LogFAQs > #934691492

Time to talk good stuff for a bit! And I may need to start making my previews a little harder to guess...

This post is going to inevitably spoil some Three Houses stuff. I'll try to minimize it and spoiler tag the big stuff, but it's unavoidable to an extent unless I make this entire post an ugly black blob, so consider yourself warned.

The Good

19. Three Houses Chapter 12 - To War

Unfortunately but unsurprisingly I can't find a good picture of the full map here, so...yeah. It's the last one before the timeskip. If you've played Three Houses, you know it. Unless you've only played Crimson Flower in which case you did this one in reverse, but I don't like that version quite as much (see above post)

A large scale "defense" map whose objective is actually to kill the boss, so you can't just sit around at the start. You'll have to push forward, which is good since that's a lot more fun anyway. To War does a really good job of giving you the sense that you're fighting an epic battle with all the NPC allies who are hanging around the start helping fight the initial wave of enemies. They're capable enough to contribute a little and the distraction they provide to enemies is very helpful, but they don't come close to getting the job done on their own. They're not FE7 Pent by any means. Just the right balance between NPCs being helpful and NPCs not undermining your own contributions to the map.

The layout of the map has a bunch of gaps in the walls, including some breakable ones, that create three main paths you can go down on your way to the boss. You're expected to go down the outside paths to cut off enemy reinforcements, which is kind of a neat mechanic to make official (you seize a certain point to stop them, unlike the usual FE "stand in square X to block enemy Y from spawning" shenanigans), although that right hand path can be a real bitch if you don't have an answer to your old pal critical hit machine...er, I mean Death Knight. While you're working on that with some units you can also push your way through the middle, which is easier said than done when it has a bunch of pegasus knights in your way in the game that decided enemy pegasus knights needed to be injected with steroids.

The big appeal of this map is definitely the overall sense of drama it conveys (even if you somehow missed the marketing revealing the timeskip, you'll still get the feeling this is a big turning point in the story) but the gameplay lives up to the hype fairly well by giving you a lot of paths and enemies to deal with along the way. Three Houses map design can be a little bland at times, but this one they hit right out of the park. It gets a shorter write up than what most chapters in this topic will get not because of a lack of interest but because I'm less familiar with it than most of the others so it's a bit harder to talk about at length. Great chapter and a great way to end the first half of the game.

Up next: The good times continue with a map not unlike one that has already been mentioned somewhere in this topic

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Meow!