I should probably preface this by declaring my love for Three Houses. It is easily the most fun I’ve had with a new Fire Emblem game in at least a decade. Naturally, in attempting to critique the game it may occasionally seem that this is not the case, so I figured it might be wise to establish a baseline upfront. Anyway…

When it comes down to it, I suppose what makes the writing of Three Houses feel fresh is exactly the same thing that so many find to be iffy about it- the plot structure.

Plenty of familiar story beats abound, of course. There’s a militant empire, a magic sword that can only be wielded by the protagonist, an extremely evil-looking evil wizard, a divine dragon, and plenty more, but the story takes its time exposing the existence and relevance of such familiar beats.

Essentially what we have is a first half that is loaded with setups and mysteries, followed by four branching second halves that each attempt to resolve a different sampling of the setups introduced in Part One.

On the one hand I appreciate the structural change of pace when compared to the rest of the series, but on the other hand, by steering clear of the traditional Fire Emblem mold, the story seems to avoid having nearly any kind of standard story structure at all. At times it feels as if there isn’t any sense of buildup or direction in the places that there should be. There are plenty of individual elements that really worked for me, but I can’t help but feel that it comes off a little messy as a whole. I find myself reminded quite vividly of the 2003 adaptation of Fullmetal Alchemist, a story which followed it’s source material for about half of it’s 50 episode run, then diverted into a totally original second half. Plenty of great ideas and moments abounded, but that didn’t change the fact that there was an abrupt shift in the writing, or that the two halves of the series don’t really flow as one piece.

It’s far from unprecedented to see a game tell its tale in a modular fashion, but generally speaking this is usually undertaken by either A) making each branch into its own complete story, or B) having each branch of the story run in parallel to the others, such that they combine to tell a larger story. Three Houses though, opts for neither approach, instead choosing to make each route dependent on the nonexistence of the others. In other words, no one version of the story feels totally complete, and there is no timeline in which the characters fully understand what’s going on. How one feels about this stylistic choice will more or less determine how one feels about the plot as a whole. I am honestly struggling to think of another story driven game that quite hits the same balance.

But, before I get too far ahead of myself, let’s break the story down into smaller components and look at it piece by piece.

Part One

In and of itself I would say that Part One works pretty well. It is only in exploring its greater ramifications on the story that it begins to become problematic.

We begin by placing our protagonist in the same situation as the player. Byleth is almost immediately immersed into an unfamiliar environment and surrounded by people whom he does not know and isn’t entirely certain he should trust. Strange occurrences and rumors inundate the monastery environment, some of them hinting toward the mystery of Byleth’s own past. From here we begin to very gradually unravel the mystery box that is Garreg Mach, revealing Byleth’s true nature and exposing an intrepid, sinister group that seems to have an interest in him, before ultimately building to the twist villain, Edelgard.

The first plot layer is about a professor, his students, and the bonds they form. The second layer reads more like a mystery novel, where you know something strange is going on but can’t quite put the pieces together. For the most part it flows quite well, front loading the player with plenty of questions and gradually answering them en route to a big twist that completely reframes the second half. There are enough threads early on that it is genuinely difficult to figure out which of them tie together and in what way, but this also plays a part in the eventual lack of satisfaction some have felt in Part Two. There’s a sense that the developers didn’t want for any one route to spoil too much from the others, but in so limiting themselves most of those loose threads are left hanging. Some require you to play other routes to understand, some are hinted at in missable support conversations, and honestly some of my plot related questions haven’t been answered at all.

It’s a bit of a strange tactic to tell the player “Don’t worry, you’ll better appreciate this conclusion eighty hours of gameplay from now when your focus is on a different storyline altogether”. It also hinders any one route from feeling like a complete story on its own merits. Well, almost. This is a point we’ll return to later on.

Basically, Part One works well in and of itself, but it also has the incredibly awkward job of setting up four distinct storylines. After such a packed setup, one cannot help but feel as though something is missing later on, and that feeling is most palpable with…

The Blue Lions

What Worked

The time-skip. Perhaps it had something to do with the fact that it was my first playthrough, but I found the time-skip to be easily the most impacting on this route. There’s a real sense that the Professor disappeared at the worst possible moment, and that his students have suffered for it. Everything has fallen apart, and the player can’t help but wonder how different things might have been if they had been there. The reunification of the house post time-skip is genuinely moving because the characters have no real reason to show up at the monastery aside from a promise they had made to one another over five years ago under radically different context. There’s no reason for them to expect for the Professor or Dmitri to be there, but faith brings them together nonetheless. When Byleth first awoke from his slumber and I had the option to say “My students are waiting for me”, I got a genuine tingle from it. Thematically it feels right that these characters should find themselves, despite all reason, drifting back to a place that is symbolic of a more innocent time in their lives after a half-decade of trauma and loss. Even Dmitri, who seems to have lost all faith and claims no attachment to his former friends, still finds himself at the monastery on the appointed day, as if some deeper part of him was crying out for help. When Byleth first sees him sitting there, scarred, bloody, and alone, the imagery said it all.

I suppose I’ve already segued into this, but Dmitri is the other thing that really worked for me about the Blue Lions route. The other house leaders are sympathetic and make sense, but I never really got the feeling that they needed me to be there for them in the way that Dmitri did. It hurt to see how far he had fallen, and I truly found myself caring about whether or not he could be redeemed. The apparent loss of Dedue struck a chord as well, as I not only liked the character but understood his significance to Dmitri.

Again, this might have something to do with the fact that they were my first house, but I would also give the Blue Lions the edge when it comes to support conversations. Unlike the other houses, the core of the Blue Lions is made up of an established friend group consisting of Dmitri, Ingrid, Felix, and Sylvain. There’s more history there to talk about, and I found some of the topics discussed to be somewhat interesting. The abstract nature of chivalry and honour, coping with trauma, how we should remember our dead, the question of what we owe to our family, and other similar topics are discussed. Ironically, I found the Blue Lions supports to be more supportive of Edelgard’s position that crests and noble castes are fucking everything up when compared to the support conversations of other houses. Sylvain’s mere existence turned his older brother’s life upside down, and turned Sylvain himself into a jaded sceptic of anyone showing interest in him. Other characters like Ingrid and Mercedes worry that their crests might prevent them from leading a life of their own choosing, as their crests make them crucial breeding assets to be bartered for the family’s benefit.

What didn’t Work

As much as the Blue Lions route worked for me as the emotional height of the game, it is also perhaps the lowest of the routes in terms of how satisfying a follow up it is to the plot that was established in Part One, which is weird, because as I was playing Part One it almost seemed to me as if it might’ve been written with the Blue Lions as the default perspective.

I mentioned earlier that Part One essentially had two plot layers. The surface layer was the story of a professor, his students, and the bonds they form. The second layer had to do with unraveling the mysteries surrounding Garreg Mach, Byleth’s past, and the mysterious group of villains who have been stirring the pot. All of it is being set up with Byleth at its epicenter.

Part Two with the Blue Lions serves as an excellent sequel to that first plot layer, but it utterly ignores the second layer. We never learn a damn thing about Byleth, Sothis or Rhea. For many characters the rescue of Rhea was a key motivation, so I sort of expected that we would at least see her at the end, maybe get some clue what the empire was doing with her all this time, or at least ask about the fucking dragon thing. We also never spare another thought for what Solon was up to, or who Thales is. This isn’t just a matter of a few loose threads. The entire plot direction and focus of Part One crashes into a brick wall and is promptly forgotten.

In addition to these rather large omissions, I still had tons of smaller questions lingering from earlier in the game. This route might honestly be the strongest case of ‘second act syndrome’ that I’ve ever experienced, to the point that I only felt roughly 50/50 on whether I had even reached the end of the game until the endgame summaries came on screen. That’s not exactly how you want the player to feel about your epic climax. When I later played the Church/Golden Deer routes and saw how the story continued beyond defeating Edelgard, I couldn’t help but wonder what was stopping the Blue route from playing out in the same way. The only reason that I can come up with is that it helped to distinguish it from the other routes, but it does feel to me a noticeable omission.

I think path of Radiance is an interesting contrast for Three Houses because it essentially takes the opposite approach by committing to a highly traditional plot structure, but is like Three Houses in the sense that it attempts to leave a few threads open for future story possibilities. Path is perhaps the most ‘hero With a Thousand Faces’ -esque game in the series. As such, its plot is much more predictable than Three Houses, but it is also a strong example of how to use a structural archetype correctly, as the story remains highly satisfying despite its predictability. The pacing feels right, there’s some great world building and characterization, as well as a good dose of thematic preoccupation. It just feels very tightly woven together. As if everything existed in just the right amount in exactly the right places. Almost as if it were plotted very deliberately. Three Houses nails the character writing, but in each of those other areas it feels somewhat vague and aimless.

I’ve meandered somewhat, but the reason I brought up Path Of Radiance in the first place was to contrast how it handles having an ‘open’ ending as a comparison to how it was handled with the Blue Lions. Path leaves us with a few Chekhov’s Guns left unfired to be sure. In any other game the Dark God would have been released and every nation would have been drawn into the conflict. We stop just short of this however, and it does feel a little flat when compared to the climax of most other games. Despite this vague anticlimax, it manages to tell a complete story with a beginning, middle, and end both at a plot level, a character level, and even at a thematic level.

On the Blue Lions route we are distracted by a scapegoat, kill it, and then the credits roll. There’s very explicitly another threat out there from a player perspective, but it doesn’t even seem as though the characters remember its existence by the end of the game. At best it feels like the climax of the second act of a three act story. A couple of the routes, but this one especially, really needed a big satisfying epilogue sequence in the style of the Tellius games to really sell the impact of your achievement, but instead we simply kill Edelgard and hard-cut to black.

Edelgard’s Route

To be honest I’m struggling to really come up with pronounced highs and lows for Edelgard’s route, as a lot of what I liked about it in certain places is done less well in others. It’s basically a whole lot of mixed. The other thing to note is that it is the most distinct route, which causes it to lose out on assets that the other routes share, like animated cutscenes. As a result, it is shorter, and feels almost as if it has a slightly lower production value.

I haven’t played most of the Japan-only entries in the series, but from what I’ve experienced I would say that Edelgard’s route is the best implementation of the ‘friends become enemies’ motif that Fire Emblem has often attempted to capture. I consider myself a fan of Radiant Dawn, but I have to admit that this concept was comparatively toothless in that game, as it relied on the leverage of a big plot contrivance and everything winds up hunky-dory in the end. You can’t even truly kill characters from the other side as they merely retreat from battle, which undermines the consistency of permadeath as a mechanic.

I believe the first character that I found myself having to kill on Edelgard’s route was Ignatz, and I definitely felt like I had done something wrong when I killed him, like maybe I had made a mistake somewhere. I hadn’t even played as the Golden Deer house at this point, but I still felt as though they had endeared themselves to me. I really liked how that piece of the story played out, with some of my former friends needing to die, some being able to come over to my side, and others leaving to places unknown. At the same time, I feel as though the Blue Lions weren’t handled nearly as well as the Golden Deer house. On this route there is absolutely no evidence of the history between Edelgard and Dmitri, so there’s really no buildup to facing him in the way that there had been between them on the Blue Lions route. When Dmitri uses his last breaths to rave at El for having killed his step mother, we genuinely have no clue what he’s even on about. Is it even true? It’s all a bit out of left field if you haven’t already played the Blue Lions route, and the rest of his house seem haphazardly heaped into the final few chapters with little context as well.

In the plot department I would say that this route makes a little more sense as a follow up to part one than the Blue route did. The villain group from Part One is at least acknowledged and continue to play some role, even though El and Hubert neglect to tell us what they actually know about them. We also learn more about Byleth and Rhea, and we’re left with a very clear sense that the next step of the story for these characters will be rooting out ‘the ones who slither in the dark’. It’s obviously baiting more story, but it does feel like a more complete ending than the Blue route had, and there’s a greater sense that Fodlan has actually been changed, whereas the Blue route felt a little more like a return to the status quo.

On the flip side, the time-skip felt largely pointless on this route. When the professor wakes up five years on, basically nothing much has occurred. On the Blue route everything fell apart without Byleth, but Edelgard is at least modestly successful on her own, and all of the other house members seem to be doing just fine. It’s a little bit amusing that Byleth choosing to side with Edelgard has a negative effect on her progress when compared to the other routes, even if the logistics of it do make sense. In this case, the line ‘my students are waiting for me’ felt kind of flat and random, as they already had a reason to be there regardless of Byleth’s miraculous return. The plot is quite clearly waiting for the protagonist to show up, and there’s very little justification for it. With the other routes Byleth was at least seen as the heir apparent to Lady Rhea, and his return a rallying cry for the scattered Knights of Seiros. On this route however, the plot begins to move again simply because Byleth is such a tactical mastermind that he’s able to shatter the five-year deadlock by merely existing. The only real narrative benefit that I can think of is that it gives Claude some time to establish himself as the leader of the Alliance, but otherwise it’s just there because all the other routes were doing it.

The other weird plot moment would have to be at the Edelgard/Church route split. In all of the other routes Edelgard’s apparent motivation is based on her ideal of a world free from class bias, where a person will only be limited by how high their strength and ambition can take them. Sounds a bit like Ashnard when I stop to write it out…

Anyway, here in Edelgard’s route we are sold an additional motivation. It is revealed that she has secret knowledge of Rhea’s true nature and seeks to expose this deceit. At the route split Rhea flies into a rage and reveals her true form, and it is apparently this reveal that we are expected to believe is the reason for why many of your students and comrades turn against the church. It makes sense on paper that people might be horrified to discover their leader is actually a monster, but the framing of it as such feels more than a little arbitrary. When Rhea turned into a dragon on the Blue route nobody batted an eyelash. If anything it was framed as more of a cool, majestic moment. Am I meant to believe that not one single person saw that? Literally no one so much as comments on it for the rest of the route, so the impact that it has in Edelgard’s route felt somewhat contrived by contrast. It is almost as though the developers wanted to shore up the feeling that you weren’t the bad guys by revealing a Bigger Bad, but the specific method of achieving this end didn’t really work for me.

I also have to say that this route muddled Edelgard’s motivations a bit in my eyes. We learn more about her tragic upbringing, and in a vacuum I would say that the trauma of her childhood informs her rigid stance against the church’s propagation of a Crest-centric social hierarchy. However, I sort of got the impression that The Ones Who Slither In The Dark are the ones who did that to her, and that Edelgard herself is aware of this fact. If I am meant to believe that the torture of herself and her siblings is sufficient justification for her rigid stance against the church, then it seems a little bizarre that she would be willing to ally herself with a group even more directly involved in her pain. They’re certainly just as deceitful and manipulative as Edelgard seems to think the church is, and she has a much more personal stake in opposing them, rather than just a philosophical one as she has with the church. If anything it would make more sense for Edelgard to first use the church as her fairweather ally against TOWSITD, rather than the other way around.

The Church Route

At times it almost feels as though I played the game in exactly the opposite order that it was designed in, because I again find myself declaring that this route is a ‘more’ complete story than the previous two. Despite this, it is essentially a watered down version of the Golden Deer route, providing no unique information that I can think of off the top of my head.

As such, I don’t really have a lot to say about it.

I found the final battle to be the most difficult of the game.

I also found there to be some weird whiplash with Dmitri’s character, as he was presumed dead, revealed to be alive, permitted to go and get himself killed on his own for stupid reasons, and then appeared in an ambiguous scene in which the player isn’t sure if he is a dream or not. All of it within a very small window. I found it became difficult to keep up with how the game wanted me to feel during this sequence.

Other than that… I’m drawing a blank.

Golden Deer

In a way I feel a little bit salty about the Golden Deer route because it was the last route that I played, and I made the mistake of starting this analysis while I was only halfway through it. As a result I had to scrap a large portion of what I had written and try to massage the rest into making sense with the new information I learned from the route.

You see, coming off of the other three routes I was of the impression that each path through the game represented one piece of a grander puzzle, and that I would have to play all of them in order to understand and fully appreciate the story. The Golden Deer path, however changed everything.

Unlike the other routes, the Gold route actually tells a complete story on it’s own merits, and just about every significant question and ambiguity set up in the first half of the game comes back around in a significant way, at least as much as this game directly answers anything. It is in this route that we learn everything the game has to tell us about the Agarthans, the children of the goddess, Nemesis, the ten elites, what’s going on with Byleth, and the heroes relics. Some of this is also covered in the church route, but the only unique piece of information from it that I can think of would be a slight whisper more about Byleth’s mother. Otherwise, the only story we’re missing in this route would be some of the history behind what Dmitri and Edelgard have gone through, but that doesn’t really have all that much to do with what was set up in Part One. It doesn’t feel as if there are any gaping holes in my understanding of the story like there had been when I played the other routes.

Maybe this is an entitled thing to say, but in a way I feel like I’ve been robbed of fully enjoying my first playthrough of the other routes because I was constantly expecting them to deliver in areas that they simply didn’t. It feels sort of like I played all of the paralogues before playing the actual game, as it is this route that holds the key to understanding pretty much anything about what was happening in Part One. As such, I definitely recommend anyone who hasn’t played Golden Deer to begin there as early on as possible.

At the same time, I don’t completely hate that the Blue Lions route was where I started either, as it has my favourite group of characters and puts the game’s best foot forward from a dramatic perspective. It might be utterly disinterested in most of what was set up in Part One, but the Edelgard twist is best viewed from this perspective in my opinion, and the impact of the time-skip is most heavily felt on this route as well.

After having just completed the church route, there wasn’t a whole lot to really distinguish Golden Deer aside from the late-game lore dumps and the fact that Claude was along for the ride, which isn’t to say that his presence didn’t elevate the experience.

Claude is definitely the most level headed of the three main lords, and it almost seems as if his path forward is being framed as the best path. I never really felt fully sold when siding with Edelgard, and god knows Dmitri made his fair share of mistakes along the way, but in Claude’s case his vision of the future seems comparatively optimistic and down to earth. In a way it almost would’ve been better if Claude wasn’t so totally successful in wiping out the Agarthan threat, because it sort of makes Edelgard’s perspective feel stupid. Her grounds for the brutality of her path and the need for her to be the person walking it are predicated on the fact that she is the only one with inside knowledge of what’s really going on behind the scenes in Fodlan, and yet her route is far and away the least successful at dealing with the threat. Hell, Dmitri manages to wipe out the major Agarthan players in complete ignorance of the fact that he has done so.

Overall, I would say that the climax of the Gold route felt the most full-circle and satisfying out of the bunch. The final battle itself was one of the few that actually sorta looked like a real Fire Emblem map, sporting overlapping long range threats, diverse enemy compositions, and environmental obstructions. I’m not saying that it was hard, but it did make me actually pause to consider how I wanted to maneuver my way through it, rather than simply rolling over everything in the most direct path to the boss.

The paralogues I encountered in the Gold route were among my favourite battles in the game too, and seemed to have more of a focus on expanding the lore. I realize most of them aren’t necessarily route specific, but the ones I’m thinking of all involved members of the Golden Deer house.

In summation, the Golden Deer path is both the most complete in a narrative sense, and the one with the happiest, most optimistic conclusion. As such, I can’t help but feel that it subtly cheapens the other routes in a manner similar to, but certainly not to the same extent as, Revelations did in Fates. I feel less like I played four separate pieces of a larger story, and more like I had to keep playing through incomplete versions of the story until I happened upon the correct route. In my case it just so happened to be the last one I chose.

I know this will be an unpopular opinion, as many have criticized FE 7 for hand-holding the player through it’s various routes in a specific order, and the new games are all about player freedom, but I honestly think that my experience of the larger story would have been greatly enhanced by having some indication of where to begin, and in what order the narrative flowed most naturally.

Byleth

You know, on paper I feel like I should really hate Byleth for what he represents, as he is almost certainly the single most plot-convenient character in the entire franchise. His time travelling powers are narratively problematic, he only seems to remember the bits of his life that the story needs him to know, when he needs to know them, and anytime something bad happens to him Sothis bails him out. He disappears when it’s convenient, then arbitrarily reawakens when it’s convenient. Plus he’s got a lot of the usual player-stroking avatar clichés going for him too.

But you know, I really can’t claim that I dislike Byleth at all. In fact I don’t have any strong opinion of him. There’s just nothing abrasive about him in the way that Corrin or Robbin sometimes felt. He is entirely unassuming, stoic, and seemingly ambivalent to his own significance. Perhaps it has to do with the quantity of player input one has on conversations, or perhaps it is because I myself have the personality of a silent protagonist, but I simply found Byleth to be…. Inoffensive, I suppose. Nothing about him seemed particularly pandering, or like he was screaming for my attention. In truth he is less a character than a plot lubricant, and I still find myself ambivalent toward the desire for player avatars in Fire Emblem, but all in all I’m strangely fine with the By.

Maybe what it is, is that they actually picked a lane with this one. He isn’t some strange abortion between an actual character and a player insert. He’s much more firmly on the insert side of the road than certain other avatars have been. Which isn’t to say inserts are better than actual characters, but I do think it’s better to just pick a lane. Honestly I wouldn’t hate it if Fire Emblem tried the Baten Kaitos approach. Give the player a presence within the game, but a non corporeal one. Like a spirit or deity looking out for the protagonist. Who’s to say the player insert character couldn’t have been Sothis? That would atleast free up Byleth to be much more of a defined character, or we could have even worked around him altogether.

Deja vu?

As much as Three Houses is a forward-looking game that seeks to refresh the franchise, it also seems to take plenty of inspiration from entries past. Many have pointed out parallels to Genealogy of The Holy War, the Tellius games, and Shadows of Valentia, and I would say that most of these reinterpretations are very tasteful and respectfully done. However, there were two characters in particular that really stuck out to me as pale imitations.

The first of these would be Jeralt, our protagonist’s father. He’s an inoffensive character to be sure, and the gravitas bestowed upon him by his voice actor does elevate him. Yet considering how instantly the fan base was reminded of Greil when Jeralt was first revealed, I can’t help but be disappointed by how they contrast.

You might be giving me a strange look as I say this, but Greil is honestly one of my favourite characters in all of Fire Emblem. That may seem a strange thing considering that he’s a mere NPC, and that he is only around for a fairly brief piece of the story, but that actually feeds into why I like him so much. It is the amount of mileage the story gets out of Greil that I so appreciate about the character. When Greil dies it isn’t just plot leverage to push the hero into chasing down the bad guy. Aside from being a crucial development in Ike’s character arc, the story also slows down for a beat and makes it very clear that each and every member of the Greil Mercenaries had their own relationship with Greil, and to show us how his loss affected them. Furthermore, the mystery of Greil’s past is not only gripping and tragic, but immensely significant to the plot. If not for Greil and Elena carrying the torch from the heron Lillia and passing it on to Ike, there would be no story. The shadow of Greil’s legacy and Ike’s attempt to measure up to it informs Ike’s interactions with a number of key characters, such as Caineghis, Ashnard, and the Black Knight, to name a few. But perhaps the most poignant thing about Greil is his thematic significance to the story. As the greatest fighter of his generation Greil embodies Ashnard’s ideal of the strong rising to the top, but he eventually rejects his own strength by slashing the tendons of his sword hand to ensure the safety of his remaining loved ones. He also figuratively accomplishes the same thing by abandoning his former prestige and refusing high-paying jobs in favor of using his strength to defend those who need it most. His life is the story’s ultimate antithesis to Ashnard’s Social Darwinism, and also stands in juxtaposition with the Black Knight’s hollow need to prove his own strength.

Jeralt on the other hand, holds none of this depth. We never really get to see him bond with Byleth, and in fact Byleth is such a non character that we don’t even really get a sense of what their relationship was, or how the loss impacted him other than by briefly making him sad. Byleth doesn’t have a character to arc, and there’s not really any narrative about him having to follow in Jeralt’s shoes or live up to his reputation. Despite having way more screen time than Greil, nothing much is being done with it.

From a plot perspective one might argue that Jeralt does have some importance, but his role is a bit janky if you ask me. He fakes his own death and flees the monastery in dramatic fashion, presumably to protect Byleth from Rhea’s influence. Then, years later, he arbitrarily decides to bring them both back to the monastery for no discernable reason other than that he happened to bump into Alois. He makes his return to the monastery providing absolutely no explanation for his disappearance and from then on simply does his job right up until his death with absolutely no ramifications on anything else that is happening in the story.

The endgame to all of this ‘build up’, if you can call it that, is to have Jeralt be killed by a character who seemingly only exists to perform this one task, prompting Byleth to pursue her into Solon’s trap. This event is admittedly significant because it reveals that Solon and his compatriots have some awareness of Byleth’s true nature, and that they require him to be out of the picture in order for their plans to unfold. Except, none of that really goes anywhere. None of the other OWSITD seem to have any specific designs in mind for Byleth after this point, and we never truly learn a damn thing about Solon’s plan or what the hell he was up to in Remire village, or even what he needed Flayn’s blood for.

The other character that gave me a similar impression was our local cosplay enthusiast, the Death Knight.

Can we talk for a second about why the Black Knight was so cool in Path of Radiance? He was cool because he had this quiet confidence about him, and he could back it up. He was an enigmatic juggernaut that never boasted or bragged. He merely went about his business, almost always appearing when the player least expected it, like the sudden rumble of thunder on a clear day. Even his helmet is practically featureless, giving no hint as to either his expression or his intention. Attempting to take on the Black Knight in his earlier appearances is a literal impossibility. Even a 20/20 version of Ike will need a little luck on his side to defeat the Black Knight in his final appearance of the game, but the fact that Ike can even trade blows with him is a satisfyingly explicit way of demonstrating the player’s progress. The Black Knight represents a plateau in the world of Tellius. He is the most powerful fighter alive, and his stats remain static throughout the game. This fact gives a tangible sense of how huge the gulf is between the Black Knight and everything from an average bandit, to a trained soldier, to a respected general.

In Three Houses we have no such consistency in power scaling. The Death Knight is always a little stronger than the mooks around him, and he has an annoying skill, but we really have no sense of how he stacks up against others in-setting. He feels much more like a neighbourhood bully than he does the apotheosis of martial prowess. He simply shows up, talks the kind of shit one might expect from the love-child of a thirteen year old on Xbox live and a Mass Effect 1 NPC, stands around doing nothing, and usually gets himself spanked.

But all of this is just gameplay integration. What is truly disappointing about the Death Knight is that there is no real character behind the mask. He’s really nothing more than a Saturday morning cartoon villain. What is his relationship to his master Edelgard? Does he care about her vision, or know anything about what TOWSITD are up to? Why does he even wear the mask after leaving the monastery? With the Black Knight this actually made sense, as he led a second life as a prominent social figure, and it was also a useful way of obscuring the agelessness of his body. He was also an extremely central plot figure, playing a key role in Ashnard’s designs, Sephiran’s schemes, Begnion’s politics, and Ike’s family history. Plus, he served as an interesting thematic contrast to the teachings Greil instilled in Ike. Greil was the previous ‘strongest man alive’ to the Black Knight, but ultimately saw the perils of having too much strength, choosing to sacrifice his fighting ability in order to ensure the safety of his loved ones. In the Black Knight’s eyes, however, this sort of choice is simply not an option. Due to his mixed blood and his ageless body, every relationship Zelgius had ever had became transient. Every friend either died, abandoned him, or was left behind so that Zelgius could continue to hide his mixed-race genetics. The only thing that remained a constant in his life was the drive toward strength and self improvement, to the point that Zelgius ultimately became exactly what the Black Knight appeared to be, nothing more than a hollow suit of armor, nothing more than a hunger for the fight. Once Zelgius became the ultimate warrior, there was simply nothing else left in his life but to ambivalently serve the machinations of others. This only began to change when Ike entered onto the scene, the son and student of the only man that could yet provide him with a challenge.

I realize I’ve gone way off track here in praising the Black Knight when I’m supposed to be talking about Three Houses, but that’s kind of what I’m getting at. There isn’t anything to talk about when it comes to the Death Knight. If you’re lucky you might find out that he’s actually Mercedes brother, but even that does nothing to describe his character. What does he even contribute to the plot? I suppose we need someone to infiltrate the monastery and get some of Flayn’s blood for…. Some reason… You know what, this actually leads me into the next topic that I’d like to discuss.

The Subtlety Argument

One somewhat divisive concern with Three Houses has to do with the obfuscation of plot information, particularly where it concerns what the bad guys are up to the entire game. Some fans have praised the fact that the game makes you work to understand what is happening, while others, myself included, still feel quite puzzled and unfulfilled when it comes to certain events. So, I thought I’d take a moment to go over some key events that occur in Part One to see if I can puzzle out what the heck is going on, then give my take on how well this ‘subtle’ approach to storytelling actually works. Given the fractured nature of the larger story, I have little doubt that I will have missed some details, so please correct me if I screw any up.

The first event of note would be the bandit attack in the prologue. Jeralt has a curious line after Byleth uses divine pulse to survive the bandit’s axe. “Did you just…”. I suppose it could mean any number of things, but in the moment it almost seems to bait that Jeralt noticed something had happened there, yet it never comes up again or goes anywhere. In any case, as far as I can tell there are three possibilities as to why the bandit attack occurred.

1)Edelgard genuinely wanted to assassinate Claude and Dmitri.

2)The attack was a ploy to lure Byleth to the monastery as a potential asset

3) The attack was a ploy to frighten off the would-be professor that ran off and replace him with Jeritza.

Were the developers going for one of these interpretations? I honestly don’t know. I wouldn’t say I’m fully satisfied with any of them.

The first option seems unlikely, considering that there are no further attempts to assassinate them later on, and no evidence to suggest that avenue was being explored. Furthermore, Edelgard can’t actually expect this attack to work, because for the bandits to be successful enough to kill Claude and Dmitri, it’s just as likely for her to be killed as well. Not to mention that she didn’t even tell the bandits that the knights were around. Then again, if Claude hadn’t made his strategic retreat who knows what might have happened.

The second option isn’t particularly appealing either, as there is no reason at all for Edelgard to assume Jeralt would wish to return to the monastery simply because he crossed paths with Alois. If anything, several lines seem to suggest that Edelgard wasn’t aware of Byleth’s true nature this early on.

The third option seems the most likely to be the intended interpretation, as we see the Flame Emperor’s frustration over Rhea choosing Byleth as the new professor, and it would give Jeritza some reason for actually being there. It also makes sense that Edelgard would want to surround herself with as many people who are directly loyal to her as possible, in order to insulate herself from the control of TOWSITD. Caspar even suggests that Jeritza would have been the expected man to get the job. The only issue I have with this interpretation is that it doesn’t really seem to matter that Jeritza didn’t get the job. He’s still on the faculty, and if anything has more free time to pursue whatever it is he’s there to do. It takes some ifs and assumptions to come to this conclusion, and I still don’t really see the point of this ploy, but for the moment this option makes the most sense to me, even if I’m not particularly confident in it.

Next up we have the incident with the Western church. Taken at face value it would seem that the bad guys have manipulated Lonato and the Western Church into moving against Rhea for the sole purpose of indirectly delivering an assassination threat against her. This clears the way for a group of insurgents to instead target the mausoleum and steal the Sword of the Creator. This explanation leaves me with a bevy of questions however. How in the world did the bad guys convince Lonato to initiate such a futile rebellion? He must have known it would be suicide. What assurances could possibly have been given to the churchmen? They seem rather shocked when Rhea demanded their execution, almost as if they had expected some kind of immunity. When I watch this scene I can’t help but feel as if this were somehow an inside job. Rhea is clearly being painted in a mortally ambiguous light here, and I don’t understand what else the churchmen could have possibly expected. That Edelgard would step forward and vouch for them when they were inevitably caught? That seems a bit ridiculous. Furthermore, what was so crucial about the Sword of the Creator that the baddies intended to use it for? Edelgard is the only other person that might be able to use it, and even then not at full power. In the moment it feels almost as though there has to be more story coming to explain the Western Church incident, but it never materializes. The captured monks all claim to have nothing to do with the Western Church, and even suggest that Rhea has been offing priests for awhile, but again, none of this is ever revisited. It’s a smokescreen based on nothing but the writers desire to portray Rhea in a morally ambiguous light.

Upon revisiting the chapter it struck me as odd that the insurgents were surprised by what they found in the tomb. Did they expect the remains of Seiros? Do the Agarthans actually not know that the thousand year old lady running the church is Seiros? How she’s managed to maintain this title without drawing any questions is a rather unexplored plot point. Arundel afterward mentions that “The archbishop lives.” He isn’t surprised, but the line seems to suggest he actually believed the assassination was a potential objective, which seems a little at odds with them later choosing to keep her alive. It is also not until this conversation that Edelgard loans the Death Knight to the Agarthans. Does this imply that whatever the bad guys expected to find in the tomb, they were doing it on Edelgard’s directive more so than the OWSITD? It’s hard to say. Arundel is obviously aware of the mission, but doesn’t bother to tell them that Seiros isn’t in there. It also begs the question of what they would even do with the remains. Up until this mission there is no reason for them to suspect Byleth’s true nature, so it can’t be for Solon’s ritual. Was it all just for the sake of creating one more hero’s relic? It seems like there would be easier ways to obtain one.

Next up we have the kidnapping of Flayn. Presumably this act is crucial to whatever the bad guys are planning, as it requires Jeritza to expose himself and lose his value as an inside man. But why? Is Flayn’s blood special in a way that Rhea and Seteth’s is not, or was she simply the easier target? What do they even use the blood for? Something to do with Remire? Does it help them to create more demonic beasts to bolster their army? We do see priests infused with Rhea’s blood transform in the final chapter of the Church Route when Rhea herself went mad, implying that there is still some link between they and her. This doesn’t really seem the case with Flayn though, as she remains cheerful, enthusiastic and fully in control. Jeralt is the only other character we know of who has for sure had a blood transfusion, and in his case it both healed him and prolonged his life. Could that be what they need the blood for? To prolong their own lives? That would explain why Rhea is merely kidnapped rather than killed, although it would not explain how they’ve gotten by for all these centuries, or why it is only now that they’ve chosen to resurface. It also would not explain why rumours of people going missing around the monastery run rampant, or why the original Monica was kidnapped a full year ago. Is any crest blood good enough? As for the Demonic Beast theory, the only way we know of to create them is through the use of crest stones. Are the artificial crest stones created by crest blood infusions? At the end of the day this is all pure speculation with little text-support. On the Golden Deer route we do eventually learn that the Agarthans used the murdered children of the Goddess to ‘make themselves stronger’, presumably by harnessing their blood, but what exactly this enables them to do and whether or not they had a specific intention with Flayn’s blood is unclear. Perhaps she was intended to be sacrificed in place of Monica? I could buy that.

The other objective here is to insert Kronya as the new inside agent, a topic which we will return to shortly. For now, the next event of note is the Remire incident. Solon claims that he could have used any village for this test, implying that he chose this one specifically to enrage Byleth and/or Jeralt. This begs two new questions. Why would they seek to provoke Byleth against them, and if that was their intent then does the test itself have any further significance to the plot?

In answer to the first question, some have speculated that the baddies wished to drive a wedge between Byleth and Edelgard. She certainly doesn’t seem to approve of their actions here, but it still doesn’t make a ton of sense to me. Outside of Edelgard’s route and the prologue she doesn’t make much of an attempt to recruit or befriend Byleth. It’s not as if anything about this incident specifically implicates the Flame Emperor, either. You probably wouldn’t even draw the connection if she didn’t take it upon herself to make an appearance in the aftermath. A more likely explanation is that they simply wanted to provoke Byleth into charging into Solon’s eventual trap. Or, perhaps Jeralt’s investigations have brought him close to discovering something about the baddies, and so they’ve chosen to make him hurt for it. Jeralt does have a curious line shortly before his death about needing to speak with Byleth about something important. I suppose it could simply be that Solon is attempting to sow enough chaos that Rhea is forced to scramble the Knights in search of them, leaving Byleth as the most suitable option to confront them when they reveal themselves in the Sealed Forest. This is what eventually happens, although the Remire incident itself feels like a somewhat disconnected catalyst for it, as the church doesn’t react until after Jeralt’s death a month later.

As for whether or not the actual experiment at Remire has any significance to the story, well, it’s tough to say. Jeralt vaguely suggests that the students later turning into demonic beasts is “like what happened in Remire”, but what this means is unclear. Was Remire a failed attempt to create demonic beasts, or something else? A mind control experiment perhaps? Some kind of magical bio-weapon potentially capable of wiping out humanity?

In any case, this brings us to Kronya’s little stunt turning students into demonic beasts. What this was meant to accomplish is unclear. It obviously works out to be the plot leverage that gets Byleth charging into Solon’s trap, and yet Kronya complains to Jeralt that he ‘ruined’ her plan before killing him. Was that a lie, or did she actually expect to take the monastery with so few? If anything you would think that such a tactic would’ve been better used in conjunction with the Empire’s assault on the monastery. Perhaps Kronya is simply an idiot, not realizing that Solon only expected the scheme to create more chaos. Naturally none of the recovered students are questioned on what they were doing there or about what had happened to their peers.

There’s an incredibly convenient moment after the mission in which the three teleporting baddies elect to have a meeting about their plans right in the monastery so that the good guys can stumble across them. Thales mentions that Edelgard was made into what she is using ‘the blood of the defiled beast’. Initially I assumed this was a bit of flippant world building in the manner of “You fought in the Clone Wars!?”, but after having played all four routes my guess is that this refers to the blood of Sothis which was stolen by Nemesis. I was originally sort of hoping that it was a reference to some sort of religion that the baddies observed, as that angle might have given them some sort of philosophical depth, but alas.

It is also somewhere around this point in the game that Blue Route Dmitri reveals his purpose in coming to the monastery: Revenge. I found this a tad strange, as it doesn’t seem to be until the Flame Emperor drops her dagger that he has reason to suspect Edelgard. I suppose he just assumed that the monastery was such a point of confluence in Fodlan that he was bound to stumble across some clue concerning his family’s murderers?

Finally, this leads us to the endgame of Solon’s scheming. The suffering at Remire, the death of Jeralt, all of it directs Byleth into Solon’s trap. So obviously it’s a pretty big deal for Byleth to be removed from concern, but why? Is he really that huge of an asset to the church? He doesn’t end up making that much of a difference when they do assault the monastery. I suppose they simply fear the return of the Progenitor God. That part of it makes sense. Why Edelgard is permitted to involve herself in killing Solon and foiling his scheme is a little strange though, considering Arundel’s dramatic reaction to her attacking Cornelia in Edelgard’s route.

The final event of note in Part One would be the reveal of the Flame Emperor’s true identity: Edelgard. Apparently stealing these crest stones to bolster their army of demonic beasts is a pretty big deal, considering that Edelgard waited until this specific moment to take action. This is the apparent justification for why Edelgard waited all year long before making her move, and why she couldn’t wait a moment longer to truly take the monastery by surprise. And yet, it feels kind of arbitrary. For one, it’s quite easily possible that she doesn’t recover any stones, despite claiming that she had fulfilled her objective before retreating. There’s also never really any pay off to it. We don’t hear of any sudden increase in the number of monsters running around, and there’s no suggestion that they helped to turn the tide or secure the win in the intervening five years. Did she have some other objective? Was this some last-ditch effort to sway the professor, despite having minimal interaction with him outside of her own route?

As you can see, most of these events require a fair amount of assumption, guesswork, and head cannon to sort out, and that’s not even getting into many smaller mysteries, like what Jeralt was up to all game, why the baddies are so obsessed with recreating Nemesis, why they didn’t simply release Nemesis himself to destroy Rhea, what the actual endgame of TOWSITD is, why Duscur had to happen, why Rhea created a culture that glorifies the 10 Elites and the Heroes Relics when she elsewhere expresses anger over people wielding the corpses of her brethren as weapons, why Byleth passed out that one time, whether or not Edelgard actually killed her mother, or if perhaps there was a previous Flame emperor, and much more. So, to return to our original question, am I grateful that the game has required me to sit down and put some work in in order to understand the basic logistics of the plot, even after having played the game several times over? Frankly, no.

To be clear, the last thing I want to suggest is that there is no room for subtlety in writing, or that companies should feel the need to dumb down their scripts to reel in the lowest common denominator audience members. No, Fuck that idea and shoot it into outer space. In writing there is, of course, an exception to every rule, but generally speaking I think that when it comes to basic plot information necessary to understand what’s even happening, it just isn’t the right place for subtlety. Not unless you’re doing something really experimental.

As an unfair comparison off the top of my head, one example of subtle writing that I do appreciate is the way George R. R. Martin hides a lot of foreshadowing in parallel narratives. If you can figure out which pieces of the story echo each other then you will often find that one of them contains a key piece of information that can inform the other. An easy example to point to would be the way in which the confrontation between Ned and Jaime in Book One parallels Ned’s tower of joy fever dream in the subsequent chapter. In both cases three men are confronted in front of a structure by a larger party that has come demanding the return of a kidnapped sibling whose capture triggered a war. The smaller party is uncooperative, a fight ensues, and the smaller party is defeated. The key difference is that in the fever dream the contents of the tower are a mystery, but in the confrontation between Ned and Jaime we know exactly who’s being hidden inside the building: a baby with Royal blood in its veins.

It’s not much of a hint, but when readers only had the first book available to them it was one of the first big clues to the infamous R+L=J theory. Martin does this kind of thing a lot, which obscures the foreshadowing even more, as the reader is never quite sure which parallels are real, which are red herrings, and which you’ve simply talked yourself into seeing.

Now, I know what you’re probably thinking. “Bum, you’re doing it again. Another long, self indulgent ramble that has barely anything to do with the subject at hand.” Fair enough, fair enough, I’ll get to the point. The reason I brought up this specific example is to showcase how subtlety in writing can be both a boon and a bane depending on the situation in which it is deployed.

In the Martin example it doesn’t matter if you miss the clue because it has nothing to do with anything that is currently happening in the plot. Missing it doesn’t add any confusion, or leave you waiting for an explanation that never comes.

If, on the other hand, you do manage to read between the lines, the implications are huge. It is a surprising and exciting payoff for having been paying attention.

In the Three Houses examples the work exists, but the payoff does not. Even if I felt totally confident in my conclusions, at best my reaction is “Oh. Yeah, I guess that makes sense.” It’s just plot information that the writers have arbitrarily obscured. To less interested players it will simply look like a confused mess.

To be clear I’m not saying that information should always be delivered up front. Mysteries and plot twists can obviously be very effective narrative tools. All I’m saying is that if it has to do with plot logistics then it should at least be addressed at some point. Generally speaking.

World Building

I do have one quick thought on the world building, which is to say that I generally agree with the pleasantly surprised response most players seem to have greeted it with. It certainly feels like a very solid step in the right direction when compared to the 3DS era games.

At the same time, I don’t feel like we ever really got to see the world that is being described to us. Despite the unprecedented extent to which the player can explore the local environment around their HQ, I felt a strange claustrophobia when it came to the rest of the world. In most Fire Emblem games the party slowly travels around the world en route to their goal, and each area the player passes through has a bit of a local flavour, sometimes even sporting their own local cast of secondary characters. In Three Houses we do technically jet around the map to most significant areas of Fodlan, but we’re only ever there to have a quick battle and GTFO. We technically get to see places like Embar and Phirdiad, but the maps don’t have any real sense of place. They’re just generic urban layouts. Really the only map I can think if in the entire game that had a bit of a unique aesthetic was Derdriu. The rest of the time we only get bland, often recycled forests and mountains, with the token volcanic map thrown in for good measure.

Theming

Themes are a bit of a slippery thing, in that you can often interpret just about any theme from a work if you try hard enough. Still, I find that just about every Fire Emblem game I’ve played appears, at least in my eyes, to have one particular preoccupation that permeates the experience. FE7 has a preoccupation with power and the inverse relationship it seems to hold with basic human nature. FE8 focuses on the danger of desire. The Tellius games obviously spend a lot of time focusing on various social and class based inequalities, as well as harboring a rejection of extremism of any kind in favor of balance. Even less well written games like Awakening and Fates have pretty clear themes. Awakening is all about the power of friendship and the rejection of destiny, and Fates was obviously trying to raise questions about the nature of family, as well as the weightiness of choice and consequence.

In the case of Three Houses though, I’m not sure if there is a single overarching theme, or if there is I haven’t quite figured out what it’s trying to say yet. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing mind you. Plenty of written works focus on more modular storylines which explore diverse themes. It’s quite common in television, for example. You could also look to Mass Effect 2 for a more video gamey comparable.

But what themes do exist in Three Houses? When I first paused to ask myself this question I had only recently finished my first playthrough of the game as the Blue Lions, and had started into my next one with the Black Eagles.

The first possibility that sprang to mind with the limited perspective that I held at the time, was to hone in on the ideological conflict incited by Edelgard. Her stance appears to be that the Crest-based system of nobility is oppressive, and that the teachings of the church make people weak. Her goal then is to upset this state of affairs by any means necessary, and instill a culture that rewards those for their strength and ambition.

Dmitri, once he’s bounced back from rock bottom, takes issue with the ‘by any means necessary’ part of Edelgard’s approach, and understands that the culture she would instill will fail to actually make people stronger, but rather will punish those who aren’t strong. It is a system built by the strong, for the strong. Dmitri instead seems to be of the opinion that strong authority figures such as an accountable noble class, a benevolent king, and a stable church can provide a more balanced system that more or less works for everybody. In this circumstance the strong are dedicated to looking out for the weak rather than pursuing their own interests. At least in theory.

The thing that held me back from dubbing this discussion an overarching theme, however, is that it doesn’t really seem to permeate the experience as a whole. Sure, Edelgard spends a lot of time talking about the injustice of it all, and Dmitri had a nice rebuttal that one time. Yet, we never actually get to see any of it in practice. I can only really think of a handful of support conversations in which characters tell us about family-drama that resulted from their having a crest, and that really only covers isolated instances among the top percentile of society. I can buy that Edelgard would have this motivation based on the abuses she suffered, and it makes sense that Dmitri would better appreciate the perspective of the weak considering that he was only able to pull himself together through the support of others, but we never truly get to explore the world and gain any kind of an impression of what life is like for the average Joe in Fodlan, much less understand how their quality of life might vary depending on which specific nation they happen to live in. As much as any other North American release, this is a game about people who are elite in some way, whether it be through wealth, talent, or birthright, and it is this narrow perspective of the setting that makes Edelgard’s perspective feel smaller and more difficult to empathize with than it should. Her position is made to seem less justified by virtue of the fact that we don’t exactly know that what she’s doing feels necessary, let alone in the brutal manner in which she executes it.

Claude’s vision for the future of Fodlan doesn’t particularly seem like a response to what the other Lords are pushing for. He’s kinda just doing his own thing, and it’s framed in a largely optimistic light. He might be less confrontational with the church, but in practice he’s basically accomplishing the same thing as Edelgard without having to ever be the bad guy, and he’s the only lord with an eye toward changing Fodlan’s foreign policies for the better. Like the Golden Deer route itself, it feels too complete and optimistic to complement the other narratives. It simply comes off as being the ‘best’ approach in a story that isn’t supposed to be structured that way. Taken on it’s own it might tell the most satisfying version of the story, but I’m not sure how well it fits into the broader narrative of the game, if there even is one.

When I step back and wonder what the narrative as a whole is trying to communicate, I’m honestly a little uncertain as to what conclusions I should come to.

It does a good job of portraying the fact that war is terrible irrespective of whether or not you believe in the cause. Does this mean it’s trying to say that there is no such thing as a just war? I mean, that sort of depends on what route you’re on, and even if that were what the game was trying to say, I think that’s a pretty ‘first world’ perspective.

Is the game attempting to argue that there is no truth, only perspective? One could infer that from the way the game is structured, but it doesn’t seem a very deliberate theme as there isn’t much in the way of text-support.

There are some very deft portrayals of characters struggling with trauma and coping with the psychological issues that have arisen from it, but again, I’m not entirely certain what the narrative is trying to say on the subject. Are these people made stronger by their traumas, or are they weakened by them? Are they able to overcome them through the bonds they make with others? When I play Edelgard’s route through to its conclusion, am I meant to think that her PTSD was ultimately a good thing for Fodlan? The answer to these questions seems to depend on the situation, rather than supporting any unified narrative direction.

Three Houses deserves praise for some of the subject matter which it depicts, but depicting something is not the same thing as wielding that depiction in a way that drives the narrative. To me, Three Houses feels like a story that is far more interested in trying to do something interesting with its plot structure than it is with its narrative, and I wouldn’t even say that I particularly love what it does with its plotting. Like I said, themes can be a pretty slippery thing, and I’m sure an argument could easily be made that other entries in the series are just as thematically inconcise. The subjective nature of how we are each impacted by themes has sometimes brought into question whether something so abstract can even be measured in any sort of objective fashion, so I’m certainly not docking the game big for how I happen to feel on the subject, I’m only attempting to explain where I’m at with it.

To me personally, I’m a bit less interested in Three Houses’ story for its emphasis on plot over theme. Plot is all about the machinery of storytelling, the craft of it. Certainly a story will fall apart without strong plotting and continuity, and I have plenty of admiration for writers talented enough to unfurl their plot in unique and effective ways, but ultimately, in my eyes at least, theme is kinda why stories even exist. Stories are a way to articulate certain wisdoms, lessons, and truths that might be difficult to communicate through language alone.

As an example, how does a man go about teaching his son about honour, or how to be a good person? I suppose you could berate him every time he behaves in a manner you disapprove of, slowly funneling him in the direction of your choosing over the course of years. But why do that when you can instead fill his head with heroes that embody the values you wish to impart? Give him a reason to feel good about behaving well, and role models that he might enthusiastically strive toward.

Generally speaking, people don’t learn all that well through esoteric lectures, they learn though experiences. Stories are an elaborate way of creating experiences for other people, so that we can communicate the lessons which we have already learned.

Of course, none of this is to say that nothing of value can be taken away from a story that lacks deliberate theming. Usually that just means you’re taking inspiration from a smaller component of a written work rather than from the impact of the story as a whole.

In typical fashion, I’ve likely gone a road too far in simply trying to say that Three Houses isn’t necessarily the kind of story that I jam to. You’ll have to forgive me for writing such a long piece, as I simply don’t have the time to write a short one.

Character Writing

I feel that I may be coming across more harshly toward the game than I mean to, and that’s probably due to the fact that I’ve been skirting around the subject of character writing. For many, character writing is head and shoulders above other aspects of the craft, and Three Houses excels in this area. All three lords have quickly leaped into the discussion for best in the series, very few recruitable characters come off as abrasive or purely memetic, and every route has at least a moment or two of poignant reflection as a result of character drama. I will say that my appreciation for the library of supports did taper off slightly as I progressed, but that is more indicative of how much I enjoyed the Blue Lions supports than how much I disliked the rest. Virtually every support conversation is at minimum loaded with characterization, some are genuinely funny, and some cover interesting subject matter. My only real complaints of the support system would be:

1) That there is a tendency for support conversations to unlock in heaps rather than being drip fed at a more rhythmic pace. For me this sometimes dulls their impact and fuzzes them together in my memory.

2) Certain characters seem to develop along a similar growth trajectory in several different support paths, which can feel a tad weird. For example, Ignatz has a number of different interactions that push him toward embracing his passion for painting, so after awhile they can feel vaguely redundant. It’s a pretty small issue, and it has certainly existed in some of the other games as well.

3)This is along the same lines as #2, but a good chunk of A rank support conversations are explicitly romantic, sometimes even discussing the potential for marriage. It’s a little strange to watch the same character go through multiple of these, and it is slightly annoying that the player has no clue which of these conversations could potentially negate a paired ending that was implied in a different support path.

Maybe this is an odd thing to single out, but I very much enjoyed the various possible death scenes for Edelgard and Dmitri. After having begun with the Blue Lions it was quite affecting to hear about Dmitri’s off screen death in the Golden Deer route in particular. The mental image of a once proud and idealistic prince reduced to little more than an animal, pointlessly rushing the enemy against all reason only to be impaled by countless spears and to die without any semblance of dignity, was very striking.

The execution of Edelgard on the church route was another good one. The way the professor just cuts her down mid-thought feels so cold, but that’s sort of the point. There is no such thing as a warm and fuzzy murder in the real world, and the game seems committed to driving that point home. On the whole I think of Three Houses as an eclectic mish mash of highs and lows. Some of the best writing in the series and some of the worst. It’s moments like these however, that remind me of the reach that those highs appear to be grasping for, and that there’s far more good than bad.

Overall, it is very much the characters that keep the story glued together in spite of the unorthodox structure of the plot.

In summation

I suppose what all this is meant to convey is that there isn’t any concise way to describe my attitude toward the writing of Three Houses. Certainly there’s plenty of good writing in Three Houses, but taken as a whole it is asymmetric and initially opaque, only to slowly reveal itself as being strung together by a cliché collection of tired Fire Emblem tropes. What I like about the story has everything to do with the character writing, and very little to do with the plot, though it is a clear step forward from Fates in practically every respect.

The supporting cast can go up against just about any other in the series, yet the protagonist and major antagonists are a limp effort. Edelgard may be an exception to this, but that’s sort of like praising the villains of Radiant Dawn because you like Micaiah.

I suppose the big question is where I would put the story in relation to the rest of the series. I’ve yet to play Geneology or Thracia (I know), but I would say that at least Path of Radiance still trumps it in my mind, though even that is perhaps subjective. Path is a very traditional story executed extremely well, whereas Three Houses attempts to be a little more fresh and original, if a bit unorthodox. The difficulty for me is that it doesn’t really succeed in the originality department. The set up is full of promise, and elevated my initial opinion of the story, but as the mystery begins to fade it reveals itself to be pretty typical Fire Emblem shlock. Overall it’s probably somewhere in the mix of games below Path.

Radiant Dawn is an interesting comparable, as Three Houses is more successful at delivering on the idea of a morally grey conflict with friends and good people on either side, and it also does a far better job with character writing, even if Radiant Dawn somewhat gets away with it due to the large number of returning characters. Still, I’m not sure that I don’t find myself enjoying Radiant Dawn as a package more than I’ve been enjoying Three Houses’ writing. Even if it does the things I’ve mentioned a bit worse, the setting is richer, the scale more epic, and the villains more worthwhile. I also really love the ‘military documentary’ vibe of the interludes, as they add a real feeling of continuity and consequence to the events of each battle.

I would give Three Houses’ writing the edge over Shadows of Valentia, as I feel their strengths and weaknesses are similar, but the highs are a bit higher in Three Houses.

I’m struggling a bit in comparing Three Houses to the GBA games as they’re just so different. It’s certainly more dramatic and bleak than the GBA games, and the supporting cast gets significantly more exposure, though that doesn’t necessarily make them better. Dmitri and Edelgard are certainly more interesting ‘lead’ characters than Ephraim, Eirika, and Roy, though I would at least put Eliwood and Hector in the same conversation. On the other hand, the GBA games have more compelling Big Bads and don’t have to deal with the baggage of a player insert protagonist. Their plots are more straightforward, but don’t feel as tired or trite as Three Houses’ redux of the all-important player insert and one-dimensional cartoon villains.

As I said in the beginning, I have been loving Three Houses, but I don’t necessarily love everything about the writing. Ignoring that it feels like an improvement over some of the more recent games in the franchise, I’d still call it qualitatively average for the series. At times it feels fresh and distinct, and at others it feels like a pure distillation of the series’ least interesting tropes. I’m glad that it exists, but I still feel that the series has another step left to take in the writing department.

I wasn’t planning on doing this, but considering how entrenched I am in the game, I think I’ll be writing a proper gameplay analysis of Three Houses next.





