Fire Emblem 3 Houses

 Yesterday I finally beat Fire Emblem 3 Houses and I want to say it's probably the best game I've played on my Switch so far.  Although do keep in mind that I thought Breath of the Wild was shit and Mario Odyssey bored me to tears and even though Fire Emblem is way better than both of those, it's still riddled with problems that detract a fair amount of the enjoyment for me.

For those who may be living under a rock, Fire Emblem is a series of strategy RPGs that's been going since the NES days.  In the west, we were first given a taste of the series on the Game Boy Advance but since that entry it's become a fairly popular series.  If you're a Smash Brothers fan you're probably more than just a little familiar with a few of its more famous faces.  The Fire Emblem games are a series of strategy RPGs which are probably most well known for their use of perma death.  In most Fire Emblem games, if you lose a character they are gone for good and combined with some pretty challenging maps the series has a bit of a reputation for being on the tougher side.

If you're new to the series then 3 Houses might actually be a good place to start.  One thing to note is that in this game the perma-death is actually optional.  When you begin the game you are asked to pick a difficulty and if you want the mechanic turned on.  So if you want to play the game on it's hardest modes but the idea of permanently losing a character turns you off, the settings are separate so you can customize your experience, it's a nice touch even if FE snobs will poke fun for you using it.

I'm going to try and avoid talking about the story because it's quite long and there are also 4 different routes which you can go down and I've only played the one for Claude (the yellow guy) so I can't really talk about the story in much detail outside of his scenario.  On a basic level you're a Mercenary that gets picked up by a monastery and you are hired to be a teacher, train your students and save the world.

The strategy RPG gameplay in 3 Houses is actually very good.  If you're a Fire Emblem fan you'll probably enjoy it and if you're new the game goes out of its way to get you acquainted to its many systems so you won't be overwhelmed.  I have very few complaints about the core gameplay of 3 Houses but it's EVERYTHING ELSE that pisses me off to no end.

In older Fire Emblem games, you start a level, complete the level and then move on to the next level.  Each map is book ended by a bit of story and you enjoy a nice strategic adventure.  3 Houses however changed all of that and now you have a sort of Persona style system between every level.  In almost every case, you are given a bit of story and then a calendar and you have an in game month to make preparations and train your troops.  You get a few chances each month to do a few things like explore the monastery and talk to people, take seminars to up your skills, do side-battles or rest up to increase motivation and recharge your super sword.  For the first few maps, this is actually pretty fun but after a while, when you start to get access to more "activity points" it just starts to feel like a drag.  An obligation that you have to partake in to keep yourself up to speed when all you really want to do is get on with the fucking story.  3 Houses took me around 60 hours to beat the first time around but if you took out all of the stupid faffing around between story missions it probably would have been less than 20 

I said above that I was going to try to avoid talking about the story but my next problem point does involve it so spoilers ahead for those that give a shit.

The "main" route of the game involves 22 missions but, much like the between-mission gameplay, the story is also padded out to fuck.  You are sort of acting as a peace keeper in the first part of the game but some shit happens and you are presented with the big bad guy.  Your final encounter with big bad guy happens around mission 18 or 19 where you have them on their knees in front of you and you put your giant blade right in the top of their skull.  Then the game is like "oh but there's also Technowizards with ICBMs" and I didn't really mind this because they are sort of eluded to as a major player in the plot very early.  So you do a stage in Tron world with dubstep music and after you finish that the game goes "oh yeah remember this dude in the worlds lore? yeah fight him" and you have to do ONE MORE MONTH of faffing around and one more fucking mission with an enemy that barely puts up a fight.  After you beat the big bad the story ceases to be interesting and I ended up blasting through the last few missions just because I didn't give a shit.  

Funnily enough, the route I didn't do, the "secret"-ish route, only has 18 Chapters.  So I guess in that path you just do what's required and win and the game doesn't pull the Skrillex Army or Lore Man out of it's arse to pad out a few more levels. 

My final complaint with this game is the localization.  My Switch systems setting is set to English so the game displayed English text but the English voice work was probably some of the worst I've ever heard in my entire life.  I like to over exaggerate my disdain for English voice actors of Japanese anime games but 3 Houses had me literally cringing with how bad it's English voice work is.  Luckily though you don't need to suffer through it as the game has an option to turn on Japanese but that raised another issue.  The translation for this game is just off in places.

I get that translating Japanese is hard, there's plenty of things in Japanese that don't really go into English too well so you have to take liberties but some of the mistakes made completely change the way that certain characters are.  It ranges from little things like completely ignoring one characters strange way of speaking to big things like completely changing a characters personality.  The best example of this I came across is a scene between the characters Hilda and Raphael.  Raph is a big strong punchy boy with a sort of gentle giant type personality and he's trying to make a necklace for his sister for her birthday or something.  He enlists the aid of the usually lazy Hilda and she goes above and beyond to help him out and make a nice gift that his sister would really enjoy.  In the Japanese Hilda says something along the lines of  "The flowers you picked were looking a bit lonely so I added these things" while in the English she says "The flowers you picked looked so pathetic so I added my own touches"

The point of that scene is to make clear that Hilda isn't so much lazy and she just has massive confidence issues.  Shes worried about letting her superiors down and so she asks people to do shit for her so she can keep up her noble appearances but for this task with Raph it gives the idea that when it comes down to it she really is willing to put in the effort for people she cares about.  However the translation just makes her sound like a bitch.  All the nuance of the scene is sucked RIGHT out and the nature of the character is completely changed.  This is the example that stood out the most to me but things similar to this are dotted all over the place, the translators should be embarrassed.

But overall, despite my bile, FE3H is actually a pretty good game.  It's got a ton of content and if you like strategy RPGs this is one of the best franchises to turn to.  So if you don't mind slogging through weird, half baked dating sim mechanics, you'll probably have a good time