Topic: Fire Emblem: Three Houses

Reviews are coming in. Lots of 9/10s. Destructoid, GameInformer and IGN all gave it a 9.5.

The game seems to be every bit as good as we hoped. Into the Delorian- we need to hit 88 mph asap! I dont think tomorrow will ever come otherwise...

@redd214
Alot of people started playing Fire Emblem at a young age. I think kids have a tendancy to surprise with how quickly they pick up on things.

@Tsurii thanks for the answer!

Based on what I’ve seen this game seems to be comparable to Echoes, Awakening and Birthright in terms of Normal Difficulty, so I’m def going Hard on my playthrough

@redd214 He should be fine. 10 isn't that young in terms of gaming complexity. If he was 6 or something I'd say it'd be too much and he'd probably be bored of all the dialogue this game has compared to FE normally. Thing is, though, because of the permadeath, playing a bit sloppily is more punishing in this game than, say, Pokemon (oh no I've fainted and just have to walk back from the Pokecentre again. Big deal!) That said, you can play on Casual Mode and it turns off permadeath so I'd recommend that.

@Matroska thanks for you response. Not to worried about dialog, the kid reads a 400 page book in a week! Lots of writing shouldn't be an issue.

Happy Console Gamer Review
“I’m gonna say something crazy... 9/10 and one of my GOTY. This game is such a pleasure”

Can you feel the hype flowing through your veins yet? If only there were a way to just mainline it 😉

Paranoid/cranky post below... feel free to skip.

HCG seems like a good guy. I enjoy his stuff. But he is a very "easy grader." I'm not accusing him of being dishonest or anything, I think he genuinely loves all the games he says he loves. I'm just not willing to accept that since he (and reviewers like him) say it's a great game that it will be a great game.

I think this is a bit of a problem in the hobby ... we've become overly reliant on these release-day reviews. Companies aren't stupid; they know who the easy graders are. And those are the people they seek out to give review copies to. By the time more discriminating reviewers buy/play/review the game, the "consensus" is already set.

Now we are talking about FE here, and it's very likely the big N made sure the game was good before letting it go. But being the paranoid/cranky guy that I am, I'm going to wait until you guys have tried it out before declaring it great.

@embison I agree generally, though I'd say the general consensus is "reviews are worthless" and "they're all shills", both of which are often though not always true, so I don't think it's like we're all blindly following reviews.

Anyway, in this case at least, the positive reviews are right. I've been playing 3H for three days now and it really is a breath of fresh air and a true revitalisation of FE. You're in for a treat when you get it.

Nah, Happy Console Gamer is legit. He has good taste in games, and a wide scope as well. When he raves about a game, I know it’s on point. Recent example being Dragon Quest Builders 2, which ended up being an absolute surprise of a delightful game I wasn’t expecting. And he called it. He was raving about how much he and his wife enjoyed that game.

Even if you think somebody maybe only chooses to do reviews on games they really like (which is very possible, which may make it seem like they are raving about most games, when in actuality they’re just raving about the ones they liked enough to rave about), you can still separate the wheat from the chaff by how excited they are after playing a game.

I, for example, play a LOOOT of games. Like, a LOT. As a result, I end up playing an absolute metric ton of great games. But the ones that are really good, I never shut up about and confidently tell anyone who will listen how great it is. All the “good games in 7/8 range” I tend to say are good, but aren’t nearly as enthusiastic about. I can tell when a game is good, and when a game is goooood, just by how enthusiastic someone is about it. Like, I’m playing Raiden V and Oninaki, and both are good games. I like both. But I’m not hooting and hollering about them because they are more of the “7/8 range” type of games. But DQ Builders 2, I’ve been singing that game’s praises since I first popped in the cartridge. It’s just excellent. Pretty much every review I’ve seen of Fire Emblem people were absolutely ecstatic about how great it is.

Plus, it’s just nice seeing how much people are enjoying it 😁 We already knew the game was good beforehand.

@JaxonH He acts like it's a really weird thing to call Fire Emblem: Three Houses one of the best games he's played during the year. I mean... it's a big, storied, first-party Nintendo franchise, not some random indie title that snuck up on everyone.

@Ralizah
Ya, it's been virtually unanimous. Plus, more than anything I trust my own eyes and the pedigree of the series to date. The game looks super good in gameplay trailers, and the series has, even in its "darkest days", still provided an incredible game. Fire Emblem always delivers. Even Fates, despite its lame characters and story, still ended up being a really great game overall. And this one looks to surpass even Awakening.

Individual opinions on where it falls in the spectrum will certainly vary, but the important thing is, almost everyone agrees it's an excellent video game.

Decided with Hard/Classic. I'm excited...aaand a little scared.

I'm not getting any more hyped by the great reviews.... Just because I was already at max hype

I've never been overly good at Strategy RPGs, but this seems unique with the training your students element. Is this game likely to be difficult? (As a guideline, I find some fairly early Mario + Rabbids levels a challenge.)

It will be super easy if you play it on normal casual along with the time wheel that rewind moves.

I keep reading that you can lower difficulty any time, but not raise it. But the person here who tried it said that’s not true.

I agree with the lower quality background images, but it’s not that big of a deal to me. I played this series on 3DS, and this feels like a huge step up in comparison. Everything else looks respectable enough.

Btw, just from the beginning portion I’m blown away by how much higher quality this game is than the previous entries. The music, the cut scenes, the emotional animations for models during dialog that would have been static in previous games... it just feels so much higher budget. Fire Emblem is moving on up. It may not yet have reached perfection but... it’s definitely improving.

So, I'm still in the introductory phase of the game, but I have to say, I REALLY love the increase in scope here. All of the lines being voices. All the unique characters. The big 3D environments your character can run around. Quests. etc. This feels like a very big, full game.

Regarding visuals, I'll say this: when I started playing it on the TV, I wasn't particularly taken either way. It looks OK on a big set, but that's it. The bigger problem was that I had a difficult time reading the small text from my couch.

When I 'switched' to handheld mode, though... OH MY GOSH! The image quality is very sharp in handheld mode, and the game looks really, really good. I'm always afraid of games looking substantially worse undocked, but this is one case where that reduction in screen size makes everything pop. This is such a massively better looking game than any previous Emblem, but especially any previous portable Emblem.

I thought, like Mario Odyssey, this would would be a primarily docked game for me, but I'm probably going full handheld mode on this. It just looks and feels better.

Not sure how I feel about the changes to the combat yet (I actually liked the weapon triangle), but we'll see what happens. I'm eager to try out one of the battles in handheld mode now.

Dimitri seems like a total cupcake right now. LOL. Curious to see what changes him and makes him so bloodthirsty.

Really impressed so far.

Ya, I LOVE. THIS. FREAKING. GAME. It’s just so good! I’ve got a grin from ear to ear right now as I’m playing 😁

Everything just looks and feels high quality. I actually really like how good it looks on the TV compared to the handheld though. Not to say it looks bad on handheld because it absolutely doesn’t. It looks great and provides a much better reference for a direct comparison to how far we’ve come from the 3DS era. But on the TV everything is just so gorgeous, and maybe it’s my new m-cable, but everything is so sharp without jaggies, something I’ve noticed on every game I’ve played since getting the cable. It’s hard to say what the game would look like without it, but either way, if I’m having to scrounge the screen looking for aliasing, then there really isn’t a problem, be it due to the cable or not.

I’m in love ❤️ ❤️ ❤️

Fire Emblem Three Houses Seasons of Warfare back in stock on BestBuy! GCU discount while you can (if you can)

https://www.bestbuy.com/site/fire-emblem-three-houses-seasons...

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Aaaand it's gone.

You know what I really like about this game? The attention to details. For example, the link attacks. In games past you just got buff because someone was next to you, and they didn’t explain or give a reason why. It was just a gameplay mechanic. But in Three Houses, they say that when you have your allies near you it intimidates your enemy and thus they are easier to hit (justifying hit rate and evasion buffs/debuffs). Another example is getting gold. In past games you would just get a message saying you got a certain amount of money. But in Three Houses, it says you received it from the Church of Seiros as funding for this month’s activities. They tell you who gave you the money, and why they gave it to you. It’s that element of realism that’s really making this game stand out to me. Similar to how DKC never has platforms floating on their own. They are either hanging from vines or attached to something in the background or whatever, but it’s always done in a realistic fashion as opposed to a game like Mario that just plops platforms wherever. It adds an element of realism. I love that.

It definitely looks better than previous games in terms of graphics, but in terms of art style it’s up to you. I’d say Echoes and Awakening had a more visually appealing art style for its portraits. While the game is not pretty it’s passable enough that I don’t completely hate seeing the character models all the time, albeit the usual stiffness and reused animations are still there, expected from FE games.