Three Houses’ has everything ‘Fire Emblem’ fans want

Fire Emblem: Three Houses has everything a Fire Emblem fan could want in a new game: a protagonist with an unnatural hair color, characters you cherish with all your heart, mysterious villains, plenty of twists, and battle after battle to test both your mind and your patience.

Three Houses is dressed head to toe in all the classic fantasy RPG tropes that Fire Emblem has wrapped itself in since the series began in 1990. Is it a little tiresome? At times. But it’s a formula they’ve done over and over again because it works.

As the first new Fire Emblem game on a home console since 2007’s Fire Emblem: Radiant Dawn, Three Houses feels like a larger and more involved experience than some of its more recent entries, while still maintaining a cohesive feel.

At the time of this review, I’ve put about 35 hours into Fire Emblem: Three Houses on the Nintendo Switch, and I’ve loved almost every hour of it. A single campaign takes about 80 hours to complete, according to Nintendo, so I’m likely not even halfway through my first playthrough. I can’t speak to the second half of the game at the moment, but from what I’ve seen thus far, Three Houses is a great Fire Emblem game.

The three houses

The crux of Fire Emblem: Three Houses is in its title: the three houses that make up both the three classes at the Garreg Mach Monastery you teach at and the three families that rule over the land of Fódlan. Near the beginning of the game, the main character Byleth has to choose which house they’re going to take on as a professor and ultimately the character they’ll be battling alongside throughout the game. 

There’s the Black Eagle House led by Princess Edelgard of the Adrestian Empire. Then there’s the Blue Lion House led by Prince Dimitri of the Holy Kingdom of Faerghus. And finally, there’s the Golden Deer House, led by Claude, the heir to the throne of the Leicester Alliance.

Are those names exhausting to you? Because they were to me. But everything is laid out in simple enough terms and with easy-to-distinguish primary colors (red, blue, and yellow) so it’s never really confusing.

I went with the Black Eagle House, because Dimitri seemed like too much of a good boy and Claude was a little bit shady, and I quickly fell in love with all the students that came with Edelgard.

After about 10 hours, I went back and started a separate campaign where I picked Claude, just to see what the differences were, but the story shifts come after a few hours into the game and I didn’t want to repeat what I just did so I kept trucking on with Edelgard and company. 

The setup to Three Houses feels thematically similar to that of the last game, Fire Emblem: Fates for the Nintendo 3DS, which had three divergent campaigns forcing players to pick sides in a power struggle. With Fates, though, players who wanted to see the other stories had to purchase separate games, which on release added up to about $80 total. That’s a bit much, and thankfully the developers didn’t try to pull that again. Still, I’m curious to see how different the three house choices are aside from picking the characters you train and fight with.

Will it really be worth it to put 240 hours into Three Houses to see the three different endings? Will there even be three different endings? It’s likely I won’t find out, because that’s too much Fire Emblem for me to handle, but at least I’m enjoying the choices I’ve made thus far.

Being Byleth

The player character in Three Houses, Byleth, is similar to other recent Fire Emblem protagonists. They can be either a man or a woman, they come with no predetermined allegiances, and they have some kind of latent power that most people don’t know about in the beginning of the game.

You don’t know how old Byleth is, who their mother is, where they’ve been, or what their deal is. Byleth has a father named Jeralt who doesn’t look similar at all, although it’s kind of suspect that he’s actually Byleth’s father.

And then there’s the character that lives inside of Byleth’s head and occasionally speaks to them. I won’t reveal her name or what she is, but she’s an important piece of the Three Houses puzzle and is a clear indicator that Byleth is an important person.

To solidify this idea even more, a relic pops up the game that only Byleth can wield: the Sword of the Creator. It’s an extremely powerful weapon that is seen in the first cutscene in the game — an old battle that helped shape Fódlan into the land that it is today, a land centered around the church.

As the story unfolds, Byleth has to make a handful of choices that help shape how you look at the world and how the characters look at you. By appeasing people, you can build up your relationships with them to motivate them and strengthen your bonds with them, which is helpful in training and in battle.

Training and battle — the two biggest parts of Fire Emblem: Three Houses.

Fire Emblem is fighting

Outside of some gorgeous animated cutscenes and conversations with characters, the bulk of Three Houses sees you training your class to improve their skills in combat and battling alongside them.

It starts out easy enough as you learn (or re-learn) the basics of Fire Emblem‘s turn-based tactical combat, directing characters around various battlefields to take down bandits or fellow residents of Garreg Mach Monastery to train. The stakes continue to rise and the battles get tougher as more powerful enemies come out of the darkness to kill you and take everything you hold dear.

Along with the story, battling is the most fun and exciting aspect of Fire Emblem: Three Houses, and routing a group of dastardly enemies with near-perfect strategies is such a satisfying feeling.

One of the staples of Fire Emblem is permanent death — if characters get struck down in combat, they die forever. Like in other recent games, this condition is optional and can be turned off if you don’t want to stress about it. But playing with permanent death isn’t quite as difficult with some past games, thanks to the new feature, Divine Pulse, which comes from the girl in your head and allows you to rewind time a few times per battle. If one of your characters ends up dying, you can just rewind a few moves and try again with a new strategy.

This saves a ton of time compared to the old method of saving characters who die by hard-restarting the game and beginning the battle over from scratch.

With Divine Pulse, I’ve yet to hard-restart a battle, and I’ve never used the pulse more than twice on normal difficulty, so thus far I’d say the difficulty is pretty fair.

The strategy involved within Three Houses is deeper than some past games, too, with individual character classes having stronger involvement in how they fare against certain enemy types and the use of battalions, which can be assigned to characters to give them an extra option for attacking with unique benefits.

Between the battles is the training and teaching, which isn’t quite as fun but is certainly important.

Professor duties

As a professor, Byleth has to teach students almost every week, selecting which stats they improve in the classroom and using other activities like cooking and chatting to increase their motivations for learning.

Exploring the monastery and instructing characters is not very fun. It’s not terrible, but it can be a little boring and tedious.

Training characters basically just boils down to selecting the stats you’d like for them to improve. There isn’t really any nuance to it, which is fine, but the whole process could be sped up a bit. Luckily there’s an option to instruct characters manually, but it doesn’t always select the stats you’d like.

Choosing to explore the monastery on free days is important to increasing character motivations and improving your own stats, but the monastery itself isn’t particularly fun to walk around it. It doesn’t look that great, either, and although the conversations with characters that happen in the monastery are fun and help deepen your connection with them, it feels like a chore.

As with other Fire Emblem games, relationships with characters are very important. Does it feel weird when some of the characters look at you with more than just platonic eyes? Yes, because you’re in a position of power and some of the characters are younger than 18. As far as I experienced, nothing actually happened between Byleth and their students, but there were definitely hints of something, which made me uncomfortable at moments.

But that dynamic changes after the conclusion of part one of the story when there’s a five-year time jump and the situation in Fódlan becomes much more dire. Still, it’s weird that some of the potential love interests in the game were once Byleth’s students.

Luckily, the strong parts of Fire Emblem: Three Houses more than make up for these slower and weirder aspects.

The story continues

I’m looking forward to continuing the game and seeing the conclusion of this story as well as the battles to come. The twists and new additions that have piled on since the beginning have been exciting, to say the least, even if some developments are a little predictable. 

To me, Fire Emblem is best experienced in bites. Bingeing Three Houses for this review is not how I normally play RPGs, and now that the review is done it’s probably going to take me a really long time to finish.

That’s not a condemnation. It takes a lot of brain power to keep these relationships going and win battles. But there’s no way I’m stopping now.

Fire Emblem: Three Houses arrives on Nintendo Switch on July 26.