Board 8 > First Fire Emblem: Three Houses review

(+) Yeah! (+)

Mac Arrowny posted...

Some people think the GBA FEs had good stories, so I don't really trust people's opinions on FE stories in general.

ColdOne666 posted...

Remind me to never again take anything you say seriously.

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I take great offense from you saying that, SantaRPG the pedophile.
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It's been awhile since I've seen someone dig that one up.
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The FE GBA games don't have particularly good stories. FE7's is honestly kind of a disjointed mess, not bad but yeah. Sacred Stones does a little better but it still has issues, Ephraim's role in it being the biggest one.
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The only one who does is him
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Calling Fates' story atrocious is one thing, but doing so whilst holding up something like Blazing Blade as the pinnacle of storytelling is not exactly consistent. It isn't Shakespeare by any means.
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No customization for the ugly main character is really disappointing. :/
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And yeah GBA stories aren't masterpieces, and sometimes are organized poorly, but they're still actual stories with likable characters/human interactions/and any amount of depth. Birthright is "we go get good weapon and get bad guy" which is inoffensive enough, it's just bland, Conquest is "we diddle around for no reason, then go get bad guy, but also some people commit suicide to prevent the main character from having to make any difficult choices also the REAL bad guy is just some guy with a bow who was angry"
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Not even my favorite FE games (Tellius) have amazing stories, and they're easily the strongest of the localized games in that department. Plot is something Fire Emblem struggles with.
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Radiant Dawn is the best one IMO. Awakening's Future Past DLC is also great story-wise (or maybe atmosphere is the better word for it?).

Conquest story is mostly entertaining for how ridiculous everything is. Everyone makes terrible decisions and bad things constantly happen to everyone. It's great.
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I haven't played the Future Past DLC, but I watched it on youtube and remember thinking that the base game's plot would have been way more interesting if it followed Lucina instead of Chrom, starting with an extended section of the game set in the ruined future.
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Mac Arrowny posted...

Conquest story is mostly entertaining for how ridiculous everything is. Everyone makes terrible decisions and bad things constantly happen to everyone. It's great.

I dare you to name a dumber character in the series than Birthright Xander.
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KamikazePotato posted...

I dare you to name a dumber character in the series than Birthright Xander.

conquest Iago
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Birthright's story is so boring and forgettable I don't even remember what Xander does.
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Birthright actually straight up killed my interest in the series, which is wild because I actually enjoyed Awakening despite its awful map design.

The story in Birthright was just so... nothing, and I feel like 90% of the characters I liked actually ended up being with Nohr. Add that into the fact that I was trying to scoop up all the kids as they appeared and some of those levels were actually awful and it just left me totally dead in the water. Completely passed on Echoes despite hearing it was really solid. Part of me wonders if I'd like Conquest if I ever tried it, but I legit don't think I can bring myself to ever touch Birthright again.

I've heard enough intriguing things about Three Houses to try it at launch, I'm hoping this will be the game to reel me back in!
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I only played like half of Conquest, but I liked Birthright more. Conquest had the better servants overall, but I thought Birthright had way better nobles and didnt really care about most of the Conquest ones

Echoes' story is...hmm.

Celica's popularity is proof that you can, in fact, make a character popular entirely through a great character design and great voice acting, even when the actual character is dumb as rocks.
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KamikazePotato posted...

Echoes' story is...hmm.

Celica's popularity is proof that you can, in fact, make a character popular entirely through a great character design and great voice acting, even when the actual character is dumb as rocks.

But how many incels came on her amiibo
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I was going to list late game Celica as a counter to Xander, but then I remembered I didn't remember Xander and thus couldn't really compare the two.
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Eh, I feel like the stuff that Celica says throughout the game generally makes sense, but the game is written in such a way that she's wrong anyway? Not sure if I'm putting it right, but that's the way I felt when I played it.

And then the end of the game is just shit writing in general. Didn't make me dislike Celica. Just made me annoyed at the game's writers.

Focusing on better characters is one of the other reasons Conquest was better than Birthright. Ryoma and especially Takumi were terrible.
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Holy War is still the best FE story by some margin.

Tellius as a whole is a solid second place.

Everything after that is more or less interchangeable IMO.
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I guess according to various Japanese previews, map design complexity among the houses is Golden Deer > Blue Lions > Black Eagles. As in BE have the simplest maps on average. I don't know if that means they're really simple or Golden Deers are just really complex.
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Most previews or reviews or whatever they're calling them that I've seen have been playing Black Eagles, and they've largely seemed underwhelmed with the maps.

So I'd expect Eagles maps to be pretty simple, but that doesn't necessarily disqualify Deer maps from being really complex.
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It didn't even dawn on me that the different houses would have different maps
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So you really are supposed to play this 3 times, huh?

Guess I'll go in order of map ranking, low to high.
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Watch there be a special true ending that's unlocked after you play through all three routes.
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LapisLazuli posted...

So you really are supposed to play this 3 times, huh?

Guess I'll go in order of map ranking, low to high.

There's multiple endings for each House too it seems. Don't know to what degree, but because of it the Engadget reviewer mentioned wanting to go back to do their starter house a second time too.
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Welp Eurogamer Spain's preview has flat out said there are four stories. That it's four games in one.
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Making up for making you buy 3 games last time.
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That story DLC listed on the season pass is more eyebrow raising.
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I don't wanna check spoiler tags without at least some kind of context <_<
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mnkboy907 posted...

Welp Eurogamer Spain's preview has flat out said there are four stories. That it's four games in one.

Well, the leaks which have been 99.999% correct also stated that soooo.

Waluigi1 posted...

I don't wanna check spoiler tags without at least some kind of context <_<

Of the last three, the first two are talking about number of routes/storylines in the game. Most recent one is about the DLC and isn't even a spoiler IMO because it's in the expansion pass description!
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I check them because who cares about spoilers anyway
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Hm... if there's 4 storylines, then does that mean you have to beat all three of the houses and then unlock a final/real story? Cause honestly that's kinda lame.
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I was fairly lukewarm on this game at first and even after I started really looking forward to it, I wasn't really super excited for anything, but now that it's getting close...I'm actually getting caught up in the hype. Not something that happens very often to me!
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Damn, I bought the digital version online, but I can't seem to find a way to buy the expansion online, other than as a bundle.
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Waluigi1 posted...

Hm... if there's 4 storylines, then does that mean you have to beat all three of the houses and then unlock a final/real story? Cause honestly that's kinda lame.

Part of me wonders if they didn't just mean the stuff pre-skip is like a separate story/game compared to what comes after. Talking about anything post-skip is strictly forbidden by Nintendo's embargo, so saying there's a secret post-game storyline would seem like a pretty big no-no.

LapisLazuli posted...

Damn, I bought the digital version online, but I can't seem to find a way to buy the expansion online, other than as a bundle.

You'll probably just have to buy it from an in-game menu then.
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how much is the expansion?
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$25 for the season pass. Surprisingly cheap given the prices of the 3DS DLC.
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Waluigi1 posted...

Hm... if there's 4 storylines, then does that mean you have to beat all three of the houses and then unlock a final/real story? Cause honestly that's kinda lame.

Dunno.

Well, if you are a believer in the leaks then I have a possible answer for you. (LEAK SPOILERS): The leaker said that Black Eagles have 2 paths, so that would account for this.
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Oh, since it was discussed earlier, the Eurogamer Spain preview also apparently answered this about marriages between the not-MC characters: Only MC has marriage.
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mnkboy907 posted...

$25 for the season pass. Surprisingly cheap given the prices of the 3DS DLC.

Are we certain it's $25 or is that just the assumption based of the $85 bundle?

Also, lol dumb people like me who pre-ordered the $100 collector's edition and are spending the extra $40 on superfluous garbage and with none of the DLC included.

theawesomestevr posted...

superfluous garbage

I mean... yeah that's the entire point of collector's editions
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theawesomestevr posted...

Are we certain it's $25 or is that just the assumption based of the $85 bundle?

I thought we got an info graphic showing $25, but I can't find it again so maybe not. To my knowledge though, Nintendo generally doesn't discount the season passes in these bundles.
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It is $25. Can't buy it online but it still lists it.
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I applaud Joe Zieja's commitment to the bit.
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I'm now reading that the Black Eagles are a bunch of sassy, snarky shit talkers to each other and it's just making my initial house decision that much harder.
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