FIRE EMBLEM

I'm about 5 hours in too - black eagle, w/edgelard & professor trashcan

best website i've found so far for reference information and tips/guides:

https://samurai-gamers.com/fire-emblem-three-houses/

for example i appreciate the straightforward nature of these recommended class paths for each character: https://samurai-gamers.com/fire-emblem-three-houses/recommended-classes/

I’m about 4 or 5 chapters in now - no idea what is going on story wise. I think I’ve been a bit flippant with some characters too - was a bit of a bummer when caspar died because I just didn’t pay close attention to his HP :/

KM are you instructing manually? and if so how are you choosing what to instruct? I did it once and it seemed confusing so have just been going auto

yep, manual instruction all the way! i haven't tried auto yet

the first step is to make sure each student has reasonable Goals. the game sets them for you by default, but they can be adjusted.

when instructing, i start with the students who have the highest motivation (a sad reflection of a real life bad teacher). direct instruction completely drains a student's motivation meter, so it's good to let it build up to 3 or 4 before instructing.

after choosing the student to instruct, i usually focus on the skills listed in their Goal (e.g., Sword and Authority). however, there are other considerations - blue arrows up indicate a better chance of the bonus experience, red arrows down mean slower learning. and a little finger icon means that the teacher is especially adept and so the teaching is more likely to be successful.

good tips
https://www.kotaku.co.uk/2019/07/26/tips-for-playing-fire-emblem-three-houses

important to treat your students with wonka-esque compassion in this game

I keep killing them :/

RIP caspar
RIP hubert
RIP mercedes

I wanna run 2 u

tbf killing them is very wonka-esque

doesn't this one have a rewind ability so you can avoid killing them even on classic mode

awakening was funny when it would drop like a level 1 teenage girl in my squad at the start of a mission and i would immediately accidentally get her one-shot killed

it does but who can be bothered

am I supposed to rewind to just before the strike that kills in the hope they whiff next time to or do I have to rewind all the way back to the last move taken with that character and not place them in such peril next time?

the latter would be how you would use rewind to save them

RIP

I would rewind to your own birth and lay a better fire emblem foundation with your life.

you are all dead to me (like many of the recruits of the black eagles who have unfortunately perished at the hands of my complacency and all-round bad play)

|||||||| do you use multiple save files? rewinding is an option, after losing someone mid-battle, but if you run out of rewinds or just forget, you can always just load the save file before the battle and try again.

i haven't played a fire emblem before, but i would guess that by mid-end game it'll start to get really difficult if you've lost someone like Hubert who has strong batallion skills

hubert is dead* let it go move on

*I swear he turned up in a cut scene last night

(no multiple saves, no rewinds. normal/classic. )

Hubert has passed away to another dimension

i saw Hubert at Trader Vic's

usually on normal your guys that don't die eventually outpace the enemies in strength by enough that it becomes less perilous

RIP dorothea

omg

who is still alive? your house is turning into the alamo

new dn is ||||||||..._____|||...________

edgelard and professor trashcan

sylvain and some other no marks

i refuse to talk to sylvain due to his tendency to objectify the women in his life

normal/casual is the way to go, blow thru the battles so u have more time to return lost items to the irresponsible inhabitants of garreg mach

this one definitely looks like it's designed such that fewer of the chars are throwaway-able, the older games always shower you with a bunch of paper-thin minor characters outside of the core cast that you don't really feel bad about sacrificing for your cause, whereas this one actually asks you to spend time getting to know everyone before shit goes down

do you get a notification when you have maxed out a class for a certain character ? all the guides say don’t reclass until you have maxed out the current class

OK... I think I’m staring to get the hang of it. 10 hours in. steep learning curve with lots to learn

no one has died in a while

because they're all dead, aren't they

RIP hanneman. it was him or felix, and so...

back on my bullshit

RIP flayn. heaven needed another ineffectual green haired lady on a horse

now flayn i can get into

Black Eagles: our leader is a fascist

Blue Lions: we are all depressed

Golden Deer: pic.twitter.com/v926kcEjeH

— di!!en (@dillexe) August 2, 2019

this game is too long!

so i just started this and i really want to love it but i'm nervous bc there are all these choices to make immediately about who i want to dine with and send flowers to and who i should pair with another classmate to do some menial labor and who i should i instruct and in what etc. and i feel totally lost in making these decisions so i don't understand enough about the systems or the characters i control to figure out what to do. does the game open itself up more or how does one navigate this

the game is easy enough that you can't really screw yourself out of being strong even on hard mode, so just do what you feel like and focus on the characters you like and you can automate the instructing stuff if you don't want to do specific builds and just want a default setup for your characters

just bought this, let's see.

Just dived into Three Houses last night. Mordy's right, the beginning is a bit intimidating, but so far kinda loving this Anime Hogwarts vibe. Great presentation all around, and I love that each school already has a VN's worth of characters to delve into. Assuming that's for three separate playthroughs...
I went with Hard/Classic, guess I'll see if I regret it!

Three Houses is one of the easier Fire Emblems thanks to the Divine Pulse do-over feature and just based off the fact that most of your students are powerhouses when properly equipped and trained/promoted into advanced classes. Unlike older games in the series where large chunks of the rosters of recruitable characters are one dimensional healers and thieves archetypes that typically die in a single round of combat and finding the select handful of units that were actually worth using in comparison was a challenge in itself.

For what its worth as someone who isn't big on platformers and wasn't very enamored with BoTW like seemingly every other soul on earth this was my GOTY for 2019 and is the honestly just the best overall Switch console exclusive in my not so popular opinion. If you dig the VN/Persona inspired social aspects on top of the actual tactical RPG part of the gameplay it's impossible not to fall in love with, and will keep you occupied for literal hundreds of hours if you decide to go through all 4 (not just 3 despite the game's title to the contrary) story routes. And then there's DLC on top of that too, but I heard its underwhelming for the cost so I never indulged outside of the free packs and patches they released.

I started with Normal/Classic and after ten hours of play realized i had made a terrible mistake. Just entirely too easy. Restarted (with EdgeLard, which i kinda regret, so dour) and am now finally in new territory. It's likely to hold me till the end of the year.

Heh, Edelgard seemed up my alley, went with her too. Looking forward to her blue-blooded prissy fascism. If I like this enough I'll go with Yellow Weirdos next time.

yellow weirdos were my normal/classic playthrough and i miss them dearly. starting to pull characters from other houses and focused on them.

Ok a few game days and battles in and I'm feeling it a lot more. There is really IS a lot of overwhelming information/choices at the beginning.
Should I go ahead and just recruit some other kids from the other houses? It looks like I have 1 extra slot for that purpose. Though I suppose that might be what the "Mission Assistance" option is for...

Love those little cutscenes showing the student bonding btw

Mission assistance is the extra slot thing yea. Students recruited that way don't level up and are temporary additions for that month only. You can permanently recruit basically everyone from the rival houses sans the leaders and their personal retainers if you meet certain stat requirements or have high enough support rank with them. Sylvain will also ditch his house for you no questions asked if you're playing female Byleth lol.

On the topic of Fire Emblem in general apparently Nintendo is releasing the original Famicom one, Shadow Dragon, outside of japan for the first time ever on Switch in December. The old FE 1-4s are fairly rough to play now but interesting nonetheless.

i got distracted and exhausted with this; should likely go back as i've already invested 25 hours and wasn't really tired of the battle system or the story. The tedium of dicking around the monastery is starting to get to me tho'.

Yeah definitely, Normal/Classic is what I would recommend if you've literally played any other game in this genre.

The thing you can't change midway is Casual vs. Classic, the latter being perma-death. The game feels VERY different with perma-death, if you're like me and want the whole story and all the relationship talks and such and will rewind over and over again to play a "perfect" game so everybody survives. (Though on the final battle, I had one death and just let it go.)

So, I say go with Classic for well, classic feels and disappointment whenever one of your brats kicks the bucket

(That said, second playthrough, I'm doing Casual, since the game only gets easier with NG+ anyway.)

I want to remark how fun it is that you straight up won't get all the answers about your students, even within your house. A lot of the interesting reveals seem to happen when you pair students from different houses or the Monastery instructors. Definitely a lure for completionists - very JRPG, I suppose. At the same time, I can see why many people complain about the story, since on one playthough you never get a full picture.

yeah having Meaningful Choices is definitionally incompatible with being able to see everything in one pass. in this case it's probably descended more from visual novel routes than the CRPG type games that term is associated with though

hah, "meaningful choices" might be overselling it a bit, but yeah, VNs are the more accurate lineage

I just unlocked tournaments which is loads of fun even though all my house is too underleveled to win.

For 1-1 instruction, is the idea to teach students until you've depleted all of their motivation (i.e. grad school)?

yup. you want to only teach the ones with a full motivation bar to maximize your teacher point usage
then refill the bars on monastery days with meals/gifts/activities

Just finished chapter 11(?) and OMG WTF Edie, so furious at you rn, if I had you in fantasy, I'd cut you from my team, I also had another game-related question but I can't remember it now either.

Heh. So what did you choose?

I sided with her thinking maybe that was the de-escalation route, and when creepy Hubert magicked me away, I reset the game immediately. I'll be picking Rhea's side in all likelihood, but I'll keep the save right before the choice is presented.

Yeah, that's what I did. (There is no de-escalation route. FIRE EMBLEM! *jazz hands*) No regrets, though - I bonded with that crew so i was happy to play it out. I'm saving the other choice for my final fourth playthrough, someday.

Part 2 makeovers: Pretty tragic all around. Dorothea at least got rid of that stupid hat, and that gown is nice except for the backlessness. Ferd needs a haircut BADLY. I wish Ferd's voice actor was better; he's so often my MVP that I feel a little bad skipping his dialogue so often. Bernie's haircut IDK what is going on, but I love her all the same (and just recently made her a paladin after letting her toil as an archer all this time, which I think may have been an enormous opportunity cost in pwnage). I didn't think that I'd get much use out of the latecomers, but Seteth and Flayn have been great; I benched Lin in favor of green haired anime girl because her white magic is so much more usable than his, and I get the sense that any flying unit borders on OP.

What class path did you go with Ferdinand? He was garbage all the way through my run, hated him. And yes, the flying units are generally pretty awesome; didn't figure that out until playthrough #2.

Cavalier > Paladin, with the latter being where he really took off. (I'm currently still leveling him into a Great Knight.)

Hitting me hard with the emotions now! RIP Edie, and Ashe and the other students I've now killed because they were all too damned picky about my stats to transfer to my class, and, after the Shambhala mission, maybe Rhea (but I suspect she'll pull through). Speaking of, that mission spikes the difficulty up -- nothing unmanageable, and honestly a welcome change of pace, but clearly it offers much less room for screwing around. I still deliberately delayed finishing off the boss so that I could get my Assassin (Petra) to mop up all the chests -- I'd actually just promoted her to Falcon Knight, but reclassed her down to Assassin again solely for Locktouch. In hindsight, I missed her expanded movement range, and I wish I'd been grooming Ignatz as my backup Assassin instead of letting him languish on the bench, which is where Linhardt deserves to be -- he's too damn squishy to be anything but a healer, and even then, he still has to be in the thick of the action to heal, when someone else like Flayn has Fortify and Dorothea has the adjacent autoheal + much better reason spells.

Having just beaten the game, one of my predictions in the previous post is obviously, hilariously wrong.

I needed a palate cleanser from Bloodborne frustrations and started my NG+ last night. Aside from the interminably slow beginning, I'm looking forward to knowing just what I'm doing in the early stages of the game; I also picked up on a lot of plot details this time around.

So I couldn't get out of the first Garrag Mach mock battle (5v5v5)! The strategy on Normal difficulty of sending Byleth headlong into a bunch of enemies doesn't seem to work anymore. Any suggestions?

creep, overuse the R2 button all the time so you don't move your units within enemy attack range and move your guys slowly. i actually barely used it until my second playthrough...

Three Houses is really addicting isn't it? I sat down to play it last night and suddenly it was 2am. 😬

https://kotaku.com/fire-emblem-engage-nintendo-switch-trailer-direct-1849529563

Feel like there's no way this could reach the euphoric highs of Three Houses/Three Hopes but I'm still in

My first replay of Three Houses really stalled out because I just couldn't summon the energy to deal with the life sim grind, so with that in mind, should I grab Awakening? I thought the tactical side of 3H was good but shallow/easy.

I just couldn't summon the energy to deal with the life sim grind

3H is supposedly toned down, "hard" is old-school FE normal, "normal" is easy.

the monastery is a complete slog, i've never played any of the older games but i hope the unit management is 100% done with menus instead of wasting time walking from place to place and skipping dialogue boxes