I don't think anyone plays FE games for the story, but nevertheless a disclaimer: some light spoilers ahead. I assume that anyone reading this already knows that a) you start as a teacher in a monastery/officer academy/ battle Hogwarts, that b) at some point there is a time skip that takes you a few years into the future, and that c) in this future you are dropped into a war in which you lead the chosen group against the other groups.
I wanted to sprinkle a few screenshots I got off the internet here and there, to break up the wall of text. In the end, I did not. You can find them yourselves, though?
Tactical entry
I'm not a fan of chinese cartoons, but I do enjoy tactical/RPG games. Not that I'm all too good at them, mind you, but I spent a lots of time failing at XCOM as a young'un. If like me, you got a Switch and feel a yearning for some on-coach turn-based (non-)action, you don't have all that many choices. Wargroove is great, Disgaea 5 nicely tickles level-up receptors if one can stomach the style, and the Mario game is supposedly pretty OK. Other than ports, that's it. Having played Sacred Stones on my mobile a few years ago, and enjoying it, I felt that I could trust the brand.
And all in all, I feel like it was money well spent. The game clock showed 70 hours once I finished (although a few of those might have been Switch idling) one of four available routes. I don't think I'm going to play another one for at least a few months, but that will probably be another 50+ hours. I'm honestly surprised at how log it took me to beat the game - I constantly felt that the battles were on the easy-ish side, and that's despite the self-imposed challenge of "no character dies". And I was playing on the supposedly 'hard' difficulty! I guess that slacking around the Vatican Castle, and doing side-battles took some time. I can honestly say that I think I 100% the route - I maxed all supports between all characters in my roster, beat all sidequests and completed all side objectives (like catching escaping thieves, etc). I did not fully upgrade all statues, but I don't think it's doable in a single playthrough. The ending took its toll on me, but we'll get to that.
Ever wanted to abuse minors from a position of authority?
You're a kid of famous mercenary captain, one evening accidentally save future leaders of three ruling houses of the continent, and sexy pope makes you a professor at her Xavier Academy as a reward (...or so you think!). Some drama ensues, with its exact type depending on which of the four routes you take. And... that's pretty much it. As usual with nipponese stuff, story of the wider world takes a backseat to problems of each character, and less time is spent discussing current events, plans and changes being brought to the world, than the fact that one of the characters has a sweet tooth, and another flirts a lot. It's easy to get used to it, but it takes away from the drama a bit. It does have a pretty big saving grace, though.
See, the Blue Lions route I took focuses mostly on geopolitical matters. Of the others, (from what I read) GD campaign tells a bit more about history of the wider world, Church focuses on your character's backstory while also talking about mystic stuff, and Black Eagles is all about Edelgard and her plans to make Fódlan a better place. You don't get the full picture after playing just one route, but seeing how characters' motivations and behaviors differ depending on with whom you side, you might have problems putting it all together. And it gets worse! In a nice touch, pretty much any character telling you about stuff, especially historic, is a somewhat unreliable narrator. It seems like the writers actually had a few nice ideas about how to write a story that's satisfying to discover, but, being Japanese, their hearts and souls were quickly overwhelmed by color-coded lolis.
The translation is pretty good, I think. My weeb wife tends to jump at any chance to show off her Japanese skills by pointing out a discrepancy between what's said and written, but she kept silent for most of the time. From what I gathered, all discrepancies were signs of translators doing their jobs properly (translating exclamations, etc). English dubbing is, likewise, OK from what I hear.
The loli is 5000+ years old, I swear
Fire Emblem did not earn itself monicker of "Tactical waifu simulator" for no reason. I think there are about thirty-something playable characters; one of those is your character, you get another eight when you pick a house, and then you have the ability to shore up your ranks by recruiting teachers/ knights/ kids from other houses. Barring a few, reasonable exceptions (you won't be able to recruit certain superloyal characters) you can grab pretty much anyone you want. They will stay with you through the entire game, killing their childhood buddies in cold blood due to your excellent mentoring skills. There is an exception, though, where in one of the routes certain characters won't cooperate with you after time skip.
You are strongly expected to grab a few additional folks; you start with 8 kids + you, and most battles allow you to send out 10-12 characters. Sadly, in bigger battles you are not allowed to bring more than that; instead, you are supported by faceless mooks. The only way to help B-teamers keep up with levels while leveling support at the same time, is using the adiutant system, where, depending on your professor level, you can attach 1-3 characters to other characters, to provide various boni. This also counts as two characters on the same space for support gain, so it's easy to powerlevel a clique of relations by sending this small deathstar to solo monsters.
Having said that, the characters are... there. They're mostly "a stereotype with a but", which usually translates to "a stereotype, but with a heart of gold". Seriously, (almost) all your kids are lovable people, and all the teachers and knights are trying their bests. Amount of sugar bursting from the screen could give a lesser man diabetes. Almost everybody has some kind of sad story behind them, which you mostly unearth reading through their support conversations. I stopped caring pretty quickly, clicking through most support dialogues; this style of writing is not for me.
Following proud FE traditions, while fighting and participating in various activities, characters gather friendship points with each other, resulting in C/B/A ranks of support. These provide small boni when these buds stand next to each other on the map, while also deciding on endings for them. Main hero can pick who (s)he wants to end up with, the game decides for all the others, basing on who they gathered most support with. The endings are almost all happy (I distantly remember that this wasn't the case in Sacred Stones, but I might be wrong), with few peculiar ones having characters die if improperly paired, or disappear from the face of Fódlan. Still, these vignettes are nice to read and are a pleasant way to end the game.
Funnily enough, it is fairly easy to get characters to A-rank with many other characters, prompting numerous situation where even most stalwart folk will promise a bunch of girls/guys (or girls AND guys) that they'll be together forever, ending up with only one of those. I guess that either the post-war period was like Bold and Beautiful on steroids, or that Fódlan believes in free love.
For whatever reason, some characters turned out really... creepy? This might be understandable with the high-heeled pope, who, as we see in the intro, is likely somewhat troubled. Yet Mercedes, for example, also made me somewhat uncomfortable, by smiling widely while talking about how unfortunate it is that goddess smote the unbelievers in such a gruesome way. In the beginning, your father reminds you to keep paranoia on, so I assumed that it was done on purpose, but naah, I guess it's just cultural barrier and my wariness of bug-eyed anime portraits.
Purdiness is about OK
Not a specialist regarding audiovisuals, so I'm not going to yammer on too long.
Graphics distantly reminded me of Persona, and, uh, Tales of Bersomething I once saw. Faux-3D-anime style works with TH. Everything is clearly recognizable, with small icons feeding info into your brain whenever necessary. The only thing that made me wince was some of the cutscene backgrounds, which are horribly low-res, and weirdly distorted (that snowy forest, ouch).
Switch's specs are kind of shitty; I realized that when playing big system seller BotW and noticing frame drops. Despite TH's simple fairly graphics, Switch still occasionally stutters. This is not all that great of a problem for most of the time, but occasional loadings can take a bit longer than you'd like - I think this is most painful when, during exploration, you decide to cross the bridge from the main part of monastery into the cathedral. The gate acting as a loading screen can take up to ten seconds to rise.
Sound direction is pretty generic, all things considered. Supposedly there are a few interesting tracks in GD route, but I never heard them. I don't remember any of the pieces I heard, but they fit the atmosphere well, so that's enough for me.
Shanking guys, flirting with gurlz
Yeah, now we're getting to the important part.
The gameplay can be divided into two parts - battles and exploration. Battles are the more important part, but you are likely to spend a lot of time exploring the monastery. Prefer the game to be combat-centric? Don't worry - if you don't feel like walking around listening to your students' inane ramblings, eating ten dinners a day, and fishing for hours, you can mostly skip it. Seeing how time spent in monastery mostly serves as a way to boost supports it is doable, if somewhat inadvisable due to the fact that you'll miss out on quests that unlock additional shopkeepers. Still - you can decide to fight additional battles, or listen to a seminar. Hell, you can even automate your own lectures, but since the game creators assumed that you are going to partake in school life and like it, I'll assume that, like me, you are autistic hoarders and explorers which feel tingling of triumph when managing to boost your professor rank to another level with fishing, unlocking this sweet, additional action per week a bit earlier.
Ten points for Blue Lions
The monastery is not that huge, but it still takes a minute or two to cross it. Each month, numerous characters have something to tell you and occasionally ask you something; if you pick the right (most ass-kissing) answer, you gain support points. A bunch of rubbish ('lost items') appears on the ground after each story mission; if you deliver it to its owners, you gain support points. You can give other characters gifts, this will gain you support points. You can answer questions left at the question box; if you answer correctly you gain support points. You can also partake in certain activities with your students (dining, tea-drinking, singing), which will gain you support points.
Here is the thing: I felt that things you do during exploration don't really have all that much impact on the meat of the game, combat. Sure, you can gain support points, but you can also gain lots of them while in combat. Buttering someone up can make it easier to recruit him/her, but if you buff appropriate skills he/she will ask to join you anyways - and you can always 'rent' a unit from another house and stick it next to the main character for a few fights. Buffs you get from cooking are minimal, and the training you can ask for doesn't give you all that much. I guess that the most important thing you can do is boost your CHA a bit, as well as improve students' happiness so that you can tutor them harder during working weeks.
Now, I'm not saying that fooling around in cathedral has no impact on combat - it just delivers fairly little bang for the amount of time it tends to use up. I like clicking on stuff, so I wanted to talk to everybody even if only to barely pay attention to what they're saying - but if one were to dislike the Hogwarts part, it would be easy to reach the conclusion that too much of developer time went into developing ultimately unimportant part of the game, and that the purpose of TH seems to be A-ranking everybody with everybody, rather than tactical fights.
When you invite your students for a cup of tea and select the right answers, you can stare close-up at their boobs. This occasionally gets them flustered.
R&D: Recruitment and development
Recruitment is simple. Each character has a skill and an attribute they're interested in. If your skills and attributes are high enough, you can ask them to join your class - although sometimes they'll reach out to you on their own accord. You might want to recruit as many kids as possible, mostly because certain characters (as well as pairs of characters, oftentimes from different houses) give you access to 'Paralogues', their own subquests that usually give really good rewards. It also makes you feel like a less of an asshole for killing them off in the second part of the game. You can lower the recruitment requirements by increasing their support rank with the main character.
Moreover, at certain points of the game, you will be able to recruit knights of Seiros. This is generally a good idea - they tend to start with really good stats and advanced classes, and don't even lag behind in stat gains all that much.
Stat gains work the way they used to. Each time someone levels up, they get a chance to increase all of their attributes, with likelihood based on character and their class. The most screwed you can get is an improvement in two stats, but you can also get lucky and get increases across the board. And if you want to shore up your falcon knight's strength, you can always have them consume a few single-use items. Skills can be improved by use, or by training - although sometimes, before being able to train certain skills by use (riding, heavy armor), you need to train them a bit to certify into an appropriate class.
Each character has a few inventory spaces; these are usually filled by a single offhand item (staff/ magical ring/ shield), one or more breakable weapons and consumables. If at any point were you to pick an item without space in inventory, you can have friendly dwarves run over and carry one of your thingies to convoy. On the other hand, your main hero, as well as anyone standing right next to him, can, at any time take an item from convoy into their inventory. This makes training MC as a thief rather pointless, as you can pull a key off your arse at any moment (although the stat-ups are OK). I know that this system is traditional, but I don't like it all that much; I much prefer weight/grid-based inventories. I also wish you could put your character on a horse/ give them heavy armor without it being a separate class: it's so artificial.
Classes are gained through the certification system. When you are at an appropriate level, you can pay a seal to take a test to gain a new certification. The success chance on characters' skills, but also, I believe, on stats. If you pass, you can now change into the new class, if you failed - you just wasted a seal and need to wait. Results are pre-seeded for each character, so you can't really savescum here. This has the side-effect of having to train your healers/warlocks how to use a lance if you want to put your wizard on a horse. You also need to train your characters in heavy armor/ riding manually, before getting them into lowest-tier class that allows you to naturally train those skills.
Go to your brother / kill him with your gun / leave him lying in his uniform / dying in the sun
There are three kinds of battles - story, paralogue, and random. You usually get a single story battle at the end of the month. Paralogue battles are unlocked depending on your level and characters you have and can be done until the end of the current part (pre- and post- time skip). Finally, random battles can be repeated ad nauseum. At the beginning, you can do two battles per weekend, three in the second part (or a single story battle). You select n characters out of your roster, possibly attach adjutants and shuffle them on the map - and move out. You and your opponent then take turn moving all your units, with fights being exchanges of 1-4 blows per each side.
So, the main problem I have with the battles is that they all boil down to cutting down every single enemy. There are barely any "protect X" missions (I had, like, two?), or "get to Y in x turns" - instead it's all "rout all enemies" and "kill enemy commander". And seeing how much XP you get per takedown, you generally want to cut down as many opponents as possible regardless. TH could use a bit more variety in this regard.
The game was surprisingly easy. I played the hard mode, with classic death rules. I think I only restarted a map once when I grabbed a team completely unsuitable for what was awaiting me. Divine pulse mechanic and markers help a lot. Divine pulse basically lets you move time back to any point in the past - so it works kind of like a save mechanic. The only thing limiting it is that you have limited charges (I think it's 5 at the beginning, but you can gain more - I had 12 at the end). Sure, this can save you some hair loss, when at the end of a mission you park your healer a square too far and get his ass meteorited, but also encourages reckless play that relies on crits and dodges. Markers, on the other hand, are lines that explain who is going to attack whom. AI's plans can occasionally change, for example when the enemy discovers that he no longer can reach his target, but usually are one hundred percent trustworthy. It saves you arduous square counting, but I remember always having a pretty good idea about who's going to attack whom in Sacred Stones after thinking for a while. It's one more thing that lets you reduce your brain usage while playing.
For the entire first part, I played all the missions with lowest-level characters in my roster and never had any issues. Then, at the beginning of the second part, I picked a difficult paralogue I was somewhat underlevelled for. This made me trim the A team down to 12 characters, which then were taken to all missions. I ended up with levels 45-47 for this group, and ~30 for the noncombatants.
Mobility is king, and long-ranged spells are a huge crutch. The only classes you might not want to put on a (possibly flying) horse are your main hero, your lord, and healers. The most important thing you get as a rider is canto - ability to move after an attack. This allows your pegasi to fly over a wall, chuck a spear or two, and safely retreat beyond enemy's range. The long-ranged spells, on the other hand, are powerful enough to kill a unit per cast, and can get your ass out of hot water if you misplay, or take down enemy catapult from beyond its range.
So, you have a single main mission per month (which oftentimes have additional tasks baked in), a paralogue or two per month (which, due to level requirements, can be pretty tough, and always have something going on for them), and random missions. Random missions place you on one of the maps you already played on, sprinkle a few groups of opponents (or monsters), and point you at them. Seeing how battles are the most effective method of gaining XP/ support/ items, you will want to play a lot of them, but seeing how - especially in later parts of the game - there is little else to do, you will fight on the same maps against the same opponents over and over again. In the final stretch, I've been doing about six almost identical combat scenarios per month and stopped when I realized that this seriously hurts my enjoyment of the game.
What's new in Three Houses? Monsters and battalions. Monsters are huge opponents with multiple life bars and armor. Hit them hard enough, and a square of armor breaks, making them more vulnerable and preventing them from counterattacking during the next attack. Break them all, and you get some special material used for repairing weapons, and the monster is stunned during their turn. If you hit them with a gambit, they focus their attention on the initializer, which allows you to keep them away from squishier combatants.
Unlike combat arts, which are standard "damage your weapon more -> deal more damage" attacks, gambits use battalions. Each character can have a battalion assigned. This not only alters their stats, but also allows for gambit actions - non-counterable attacks which can do as little as damage a single opponent, but also pull/push them, grant you dudes a powerup, fire a huge AoE fireball or grant someone another turn. They're fun and mix things up a bit.
Weapons still break. They can be repaired or reforged at a blacksmith - repairing maxes their endurance while reforging turns it into a weapon of a higher tier. Reforging is the better deal of the two. Blacksmith uses money and ore; you can buy some basics at shops, but you'll mostly earn it by completing random missions and, for whatever reason, stunning monsters. Stunning monsters is important, as they are the only source of the superore used to repair your Hero Relics, elite weapons best used by nobles with appropriate crests. Funnily enough, if you play on-line, purple and golden fields appear in places battles were fought/ other players' characters died. The golden fields ocasionaly fix your weapons, thus allowing you to cheese this mechanic by using them to fix damaged relics.
At first, I was surprised that the rock/paper/scissors mechanics of sword/lance/ax disappeared, but they're still kind of here. At certain weapon skill levels, you get equippable abilities that give you +20 hit/avo when fighting an enemy who uses x weapon when you use y weapon. It's pretty big; would be bigger if you weren't so much more powerful than your opponents.
So yeah, until the endgame hit, I was having fun. The mechanics eventually wear their welcome, especially when you beat up the same team of elite bandits and thieves over and over again. You won't find too much of a challenge here - the last mission was not banal, but turned much easier when warped Dmitri shove a javelin up a named enemy's ass, causing a bunch of units to retreat for whatever reason. A new, higher difficulty level was promised, although I'm afraid that all it'll do will be boosting opponents' stats and little else. A bunch of other DLCs were promised as well, so maybe in a year or two I'll try out another route in NG+
Play it once again
...which exists! Unfortunately, all it does is allow you to spend the renown you earned in the first game to improve your relations with students, boost stats, and change clothes. Still, a playthrough where you recruit absolutely everybody might be fun!
It's OK
I might complain a bit, but all in all Three Houses was fun. A bit too much waifuism, not enough tactics, but it's still a good AA game. If you are reading through this thread, and have a Switch, you are likely to buy it anyways. Perhaps you'll have more fun than me, by virtue of giving up the grind for getting through the game at a somewhat livelier pace.
Honorable mention goes to those vignettes that appear in-between chapters, especially those from pre-timeskip period. I don't know, I enjoyed those a lot, the pictures were purdy, and the poetic summaries of Fódlan's day-to-day life were a touch of spice the game needed.
I rate it pretty OK. Admittedly I rate, like 90% of stuff pretty OK due to my high levels of optimism.
PS 1. There are a few things that'll help you with the enjoyment of this game.
- Don't advance your healers into holy knights, go bishop -> gremoire. They're not going to use weapons anyway, a horse doesn't improve their defence all that much, Physic lets you not worry about their mobility anyways, and having twice as many fortifies would prevent me from divine pulsing twice in the last mission.
- Pretty early an arc regarding kidnapping happens. You then have to explore the monastery for a while and look for clues. Obviously, it boils down to a conversation or two, after which a glowing spot appears. If you interact with it, next story mission will begin - don't do this, as this will skip you to the ond of the month, losing you a sunday or three. Just finish the day and wait.
- Fishing doesn't cost you actions, can be used to boost your professor rank, and earn huge amounts of money with golden/platinium fishes. Buy bait whenever available, but don't use it unless you lack < 500 points 'til the next professor level. Sooner or later, there'll be a "lots of fish" weekend. During it you usually catch 3-5 fishes per bait, which makes XP gain massively faster.
- Lysithea is a beast. Petra pretty much one-turned most of enemy commanders with her massive crit chance. Mercedes is likely the best healer in the entire game. Ingrid can solo entire battalions of mages as a falcon rider. Dorothea is a pretty good all-rounder wizard, quickly gaining her range 3 spell.
PS 2. Special rewards:
Most likely to choke you in your sleep, while repeating how much she loves it when you stomp on her
Most likely to be AN ABSOLUTE UNIT
Also, Obersturmführer Reich: