Current Events > Ngl, Fire Emblem 3 Houses is even better than what I thought it'd be (minor spo)

(+) Yeah! (+)

It's just basically the perfect FE.

Storytelling wise, amazing supports that are more about like budding friendship or dealing with 2 character's pre-existing friendship. The conflicts per months actually involve more than just the main characters, like sometimes some lord somewhere raises a conflict and you gotta kill him, but you've heard of the lord before because he happens to be the adoptive father of one of the students. You see the aftermath of what happened by talking to that student before and after, like a student grieves about the events that occur for basically 2 whole months.

Also they just set up a lot of mysteries. I'm on the Golden Deer path, and I feel like it's one of the better paths to start with, because Claude has grown up away from all the inner workings of Fodlan and only has been an heir for like a year. So you go through with the process of trying to figure out wtf is going on with the church bh the scenes or what's the root of all the conflict alongside with him. He's a schemer, but you can always see the level of effort he puts into trying to stay a step ahead of all the conflict. But of course you realize this because so many people and things in the story are obviously hiding something. Everybody always says odd things that mean something else behind the scenes, or a character's origins are often unexplained and left implied to be important to the whole story, or the divine weapons or the crests doing things that aren't recorded in history books. I'm so engrossed by the mysteries of that world and how the peace is gonna just all turn to shit near the end. They leave very subtle hints here and there as to what could happen but it's really hard to tell where or how far the story is gonna go. It's just amazing.

Gameplay wise, you're basically playing as a professor at Hogwarts lmfao. The monastery just feels so freaking alive. Every month, you sorta feel like so much has changed. People sorta go from complete strangers to actually feeling like they've been at the school for a while. A lot of quirky characters lead the scenes, so sometimes you get things like a goofy fishing tournament that happened because the sister of an overprotective higher-up in the monastery off-handedly says she wanted to eat a specific type of fish. You can also go to the library and see what is basically a doctored history behind the world, to which later on you find out certain details are conveniently left out. You basically have like 5 different ways to raise your relationships with the people in your army outside of battles. You can help them out with their problems based on their personality, have a tea party with them and discuss their favorite subject, gift them something they would like, find missing items for them, specifically tutor them so they become really good at certain things.

In terms of raising their combat abilities within the cathedral, you basically create your own class in this game. Only select classes can use magic, which can suck (you can theoretically use your base class once you mastered a certain class but I think what class you choose affects your growth rates and bases?). But all it means is that you don't get to use a crazy unit on a horse that kills everything from the get-go. Otherwise you can have a horse unit that uses every weapon type in the game (except gauntlet on a horse I think?). You can have a guy mainly use swords and sword related skill, but you can raise their lance and horse stats on the side and just put him on a horse. He will just use swords on horses

I'm running out of space but I'm fucking not done gushing about the game. I'm like working atm lul so might take a while til my next gush (been minimizing the screen)
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You assign battalions to people that become this amazing AOE move that does a ton of damage and prevents counterattack. Some of these attacks create field effects, like burning woods or poison tiles. Some of them are buff based, like an amazing one that increases move by 5 (which is broken). Enemies use these attacks too, which are just devastating once they hit you. A flier might come out of nowhere and just AOE stun your entire team, so being globally aware of the map is even more important than ever. These battalions also level up (only up to max lvl 5 for now?) and give you residual stat buffs like might or hit/dodge. There's a defense map for a paralogue though, where there are enemies rushing from 3 sides with many of them having battalions. You really realize the extent of their power when it's being used to great effect against you lol.

You have these combat arts that are basically combat arts in Echoes but perfected. They don't double enemies like in Echoes and use weapon durability instead of HP. But weapon durability is often not the biggest deal as you get ample money to repair them, and the weaker weapons have pretty high durability. It's just the best way to get that extra bit of damage and accuracy that you need to kill an enemy, and they're not always a better option than just simply attacking. They also give a better way for characters with low speed and high attack to just kill things in a single shot.

You also get 5 passive slots like in the first 2 FEs, but skills like lancebreaker etc or seal attack etc are far more easier to come by in exchange for global weapon triangle being gone. But wep triangle has always been a flawed mechanic in FE. In the GBA games, it made swords undeniably the weakest weapon type despite having the best weapons because axe enemies were so weak, and most lance users also used either an axe or a sword. In Fates, it created dumb situations where you'd have chokepoints that expected you to face all 3 sides of the triangle with a single unit. Also the stat bonuses are pretty weak early on in the weapon ranks, and you learn the breaker skills a lot faster in this game than the bonuses would give you the same effect. Breakers do + 20 hit/avoid, which yeah the weapon triangle in other games give you 1-3 might but it takes a while til you get more than 1 and up to 20 hit/avoid. So I don't miss it. Plus, a lot of classes require lances later so that would've made for axe being op because their stats are good. Other skills are also more balanced, like increasing general hit/stats when wielding a certain type of wep. And of course, the thing that I was the most excited about, which is the movement based skills like in Heroes, like the legendary reposition which is better than just about any other movement skill.

Your magic also replenishes per battle. I think most of the lower level magic usage number is irrelevant. You usually never end up running out of any basic level magic even if you're soloing with a mage or something. However, the higher tier magic usage number becomes pretty quickly relevant. Some spells have ridiculous mt and crit rate, but maybe you can only use it 3 times per map. Spells with high range or status effects or movement effects will often also have very low use numbers so that despite being easily available, you'd still have to think carefully about when to use them. Like if a room was difficult and you needed to use silence, but you're aware that there are 2-3 rooms after where you can't reach a healer easily but he will be a big problem, you might hold off on using silence for a bit. Maps can get pretty big in this game so if you half-ass a mastery of magic type, you might run into some serious good magic shortage.

They really upped the risk vs reward factors in this game. But of course Mila's Gear is back so you can experiment without feeling like you gotta restart after a late game mistake
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okay but allow me to raise a very valid counterpoint

nah

Reis posted...

okay but allow me to raise a very valid counterpoint

nah

Lol I see you around a lot in these topics even long before its release. It's kinda creepy how you go into every single topic related to anime or games like FE and say it sucks and just disappear
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anime is the number one contributing factor to the degradation of the moral fabric in our great society, and it is my duty to combat this at every chance I can

what anime is that