Topic: Fire Emblem: Three Houses

Anyone try the Friends Travelers feature? You can enable it in the options next to Fallen Spirits. The guy you talk to in order to access the feature is a direct left coming out of the Training Grounds. He has a little circle symbol with two arrows rotating within it. You can send a character out with a weapon to sell from your inventory, and you can hide them within the monastery, anywhere you can reach within a one minute time frame.

Then other travelers from other peoples games will visit you right next to that guy, and you can buy the items they said for less than market price. I just got Arcane Crystal for 450G. And then I excepted the challenge to find where they had their traveler within a minute, and I found them. At 30 seconds a colored radius shows on the map, narrowing the search, and it slowly shrinks as it counts down to zero.

You can also hire them as adjutants, if you wish.

This is a neat little feature that I wasn’t even aware of.

@Heavyarms55
Try your TV settings? Sometimes Cinema, Theater, Gaming, etc can be selected which rebalance the audio. I keep mine on Gaming for Switch, to minimize input latency and disable all audio-visual post-processing on the signal.

@JaxonH hmm good idea, I'll do that.

Finally bought Three Houses! I'll say how I feel about the gameplay later on, but for now I love the characters

Wondering if anyone has any tips here. I joined the Blue Lions and I'm trying to figure out what to do with Sylvain. He seems to be keen on becoming a cavalry knight but i dont really want that for him. I was hoping to maybe make him into a good brawler but that just doesn't seem to be where his talents lie. Has anyone come up with any good/interesting builds for this character? Or any other characters for that matter. I'm interested in knowing what people are doing with this surprisingly open system.

@EOTW You can make him into anything you really want, it just may not be super efficient with your lecture points to sink them into an area of weakness. Using your renown on a statue that will help the skills you want to level is always helpful though. I am on my 2nd playthrough now, and with GD I have found I am super light on magic based characters (minus my healer) so I made a dark knight and a holy knight with my two paladins to make up the difference.

@EOTW
I chose Black Eagles, but here’s my advice.

If you want to make a character a certain class, just go for it. The only thing preventing you from doing so is a negative growth in one of the required skills (and even then it’s possible, it’s just going to be more of a pain in the butt).

The game is meant to be played how you want to play it. My advice is to plan out what master classes you want each of your characters to strive toward, and map out the intermediate classes they’ll progress through on the way. The sooner you figure out what your goal is the sooner you can start sinking points into the right skills. The last thing you want is to play half the game, change your mind, then have to start building a skill from scratch

Anyone else just a little bit bummed by how little Amiibo do in this game? If it were me, I'd have made them spawn in "legendary heroes from mythology" who you or your students can train with. It's not a big deal but I think this just adds fuel to my theory that Nintendo is quietly moving away from Amiibo. Which I think is kind of a shame. I have a positively stupid amount of them and would likely still buy more as more characters I liked got released. And no Byleth Amiibo? No cross over Easter eggs from other series? How cool would it have been to get a "totally not the master sword" from a Link Amiibo or learn a Mario themed fire ball (or just the sound effect for giggles). A Xenoblade themed weapon or possibly even Avatar clothing items based on other series.

Don't get me wrong, I'm not even complaining. I love this game, already put 30 hours into it and will happily probably end up putting like 200+ since there is Apparently a secret 4th route? What and how?!. And I am only on like chapter 7. It's just that I feel like this is another missed opportunity. For those who always say Amiibo unlocks are unfair to people who don't/can't afford to buy Amiibo I just say - they don't have to be exclusive to Amiibo, it's a simple matter to have these features unlockable in another manner.

@Heavyarms55
this just adds fuel to my theory that Nintendo is quietly moving away from Amiibo

Agreed. They didn’t even release Amiibo for the game. They could have done the 3 house leaders and we would have lapped it up and begged for more, yet they chose not to. Heck, they could’ve released every single student in the game and people would’ve eaten it up. Same for Marvel Ultimate Alliance 3. Can you imagine how many they would sell if they released Amiibo for each character?

I think they are pretty much done after the Smash Amiibo run their course. Fewer and fewer Amiibo released (apart from Smash which is obligatory to finish the series), and less and less functionality in games. I’m just glad they included support at all, at this point.

I'm doing Hilda's paralogue now and, I gotta say, this is the tough-as-nails difficulty I was missing. I think the paralogue maps really help capture that old school FE feel. I've been struggling with the map all night.

@JaxonH OMG yeah, I think all of the students might have been a bit much but Byleth and the house leaders absolutely! (though some die hard fans would certain have bought many and I know I would have) And the Marvel characters???? Have you ever seen a comic book convention, even on TV? Preorders would have sold out in like 12 minutes.

Nintendo moving away from Amiibo makes me wonder if perhaps they were not making much, or perhaps really any money on them. I always thought they were way higher quality figures than almost anything else on the market for the price. Certainly blow junk like Funko/Pop figures out of the water!

@Heavyarms55
Amiibo are great. I own every single Amiibo ever made, even the JP exclusives like Qbby (sells for $200 open box) and the Monster Hunter Stories Amiibo. I’m glad I got them because if they’re done making them they’re probably going to go up in value over time. Some of them, anyways.

I would have loved to get Marvel Amiibo. Oh my gosh, they would have made so much cash they’d have to weigh it at a truck stop. And it’s a shame, an utter shame, that we didn’t get Three Houses Amiibo. Can surely count on Figma though, and some nice 1/7 scale statues.

@Ralizah
Do you have to be GD house to get her paralog? I can’t even give her gifts or recruit. I’m guessing she’s like Hubert and Dedue then. The “right hand man” of the house leader? And ya, The game has noticeably ramped up in difficulty for the second half. And now with 16 people I’m falling behind in levels, to the point I decided to actually grind 2 paralogs to catch up.

It’s still easier than say, Awakening was. But not so easy it loses your interest. It really comes down to what level you’re at, too. I found it I just needed to drop my levels down so that I’m always exactly the right level or 1-2 below at worst. Then it’s a nice, solid engaging challenge without being too stressful. I imagine HARD mode would be perfect then, if you’re not over-leveled.

Oh, new trailer and it’s amazing

edit
Also, is it just me, or is it fair to say Three Houses has healed the divide in the fanbase? Sure, there’s still a small group of never-happies review-bombing the game, but even then they’re much smaller in number compared to Fates, and I haven’t seen ANYONE posting about disliking Three Houses. Seems everyone agrees it’s a masterpiece.

Has this game singlehandedly healed the divide?

edit #2
And who doesn’t love the Gatekeeper 😄 He’s voiced by the same actor who voiced Alm in Shadows of Valentia

@JaxonH Yeah I have an awesome Cordelia sitting on my shelf right now. I'm sure we'll get some great collectibles for Three Houses.

@JaxonH Nah, she's a lazy git who keeps begging me to not put her onto the field and tricks the male members of my house into doing all of her chores. I'm surprised to hear you can't even engage with her, though.

That paralogue was a good deal harder than anything in Awakening. Actually reminded me of my Fates: Conquest hard/classic playthrough, if I'm being honest. I had to restart the game five or six times to figure out the best approach to completing the battle. It probably helped that I was right at the minimum recommended level for the mission (and that I'm playing on the harder difficulty, of course). There were a number of factors I had to consider. For one thing, my army was split up between two ends of the map. My main force had to defend a reasonably large location from enemies while simultaneously rushing out to help a number of NPCs who were being attacked by beasts, which meant I had to split my forces up further and carefully consider where everybody went. There were so many failure conditions that started to feel more like an elaborate puzzle.

Anyway, I'm going to see if I can recruit Bernadetta in this last month or two before the time skip, but I'm pretty happy with how I've padded out my ranks. So far, I've recruited Sylvain, Dorothea, Petra, Mercedes, Ingrid, and, of course, the game has you take on Flayn (who is now my dancer).

How far into the game were you before you entered the second half? I'm over 40 hours in and still have over a month before the year is up. This is a MUCH longer FE game than any of the other ones I've played.

@Ralizah
That sounds amazing.

Over 40 hours on my save file. Probably around the same as you, I imagine. Also, Bernie is amazing, but I would really recommend not recruiting her, as much of her charm comes from seeing her character develop over the course of the year, part of which is through support conversations but not all of it. She opens up quite a bit after the time skip, and I worry that you’ll miss out on a lot of the flavor that comes from getting to know her initial personality.

I made it a point to not recruit anyone from other houses (except one- Raphael, as I needed a good Fortress Knight and had none), because I didn’t want to spoil characters for future runs. I plan to do a final run when all the DLC is out with the new difficulties early next year, so Golden Deer is saved for then. And Blue Lions is next, on Hard Mode, after I finish both Black Eagles routes.

The other side of that coin is there are unique support conversations with students between different houses, and that is something you will gain by recruiting as many characters as possible. So I guess it’s give-and-take, really.

@Heavyarms55
I’ve got the same Cordelia statue 👊

And the Tharja statue, and the Camilla statue. And a bunch of Nenderoids and Figmas. The Corrin and Lucina Figmas, and the Sheeva, Marth and Elise Nenderoids. When I got into this series I just couldn’t get enough. But now I’m worried they might release a whole bunch more with the popularity of the series, and I’m really not interested in buying anymore Figmas or Nenderoids. I have enough figures from Amiibo. Would prefer just to get the one statue that releases every couple years for FE and that’s it.

Finished my Blue Lions run. Overall I def enjoyed it, albeit near the ending parts were beginning to drag.

Byleth as a character I also feel is a bit of a missed opportunity. They’re very plain (purposely made that way) but seeing them alongside all these far more complex characters is saddening and easily noticeable. There is no spark when they interact with others they’re just Byleth.

@JaxonH Gosh dang man! You got me hella beat! Sounds like an awesome collection!

@Heavyarms55
Well, it took a while, and was built up over several years. All the FE games in sealed condition from FE7 to FETH is probably my most prized piece of the FE collection. But honestly it's all getting to be a bit much now. When I can no longer fit everything on a single shelf, I have too much stuff. I like having the sealed games and amiibo and statues, and the steelbooks and artbooks and special editions, but even that is bordering too much.

@JaxonH Art books are cool but I rarely actually buy them because you really can't display them well. So much art in them is really cool but... how does one display them? I end up leaving them on a shelf with other items in front of them...

Too much is relative. It all comes down to how much space you yourself have and are willing to devote to collecting. I've got figures and models and tapestries all over my apartment.

@Heavyarms55
I have a dedicated space on my big display shelf for art books and strategy guides, but the softcover NA exclusive Awakening Artbook with the EU exclusive hardcover version of the Awakening artbook on the right to balance, and Fates hardcover in the middle.

And the Three Houses art book on the shelf above. And the purchased Awakening Knights of Iris just isnt able to be displayed because it's too big. Maybe one day if I convert a separate display room.

So ya, smaller ones that come in special editions can be, but not so much the big ones (I made room for FETH artbook though, it looks so good).

I'll share an updated pic later on the artbook layout to show you what I mean. But ya, in general the big ones are best kept on a bookshelf.