Topic: Fire Emblem: Three Houses

Damn this story really starts to get good around the timeskip part.

This game is insanely long though!

@Dezzy You think so? I suppose if you intend to do all 4 routes and the side story it's very long. But only one route isn't anything unusual - then again, I favor RPGs and JRPGs so our opinion on what makes a long game might be different. lol

@Heavyarms55

I looked it up on howlongtobeat.com and Three Houses is the longest FE game by quite a way. About 50 hours to finish a standard playthrough.
Most of the other games average around 35 hours.

It probably depends on how you play quite a lot though. If you choose to do a lot of the optional side-battles, it probably takes longer than if you do more exploring the monastery and doing the social stuff. I'm very much in that first camp. I do as many battles as possible, and ignore a lot of the social stuff.

@Dezzy The social "sims" stuff is what makes this a long game. I found trying to do all 4 paths got very repetitive.

@komodo182

I find that part is a lot quicker. But that maybe is just because I don't enjoy it as much, so I often speed-read through a lot of interactions.

@Dezzy You think 50 hours is long? Wow, for me that's below average for most games I play. I've got over 150 hours in FE3H so far. I played the Edelgard route first, and then started Golden Deer, stopped and waited for the DLC, then played the DLC and now I'm resuming the Golden Deer route. I still have Blue Lions and the Black Eagles Church route to play.

Most games I play tend to be RPGs or JRPGs or long running games like Cities Skylines, Civ 6 or Pokemon. 50+ hours is easily the norm for me.

@Heavyarms55

Even most RPGs are probably less than 50 hours for the standard playthrough. Only a few have stories longer than that. Dragon Quest, Xenoblade, to name a few.

Most Final Fantasy games for example, are shorter than 50 hours for the standard campaign. Of course they often have a lot of side-content so you can extend that time if you're a completionist!

It was something of a slog getting though part 1 again, I'll admit, but as soon as I got to the end of part one and started part 2 on my Golden Deer run, I feel like I've been massively pulled back into the game. Last night I stayed up later than normal playing it, and woke up and played it in the morning again before work.

On another note, I have to say, WOW, Marianne and Hilda got real cute post time skip.

Also, fighting against Edelgard is still so hard... Still my favorite character and I really wish there was a route where Edelgard and Claude teamed up to fight against Rhea and the Church, allied with Dimitri who I still really don't care for.

So my opinion of this game has improved the more I've played. Whilst I still think there a few too many boring or ugly maps, pretty much everything else about the game does improve the more you play.

One thing that I really liked that I hadn't anticipated, is how the bigger maps combined with all the character battalions combines to create the real feeling of an epic battle, that you never really got in most of the older games, where everything feels like a small skirmish.

The only flaw with this is the fact that it then zooms back out to the standard individual characters on a grid view, which kinda breaks that feeling. I know they have the zoomed-in view, but that's just not as easy to strategise from so I don't tend to use it.

So my Golden Deer run is a new game plus, thus I recruited almost every character. And I'm pretty obsessive about support conversations. As soon as I got into part two I had near 2 hours of nothing but support conversations waiting for me as a result. XD There was no need to push so many like I did.

Also the DLC characters: Constance, Yuri, Hapi and Balthus - their part two designs are really cool! Well, all but Balthus. Constance and Hapi especially like! Yuri kinda looks like a clown, but I think it suits him.

@Dezzy As much as I really do love this game, I absolutely agree that many of the maps are dull and there are too few.

For anyone who's played the Black Eagles route, can anyone answer me this question?

Is the branch triggered by a dialogue choice OR something else, like a particular support level?

I played through the Blue Lion's route, and I intended to finish with the branched Black Eagles route, so I was hoping to play the Black Eagle's default route, then Golden Deer beforehand.

@Knighty_IX Thanks.

Question for everyone here. Do you have to do all three routes? Cause I'm thinking of doing one route( don't know which one to pick) and moving on.

I've beaten the Crimson Flower route, but I was having real trouble on the final encounter with Cyril sticking to the boss like a fly. He just didn't want to initiate against Edelgard when I put her in range, so I ended up spareing him. I was so apprehensive about sending anyone in, in case he decided to fly in and ORKO any one of my units, but I was able to win the day with a Death Knight with his mastery skill 'Counterattack' which meant I could safely strike back whenever the boss attacked him.
It got a bit hairy when Wrath activated, but fortunately, it only triggers on 'enemy' phase (or when I attack them), and so Bernadetta was able to claim another scalp.

I'm curious as to under what circumstances Cyril aggros on you.

@MsJubilee

Late reply, but there are four routes. I've played one other route - Blue Lions and now, Black Eagles, but it wouldn't seem complete unless I do the other two routes - especially Golden Deer. I also wouldn't mind playing all routes on the hardest difficulty, but for now, I'd rather take a break from it.

If you're not too bothered about min/maxing your squad, and just want to experience the story, there are a number of things you can do to speed up a playthrough.
Letting the AI teach your students for you, skipping exploration, fighting less battles (in my last playthrough, I picked battles over seminars as I was mainly concerned with raising class ranks than weapon ranks), and disabling battle animations are some examples.

I've clocked 190 hours so far, but I'll admit a lot of that was spent in menus and exploring the monastery min/maxing my units.

@MsJubilee

I only did one route and then sold the game on ebay. Felt like I'd got enough out of it with just one, and there would be too much repetition if I redid it with the other houses.

@edhe Wow, four routes. I love this game to death, but I'm not playing it three more(maybe another route in the future) times. By the end of it, I'm going to hate it.

@Dezzy I might do one route and be done with it. Or I might do another in the future. This game isn't going anywhere.

If you wanna do more than one route, just pace yourself. If you finish your first route and launch right into a second, most people are gonna feel some burnout unless you're a super hardcore fan. I finished my first route, took a few months to play some other and very different games, and now I'm back into my second route and loving it.

Yeah, I did my 1st route (Golden Deer) in November-December and then my 2nd route (Blue Lions) after finishing the Cindered Shadows side story in February. I'll probably do my 3rd route during the summer if Nintendo's lineup for the 2nd half of the year is still barren in a few months.

Yea. The rest of 2020 on Switch is looking pretty barren for the types of games I like, so finishing my Blue Lions run will definitely happen soonish, then I'll probs do Golden Deer later in the summer. Perfect game for that kind of thing.

@MsJubilee

I can understand that - I'm not going to want to go back to it for a long time, but I'll admit the routes are too similar at points, which makes it easier to get fed up with it.

5 routes though, if you count the DLC one @Grumblevolcano mentioned.