Baldurs Gate Dark Alliance

 Baldurs Gate is a series one might be quite familar with if you're into the Dungeons and Dragons RPG games for PC but if you have never played Dark Alliance and expected something similar to those PC entries, then you're in for a bit of a surprise.

Baldur's Gate Dark Alliance, released for the PS2 in 2001, does away with the slow, methodical RPG-based in table top style game play of the PC versions and instead goes for a more action oriented approach.  You start the game by picking a Dwarf fighter, a human archer or an elven mage and as far as character creation goes that's where it ends.  You watch a cutscene and then are quickly thrust in a sewer to go kill a bunch of rats, as is common for these kind of games.  The game probably bares more similarity to something like Diablo more than anything else where you go through dungeons, hack and slash your way through hordes of enemies and hopefully collect some sweet loot on the way.

That's not to say that ALL Dungeons and Dragons stuff has gone completely out of the window.  Each monster you slay gives experience and when you fill up your bar you gain a level.  Gaining a level grants you skill points to apply to various feats which are things ranging from hit harder and die less to all new skills to play with depending on which starting class you picked.  The last playthrough I did I chose the Dwarf fighter, so all my feats were pretty much hit harder and die less but I did get one skill called Bull Rush which made traversing the environment a bit less dull sometimes.

There is also a cool multiplayer mode where you and a friend can slay things at the same time but the game doesn't automate any of the loot sharing, it's all first come first serve so if you have a particularly greedy buddy you can expect a few arguments from time to time. My recent play of this game was solo so I'm not entirely sure but I think that experience isn't shared either which is extra annoying if you can't get any killing blows in because your buddy who stole all the good swords is doing all the killing instead.  I'm basing this on a memory from when I played this with some school buddies though so there's a chance my memory is flawed on this one.  

The one thing I can complain about for sure is the bullshit damage values on hard mode.  When I played this game in my younger days, I played it on Normal, a time before I made playing games on hard my personal standard.  Going back to it to record for the stream I thought to myself "this game is easy, I'll play it on hard!" and while it's no Dark Souls by any stretch, sometimes this game takes the piss with how much damage enemies do.  Damage in this game is always done in a range of values, for example a weapon you pick up will have a strength rating of, lets say, 4-19 or something like that.  So when you hit something it's taking that range, plus whatever stat bonuses you have and then it's applied to your strike.  The same goes for the enemies too only I think their ranges are jacked up in hard because sometimes you'll get hit and less than 1% of your HP will fall away and then a moment later you'll get hit by the same guy only he'll one shot you and cause you to reload a save.  The game IS pretty easy and almost all enemies can be beaten hitless by running in little circles around them but it can be annoying when you take a hit and either have to run away chugging HP potions like some kind of addict or you just flat out die.

Overall though it was fun coming back to Dark Alliance.  If you're looking for a sort of brain-off hit the goblins till they die kind of action game then give it a go.  Even if you aren't into table top games AT ALL it's a fun little romp through a bunch of location severing scalps from heads for EXP and gold and it's just generally very much worth playing

SMT: If...

 

Persona is now a pretty popular series for RPG fans.  Persona 3 roped in a few weebs with it's dating sim elements, Persona 4 got even more popular with it's Scooby Doo-esque setting and story and then P5 really came along and really got people excited.  It's sort of a joke about the fandom ignoring the first two games in the series due to a lack of social links and much clunkier game play but the one game that next to nobody talks about is Shin Megami Tensei If..., the entry in the series that sort of kicked the whole thing off.

Shin Megami Tensei If... starts out with you doing a personality test which will decide a bunch of stuff and then you are thrust into the halls of Karukozaka high school where you do a bit of wandering around and all hell breaks loose.  You find a partner to join you on your quest and then you go dungeon crawling around a bunch of areas loosly based on the seven deadly sins.  For people who have become confortable with the more modern entries in Persona or even mainline, SMT If... may be a little hard to play at first since it's a traditional first person dungeon crawler but if you can stick with it you're in for a good time.

The gameplay is standard first person dungeon crawling affair where you wander around, get lost, find gear, blunder into traps and so on and so forth.  The usual Megami Tensei mechanic of demon negotiation makes an appearance where almost every enemy you come across in a dungeon can be talked to and if your negotiation goes well they well join your party.  Right now it sounds almost entirely like a mainline SMT game and not like a Persona title at all but the seeds of the franchise turn up in something called the Guardian System.

In SMT: If... there are no game overs, death just isn't a thing for the protagonists here.  When you die you are instead given a nice mode 7 sweeping shot of some grassy lands and then an old man gives you a guardian.  A guardian will give your characters stat boosts (or reductions) and in the case of your partner, the guardian will dictate what spells they have throughout the game.  Entering the status menu allows you to see a "guardian meter" which fills as you defeat enemies.  If you die when the bar is yellow then your guardian gets downgraded and if you die while it's red it gets upgraded.  So while you'll never have to worry about a nasty insta-death spell killing you and sending you back to your last save, dying before you're ready for an upgrade can be just as, if not more annoying than a traditional game over.  

The guardian system is pretty much what laid the foundation for the personas in the Persona games.  Obviously later games would do away with demon negotiation and just have full parties of human characters but it's very clear to see where all the inspiration came from.

Aside from that, SMT If... is also bursting with content, with slightly different story routes depending on which partner you pick at the start of the game as well as a special New Game + character that does away with the sin themed dungeons and instead has a completely different dungeons to explore and bosses to kill, it's almost like having two games in one.

There are some annoyances though that come par for the course with a Megami Tensei game.  For example it's extremely easy to get blindsided by a nasty Mudo or Hama spell in some of the later dungeons, instant death attacks that will have you tearing your hair out although there is at least some counter play when you know it's coming.  The worst part of the game that isn't well known to MegaTen fans is the Dungeon of Sloth.  A slow, boring part of the game where you have to wait for students to dig tunnels by just mindlessly walking up and down the level until the in game moon cycle ticks enough times.  If you were going to get pissed off and give up on the game, it would probably be in this exact part and I absolutely couldn't blame you for doing so.

That said though, Sloth dungeon aside SMT If... is an pretty good game and if you're a Persona fan looking to experience a bit more MegaTen, this is a pretty good place to come since it's challenging but not overly brutal.  The game was never officially released outside of Japan but if you're willing to get your emulation on then a fan translation does exist for this game so you can enjoy it in English.

So go check it out, go see where it all began

Zombie Night Terror

 Lemmings is a name that may not be some commonly recognisable with some of today's younger gamers won't remember which is sort of a shame but when the only thing that series has come out with is a crappy mobile game that no one plays, it's sort of to be expected.  Well the lads over at NoClip have us covered with Zombie Night Terror, a game that has clearly taken a lot of inspiration from Lemmings but added it's own post apocolyptic twist.  

In most zombie games you play as survivors trying to fend off the hordes of the undead but Zombie Night Terror flips that around and instead puts you in charge of a horde of zombies that you must command through various levels and tasks the player in most cases with infecting a certain number of people or getting the zombies from point A to point B so the outbreak can continue.  There's more to it than just that but in a nutshell that makes up most of what you'll be doing.

If you're not sure why I mentioned Lemmings at the top of this post it's because gameplay wise it's basically the same thing.  For those that haven't seen Lemmings I'll take a moment to explain.  You don't actually control the zombie horde directly, instead they are dropped in in to the stage and in most cases will just aimlessly walk from left to right with no regard for anything that might stop them or kill them.  Your job is to direct them around the map with little arrows on staircases, for example, or mutate them into diffent zombie forms to help them avoid or get through an obstacle.  For example you may be faced with a situation where your zombies will mindlessly walk themselves off a cliff so you must mutate the first zombie in the line into an overlord, which will turn the zombies around and prevent them falling to their doom.  Aside from mutations you get a number of skills which a zombie can perform such a run to get past falling objects or close the gap on their prey or a jump to well.....jump.

What makes the game interesting is that you can combine the mutations and skills to come up with pretty clever solutions for various puzzles.  For example the basic one is to turn a zombie into a direction altering overlord and then using the jump skill on it which will permenantly change the overlord into a sort of catapult so you can lob zombies into hard to reach places.  Another example is using the tank mutation with the scream skill.  Scream on a regular zombie will make it scream either scaring nearby humans or waking up zombies that aren't currently part of your horde, mainly used for paralyzing guys with guns so you can bite them.  If you use the tank mutation to turn a regular zombie into a big strong lad though, scream will send targets in front of the tank flying away from it allowing you to cross gaps or send smaller lads towards their targets much faster.

The regular levels are pretty fun to work out and get through but there's a number of stages where the game starts to get cute with it's design and I don't mean that in a good way.  One bad example of this is an auto scrolling platforming stage where you have to use mutations and skills to get away from a vehicle that kills your zombies on touch.  At the start it's fine but you end up losing a great deal of guys and ending up in an unwinnable position because you got fucked by some trap you had no idea was coming and had way too little time to react to.  That's only a mild annoyance in comparison to the dark levels.  Long stages in pitch black where the only way to see is one radioactive zombie and the rest are just 2 blinking eyes in the darkness.  Somewhat maze like and full of pitfalls you can't see until you've already thrown a few zombies down there they are hair-pullinglly annoying and whoever decided to include these in the game deserves a slap hard enough to maybe cause a tooth to go flying.

Thankfully though, those levels are few and far between and overall Zombie Night Terror is a fun little puzzle game that will leave you feeling pretty satisfied when you eventually solve a level.  So if you're a puzzle game fan looking to scratch an itch then maybe check this one out and if you're an old school Lemmings fan looking for a similar kind of game then absolutely check this one out.

Hard Vs Bullshit

 

Recently I've been playing a game on stream called Wings of Vi.  Wings of Vi is a platform game brought to us by a guy named Solgyrn who is probably the most well known for creating a similar game called I wanna be the Boshy.  I Wanna Be the Boshy was a fan game of the notorious I Wanna Be The Guy, a platform game that was designed to troll just as much as it was to challenge the player.  

Hard games are something I usually quite enjoy.  If you were to come to me and tell me that a game presents an above average challenge I'm probably going to buy it.  When a game has multiple difficulty options I'm the kind of person to jump straight into hard mode and completely ignore the normal or easy settings.  I'm not saying this to flex any kind of gaming cred, of course, I'm merely pointing it out so that when I go on to call Wings of Vi "bullshit" in the next few paragraphs, I'm being genuine rather than just throwing my toys out of the pram because I died a bunch of a couple of bosses.

Difficulty is a hard thing for a lot of developers to get right and generally speaking I find that the best games in this aspect don't even have difficulty settings to speak of.  3D Mario games are one example of this where you can usually beat the game with only 70 of the stars/shines/dragon dildos or whatever but for players looking for extra challenge can find it in post game content or in challenging courses when trying to 100% the game.  Another example would be Celeste, a challenging platformer that presents the player with no difficulty settings in the traditional sense but instead gives a reasonable challenge to all players and then ramps up the difficulty in post game content such as B sides, Golden Berries and Farewell.  Dark Souls would be another good example of this where some basic knowledge of the games systems and adapting to the combat a little will get you through all the games story bosses, but extra bosses and self imposed challenges can help bring up the challenge for people who want a bit of punishment. 

Bad difficulty, I find, usually comes in the form of settings that one must pick at the start of the game.  The one that stands out extremely clear in my mind was Nier on PS3 where the hard mode just increased enemy damage and health to the point where almost all the battles were just long slogfests and death would be brought about by a loss of attention due to boredom rather than the game being actually hard.  The other bad example I can think of is Dante's Inferno, also on PS3 where the higher difficulty levels were designed specifically around New Game Plus and the carrying over of skills and stats.  Sure it's POSSIBLE to beat Dante's Inferno on hard from a new game, but it's not fun because you feel like you're playing with your hands tied behind your back rather than because the game is actually any harder than it was on normal.  From what I understand, Resident Evil 8 does a similar thing but I've still not played that yet so I can't say for sure.

Then there's bullshit games like Wings of Vi.  Funnily enough Wings of Vi actually does present you with difficulty settings that change the number of checkpoints and enemy damage but again, nothing actually interesting out side of "die less and jump better".  But the problems in Wings of Vi are much more than that in both platforming and combat.  Platforming bullshit comes in the form of challenges and obstacles that 1) You can't see before it's too late and 2) Aren't obviously clear how to get around them.  Platforming in Vi is extremely precise and the game is almost more of a puzzle experience in this regard than a straight platformer.  Working out which combination of jumps and wing flutters you have to do is difficulty and can be pretty satisfying to achieve when you get it down.  However there are often points in the game where you will be presented with a jumping challenge, you practice and die and attempt to clear it and eventually you get it, only for the screen to shift and you get given more instant death spikes with no time to react and no time to work out what the hell you were supposed to do.  Back to the checkpoint with you, idiot.   A good example of this is a section that involves dashing through rhythmically moving worms.  The timing on the jumps and dashes to get through but when you get above the section you have to make a diagonal dash to safety through an enemy and onto a platform that you CANT FUCKING SEE.  So yeah, har har you got me with the sudden direction change and enemy placement but the death isn't my fault.  Maybe if you had shown me that before I would have made it through but you just covered my eyes for a stupid "gotcha" moment.

The bosses aren't much better where the first 10-50 attempts will be just adapting to whatever attack pattern the enemy has and then every attempt after that is just doing it until you can that one "in the zone" run where you pull it all off.  One boss however, a giant 3 headed worm in a perpetually moving tunnel with floating platforms can make you lose runs to it just not working.  The bosses chases you left to right in phase 1, top to bottom in pase 2 and the left to right in phase 3.  The shift from phase 2 to phase 3 will ALWAYS bug out, I never saw it work properly once and you will die to platformings not spawning and leaving you trapped to take a big chunk of damage.  Bosses that do work right, like Ancient Constructs, aren't any better though, starting off reasonable and then just becoming jank Touhou by the end.

Sure, Wings of Vi and games like it are extremely satisfying to get through but "bet you didn't see that coming" platforming and "bullet hell with a jumbo jet" aren't fun to experience, it's just bullshit bad design so that idiots like me can say that we bashed our head off the wall long enough to get it done.  There's a reason Celeste, Dark Souls and games like it will be celebrated forever and shit like Wings of Vi will be forgotten and fade into obscurity

Until Dawn

 

Until Dawn is a game that I ignored for the longest time because I saw it was a similar sort of title to things like Beyond: Two Souls and Heavy Rain and David Cage had very much destroyed any hope I had of the "interactive movie" genre being any good.  Well, thanks to the viewer request system on my stream I was eventually forced to play it and I would like to formally apologise to Supermassive Games for ignoring their first game for so long because Until Dawn was probably one of the most fun experiences I've ever had on my PS4

The game follows a group of young adults (teenagers maybe? they might be high schoolers I forget and they look older than the game is telling me they are) having a weekend getaway in a snowy log cabin on top of a mountain.  The group pranks one of the girls who then gets upset and runs half naked into sub zero weather where she is then set upon by something or someone and ends up falling off a cliff with her sister to her death.  One year after the prank gone wrong, the group re-unite to try and have another party but this time with a bit less death and shenanigans ensue.

You, the player, are effectively watching this teen horror flick and every so often you get to make decisions for the characters or attempt to clear QTEs to see if they live or die.  There isn't quite as much weight to each choice or action as the game might have you believe in a lot of cases but some decisions are quite severe and do effect the plot in major ways and even a few of the QTE's will result in a character just outright biting the dust when failed which is a lot more than I can say for other games that I've played in this genre.  On your first go through you learn pretty quickly that this is the case but you aren't sure which decision will lead someone to their doom and which you can fail for the funnies so there is a decent sense of tension on that first run 

I'm going to get into spoiler territory  so if you haven't played it and you give a shit, stop reading here and go play it.

For example there's a part sort of early on where a boy and a girl are tied to a couple of chairs and one of you must die so the other may live.  The boy has a free hand and a gun on the table and you must decide if you are going to shoot her or yourself.  No matter what decision you make, no one dies because this is where the first of the games major twists takes place, where the whole thing is an elaborate prank being carried out by another character.  The two characters who were tied to the chair don't really talk about the effect of this decision after this scene so you may be led to believe that it's just one self contained scene for a long time, the boy and the girl even carry on their adventures and everything seems fine.

That is until the games second twist, where the game changes from a slasher movie to a supernatural monster flick and the group is being chased by the Wendigo, a lanky fucker that will rip your head off.  You get to a scene near the end of the game where the boy from the previous scene is being chased down a snowy path by the monster and when he reaches the cabin he needs the girl to open the door and let him in to safety.  If you shot yourself in the buzzsaw scene, she opens the door and you survive.  If you shot her she keeps the door tightly locked and watches you get your head ripped off by the Wendigo and sort of pretends to be sad about it.  There's even a combination of events you can do that I'm unsure of where she doesn't open the door for some reason and is distraught when she watches you get torn to shreds.  

There are plenty of scenes that play out in this way and are affected by stuff from WAY earlier in the game and it sort of invokes the same feeling that I had playing Kamaitachi no Yoru (also set in a snowy log cabin, funnily enough) on the SNES where we were working out every decision comination possible to get every possible ending scene, it was good fun there and it's good fun here.

I do have some minor complaints about the game though and while they don't ruin the experience they are worth noting.  There are some characters in the cast, two in particular spring to mind, that don't get nearly enough screen time.  They appear at the start and then either die SUPER fast or are ignored for most of the game and then get a little scene near the end.  Some of the decisions the cast decide to make on their own, outside of your choices, sometimes feel a bit stupid but I suppose you are playing a teen horror movie where this kind of thing is to be expected but it's still annoying.  Also parts of the game that involve walking from one area to another are PAINFULLY slow, with no proper run button and nothing to really do or figure out until the next set piece starts in 99% of cases.

There is one other HUGE complaint I have with the game but I'm separating it out because this is a problem that is no fault of the developer or the game itself.  Since I live in Japan, I was playing the Japanese version of the game and this version is HEAVILY censored.  Most of the deaths that the characters experience in this game involve either decapitation or amputation and in Japan, this is a big no no for games.  That means that when a character is killed the game will usually fade to black or certain parts of the kill animation will be modified.  This however goes as far to effect the story near the end.  There is a scene where you open a door and find a hall that is filled with the hanging, mangled corpses of every character who has died up to that point.  You go through the hall to rescue another member of the group and on the way out he has a sort of break down at all the death he's surrounded by.  In the Japanese version of this game not only is there a fade to black during some of it but the 3D MODELS OF THE BODIES ARE COMPLETELY REMOVED.  I had NO fucking clue what the cast was getting so upset about and I would have never have had an idea if it wasn't for someone in my stream chat explaining what was supposed to be happening.  Japanese censorship of this game really fucked some of it's best moments so if you're going to play it, don't play that version, import a UK or US version or something.

Overall though, Until Dawn was an extremely fun game that has quite a surprising amount of replay value considering the kind of genre it's in.  If you played a Quantic Dream game and found it lacking, give this game (or it's sequels Man of Medan and Little Hope) a try.  If you're a fan of the old school SNES sound novel like Kamaitachi no Yoru and Otogirisou you might also like it since it's sort of a modern version of that kind of experience.  Or if you just like trashy teen horror slasher flicks you'll probably like it as well because it plays VERY heavily into it's influences.  

Bottom line, give it a go.  Pop it in your PS4 in the evening and you'll probably be playing.....Until Dawn

Dohohoho

Dante's Inferno

 

When Dante's Inferno came out way back in 2010 I pretty much ignored it but thanks to the power of the stream request system and a friend of mine loaning me a copy to play on, I finally got around to giving it a go.

The one thing that everyone says about this game is that it's a God of War clone and it was for that reason that a lot of people I knew at the time either didn't buy it or gave it a bad rap.  Being honest, they are completely correct, Dante's Inferno is a SHAMELESS God of War clone in pretty much every detail.  The combat feels very similar, the boss fights all end in bombastic QTE's, you get souls to upgrade your character as the game goes on etc. etc. But none of that make Dante's Inferno a bad game, there are a lot worse things you could be cloning and as far as it goes, despite some jank here and there, it plays pretty well.  If you like God of War then there's no real reason I can think of as to why you wouldn't enjoy this.  

It does have some things of it's own though, such as the dual upgrade trees that are marked "holy" and "unholy" and gain experience based on if you commit gruesome murder or if you commit gruesome murder in a slightly more pious way.  Each of these trees have their own skills and upgrades, with Unholy being focused on your scythe and Holy being focused on your shooty hadoken cross thingy.  The other thing it offers is a sort of judgement system where you find lost souls and you choose to absolve them to heaven or stab them through the face for huge amounts of experience points in one of your upgrade trees.  The weird thing about this system is that if you choose to absolve a lost soul then you have to play Dance Dance Revolution for about a minute before the game gives you the exp which can bring things to a screeching halt and is generally quite an annoying thing to have to do.  

The one thing I hated more than anything else about this game was the difficulty level balancing.  I started the game on Hellish, the games hard mode and I started getting my ass kicked.  This was fine, I wasn't expecting hard mode to just let me win but as I progressed and got stuff off the upgrade tree and unlocked more equipable relics it hit me that the game wasn't really playing fair.  With a New Game+ file hard mode seems challening but reasonable but from a fresh file Hellish mode is just hair pullingly annoying.  Enemies will do damage like it's Dark Souls in Hellish but in Normal they do <1% of your health with a big wind up unblockable.  On a new game plus this would be offset by a relic you get about half way through the game and you'd have a lot more options with spells and combo upgrades from the unholy tree to deal with the scenarios but when your a baby crusader taking your first trip into the rings it's borderline impossible unless you have a lot of prior experience. 

So despite some jank, the hard mode being way too hard and the normal mode being laughably easy Dante's Inferno isn't a bad little game at all.  It's the kind of thing that would be good to play when you have gaming friends over, something to fiddle with and you don't have to think too hard about while you have conversations about whatever.  The cutscenes and game help boxes are also equal parts awesome and hilarious so even if you end up hating the gameplay it's probably worth playing just for that to be honest.  

The game ends on a very saddening "to be continued" screen as well.  I imagine the developers had plans to do games for heaven and limbo but this game probably just didn't do well enough.  Give it a go if you can get your hands on a copy.  Brain off, scythe out and just enjoy the sights and the action.

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