perspective and given free range of the poorly laid out, very large monastery grounds. While exploring there is a lot you can do, very little of it mattered, though, I’ve found.

Naturally, all the students and faculty can be found while exploring, and you can chat with them to get more info on the current month’s happenings. You can also explore the grounds to find items and whatnot scattered about the grounds. There are also special quests (mostly pointless fetch quests) that are accessible only while exploring. Oh, and you can also do a variety of things to raise your students’ motivations, or to recruit other students. Give gifts, have meals together, cook stat boosting meals for a single unit, throw a tea party (yeah… because when i think Fire Emblem, I think Tea Time!……).

Of course, if there are meals, you’ll need to have food to cook, right? So why not do some gardening? Or go fishing?! Because every game needs a fishing minigame, right?!

Oh, and I will note, that in order to do most of the activities in explore, or to even teach your students, you need energy. You have tragically little energy at start, and can only get more by raising your “professor level” which is different from your character’s actual level. You get professor xp by doing these various tasks, so it’s kind of an endless cycle of monotony and pointlessness.

It’s all just juice. All of it.

For those not in the know, “juice” is an industry term used to describe something added to the game to add a little more razzle dazzle to it. It doesn’t, or I should say, shouldn’t affect the actual game. The iconic sound effect of Mario collecting a coin for example, is juice.

But the problem with FETH’s juice, is that it is affecting gameplay. Remember how I said I’d gone two hours into the game and only seen two battle scenarios? That’s because I was trying to wrap my head around the massive amount of all this other added, mostly frivolous crap that they added on to the game. You could strip it all away, and the game would have been better for it. But in the age we live in, where pointlessness is apparently king, the devs somehow felt all of this was necessary.

I like juice, and I think innovation is the key to keeping a game series relevant and fun. But there is such a thing as taking it too far. And that’s what happened with FETH. They took it all too far. If they had narrowed their focus, and not spent so much time with all this other stuff, the game would have been so much better for it.

All that said, at it’s deepest core, it is still Fire Emblem. And because of that, I was able to find the fun, and enjoy it. But man, I’ll tell ya… It took me a long time to do that.