Fire Emblem: Three Houses Review

On your days away from battle, you’re able to explore the monastery, speak to your students, help them out with fetchy-side quests, eat dinner with them or even go for a choir session to raise your friendships, teach class, sit in on other classes and learn some stuff yourself, try and coax other students away from their house and into joining yours, do some gardening, fish – honestly, the possibilities at the beginning are a little overwhelming. But pretty soon you’ll fall into a rhythm with Three Houses, and it’s one I cherished. Engaging with your party members feels more meaningful now, not just because it’s more than just watching a quick, usually comedic exchange but because you’re their teacher. You shape their future at every turn by deciding what studies they’ll focus on, what class they will become and even, at times, who they’ll eat food with to try and raise morale and patch up relationships.

There is an option to skip most of the above, if you’re solely focused on battles, but if you find yourself thinking you’ll want to do that then I would suggest that Three Houses might not be for you. What you do outside of battle takes up so much more of your time then when you go to war that you’d be missing a huge portion of the game – a part of the game that directly feeds into the battle system in countless ways. Whilst the game plays host to some excellent, traditional Fire Emblem strategizing and painful decision making (if you have Classic, permadeath mode turned on, at least) it was very much in the back of my mind for most of the story. Trying to steal Bernadette and her skills for the glory of the Golden Deer was way higher on my list of priorities.

Presentation:

Three Houses is an ugly game. There – I said it. This game looks incredibly rough, and I can’t blame the fact that the series has simply stumbled in making the move from handheld to home console when almost all pre-Awakening Fire Emblems were on home console (and arguably looked better than this.)

The new freedom the game allows you, with the ability to freely explore the monastery or even get down and dirty in battles and look at the proceedings from the eyes of your soldiers, means that every unsightly texture and horrific skybox is in plain view at all times. The character models are a lot better thanks to their clean anime aesthetic, but even still they don’t look up to snuff with what we know the Switch is capable of. Not only that, but the game chugs when under the slightest pressure, barely outputting 20 frames per second at the best of time in battle.

Luckily the sound is terrific, with a swell of incredible voice acting and a beautiful score. Everything is voiced here which is really great, and there are just so many people in the game to voice that it truly blows me away. The music is memorable, grandiose – just great, really.

Conclusion:

Three Houses takes a lot of what wasn’t working in modern Fire Emblem games and shakes it up. Usually that shake up results in fantastic steps forwards for the series, though we now have more distractions than ever from what is – or at least, was – the core of the Fire Emblem series. For diehard SRPG enthusiasts I imagine this will be upsetting, but for the rest of us we get to throw tea parties with our anime crushes so it’s all good. It’s a strangely ugly game, but if you can look past these visual shortcomings you’ll find a game with untold depth and a generous amount of replayability. If Three Houses is a sign of things to come for Fire Emblem, I’m pretty excited to see what’s next.