Topic: Fire Emblem: Three Houses

In fe3h, how important or at least significant to the "whole experience" is walking around the school? I never made it past the time jump.... And trying to go back it is so show. In Cold Steel i don't mind because it's always new... But I'm 3h so much is redundant only to find those few new things each time. I probably spend double the time taking to everyone than playing the battles.... If i just fast travel for listed BB and quests... Am i missing much? And does that disappear after the time jump?

@NEStalgia
Well, you can build up support points amongst your team which can help during the battles, and some of the activities can give you useful items (the sparring tournaments come to mind). Building professor points through the activities results in various other benefits like being able to teach more. Has a subtle but expansive trickle-down effect. I usually don't explore the school more than once per month, though. I think most of the stuff there resets every month, if my memory is correct. The more you play you'll get a better sense of how to streamline your exploration process. Some things are definitely not worth it (my first playthrough I would make sure to talk to literally every person lol - no necessary).

You will go back to the school after the time jump, but it will be very different in certain ways. But it won't be gone, so don't worry about that.

@NEStalgia That is the reason I haven't done all the pathways yet. The school system was not for me.

@rallydefault @komodo182 Thanks!

So, yeah, it sounds like it's kind of important. I actually do like the idea of the school/social part in concept. I'm a Persona fan after all, I love TMS#FE, Cold Steel, etc. I think were FE falls more flat is, the environment is so much larger than most of the above, but so much is static from instance to instance. There's dozens of people to talk to but most of them don't contribute much new, the layout is pretty complex with the indoor and outdoor areas, so there's a lot of corners and hidey holes you have to check in on only to find nothing, etc. In those regards though, it shouldn't be different from Cold Steel 3. That's arguably a larger, more complex environment, and is also a school, and also has a large cast. But that becomes simpler in that all you have to do is look for people with quest bubbles to talk to, whereas FE has so many activities, from training, to quests, to solicitation to bonding etc. It feels like you do have to stop and talk to everyone in the same environment over and over. Overall it makes the world much more alive and the characters much more personal than just the paralogues, but the layout and large space probably should have had more map indicators and fast travel indicators so you can accelerate it once you know the land.

I'm a really slow FE player. And not a very good one. It usually takes me a long time to get through the battles (and a lot of retries - leave no one behind! ) But with the time consumed walking around means that despite quite a few hours put in last year means I never made it past preparing for the quest to go to Remire......I feel like that's still "the beginning of the game" and I was already 30+ hours into it and had put it down again!

Tbh I really wish the school was a more interesting place, the activates are fine, its just the school is a really drab place to be.

@NEStalgia It's just too repetitive for me. I did 3 playthroughs. Still have the yellow pathway and dlc.

Yea, I think the school itself is too big and lifeless. There are fairly large areas that really serve no purpose other than stationing some NPCs with flavor dialogue. They could have cut it back by like a third or quarter. And it just doesn't feel alive. If they would have given random pathing to the generic NPCs even that would have gone a long way to making it more engrossing. And more special events like that dancing competition and holidays would have been really cool.

I understand that at the end of the day it's primarily a strategy rpg, so the battle systems are certainly where most of their development energy went, so when I keep that in mind the school is a fairly nice achievement for the dev team.

@NEStalgia
Lol yea, you're definitely taking it slow. It took me about 40 hours for my first playthrough. I played on the mode where allies who die don't come back, so I also restarted a few battles, mostly near the end, but a couple dumb mistakes early.

@NEStalgia Just try to spend your PP each day on activities. If you're not enjoying the student flavor text, though, don't worry about combing the school to track everyone down.

Agreed about the school, it's a good concept but not very compelling in practice. However I did go round talking to everyone each month, which is probably part of the reason my first (and so far only, but I do intend to play it again) playthrough took me just under 70 hours.

I want to love it. It breathes a lot of life into the game/genre to be more of a "world" and "place" than a sequence of gridded battles. But it's so much wandering aimlessly and padding time. I'm also not good enough with the game's stats to really understand what I'm spending points on which doesn't help.

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I find that with all FE games, it’s not til the second play through when you know how the characters will develop you make full use of these type of things.

@jump To me that's kind of a design problem in the series if you have to finish the game to understand how to play it properly.

@NEStalgia
I do agree, but that's how a lot of rpgs go. I would say it's almost the nature of many rpgs to have that "hindsight is 20/20" thing going on. It's a lot different from platformers or adventure games where you're not developing your characters with permanent choices usually.

@NEStalgia What stats do you have questions about? In general, you should be looking to higher classes for your units and focusing on certain stats accordingly so that they meet the requirements for advancement.

@rallydefault I can't say I've found that to be the case with many RPGs at all. Nor do I often replay any RPG due to how time consuming one play through is, unless it's an amazing classic. Most RPGs you have a feel for where you want to put your starts. you're either a magic user or a sword user or an archer, or a thief.....you generally know what among your dozen stats or so you need to worry about.

FE has become kind of top heavy, and if you weren't there with it in the early days (I wasn't, I didn't join until Wii, and it was so confusing at that point I barely played at all until Awakening), you haven't followed the progression from the more straight forward "just the battles and standard attributes" to the modern intertwined, overdeveloped systems. There's sooooooo many stats per unit, across so many units, between character stats, weapon stats, what I'll call "team stats" (bonds, etc.) It's definitely on the rare side of stat saturated games at this point.

@Ralizah There's so many things to know I'm not even sure what I don't know! There's all the primary character stats (faith, etc), basically all the stats you train. There's the "team stats" in terms of the character bonds, teacher ranks, etc. etc. But I don't deny I'm an awful FE player that's never really understood half of what's going on in these games. This game (and SMT#FE) are the first times I've even changed classes....my first two FE games I never even knew you were supposed to and that was basically "leveling up" - I just hoarded all the stones afraid to use them on anything and waste them. And the first time I thought class changes were just if you didn't like your character's class and wanted them to be something different.

I'm not sure what it is about FE, but I'm an RPG-superfan....I buy probably 4 RPGs for every other genre (and that's a library that's probably 600 games strong across all generations and genres) But FE just confuses the heck out of me and I pick up a few snippets of info each new game rather than through one game. To a degree I'm assuming a lot of those stats don't really matter at all unless you're trying to go hardcore and take on the toughest fights on the hardest settings. But I still don't like when I don't even understand the systems in a game.....if you didn't HAVE to spend your points each month I'd just hoard them all until endgame so I don't screw up.

There's also the weapon durability which, I do, obviously, understand, and it's not a bad system, but it's another thing to micromanage among all the other stuff.

I love FE games but I'm always confused and overwhelmed by them and play through part of them without really knowing what I'm doing, or so it feels. The only FE, so far, I've fully completed to the credits is Fates' Hokkaido route......I'm not proud of that....and the story wasn't worth the time. I tried to play the supposedly superior other route, but I was so burned out on the game after Hokkaido I didn't get too far into Lolli Incest: The Game as I just tried to steamroll levels quickly, and that doesn't go well.

@NEStalgia I’m the opposite. Most RPG’s confuse me to an incredible amount. FE feels so natural to me. Each stat increases a certain weapon or ability for a given unit. If I want Bernadetta to eventually become a cavalry archer I’ll increase her stats that would benefit her, while also making sure she has stable duty on chores and she has a method of Melee attack so that she can get out of sticky situations. The same goes for every other character in the game. I have my vision of what I want each unit to become and I ensure that the weaknesses that are normally present for each unit get backed up by stats that will help negate that weakness.

@Blooper987 That sounds like it comes from being very familiar with FE's classes if you're aiming from early on to make characters into something. To me it's all a blank canvas and each character is a unique unicorn that will become the "correct thing" eventually. I guess it comes from being more into standard RPGs than SRPGs

@NEStalgia It's nothing too complex.

Professor Level basically gives you more time to do stuff around the monastery, more lecture points to train your students, etc.

The skill stats around reason, faith, etc. raise proficiency in certain skills. So, a white magic user is likely going to want to focus more on faith. But you don't even need to micromanage it. Like I said, look at the job evolution charts, make a mental (or physical) note of where their skill growth needs to go, and then tell the game to have their lectures focus on those stats. I always manually did lectures, since I like to micromanage my units, but I believe everything can be automated, requiring a minimum of input from the player.

Durability is... yeah, a necessary annoyance. Make sure you have an extra weapon on your people before heading into battle, and you're probably good.

I mean, I totally get finding an RPG to be intimidating. I STILL have no idea what half of the systems in Xenoblade Chronicles X entail, or what the hell the affinity chart from the first game is even supposed to do or mean.

@NEStalgia Three Houses was my 2nd game and the only one I won

@Ralizah Haha, XCX definitely falls on the FE side of "needless complexity for the sake of complexity." The XC1 affinity chart isn't confusing, it's just stupid, though.

FE....yeah, I've been going with automatic, but I just do random training. Spears for my main character? He doesn't even use spears. Isn't Byleth a sword character by nature? Seems silly to try to force him to be a mage. I might just stick with all the training from Rhea, Jeralt (if he's still there in a little bit....the opening of the game pretty much declared him a meatshield so I just assume, but am not there yet), basically training that gives boosts to command and the like? So many characters to train with...so few with things that seem relevant in my limited understanding. I usually just spend the points in the dining hall and cathedral?