I've long considered myself a fan of turn-based tactics. When done right, it tickles the section of my brain reserved for improving the efficiency of designs and making correct decisions. I love carefully managing the growth of my units and massaging them into unkillable machines of destruction. I've run cold-to-lukewarm of the Fire Emblem series in the past, enjoying titles such as The Sacred Stones and Path of Radiance, while liking entries such as Shadow Dragon and Fates far less. Turn-based tactics is a genre that's very easy to get drastically wrong, and Fire Emblem: Three Houses—like some of its predecessors—commits several of these cardinal sins, in addition to looking and performing at a level I consider to be sub par.
Three Houses' depth is readily apparent in how it presents you with its three titular houses from which to choose. Each features a set of characters given significant depth that you'll grow to form opinions about. These initially felt relatively shallow, but as you continue your support conversations with them, you begin to realize they've each got their quirks, their pains, and their strengths. Learning about the characters as I progressed was one of my favorite things to do, and continued to fuel my desire to dig through the game's undoubtedly Persona-inspired social sim mechanics.
Some of the new stuff here is a welcome addition to the classic Persona formula. Having a home-base to freely roam in the third person while seeing your units live their lives is a nice touch. Unfortunately, the game leans a bit too hard on fetch-questing to fill out their activities when you're at the monastery. I became unfortunately aware of the grind when, after completing a battle, I'd often stop playing the game rather than having to grind through a bunch of lost items—which I'd imagine are fun little side activities to do when you know all of the characters very well, but become a tedious grind of asking every single character on the map if a lost item is theirs when you're just starting out. The system doesn't really work, and the game should have leaned more heavily on its character interaction than simply having you deliver items to its characters as a way to pass the time.
Being able to increase your character's skills in the classroom while at the monastery is a welcome change to simply grinding out battles, and having your Support levels increased by spending time with these characters is excellent. I, for one, welcome the Personafication of Fire Emblem. Nearly all of the social systems added to this game work very well, and I found the writing for these characters to be suspiciously good. I've criticized the writing in Fire Emblem games very strongly in the past, and although the plot of this game features some of the same silliness as previous games, I found the characters to be markedly better written than those in any other Fire Emblem game I had played before.
Unfortunately, the game's actual tactical play features some pretty deadly warts.
Class parity and good balance is absolutely essential to crafting a class-based turn-based tactics game. And unfortunately for Fire Emblem: Three Houses, its class system suffers from a striking lack of balance.
After about a dozen hours of planning out potential class builds, I realized that skilling in swords is relatively worthless considering there is only one Master-level class which uses swords, and it also requires the character to have high skill in offensive magic. This is a big ask from physical-focused classes, and requires quite a bit of grinding. Additionally, the game features several strong pushes towards Lance- and Axe-focused physical characters, one of which being the ability Deathblow, which grants Brigands (an axe-based class) a whopping +6 Str whenever initiating combat. Class balance is imperative for a successful turn-based tactics game, and Three Houses unfortunately fails miserably at creating parity for its classes, making class builds a rote exercise in which you send all of your physically-focused characters down a nearly identical path.
The game also looks flat-out bad in most cases. I'm usually ready to grant some slack to Nintendo Switch games for running on relatively inferior hardware, but Three Houses looks even poorer than I was willing to expect. I long for the days when Fire Emblem featured charming, hand-drawn sprites, because the polygonal combat sequences have been nearly universally poor in every Fire Emblem game that has featured them. The characters in games like Awakening (which I actually liked) were famous for having no feet—something just as odd as it sounds. And the polygonal characters here, although obviously better than in the past, are still not all that well-done. The character portraits feature exceptionally good illustrations, which makes me wonder what could be if the entire game were done in such a style.
Further, it's not just the execution that's lacking, but the design. Several of the armor sets on these classes look the worst they've looked in several iterations. The Assassin—one of my favorite classes—has lost all of its coolness from older games, instead granted generic-looking fantasy armor. Similarly, the Knight classes have lost some of their thickness, making them look more generic as well. 'Generic' is a keyword, here—for some reason, the class designs of recent Fire Emblem games just don't feature the great art design which initially drew me to these games almost two decades ago. It hasn't been the same since the switch from sprites to polygons, and I wish the series would double back and go for a more classic look once again.
Additionally, the game tends to perform poorly on the Switch. When traversing the monastery (where you spend all of your downtime), the draw distance is relatively poor, and the framerate often tanks to levels below 30. Ditto during combat, during which battalions actions can tank the framerate as well.
These faults are damaging enough to a game of this sort when they all add up, but what finally broke me from the game is Three Houses' tendency to spring 'gotcha!' moments on the player in mid-battle. There were numerous moments in which I felt I was losing units to permadeath due to no fault of my own, but because the game sprung an event on me which was impossible to plan for, such as spawning multiple enemy units literally out of nowhere.
Playing through a combat encounter typically includes a lengthy period of pre-fight analysis, during which the player devises a strategy ahead of time, equips and places their units accordingly, and proceeds to attempt to execute said strategy. Sometimes it doesn't work, and you've got to alter it on the fly. At other times the player makes mistakes, which was fine—that's a part of the game, and often a source of enjoyment as you deal with new challenges on the fly. I personally enjoy living with my mistaken decisions when I enact a faulty strategy, or don't pay enough mind to a certain threat, or even when a sensible plot turn throws a monkey-wrench into the works. But Three Houses' propensity for springing enemy units out of thin air, directly ruining a carefully devised plan, is inexcusable and breaks the entire experience of playing a game like this.
I don't mind when there are doorways or staircases in the environment, clearly visible, from which reinforcements might arrive unexpectedly. The player is taught early that these need to be accounted for. I also don't mind dealing with fog, or forests, which might obscure enemy troops. The egregiousness of Three Houses' gaffes is that you will often send a thief-classes character to pick up boxes, or send only a unit or two on a flanking run, only to have the game drop multiple units literally out of thin air directly in their path, at a point from beyond which there is no return—these units will be ambushed and permanently killed. Now you've got a choice between continuing the game without this unit, or you've got to restart the entire encounter with knowledge of this mechanic in mind. And it's impossible to plan for these occurrences, since they can occur completely separated from any logical expectation.
This is a terrible design philosophy on a game which lives and dies on how it challenges the player's ability to plan. It leads the player to either closely following a guide to avoid such occurrences, or engaging in multiple instances of trial-and-error as they discover where the game will cheat in order to trip them up—it forces the player either to cheat, themselves, with a guide, or to expect to replay content for no engaging reason.
There's clearly some stuff to like with Fire Emblem: Three Houses, but it can't withstand the assault of such poor design decisions and awful visuals. Hopefully the next entry of this series can straighten some of this stuff out, because it's got real potential. But at the moment, that's all it is—potential. Play Persona instead.
⭐
Playtime: 32 hours
