Fire Emblem: Three Houses |OT2| Greetings, Era! Nothing to Report!

[Anteo]

I'm currently in chapter 8 or 9 (the one with the White Heron Cup, I already know that unlocks dancer), some random thoughts and questions after picking the game up again. Playing as Blue Lions.

Most of the units I use are already over level 20 and can already be promoted to advanced classes. Is it advisable to do so asap or do I need to master their intermediate class for any reason (abilities for example) ?

Who should I put Dancer on? 2 years ago when I started the game I remember reading I should recruit Dorothea and put the class on her, or Flayn. Is that still the way to go?

Byleth is a powerhouse but due to recruiting many units he dabbled in several jobs/weapons, is a master of none and doesn't qualify for any advanced class yet. That's probably a non issue in the long run, but still kind of funny to me.

I actually picked the game up again due to being hyped for Engage, but man running around the monastery doing all the social sim stuff gets tiring. Also there is so much stuff to keep track of in the game, from equipment to planning your party's class evolution, to recruiting etc... I quit the game the last time because of it.

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- It really depends, some skills are pretty nice like Death Blow (Brigand, great for any str class), Darting Blow (Pegasus Knight, amazing if you can pick it up), Watchful Eye (Archer, good for low accuracy characters, but it takes a detour), etc. For the most part you will want to upgrade asap.

- Dancer could go on anyone, in general they wont be doing combat so it doenst matter who gets it, it just matters that they have good healing/attacking spells they could learn on the side, but even then most of the time wont be used. Tbh, for me Dancer felt pretty useless as this game was really all about the enemy phase, so it was better to get a really strong unit that can kill 3 or 4 on the enemy's turn than have one of my units act twice. Once thing you can do is give dancer to a sword unit, as they will unlock sword avoid +10 from the class mastery, which they can use on their regular sword class.

- For Byleth swords is fine, there is no reason to choose anything else, if you know about the events later in the game maybe you can pick White Magic as thats part of their unique class along with swords, but you dont have to do it ahead of time.

- Please do not recruit too many untis unless you really really like the micro management. This is a fire emblem game, in three houses you get the option to "shop" around for units but they never give you more than 12 deployment slots (and 3 adjutants), meaning anything over that will probably require a lot of Monastery micro management to keep upgraded and will not see any combat regardless. Engage does something similar were it throws units at you and you will have to leave a lot of them behind or go crazy on how much upkeep they take. If you go for 15 to 18 units total, you will only need to do the monastery once a month/chapter, and use the rest for battle or just skip to the end of the month, which is much more manageable than having to do 4 weeks of monastery busywork

 

[Haziqonfire]

I've been debating picking up Three Houses or Engage but I really can't decide where to start. I thought I'd ask here if anyone has played both? The last one I've played and enjoyed was Awakening on the 3DS. Three Houses' story looks really appealing to me but I've heard people talk negatively of the social elements.

 

[PBalfredo]

I've been debating picking up Three Houses or Engage but I really can't decide where to start. I thought I'd ask here if anyone has played both? The last one I've played and enjoyed was Awakening on the 3DS. Three Houses' story looks really appealing to me but I've heard people talk negatively of the social elements.

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If story has an appeal to you, that is Three Houses main strength, particularly the character writing. Engage's story is basically a lazy rehash of Awakening's, but without the emotional core of Chrom-Robin-Lucina and frontloaded with one dimensional characters. Both games have social elements, but Three Houses' are deeper and more core to character progression than Engage's which are more grindy.

Honestly when people say the social elements take too much time in Three Houses, I don't think they're actually referring to the social aspects. The bigger thing is that Three Houses is built on a calendar system where you have a set number of opportunities to socialize or fight in side battles/paralogues before the next story mission. This keeps the player from being able to grind forever, but also means if you want to just go directly to the next story mission, you're paying a bit of opportunity cost. So you're incentivized to maximize your activities between each story mission.

Engage has it's mission on a map, similar to Awakening, where you can either go directly to the next story mission or head off to a random encounter or paralogue at your whim.

 

[Anteo]

I've been debating picking up Three Houses or Engage but I really can't decide where to start. I thought I'd ask here if anyone has played both? The last one I've played and enjoyed was Awakening on the 3DS. Three Houses' story looks really appealing to me but I've heard people talk negatively of the social elements.

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I think some of the hate is overstated.

Part of it is that Three Houses uses a calendar system, and each chapter has 4 weeks with some activities like teaching the students happening 4 times a chapter. These are mandatory, and you are encouraged to keep their motivation maxed out so they can get more lessons in a given week.

In order to max out motivation, you have to get into the monastery on one of the weeks (which means you wont be doing side battles then) and do some stuff like have lunch with them. Thats not much of a problem (ymmv) because with low unit numbers you only need to do it once a chapter. However, this being Fire Emblem, they give you the opportunity to recruit a lot of units, and in TH this happens very early, so some players fill their party with 25+ units that now they feel obligated to maintain which requires more monastery busywork and they end up having 80% of gameplay being just the "social" stuff.

In case of Engage, it just throws the units and you instead of giving you potential FOMO, so most people realize its pointless to try to keep up all of their units updated and they just use their favorites like on most other FE games. The Somniel (hub, like the monastery) still has a lot of busywork which you do not want to miss (Arena, upgrades, the farm, picking up materials, taking care of Sommie) so it can be annoying, but at least you are not forced to do the teaching thing 4 times a chapter.

In terms of story, Three Houses has a way stronger world building, but the story is divided on 4 different routes and a DLC which all give piecemeal information, so some people hate that half of the mysteries are just not solved on whichever route they chose first. Doenst help that Three Hopes (spinoff) adds 3 more routes with more new info.

Engage story is more like a midpoint between Awakening and Fates, but the increased production values highlight how.. dumb.. some parts of it are. To me, the funnier parts do land well, but the rest.. ehhhh. Engage would be right at home on the 3ds next to Awakening and Fates imo.

Gameplay, TH has a lot of customization which can feel cool when you break the game and have this monster of a unit, while Engage actually just throws unfair stuff at you but gives you beyond broken tools to solve the problems, Engage gameplay has been the best part for me, its just amazing on how impossible some maps feel until you figure out a way to solve them, 10/10 on gameplay alone (hardest difficulty tho).

 

[jonjonaug]

I've been debating picking up Three Houses or Engage but I really can't decide where to start. I thought I'd ask here if anyone has played both? The last one I've played and enjoyed was Awakening on the 3DS. Three Houses' story looks really appealing to me but I've heard people talk negatively of the social elements.

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Depends on what you mean by "social elements". The characters and supports in Three Houses are some of the best in the series, but there is a fair amount of busywork involved in spending all your "daily life" points in each chapter. It can get particularly time consuming if you want to recruit every character possible to keep everyone from dying in the second part of the game and to see every possible support conversation. There's also more cutscenes between stages for a Fire Emblem game.

To compare: The first playthrough of Three Houses (which has four scenarios) takes around 50 hours. One playthrough of Engage (which has one scenario) takes around 40. But, IIRC, Engage has more stages to go through than a playthrough of Three Houses does.

Play Three Houses if you care about story/characters. Play Engage if you just want really good TRPG gameplay (Three Houses certainly doesn't have bad gameplay though).

 

[chrominance]

Finished Engage a few days ago, and wasn't really interested in playing more (I technically have a bunch of paralogues left to do) but kind of wanted more Fire Emblem. So back to Three Houses it is! I picked up my in-progress Blue Lions playthrough from chapter 3, and oh my god I don't remember how any of the monastery stuff works, holy crap. Also I bought the expansion pass since the last time I played the game, so now I have a ton more stuff floating around randomly (I haven't even touched the DLC stuff in my bedroom).

Relearning the intricacies of this game is going to be a bit of a process, though I think I figured out a bunch of it already. The biggest surprise to me is just how terrible everyone's hit rate is; I guess I got used to my ridiculously OP endgame characters in Engage but here it feels like half my team can't hit the broad side of a barn, with hit rates in the 50s and 60s. I did completely forget about the mechanic that improves hit/avo if there are nearby allies that can also attack your target, which is a neat change of pace, but even with three allies helping I almost never hit 100%. That, plus the lack of weapon triangle, will probably take some getting used to.

The second biggest surprise is the performance; Engage really does feel a lot snappier. One of those things I didn't really appreciate about Engage until I came back to Three Houses but the presentation just seems better all around in the more recent title. I wish I could backport the battle UI changes especially, not being able to see basic stats like def/res (or whatever they're called in 3H) at a glance is annoying.

I wonder if it would be better to start from scratch in something like Ryujinx, but I also don't really want to go through three extra chapters of monastery stuff and I'd probably miss the NG+ bonuses to stuff like professor level.

To compare: The first playthrough of Three Houses (which has four scenarios) takes around 50 hours. One playthrough of Engage (which has one scenario) takes around 40. But, IIRC, Engage has more stages to go through than a playthrough of Three Houses does.

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Damn, did I do something wrong? My playthrough of Crimson Flower took 90 hours, and that's supposed to be the shortest one if I remember correctly?

 

[jonjonaug]

Damn, did I do something wrong? My playthrough of Crimson Flower took 90 hours, and that's supposed to be the shortest one if I remember correctly?

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I'm just going off of howlongtobeat, it takes significantly longer if you grind out supports and do all the paralogues (around 75 hours for "Main+Extras" on that site).

 

[Anteo]

I did completely forget about the mechanic that improves hit/avo if there are nearby allies that can also attack your target, which is a neat change of pace, but even with three allies helping I almost never hit 100%. That, plus the lack of weapon triangle, will probably take some getting used to.

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Funny thing, engage has a similar mechanic, but its for the most part hidden from the player.

 

[chrominance]

Funny thing, engage has a similar mechanic, but its for the most part hidden from the player.

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Oh my god, you're right. I remember vaguely that Engage mentioned support bonuses in combat but I never thought about it at all after that. So yeah, basically hidden unless you specifically go looking for it. Though I guess Three Houses doesn't really tell you how much each additional person is improving your hit/avo so maybe it's actually about the same in the end, aside from the little graphic in the battle preview.

 

[kuroneko0509]

most of fire emblem games have this sort of bonus based on nearby allies support level, not just 3h and engage

 

[Poodlestrike]

Engage's story is basically a lazy rehash of Awakening's, but without the emotional core of Chrom-Robin-Lucina and frontloaded with one dimensional characters

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Ehhhhhhhhhhhhh

I think Awakening's cast was more one dimensional, personally. None of the core members in Engage are as bad as Valke, or Kellan, who is *literally* a non-character.

 

[Kenai]

Ehhhhhhhhhhhhh

I think Awakening's cast was more one dimensional, personally. None of the core members in Engage are as bad as Valke, or Kellan, who is *literally* a non-character.

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I've been saying this for a while. Outside of that one meme-worthy exchange between Owain and mMorgan, I definitely prefer the majority of the support stories in Engage. The writing still isn't exceptional or anything, but it's usually at least competent, with a few surprising twists from time to time.

 

[PBalfredo]

Ehhhhhhhhhhhhh

I think Awakening's cast was more one dimensional, personally. None of the core members in Engage are as bad as Valke, or Kellan, who is *literally* a non-character.

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That's not really the comparison I'm trying to make here. Even if some of the characters in Awakening are duds, you still have the relationship between Chrom, Robin and Lucina as the emotional foundation of the game, and that's enough to build a compelling story around. Meanwhile, what's the emotional core to Engage? Vayle? Dead mom? Marth.exe? None of Engage's overwrought and lengthy death scenes carries the emotional weight of the game nearly as well as Awakening's "You deserved better from me than one sword and world of troubles"

 

[Delphisage]

Is a talking self-insert better than a mute self-insert?

 

[PBalfredo]

The secret is that Byleth isn't actually a self-insert; they took the qualities of a self-insert (or in this case, Sothis-insert) and made a character out of that. Byleth is a weirdo and people react accordingly to their weirdness.

 

[Delphisage]

Byleth is a weirdo and people react accordingly to their weirdness.

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And then they treat them as a comfort space for their emotional tantrums and honor them as the messiah for doing so.

I don't want that in my anime.

 

[PBalfredo]

If anyone has any aversion to avatar worship, steer clear of Engage, where it goes from an exaggeration to literal text.

 

[Disclaimer]

I would so much rather have a silent avatar like Byleth than an Alear/Corrin-tier avatar. The saccharine niceness and subsequent worship is just nauseating.

(That said my ultimate preference would obviously be to nix avatars entirely and let us have lords as the real MCs again.)

 

[Rutger]

I wouldn't call Alear or Corrin self inserts tbh.
Robin probably.

Anyway, anyone hoping IS drops the avatars and they'll suddenly like the writing around the main character will not be happy with the result. The issues really have nothing to do with the avatar system, at this point all it is is a gender toggle.

 

[Kenai]

I wouldn't call Alear or Corrin self inserts tbh.
Robin probably.

Anyway, anyone hoping IS drops the avatars and they'll suddenly like the writing around the main character will not be happy with the result. The issues really have nothing to do with the avatar system, at this point all it is is a gender toggle.

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When Robin came out with different build/hair options and things like that I was kinda hoping they would continue to improve the character creator options, but yea. Nothing but gender toggles. If they are gonna keep very distinct character designs for the avatar with next to no customization going forward, I do hope they continue to work on their personalities. Nearly emotionless self-inserts/ones with no customization options (Byleth/Corrin) is the worst of both worlds imo. Engage gave them better personalities than their actual games did.