FIRE EMBLEM

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'.

i also got exhausted by the monastery and quit around 25-30 hours in. it takes so loooooong to walk around the monastery and find all the things! it really is exhausting.

sorry to talk about hades in this thread, but i was surprised to find that its story and characters were much more fun and engaging than fire emblem's, especially because we already know most of the characters in hades (persephone, orpheus, hermes, etc). but the story is integrated into the game in a much more satisfying and addicting way. the hub area in hades is much, much smaller than fire emblem, and it's amazing how much that changes things. if you need to talk to Achilles, for example, you just walk 4 seconds to the left and talk to him. he's almost always in the same place.

hades!

can't you just skip the monastery if you don't want to play it? or is there a lot of required stuff beyond the beginning

yeh you can skip a lot of the monastery stuff if you just want to get through the story
interested to know if the translation for the very first FE is a recent thing or if they've had it lying around for 30 years like Mother

OCD and the many benefits of the monastery grind (especially on hard/classic) makes it feel much more necessary, but no more enjoyable.

I would like to say though that first battle where all your students are Lvl 1, definitely not so easy to get through completely unscathed! I'm guessing it gets a lot easier as your tots rank up and get classes

Said this in the Switch thread but I may get the FE ROM port just to support more such projects, even if them making it available on sale for only 3 months is pretty obnoxious.
Re: the translation, maybe they were able to reuse the scripts from the DS Shadow Dragon, which of course goes for crazy money on eBay now.

Had a great weekend playing this. Once classes open up and your students can actually do their jobs (that is, Frontline vs. Support vs. Heal/Magic) it's pretty awesome.

One annoying thing: got to the first "real" mission against the Death Knight (the one with all the Warp tiles). He is virtually unbeatable, and I had to find out online that you're supposed to eliminate everyone else but him to end it, so I gotta get through it all again... at least I know I'll try to Steal the Dark Seal before finishing up.

Yeah, they like to throw curveballs like this at you to make sure you're listening to the dialogue.

The first time you see him, Edelgard does tell you to avoid him (a few chapters ago). This time though there's a whole cinematic where he goes up to you and says "only one of us will survive" or something to that effect, so I assumed we would actually fight!

Played it again and dammit, you were right - it DID say the win conditions upon starting the battle

Certain classes can/can't do magic, yes? My Byleth is developing Faith but can't cast Heal because he's a Thief, I think...

yes, that's right. you can change classes at any time as long as you meet the conditions, can even go back to older classes

death knight is beatable in all showings if you know the game systems well enough. i did what the game told me and avoided them but even if i had attempted a kill i'd have failed horribly

Beat the game, loved it. Hungry to do it again, and re-recruit my sleepy favorite Linhardt so he can actually survive the final battle.

Does the BIG CHOICE that happens in Chapter 10 only seem to happen in the Edelgard/Black Eagle route? Definitely chuckled when the game came to a halt twice and explicitly said "THIS WILL DRASTICALLY CHANGE THE STORY OF THE GAME", followed by an excellently Feel-Bad route of heroically killing all your former classmates.
I looked it up and it seems like it won't happen in the Yellow/Blue routes, making this... four playthroughs. Yowza. Thank goodness there's New Game+.

I both like and dislike the fact that there's still so many mysteries about Byleth, Rhea, etc. even after 50 hours but it's also spurring me to play again, so mission accomplished, Intelligent Systems.

Is this as hard as, say, Wargroove?

Haven't played Wargroove but I wouldn't call this very hard. Nowhere near XCOM level, but like that game, massively satisfying once your little army become godlike warriors. Also there's a time-rewind mechanic that you can buff up throughout the game, and I greatly find this preferable to the infinite-save/reload paradigm for these games.

Most reviews pegged Normal difficulty as being too easy, so I played on and Hard found it all right, though the beginning could be a bit rough. Some of that is due to obscurity, like, the game is not incredibly clear about what weapons/units have advantage over others, and some of the class system is hidden for a while. But this game seems designed for NG+ since you have to play it at least 3 times to get all the story, so I wonder if it's even easier on the second goes. Still, RIP Linhardt.

Around chapter 8 in my second playthrough. NG+ almost feels like cheating, especially since I lost patience and bought my professor level back. That means you can more easily regain student motivation, do three battles per weekend, etc. Also went with "Casual" this time and boy, the game feels very different when you're not in panic rewind mode trying to save every student.

Still love it though. Recruited Catherine, Shamir, Sylvain (lol female Byleth can recruit him immediately with no requirements because he's thirsty as hell) and Ingrid to my Alliance faction. I admit though I still feel more attached to my Black Eagle students and I'll go back for some if I make it to playthroughs 3 and 4.

$35 at Best Buy and Amazon, so I'll be picking it up today.

I'm confused so far!

get used to it

Yeah! Even looking at beginner guides is overwhelming.

foolishly, I put it down about 25 hours in - going to try go back to it, all the wee systems are a bit intimidating though

kinda tempted to just start over

always look at the combat forecast before engaging, especially hit% and double attacks
unintuitively, equipping ligher weapons (iron instead of steel sword) often helps because you can double during player phase or avoid being doubled during enemy phase

i forcibly put it down after my first playthrough because i could easily sink 300 hours into this thing, tactics games are my weakness. it also helped that the monastery sections are a slog, stupid busywork that could well be handled by menus instead of navigating a 3d space and that all 4 routes are apparently very similar in map selection

yeah this definitely became that sorta thing for me, I'm 100+ hours in. hard to tear myself away

ulysses, i hope you kept on the Edelgard playthrough because iirc there's a big storyline branch path that doesn't happen with the other houses

yeah edelgard route splits in 2 but confusingly gives you 2 BIG WARNINGS; the last one is pretty clear what's about but the first one less so and very easy to miss (it requires monastery boredom) and missing it immediately locks into one of the story paths

I wish they'd release some of the earlier FE games on switch. guess I'll pick up the NES FE that's coming (to show support for this) but I'm not expecting great things. need those GBA FEs

give us the advance wars games while you're at it, nintendo

I feel like I'm getting the hang of it now, as I'm starting to customize the skills of someone of my students.

I haven't been able to unlock the blacksmith yet, though, so am I stuck buying new weapons of downgrading to training models for my units?

you'll get the blacksmith by Month 5, i think? (at which point you never really need to buy fresh weapons as there's an Forge upgrade path for all of them if you have the materials.) just buy new weapons as you need until it opens

PRO-TIP: I was selling all my Broken weapons for 1G (Lances, Swords, etc.) since once you get past Iron level it doesn't often feel worth forging. WRONG. Some Broken weapons that you get are secretly unique and will upgrade to a different or higher level weapon altogether - the description will tell you if this is true, it'll be separated in the list from the other broken swords/lances/etc.

I'm getting back up to speed. just need to relearn all the classes and battalions stuff

I have my first vacation in a couple years over Thanksgiving--9 days I have to figure out what to do with.

Reading this thread has me thinking trying to get back into Fire Emblem might be the call. I think I'm bad at games that don't have a "right" path, and upping the difficulty could be just what I need. I think I tried playing through on Normal the first time around and no decisions felt consequential.

going by FE veterans, hard mode in this game is on par with normal for older entries and you can (permanently) drop the difficulty setting midgame but not the other way around. no reason not to start on hard

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.