I have a very unique and weird relationship with the Fire Emblem series. I’ve never really cared much for the games at all in the past and yet here we are. In fact, last year in December I picked up my fifth Fire Emblem game but up until last month I still had very little experience with the games in general.

I did try to do a full playthrough of a Fire Emblem a while ago but unfortunately the game that I tried to play was Warriors and I subsequently gave up on the game maybe 30 minutes later because I absolutely hated the gameplay along with some of the story and characters.

Plus, it doesn’t really help that I don’t like strategy RPG’s at all either. I never really liked them in the past so I never bothered with them until recently. I even bought Disgaea 5 back in 2019 so I could get into the genre, but I still have yet to play it because I couldn’t get around to starting the new genre fully.

In fact, I didn’t even really want to buy Three Houses in the first place. Then only reason that I bought it to begin with was because of the sale that Gamestop has where if you buy a new game that costs $30 or more, you can get 30% off any pre owned game. Last September, I bought the new Tony Hawk game for PS4 and I thought it would be a waste to not use the 30% off coupon and let it expire.

At the time, I don’t think I had any interest in the game at all but a pre owned copy was on sale for a little less than $50 so with the discount I was able to grab it for $33 after tax. I thought that was a good deal and didn’t want the coupon to go to waste even though the cartridge went on to collect dust in my dresser for the next nine months since I didn’t really have any intentions of playing.

But as some people on vizzed might know, I had plans to do another big review going back to February and that month I began the process of finding the perfect game to review. But there was a small problem because I’ve already done so many reviews that there weren’t that many games left to review that I was insanely passionate about.

I made a list of a handful of games that I could mess with and did a few days worth of research on each one but none of them really clicked so I ended up putting this ambitious project of mine on the backburner and I eventually forgot about it for a while.

But a few weeks ago, I was told that I would not be eligible to do an internship for school over the summer which meant that other than my regular job, I would basically have the whole summer to myself and I thought that would be the perfect opportunity to sink hundreds of hours into gaming.

So I quickly began getting the itch to sink my teeth into another big blockbuster game that could steal hundreds of hours of my life away from me, which isn’t the kind of game that I play often. So I started doing some research again on what game I could play and this time I put Three Houses on the list, I actually considered thinking about maybe playing it.

But after looking into the game for a couple days and seeing what it had to offer, I really began to understand what the series was like and why it was so popular. All of the research that I did promised me a really good and detailed story, some great music, and a plethora of side activities and as a result, the game really began to jump out at me. In the end, I went against my general disdain for strategy RPG’s and I finally decided to give Three Houses a chance, and I wasn’t disappointed.

Three Houses ended up being one of the most difficult games that I have ever played, if not the most difficult, for a number of reasons. Not only is the game itself pretty hard at times, but I was 100 percent a newbie at strategy games and had no understanding of the mechanics. Now that I knew that I wanted to play this game, I had to do so much extra research just to get a basic understanding of how the game works.

Spoiler: Even though I’m past 100 hours now, I still find myself button mashing on the battlefield at times because it’s still a foreign concept to me and there’s still so much going on at once and so much to pay attention to.

Not only did I have to do a bunch of extra research to figure out how to play, I had to do a bunch just to figure out the game itself. I literally went and watched a 30 minute long Youtube video that broke down the three houses so I could better understand them and make a better educated pick instead of being like “Blue is best color”. I obviously knew that I could go back and play all of them, but I wasn’t THAT ambitious at the time.

All that stress and research that I did paid off in the end and I’m really glad that I eventually got into Three Houses but in retrospect I’m pretty disappointed that it took this long to try it out. Overall, strategy RPG’s still aren’t my thing and the Fire Emblem series as a whole still makes very little sense to me but there were so many aspects about Three Houses that really jumped out at me and made me fall in love with it. I bought the game a long time ago and was probably never going to play it but here we are talking about why it’s so great.

STORY: 10/10

It’s been a while since the last time that I played a game that had such a captivating and thrilling story. Many of the games that I play are mostly fun stories or epic adventures but the story here is way more powerful, dramatic, and emotional than many of the ones that I have played in the past and that’s something that I love about it.

Obviously, I don’t want to reveal too much to the point where you would know everything about the game and not want to play, but there’s still so much to tell you about when it comes to the story. When it comes to the first two or so hours of gameplay, there’s probably enough story content to fill up a conversation that would last for hours. So what’s the story about?

The game starts off with you taking control of a character named Byleth, who you can change the gender and name of before you start playing. You learn that Byleth is a mercenary, and you find out about a group of bandits who are harassing some teens. So after a few cutscenes and lots of dialogue, you help them defeat the bandits.

It turns out that the three you helped belong to an academy at the Garreg Mach Monastery, which itself has a whole ton of backstory that I probably wouldn’t even have the time to get into anyway. But something that you should know is that the three of them are each part of a royal family and lead a house of students at the Monastery. It also turns out that Byleth’s father Jeralt was a captain and led a group of knights there long ago but left.

The two of you are asked to visit the Monastery where you meet the Archbishop Rhea (Who is my favorite character). Jeralt is asked to return to the knights, and you are asked to become a professor and teach the students at the academy. That’s quite the jump from being a mercenary to randomly being appointed as a professor at such a prestigious place but apparently the person who was supposed to be the professor ran off after the bandit attack and you’re the only option.

It’s definitely a very silly MacGuffin, but eventually a lot more starts to make sense and a lot of backstory about Rhea, Jeralt, and Byleth becomes revealed and plays a major role in the story, even if it doesn’t entirely make too much sense at times. But nonetheless, you are now a professor, and you are expected to be a great one too, but no pressure.

This is where your first major decision of the game comes in. Your first task is to choose which of the three houses is the one that you want to teach. Just like when picking your starter Pokemon, you get first dibs and then the other two houses go to the two other professors.

When you’re playing the game for the first time, it might not seem like a big deal right away but your entire experience going forward will literally be changed at this moment when you make your pick. But that’s not something that you’re going to be thinking about during the first hour of your playthrough.

You’ll probably choose the house you teach based on which house leader you like the best, which house has the most characters that you like, or each houses overall stats, skills, and abilities. There’s nothing wrong with that, but from that point on, all of the story stuff is pretty much going to be locked.

The first half of the game is going to be the same for everyone though. No matter which house you pick, you’re going to be doing the same things until the middle of the game, but then the story will branch off into very different storylines based on which house you picked for the second half of the game.

That’s one of the reasons why so many people put hundreds of hours into the game too. You might beat the entire game with one houses and then you’ll feel the need to see what the story was for all the other houses so you’ll start over from scratch and pick a different house to see where that road takes you.

When it comes to the three houses, there’s just so much content and lore for each one. The game takes place in the land of Fodland, which is broken into three regions and each house is generally for people from each region. But through the game, the library, and each of the characters, you basically learn about the entire history of Fodland from when it was created until the present day.

That’s dedication. You learn about the history of each region, the people in power, the conflicts, and how all the students fit in. As a result, each house has hours of lore and backstory to comb through and each character has their own story that’s being told as the game progresses. There’s so much story to digest and much of it is top notch.

So what are the houses and characters like?

A Character A Day Keeps The Doctor Away

There are so many amazing characters split behind the three houses and beyond and they all have their own unique and entertaining backstories along with a ton of thrilling drama at times. The three houses are the Black Eagles, Blue Lions, and Golden Deer and by the time I had looked through all of the students in each house, I determined that the Black Eagles were my favorite while the Golden Deer were my least favorite, even though I thought their leader was rad.

I chose the Black Eagles because there were three characters that I ended up liking based on looking into them and they are Bernadetta, Dorothea, and Ferdinand, I think they’re all cool. All the students in this house come from the Adrestrian Empire, one of the three regions of the game world and their leader is Edelgard, who is also slated to become the rule. All the house leaders are technically.

One of the main focuses of the Black Eagles is the use of magic, which is another one of the reasons why I ended up choosing this house, you know, since magic is cool. This house as well as the empire both have a really good amount of backstory as well as drama spread out through the playthrough, especially in the second half of the game.

Then you have the Blue Lions. All of their students come from the kingdom of Faerghus and is led by Dimitri. I personally feel that Dimitri is one of the best and most well rounded characters in the whole game. He goes through an insane amount of character development by the end of the game depending on which route you take and many of the scenes that he’s in later on end up being super captivating.

The Blue Lions also have eight students but I only found Dimitri and Mercedes to be the ones that I liked and there weren’t even that many chances to interact with Dimitri near the beginning. I also found that this house can be a bit harder to battle with since you need to get up close and personal with close combat which leaves you vulnerable to counterattacks a swift loss of health.

Personally, this was my favorite route of the three because even though there weren’t as many thrilling or heartbreaking moments, there were lots of great character moments and some good emotional ones as well.

Lastly you have the Golden Deer, which is a weird one for me. Their leader is Claude, who comes from the Leicester Alliance as do all the other students and like the other two leaders, he’s a pretty big heir too. I really liked him and think that he’s a great character overall, but when it came to the other students, I just didn’t find any of the other characters to be all that interesting and just found the house to be pretty lackluster.

The Golden Deer is a lot like the Black Eagles in the sense that they tend not to get up close during battles because of their proficiency with bows and one thing about this house is that many of the students are commoners. Bows ended up becoming my weapon of choice throughout the game but I ended up not giving Golden Deer any though because IMO one of the best archers in the game was already in Black Eagles.

The coolest aspect of the house system is that you aren’t limited to just the students that are in your house. If you chose one house but your favorite character is in another house, you’re totally free to mix things up eventually, which is something that I did quite often in order to get the best possible team for many of my major battles.

This works by recruiting students from other houses. The only thing is that the character you want to recruit isn’t going to join your house unless you have a high enough rating level in a skill that applies to them. So for instance if you want to recruit someone who wants you to have a high sword skill but you don’t have a high one yet, you won’t be able to recruit them until you do.

But once these skills are all leveled up, recruiting them will be easy. Let’s say you are in the Black Eagles but you want to recruit Mercedes from the Blue Lions, then all you have to increase your Bow and Magic skills and then she might join you. But there’s also a bunch of other characters that can be recruited too so that they will fight with you such as the other professors and Seteth.

Recruiting students from other houses is also a great way to work on bringing up your support levels with them. Once you recruited them, you get the option to do lots of actions with them that would have only been available to students of the house you chose. It will also be much easier to see and grow support levels between two other characters when they’re both in the same house and support levels between two students is the best and most fun way to get character backstory.

There are two main reasons to increase your support ranks between you and a student or between two other students. The first is because of the support system itself which allows for a cool romance system along with some benefits, but I’ll get into those a little later on. The second reason is because of all the little interactions between the people who are supports and all the character development and backstory that you get out of them.

All you need is interaction. You can interact with the student that you want to increase the support with or you can make a scenario where two students interact with each other and their support with each other increases. I ended up spending so much time on this because I loved the little interactions along with the story.

For instance, I spent hours trying to create as many interactions with Bernadetta as I could. Eventually I increased all of her available support ranks with other students to rank C and each one came with a cutscene that was more than a minute long each that revealed so much about what her life was like and who she is. The interactions were sometimes silly or charming and I was able to learn so much.

This is a really cool system because there’s so many possible pairings to the point where you might just accidently stumble upon one halfway through the game that you didn’t know about but interested you anyway. This happened to me with Ferdinand and Dorothea. I was minding my own business when the C Support for them was unlocked and I learned that Dorothea hates Ferdinand.

It was so out of the blue and shocking to me because I had no idea why she would hate sweet little Ferdinand. It sort of had a soap opera vibe to it and I ended up slaving away for many hours pairing them with each other as much as I could until I got all their support ranks completed and the whole story between the two of them was finally revealed.

But that’s not all the characters have to offer, your relationship with them as a professor is a two way street. Just like how you rely on them to give you hours worth of backstory and content, all the students rely on you to increase their ranks and skills by being a good professor and teaching them. This is done by performing lectures, seminars, and of course by battling. This is where the gameplay comes in.

GAMEPLAY

When I first started playing Three Houses, I had no idea what I was doing at all. It was my first time ever fully investing in a strategy RPG and it was pretty hard, I even lost quite a bit at the start. If you don’t know what you’re doing, then this kind of game can be quite difficult, but the battle system is a pretty easy one to understand after you play a few battles.

It’s a turn based RPG but on a grid. Each character stands on a square and they can only move a little bit per turn. With nearly all other turn based RPG’s, it’s just an endless loop of you attacking the enemy and then the enemy attacking you back, but not in this game. In Three Houses, a character can only attack if they are really close to the enemy unless you’re using a long range weapon like a bow or magic.

This is where the strategy comes in because you really have to focus on everything that’s going on all at once. You need to be aware of your characters class, weapon, and abilities along with where they are on the battlefield. On top of that, you also have to worry about how the terrain will affect each person as well as how you take on each enemy.

But the enemy is going to be doing the same thing as well, and you have to pay attention to who you’re fighting, where they are, and what they’re doing. Battles can get very intense as a result and will require your full attention if you plan on winning because you’ll be actively planning, ambushing, or retreating on every turn. My first few battles took around 15 minutes but once I figured everything out, I knocked that down to five to eight minutes each.

But there were also some massive battles that took me 30 minutes or more to complete where I’d be super sweaty by the end. If you like puzzles, then the battle mechanics in Three Houses will end up being lots of fun. I quickly grew to like the battle system and gameplay mechanics but even after 100 hours of playing, there’s lots that I still don’t understand, and my allies still die often.

For instance, don’t even get me started on gameplay mechanics like gambits, because I won’t even pretend like I understand them. Another aspect of gameplay is leveling up the skills of your students so that they do better in battle. One way to level up that skill is by using that specific skill over and over in battle but another way is through the use of lectures.

Lectures can be fun and very helpful because they also increase support points in addition to skills. By resting, doing activities with students, or giving gifts, you can increase the motivation of each student. Each time that you do a lecture, a student that has no motivation won’t learn anything at all. But, if their motivation is maxed out, they will be able to be taught up to five times in a single session.

Each action will offer a certain amount of experience towards that skill. You won’t be able to do much early on though because the number of people that you can teach during each session is directly influenced by your professor level, but more on that later. If your level is high, you’ll be able to increase skill levels at a much quicker rate. You can also do group work between two students that will get you some rewards in addition to the increased skill levels.

But don’t get too attached to any specific gameplay element, especially if you do multiple playthroughs. That’s because your gameplay experience is going to change drastically based on a number of facts. For instance, the house and characters that you choose will affect gameplay, but so will the combination of weapons, classes, and abilities that you utilize.

For me, the story section is the best part of the game because it’s so well detailed, emotional, and engaging. This section gets a perfect 10 out of 10 from me but it’s just the tip of the iceberg because the game has so much more to offer.

DEPTH: 10/10

I absolutely love games that off you a ton of extra things to do and Three Houses is no exception. If you’ve read any of my other reviews, you probably know by now that I’m not a fan of short games at all. I’ll occasionally get a story driven game that’s five or ten hours long when there’s a big sale or when I’m really in the mood for one, but 90 percent of the games that I play involve massive campaigns and a million extra things to do on the side.

In the end, that’s exactly what I got out of Three Houses. The main storyline itself is just massive and when you take into account the fact that you can go back and play the game from the perspective of one of the remaining houses adds so much more to the playtime. But then after you add in all of the side quests, bonus activities, and strategy stuff, the game ensures you that you could end up playing for more than a year without getting bored.

As a matter of fact, the website howlongtobeat shows that some people have spent more than 300 hours playing Three Houses, with some going as far as 500 hours. That’s something that I really enjoy out of a game, the more there is to do in a game, the more I love it, and the surer I am that the overall experience is worth the final price tag. For me, the three biggest aspects of the game were the monastery as a whole, the DLC, and the sheer number of characters, weapons, and more.

THE MONASTERY IS YOUR PLAYGROUND

The Garreg Mach Monastery ended up being one of the biggest and coolest structures that I’ve ever experienced in media and made me instantly think of a place like Hogwarts. The Monastery and game as a whole offers dozens of activities to make sure that you get the most out of your experience.

-My favorite aspect of Three Houses is easily the sheer number of interactions that you can do between all of the students and other characters. There’s a large number of support levels that you can grow as well as a bunch of romances too, which is something that I love in a game. If a game has a well detailed character development system, it usually ends up being something that I can talk about for hours.

For example, whenever I play any of the Persona games, I can never get enough of the Social Link system and when I played Sword Art Online: Hollow Realization, I must have wasted 30 hours trying to get all of the characters to like me. Three Houses is no different.

You can level up your support with characters while you’re in battle but there’s also a bunch of ways to do wo when you’re not in battle. One of the best ways to make sure that everyone loves you is with the use of food, just like in real life because if someone feeds me, I’ll be their friend for a couple of hours.

Once you unlock cooking, it’s going to be an incredibly important part of your routine. When you are cooking, you can choose a character to cook with and you get to choose the best ingredients possible that you can get from fishing and gardening but more on that later. Not only does your support with that character increase when you cook, but you can also get a number of beneficial effects based on what you cook.

For instance, if you cook a Pike, all of your allies will end up gaining an extra defense point. Or you can cook a bear and your max HP will go up a little bit. These benefits aren’t permanent, but they do last for quite some time, which can be very helpful. In total I cooked around seven different meals and all of them proved to be helpful.

Cooking isn’t the only thing that you can do with food, you can stuff your face too and this adds a whole other level of strategy to the game. Unlike cooking with one person, when you’re eating you can do so with two others. Not only will your rank with them increase, but it could also increase between the two of them if you choose correctly.

Food can do wonders on your relationships with all the other characters, but it’s only the tip of the iceberg when it comes to getting people to become your best friend. Another great way to make some friends quickly is by giving them gifts, which has become a staple of life sim games. There are so many farming games that allow you to swap gifts for friendship points such as Stardew Valley, My Time at Portia, and Story of Seasons. Having such a system in a Fire Emblem game is a must.

There are three gift levels. Giving someone a neutral gift will give them a small increase to both their support with you and their motivation but giving them something that they love will boost those stats by quite a bit. Giving them something that they don’t like won’t increase those stats but there won’t be any negative impacts either so don’t be afraid to find out what they like through trial and error.

All in all, there are well more than two dozen different items that can be used as gifts. Many of these items can be bought but there’s also a handful of flowers that can be gifted that are only obtainable through gardening so don’t forget about that. Plus there’s also a bunch of other activities, like simply talking, that you can do to increase your relationship with someone.

However, if there’s one aspect that you simply can never overlook and have to immediately work on, it’s your professor level because this is what directly influences how many interactions that you can do with other characters. Each action will either be free or will cost you one activity point but when you first start out you only have one activity point and you aren’t even allowed to do gardening or tutoring. There are ten professor levels in total and as you rise through the ranks, you get more gardening plots and more activity points so that you can do so much more.

-Now that we discussed many of the ways to become friends with everyone, it’s time to discuss where all the food for cooking, eating, and gifting comes from. This is where fishing and gardening enters the fold. As some of you may already know, fishing and gardening is something that I can never get enough of in a game. However, many of my experiences with fishing and gardening have been in games that were primarily farming based so having these systems play such an integral role in an RPG is a nice touch.

The only issue that I noticed with both fishing and gardening is that you’re kind of limited when you first start playing the game, you can’t do much of either. When you first start, you have zero gardening plots and when you reach professor level two, you only have one plot. Fishing on the other hand has no such restrictions but you still need to have enough bait on hand to fish. Neither actions consume any activity points though, so that’s a good thing.

I love fishing because it can eventually become a great renewable resource because if you choose to, you can sell the fish you caught and use that gold you get to buy even more bait, creating a nearly endless fishing loop. For me, fishing in Three Houses was way more complex than in other games because of factors such as the type of bait used, the fish shadow, and the long list of fish that you can catch.

The reason I think fishing can be a great renewable resource is because of how easy it is to get bait. For instance, you can buy the insect larva for only 10 gold. This is the worst bait that you can use and can’t catch great fish but you can get lucky and catch a fish that sells for 20 to 50 gold. Most of the time, you’ll get way more money back than what you spent if you sell everything that you catch.

In total, there are five different types of bait that you can buy, with the most expensive one costing you 50 gold. This one is called the Herring Bait and while it can still get you cheap fish, there are four very rare fish that can only be caught with this bait and can each sell for at least 1,000 gold. Seriously, fishing in Three Houses is as good as playing the lottery, if not better.

You can also generally tell what kind of fish you’re getting by looking at the shadow. There are six different shadows that are color based such as a blue shadow meaning it’s a small and weak fish or a rainbow shadow meaning it’s a very rare and valuable fish. This is very similar to the fishing system used in Animal Crossing: New Horizons where the bigger shadows usually belong to the bigger, more valuable fish.

In total, there’s lots of fish in the sea. I caught 12 different ones including some of the super rare ones and I made a hefty profit on those. You also get small bits of experience from fishing that goes towards increasing your professor level, which makes this activity even more worthwhile than it already was. It also doesn’t hurt that the actual fishing minigame is fun as well.

But it isn’t all about selling because you shouldn’t forget to cook your fish too. Fish such as the Goddess Messenger, Teutates Pike, and Queen Loach are integral for some of the recipes, so don’t go around selling those if you don’t have many on hand but love fishing because you might miss out on some of the meals and benefits.

When I first unlocked the merchant that sells you bait, I wanted to take advantage of the occasion and buy as many as I could to see what I could end up with. So on one day in the middle of chapter five, I bought all the bait that was available, 40 pieces in total, which cost me a whopping 1,050 gold and I got to work fishing.

The results were pretty good. I managed to catch a fish on all 40 attempts and caught 12 different ones, including the Goddess Messenger. In total, if I were to sell all 39 regular fish that I had caught, the total value would have been 1,270 gold. In the end, I would have gotten a 220 gold profit for around 10 to 15 minutes’ worth of fishing. Selling the Goddess Messenger would have netted me an additional 1,500 gold, turning the profit to 1,770 if I were to sell everything.

On the other hand, gardening is a bit easier and more straightforward, but the rewards aren’t really as great and it’s not as fun either. You unlock the greenhouse pretty early on. In fact, by the time you unlock the merchant that sells you fishing bait, you’ll probably already have messed around with the greenhouse a bunch of times. Throughout the game, you’ll come in contact with a bunch of seeds that you can plant to reap some pretty cool rewards.

Not only can you get seeds as a reward for completing quests or by finding them, but you will also be able to buy a bunch from the later merchants, which means you’ll be able to create a pretty good farm system. The only downside is that you won’t be able to farm a lot because the number of seeds you can plant is based on your professor level. For the first five to 10 or so hours you can only plant one to three seeds at a time, which sucks.

Once you max out your professor level, you’ll be able to plant a few more and things will start getting even more interesting. Once you plant the seeds you want, you can cultivate them using methods that cost different amounts of gold and then you will be able to harvest them the next time that you explore the monastery.

You’ll usually get a couple items per seed and they can range between food items for meals, items that can permanently boost your stats, and flowers that you can gift to other characters for support points. Plus, you can also sell the stuff that you harvest if you really need the extra gold, but most of the stuff that you get from the greenhouse doesn’t really get you that much gold to begin with.

One thing that I would recommend you do if you’re going to focus on the greenhouse is take note of what you get for each seed or see if there’s any guides. There’s so many different types of seeds that you can use and they all give different things, so creating a list of what grows into what can not only help you be more organized, but you’ll be able to plant specific seeds whenever you’re looking for certain items.

Together, the fishing and gardening system offer so much to the experience. One of them has a really fun mini game while the other needs a guide to determine what you’ll get, and both allow for a crazy amount of rewards and should be taken advantage of each and every time that you choose to explore the monastery on your off day. But these aren’t the only things that you can do at the monastery, there’s still so much more.

-The last part of the monastery section that I find to be pretty major is the quest system. Obviously, the game has a number of major story quests that are required but there are also a ton of free side quests that you’ll be able to take part in while you explore the monastery. Many of these quests are short and easy but they will reward you with some gold, resources, and renown.

Most of the side quests will be fetch quests of finding specific people but there’s also a bunch that require battling, among others. Personally I’m not a huge fan of the side quests because they can get pretty repetitive after a while and there’s barely any to be found during part two. But, if you need the extra experience or resources, then you should complete as many as you can.

-There’s also a bunch of other small random activities that you can do to either raise your support points with someone or for a couple items or gold here and there. You can do choir practice which is a lot like eating together since it involves two other characters but for singing instead of eating. You can also do things like give advice or do faculty training, which also increase support points but aren’t really as great as the previous examples.

-Lastly, you have things like an online recon mini game and a training tournament where you get a small amount of rewards if the unit that you select to participate does well. I personally don’t bother with these too much though and I wouldn’t recommend them unless you wanted the rewards or were playing on one of the harder difficulties.

FREE BATTLES

If there’s one thing about Three Houses that I like even more than the ability to explore the monastery, it’s the extremely useful free battle system. The battles that you take part in for the main storyline or as part of other quests are obviously very important, but free battles are really on a whole other level for a number of reasons.

If you’re a fan of these kind of grid based strategy games, then you won’t just find these battles to be lots of fun, but you’re also going to find yourself amassing large amounts of rewards and resources very quickly for winning them all. Each battle should get you a small amount of gold along with one piece of gold bullion, which are worth 1,000 gold each. That alone is pretty much the cost of a steel weapon, so it’s definitely worth it.

You’ll be getting a whole lot of other items too. The only downside to free battles is the fact that you can’t do them every week because on each of your days off, you have to choose what you do between battles, exploring, and other activities. So if you spend your days off exploring the monastery, then you won’t be able to do any battles that week at all.

But the fact that you can keep battling over and over again makes this system so important. When you do quest or story battles, they will all cost you one activity point and when you complete that battle, the game automatically progresses to the next day so you won’t be able to do anything else. Free battles don’t cost you any activity points and don’t progress you, so as long as you have enough weapons or gold to buy new ones, you can keep battling over and over for as long as you like.

Not only do you get more than enough gold and items from battles, but each character involved will keep getting more and more experience and your support levels between each character will also increase as well. If you have the time to battle non stop, there is no better way to grind for money, experience, or items than with free battles. As long as you don’t progress to the next week, you’ll have an endless supply of resources.

I really liked the idea of being able to battle an infinite number of times and getting an unlimited number of free items, so in the middle of chapter five, I took advantage of this system to what I could get out of doing 20 battles in a row. In total, the entire endeavor took a little more than four hours, and I was not disappointed with the results because I ended up getting so much good stuff.

In each battle, I was guaranteed one piece of gold bullion along with either 2,000 or 4,000 gold. So over the course of all 20 battles, I earned a grand total of 56,000 gold, which was more than what I had already earned up until that point. I also earned 20 pieces of gold bullion, which I was able to sell for an additional 20,000 gold.

I also picked up a ton of other useful items by the end of the 20th battle. I grabbed 15 pieces of wild game, 10 pieces of poultry, 9 bear, and 3 wolverine, which can all be used for food. I also grabbed 20 pieces of stone and 15 pieces of steel, which can be used for crafting weapons or repairing them at the blacksmith. But that’s not all, if you battle while you’re connected to the internet, you get even more rewards.

This online system is a lot like the one that you have in Pokemon Sword and Shield when you’re connected to the internet while in the wild area. In those games, you can interact with other players who are also online and when you do, each one gives you a random cheap item. The online system used in Three Houses is very similar and just as helpful.

When you’re online and in battle, you’ll occasionally see a couple spaces scattered across the battlefield that have a sort of glow on them. Those spaces are the ones where other players were standing on when they met their end. If you step on one of these spaces, you’ll be able to pick up a random item that the other player “dropped” and sometimes the items were pretty good too.

But taking part in all these physical battles wasn’t just about reaping the physical rewards because throughout my 20 battles, all of my characters went on to earn so much experience. Each character gained between three and five levels and all of their skills and abilities were leveled up as well. Plus, by having the same team battle 20 times, all of their support levels with each other went up pretty quickly too.

Sure all 20 battles took a really long time to get through. Four hours is no walk in the park but the battles themselves were lots of fun to mess around with and all of the exp, money, and items that I earned from them ended up helping me out so much. You should never skip over free battles and just focus on just the story and quest ones, and if you do the free ones, don’t just settle on doing one or two.

I did this again later on in the game and the results were obviously much better and took less time to complete too. Once I reached chapter 16, I did another stretch of 20 battles in a row, and by then, they all lasted 3 or 4 turns each time. This time around, all my allies continued gaining a couple levels each and all the gold that I acquired from the battles and from all the bullion totaled more than 140,000.

If you really want to maximize what you get out of the free battles, I will say that you should do at least five in a row. If you’re really strapped for time, you can also mess with auto battles to speed up the process a bit. Heck, I wouldn’t be surprised if there was someone who did 100 battles in a row and ended up becoming an unstoppable force of nature early on in the game. Be like that guy and take advantage of as many of the free battles as you can.

NEW GAME PLUS

I really love it when a good game offers you some sort of a great new game mode that allows you to keep coming back for more. There’s lots of games that offer you a pretty decent form of new game plus but most of them only offer you the ability to transfer over stuff from your original playthrough or a couple bonus items here and there. There’s nothing wrong with that but I think that the new game plus mode in Three Houses goes above and beyond.

Obviously, the main draw to starting a new game in Three Houses is so that you can choose a different house so that you can experience the unique story that coincides with that house. That’s more than enough reason to start a new game multiple times but the game gives you another big reason to start a new game and it’s called renown. For the first five to ten hours of your original playthrough, you probably won’t have any clue as to what renown is but it’s super valuable.

You can acquire renown throughout your original playthrough by doing quests or completing certain battles and you will get a ton by doing stuff in the Cindered Shadows DLC. But, until you unlock the saint statues, you won’t know what they are or what you can do with them. You can upgrade lots of stuff at the statues using renown, but I wouldn’t recommend using all of them there. You should save as many as you can for your new game, but if you do spend some on the statues, the upgrades will transfer over to the new game too.

The biggest thing that you can spend your renown on is support levels between you and other characters. In a new game, you can spend renown to instantly increase your support level with another character to the level it was already at in your previous playthroughs. So if you didn’t get a chance to see all of Byleth’s support dialogue or you wanted to marry someone new, this system is going to make it so much better.

For instance, let’s say you married Dorothea during your first time that you played and Rhea was one of the characters that you had managed to get to support level A. If you wanted to marry Rhea during your second time playing, it would be so much easier now. Instead of wasting time trying to get her support level back up, you can spend your renown and when you start your new game, your support level will already be at A when game starts.

So not only will you be able to get her up to the S support level so much faster, but all that time that you just saved can now be used to focus on casually working on other relationships with even more characters, so it’s win win. This is perfect for someone who really wants to experience all of the dialogue options and character development that the game has to offer.

Support levels aren’t the only things that you can restore with renown. You can also restore your weapon skills along with the certifications of any character you want.

Personally, I’m not a big fan of restoring certifications because I think it’s a pretty useless system if you’re not super invested in the game. If you’re starting a new game for the purpose of picking a new house, then you’re going to be with new characters anyway. Restoring certifications won’t offer you any benefits unless you chose the Black Eagles multiple times, or you focus on recruiting characters that you already played with.

There is one other thing that you're really going to want to spend your renown on when you start a new game and that's restoring your professor level. If you increased your professor level a handful of times during your initial playthrough, that's not something that you're going to want to reset. If you start your professor level from scratch, getting back to where you were before will be a pain because you'll only have one or two activity points to spend at a time for the first couple of hours.

But let's say you maxed out all 10 of your professor levels and then you restore them. You'll be able to do so much more and you'll also be able to increase your support levels at a much faster pace right at the start of the game. Plus, since higher professor levels earn significantly more gold each month, you'll be getting a lot more gold in the early parts of the game, which will also be super helpful.

Restoring your professor level along with the support levels of the characters you want to work on is the perfect one two combo to making sure that you get the most out of your subsequent playthroughs so these should be the first things that you spend your renown on when starting a new game. There's also a bunch of other things that you can spend your renown on if you have the Cindered Shadows DLC but that's not necessarily tied to the new game mode.

EXPANSION PASS

If There's one thing that I love about games, it's good DLC. 10 or so years ago if you asked me about my thoughts on the subject, I probably would have told you that I hated DLC because of how bland and boring they were back then. When I was first introduced to DLC it was mostly spending like $15 on a new map to play on and nothing else really.

But ever since then, DLC has come a long way and has evolved to the point where sometimes the DLC is just as good and worthwhile as the base game if not better. I think the expansion pass for Three Houses but at the same time, I'm not really a fan of it but I won't get into that until a little bit later on. But, if you love the game and you need the stuff that the pass comes with, then yeah, it will be a good idea for you to pick it up.

But what does the Three Houses expansion pass come with? For starters, it comes with a bunch of different DLC packs that were all released over the course of a year. Many of these packs are very small and item or character based and the pass as a whole will set you back by $25. For me, the biggest aspect of the expansion pass is the extra storyline that gets added called Cindered Shadows.

I really liked the Cindered Shadows DLC because of what it offered on its own but also what it offered for the main game game itself. But the only problem was that I felt like this DLC was the only part of the expansion pass that was worth spending money on and I probably wouldn’t even say that it’s worth the full $25 on its own. Cindered Shadows is a pretty decent story expansion though and it’s a really good size as well because it’s multiple chapters long and depending on how you play, it can take anywhere from six to 12 hours to beat.

One thing that I’m not really a fan of is that it technically isn’t canon to the main game. You can’t access the DLC story from the main game, only from a separate save file, the first chapter is about you entering the area under the monastery known as the abyss. It’s a brand new area to explore that introduces a few new characters. Once you beat the first chapter of the DLC story, you will unlock abyss in the main game. The only thing is that when you enter abyss in your actual game, it’s a completely different set of introductions to the new characters.

I really like the level of content that the DLC story comes with. When I first started it, there was like 15 minutes straight of just dialogue and backstory along with even more backstory following the main battle of that chapter. The story of Cindered Shadows is pretty good but for me, the main draw of the DLC was unlocking everything in your main game. After clearing the first chapter, you can start interacting with the four new characters in your main game and raising your supports with them.

You can even recruit them into your house, but you must complete more of the DLC chapters to to get them to join you. The actual abyss area also introduces a bunch of new things to do, for instance there’s a place called the Pagan Altar, which I love. Here, you can buy weapons with renown. I wouldn’t really recommend doing that when you can just buy weapons and then forge them into better ones.

However, one really good thing that this location does is that you can trade in items for renown. Basically any item that can be sold for gold in the storehouse can be sold here for renown. It’s an easy way to get renown to spend on your next playthrough because just before you end your playthrough, you can purge your account of all items and stack up on renown. There’s a couple other things that you can do in Abyss and I liked the introduction of the new characters along with how they fit into the story.

This is something that you should take advantage of because it’s easy to cheat the system. If you save up a lot of gold, you can go to the marketplace and buy items or weapons, and then you can trade them in for renown here. This is helpful if you do free battles a lot to grind because all the gold that you get can basically be traded directly for renown buy buying stuff and then selling them at the altar. This is especially good for right before you end your playthrough and have lots of gold left.

I personally prefer doing this with the Smithing Stones because they only cost you 100 gold each but will net you 2 renown each. If you just keep buying and selling these, you will get 200 renown for every 10,000 gold that you spend. There’s no limit either because all you have to do is buy as many stones as you can carry and then instantly go to abyss to trade them in and then start the whole process over again.

But when it comes to the rest of the expansion pass, I’m not really that big a fan. The rest is mostly cosmetic and item based. In fact, Three of the DLC packs only offer new outfits and uniforms, which actually happens to be the aspect of DLC that I like the least. However, there are some outfits that apply to all characters, not just Byleth or specific characters. Most of the time when I see outfit DLC, you’re paying for one outfit for a specific character and I never bother with those because they’re usually a waste. Getting a new outfit for every character it applies to is a nice change to the standard DLC formula.

There are two other good DLC packs within the expansion pass though. The first of these adds a few additional side quests which allow for more activity and the second introduces a few extra battles as well as a new song. Having a few extra side quests along with more battles is an okay way to squeeze a few extra hours into your playthrough but it isn't a major addition like the extra story stuff.

Lastly there's also a DLC pack that offers a couple support item, which I didn't really care too much about. In fact, when I first acquired them, I couldn’t even figure out what they were or how to find them. For me, about 80% of the expansion packs value came from the Cindered Shadows expansion alone. The rest of the packs just weren't things that I really liked. As a whole, it's pretty good but there was that one aspect of value that almost stopped me from picking up the Three Houses expansion pass in the first place.

The one issue that I found with the DLC that really stopped me from fully enjoying it is the fact that you aren't getting a whole lot of value compared to the base game IMO. So far, I think it's the worst valued DLC that I've encountered on the Switch.

Obviously, that's relative because if all the DLC I've ever played were great, then the worst one would still be good. But in this case, the value is significantly lower than what you get out of the DLC for games like Breath of the Wild, Pokemon Sword and Shield, and Immortals Fenyx Rising. Let's revisit those DLC packs, shall we?

The Immortals Fenyx Rising expansion pass for example was a beast. It was one of the more expensive ones at $40 but you got a whole lot out of it. You got three different DLC packs that all offered a decent bit of content and changed the game in a way. Each of the three DLC packs was basically its own small game. So even though the expansion pass was expensive, it was still a great deal.

Without taking any of the many sales the game offered, Immortals Fenyx Rising would cost you $60 and would usually set you back by about 60 hours on average, which is pretty good. The expansion pass cost $40 which is two thirds the cost of the base game, but the three DLC packs could combine to cost you an extra 45 to 55 hours. So honestly the DLC might get you more value than the game itself.

The Pokemon Sword and Shield expansion pass was just as great of a deal, if not better. The base game cost $60 and if you're the kind who really wants to catch them all or go shiny hunting, you can easily spend 100 hours on the game. The expansion pass cost $30 and gets you two DLC packs that are both pretty big for half the cost of the base game.

The Crown Tundra for me was the meat and potatoes of the Pokemon Sword and Shield expansion pass because it added a whole new massive wild area to explore with a lot of additional Pokemon along with a crazy den system that would allow you to catch as many legendary Pokemon as you can. Again, if you're the type of person who needs to catch every last Pokemon, you could initiate hundreds of battles in the tundra.

Plus, that's not including all the extra story stuff, the tournament, or all the stuff you can do in the Isle of Armor DLC pack, which isn't as big as Crown Tundra but still packs a punch. I probably spent more than 40 hours on Crown Tundra alone and I still have yet to do everything that the expansion pass has to offer. So if you're really into the game the Sword and Shield expansion pass could have gotten you 100 hours of content for only $30 which is a steal.

Then you have the Breath of the Wild expansion pass, which isn't quite as big as the first two but can still get pretty extensive. The base game costs $60 and can set you back well over 100 hours which is insane, and the expansion pass costs $20 or one third of the game and can set you back an additional 30 to 40 hours between all the extra content and bonus stuff.

Many of the best expansion passes offer you a great deal of value, not only in relation to the cost, but in relation to the size of the base game and don't even get me started on the DLC for The Witcher 3, which is just crazy. Basically, if you paid $60 for a 60 hour game, you would hope that the DLC can at least match that like a 30 hour DLC for $30 or a 10 hour DLC for $10. But unfortunately, the DLC for Three Houses doesn't really match that level of value.

This is because of a combination of two things. The first is how much value the base game has and the second is how much you get out of the DLC, which isn't a lot. The game itself will cost you $60 and like Sword and Shield, it can easily set you back over 100 hours. But if you join all the houses and do everything the game has to offer, that's easily 200 or 300 hours of your life gone in the blink of an eye.

The Three Houses expansion pass however is very small and will cost you $25. It mostly just gets you a bunch of bonus cosmetics and items with only a small bit of extra story stuff and overall content. In total you're probably only gonna get like 10 hours worth of content out of an expansion pass that costs $25, which I think is just terrible.

Not only is 10 hours for $25 a complete rip off IMO, imagine paying $60 for a massive 300 hour game but then paying another $25 just to tack on an additional 10 hours. Not only is that price bad for that amount of content but it's also nearly half the price of the base game but for less than 10% worth in content. Overall, I wouldn't say that the DLC adds any extra value to the whole Three Houses experience, but it can be a decent extra experience if you do want the extra cosmetic stuff and items or don't mind paying that price.

I was able to pick up the expansion pass for a discount and only had to pay about $8 for the whole thing so it was a bit easier for me to get, but I personally think that the Cindered Shadows DLC is the only thing that’s really worthwhile and that’s probably worth around that. I think it would have been much better if users could buy the individual DLC’s that make up the expansion pass like so many others do. I would personally prefer to pay $10 or $15 for Cindered Shadows instead of $25 for everything.

I also find it odd that the game has to connect to the internet every single time I play in order to check whether the expansion pass can be played. This is something that I’ve never experienced in a game before. I’ve bought lots of expansion passes in the past and usually when I download it for the first time and launch the game, the game knows that I have the expansion passes going forward.

But with this one, every time I play, it says that unplayable DLC was found and that I have to connect to the internet. So because I bought the expansion pass, I have to hook up my phone to my switch every time I want to play the game, which is a chore. To make matters worse, once my Switch is hooked up to my phone, it usually takes 15 to 30 seconds just to see if it can be played.

UPDATES

If you’ve played the game when it first came out but haven’t played since then, you won’t have to worry about spending a ton of money on the expansion pass to get extra content because the game had a ton of updates that offered a bunch of changes and bonuses for free. Within a couple months of the games release was the first major update, which added a maddening game mode. This mode is a lot more difficult than the hard mode and adds so many new challenges to your gameplay but we’ll talk about that later.

Another major update soon followed that added an extra 20 game save files. This might not sound like a great deal but with all the different routes that you can go and all the different experiments that some players will want to experience with different supports, five might have never been enough to begin with. This allowed you to be more creative and allowed you the freedom to do more without having to worry about your saves. This update also added a few extra quests along with some new outfits.

There were also a few other small updates that added, changed, or fixed one aspect of the game or another. If you’ve played the game before, there’s more of a reason to play it now with all the stuff that the free updates did. The only sad part is that the last update was more than a year ago so there probably won’t be any more.

ECONOMY

The economy of Three Houses is comprised of three different types of unique currencies that help keep the world go round and are fairly easy to accumulate. Many of the games that I have played only involved one form of main currency for everything the game had to offer whether it was gold, pokedollars, or whatever currency the game had to offer. There are also lots of games that have different types of currencies, but Three Houses does currency in a slightly different way.

First of all, the three types of currency are gold, renown, and we’ll call the third one craftables. Gold is pretty self explanatory but is kind of difficult to get near the start of the game. You get a small amount each month from the church based on your professor level but you won’t be getting much until you’ve reached higher levels.

You also get a small amount when you win a battle. Other than that, you’ll have to sell stuff to get more gold. You can buy a lot of things with gold though including weapons, health related items, battalion upgrades, and more using gold.

The second form of currency is the renown system, which was already explained quite a bit earlier on. Renown is relatively easy to get by doing quests and battles and can be spent on the statues to get some nice stat boosts, in certain shops, and of course in the New Game Plus mode. To me, renown offers the most when it comes to gameplay functionality, it just takes a while to get a major amount or until you can use it.

The third kind of currency is the craftable. Every game has some sort of a crafting system right? Well not a lot of games use their crafting system as a form of currency. There are some games where you craft certain things as part of a quest for a specific person but only as a way to introduce you to that specific mechanic or item. Then you have games like Minecraft where the things that you craft or cook are mostly used by yourself.

It’s a bit different here because the finished product is something that can be used perpetually as a currency. What do I consider to be a craftable? I consider fish and seeds to fall under that category. If you have bait, you can fish and get a ton of fish for your collection and if you have seeds, you can visit the greenhouse to turn them into a ton of vegetables or flowers.

Technically the fish and seeds can be sold to the storehouse for as much gold as you can carry but I don’t really count those as the currency, it’s the finished product that is the currency for me. Once you have your fish or the stuff you grew, you can cook the fish and stuff you grew or eat with someone else. Or you can give the flowers that you grew to other people as a gift.

The ingredients themselves are pretty useless and can only be used to sell for some gold, but the finished product is worth so much because they can be traded to other characters for experience to increase your support level with them or for experience to increase your professor level. You’re probably going to end up “buying” stuff with these finished products more than you will with gold, and that makes craftables the most important currency in the game to me. The three different types of currencies work well together to create an in depth and pretty expansive form of economy within the game.

ODDS AND ENDS

That’s it for the major aspects of depth, but the game still offers a ton of smaller things to do and collect across your playthrough. In total there’s literally hundreds of classes, weapons, items, skills, and abilities to work with, maybe closer to a thousand. For starters, I love the class system. Each class that you can equip to a character comes with a unique set of stats and abilities and a new outfit. In total there are 37 different classes between beginner, intermediate, advanced, and master ranks, along with a few special ones.

Getting new classes is basically its own game too because each one requires certain skill levels to be acquired and then you have to take an exam. Not only do you have to pay for the exam too, but it isn’t always guaranteed that you’ll pass. But you should never pass on the chance to improve your class because they will be much more powerful than the ones that you already have equipped.

There’s also a large number of weapons to choose from. In total there are swords, axes, lances, bows, gauntlets, and magic to fight with, I’d at least two dozen of each. For most weapons, you have standard types like iron, steel, and silver which can be bought or acquired anywhere. But then you also have a bunch of special ones that are harder to find and buy or only have one copy in the game.

You can also use the blacksmith to upgrade certain weapons into a more powerful version and if you’re lucky, someone online might sell you one of the really rare weapons that there’s only one of. That’s what happened in my original playthrough when I got Viskam for 1 gold. In total there has to be close to 200 different weapons to choose between.

There’s also a large assortment of items and abilities that can make you stronger. There are items that you can buy or grow in the greenhouse that will permanently increase your stats along with more than 150 abilities that will make your strategy so much more impressive. In total, Three Houses has so much to offer and it’s no surprise that you can invest hundreds of hours into it because it’s easy to get lost in the game. My grade for depth is another perfect 10 out of 10.

ADDICTIVENESS: 9/10

Three Houses is definitely a lot of fun but is it super addicting? You might put 60 hours into your first playthrough, but will you be willing to do the same thing over and over again? In general, the answer is going to be yes, but it’s going to have a couple slight limitations.

The big draw to playing the game over and over is the story and the ability to choose a new house and play through a drastically different game. This is a lot like Undertale and how that game has endings based on what you do throughout the game. But Three Houses is less of different endings and more like completely different games based on a small choice you make at the very beginning.

Once you beat the game for the first time, you’ll have the option of starting over with the New Game Plus mode and picking a brand new house to see where that path takes you, and yes, it’s worth it just for the story stuff alone.

The only downside to starting a new game to experience a new house is the fact that you’re going to have to play through the entirety of the first half of the game again and again depending on how many times you replay and that might start feeling old after a while. Regardless of which house you picked, everyone plays through the same scenarios and events for the first half of the game, which for me the first time was around 30 hours long.

The branching point of the story and where things really start to pick up doesn’t take place until the second half of the game. So, if you’re only doing this to experience the new story stuff, you’re going to be sitting through a lot of the same battles and the same events from the first half for many hours. But in the end, it will be pretty much worth it if you like the game enough that you deeply care about what’s going on.

If you want to focus on your support links and such, then replaying all the events of the first part over and over won’t feel as much like a drag anymore. During your first playthrough you picked who you wanted to marry but for your second playthrough you wanted to pick someone else. So in addition to grinding to get back to where the story branches, you’ll be kept busy by trying to increase the support levels of your new sweetheart.

But maybe it’s not just about the romance options, maybe you want to see how all the other supports end up since you probably won’t be able to see them all during your first playthrough. Not just support levels between you and someone else, but the ones between two other characters too because sometimes those can be the most interesting ones in the game.

So when you’re on your second or third playthrough, not only will you be searching for the new waifu, but you’ll continue grinding up the support levels of other characters that you missed out on your first time around.

Those three reasons are good enough to repeat the game over and over, but that’s about it. There isn’t much else to do other than story, romance, and support dialogue, and it’s going to be a drag at times. Whether or not it’s worth it will be entirely up to you and for the most part, it will be worth it if you liked the game during your first time through.

I know I loved it and will be playing multiple more times in the future, but I will probably rely on auto battles a lot later on. Overall, the game has a bunch of replayability but can also drag on a bit and addictiveness gets a 9 out of 10 from me.

GRAPHICS: 9/10

I want to do this section a little bit differently than usual by starting with the things about the graphics of Three Houses that I don’t like before talking about all the great stuff going on with this category. You see, the aspect of the game that I think is the coolest happens to be part of the graphics but t the same time, I think the graphics also happens to be the weakest link of the entire game.

There are two major aspects of graphics that I’m not a fan of and the first is the way that battles look. Obviously, I have never played other strategy RPG’s, and this is my only experience ever with grid based battles. For all I know, this could be the best looking strategy grid battle thing in gaming history, but I still don’t like it.

I think it’s really cool that the battles are kind of in 3DS with the birds eye view and have a decent level of detail but for me, it doesn’t look great all the time and sometimes can even get a bit confusing. There were lots of times where I would click on the space where I think one of my allies is standing and nothing happens because it turns out they were standing on a different space, but it looked like the box I was selecting was theirs.

This can be fixed by moving the camera for a higher view, but this cost me a few second dozens of times because I couldn’t instantly tell what I was clicking on. This was even more of an issue for me when my allies were hiding in trees, making it somewhat difficult to see who was where and how far apart units were from each other, both good and bad.

Plus, every now and then the textures get a bit weird. If you’re looking at a flat ground area, it can look pretty good, even with some trees here and there. But once you start adding other textures and different kinds of terrain, things started to look a little messy. I wouldn’t go as far as to call them ugly, but they were definitely pretty obvious at times.

However, one of the coolest in-battle options is the ability to zoom in onto the field and enter a sort of 1st/3rd view where it becomes a full 3D scenario. When you’re viewing the battlefield this way, everything looks so much better and ha way more detail, especially all of the characters and trees and there’s way more to look at.

I would have loved this ability if it wasn’t for the fact that it made it even harder for me to move around and see where I was or what I was doing. As a result, I rarely battled this way and had to stick with the birds eye view for functionality purposes, though that function is a nice one to have overall.

The other aspect of graphics that I wasn’t too fond of was the backgrounds used during in game cutscenes that weren’t animated, the ones where there’s mostly just talking and nothing else going on. All the characters involved in the scene would do a bunch of casual movements which was a nice touch but there was literally nothing going on in the background, which I believe was just a wasted opportunity.

During these scenes, there’s never any life going on in the background, it’s always just a static image of what the environment looks like. There’s nothing wrong with that but there could have been so much more added to each of these scenes to make them seem more realistic and to allow them to stand out.

For instance, it would have been really cool if there was stuff in the background that moved like trees or if there were other characters walking across the screen the same as they can do while you’re exploring the monastery. Making the backgrounds dynamic or having these scenes actually take place in the overlord would have brought so much life into each of them and made them look better.

Plus, it also hurts a little that many of the backgrounds are out of focus or blurry. Yes, this adds a level of depth and expands the 3D awareness but some of the images could have been made clearer without losing that effect.

Well now that we got that out of the way, what are the aspects that I enjoyed out of the graphics. In total, there are three aspects that I really enjoyed looking at, they are the character designs, the combat graphics, and the animated cutscenes.

First of all, I think the character designs and models are fantastic. All the characters have really cool and unique designs and they’re all really detailed too. When you’re looking at the full character model of someone, they look great and when you’re in the in game cutscenes they look just as great while also having some movement and animation that works well.

When you’re out and about in the monastery, the character models barely lose any detail here either and still look just as great. One cool aspect about character design is that there’s a lot more NPC’s in the monastery than there are playable characters and ones that you can interact with.

There’s random characters and students just roaming the monastery to make it look fuller and these characters are all fully detailed as well. The developers could have just put in the playable characters and left it at that, but they went the extra mile to populate the game with more people that were fully detailed and animated.

The next graphical aspect that I enjoyed were the combat graphics. When you’re battling and doing all your strategy stuff, it looks good but I’m not a fan of the lack of detail in certain areas or the textures. But then once you initiate an attack, the camera transitions to a more 3D environment with better character designs, cool looking attacks, and an overall much better looking appearance than on the grid.

The only downside here is that at times all the solders in the background feel out of place. Their models here look good but sometimes their movement looks choppy or laggy and every once in a while, they can glitch out, disappear, or look weird. But most of the time they give each battle more depth and are welcome.

The final graphical asset is by far my favorite and it’s the animated cutscenes. The first time that I had ever played a game that had real animated cutscenes was Persona 4 Golden and I was completely blown away by how good those scenes look. I couldn’t get over the fact that a game could have scenes that look like they’re ripped straight out of an anime and that’s still a pretty impressive feat today.

When I first started Three Houses and saw the opening scene, I was in awe at how beautiful it looked. It really looked like there was no expense spared because the art and design itself was beautiful, the characters looked as good as they possibly could, and there was so much action going on at once that it felt like it should have been impossible to pull off and yet here we are with more than two dozen beautifully animated cutscenes.

When I was watching the opening animation, I kept getting vibes that made me think of animated shows like Avatar: The Last Airbender and The Dragon Prince, which are both impressive feats of animation. It’s not like the developers made a couple great animations near the start to draw people in and then gave up on them either.

No, if I’m not mistaken there’s around one hour of these kinds of cutscenes, which is basically a little less than a short movie worth of quality animation. It’s also really cool that you can re watch any of these clips whenever you want because there’s a movie gallery in the main menu that allows you to freely see any of the ones that you have already unlocked.

One cool thing about the gallery is that you can watch with subtitles on or off, making it feel more like you’re watching an actual animated show or movie. All in all, Three Houses is one of the very few games where I’ve personally seen so many animated cutscenes that also happened to of insanely high quality and watching these is really just a treat.

Overall, the graphics section is pretty good. For me, the detailed characters and 3D combat graphics are nice but just the animated cutscenes alone would have been enough to get this section a perfect 10 out of 10 if it wasn’t for all the little graphical things that I didn’t like popping up here and there.

But when you take into consideration everything that the visuals have to offer, the graphics section becomes the weakest link of the entire game for me. I still think the animations are perfect and that the graphics as a whole are great, but the category gets an 9 out of 10 from me but closer to an 8.5 honestly.

SOUND: 10/10

The graphics of Three Houses were pretty good but the sound was even better. Aside for the sheer number of things that you can do in the game and the top notch story, the sound design has to be one of the best aspects of the game and one of the reasons why it’s as good as it is. Between all the music and voice acting, the game offers you so much in this department.

Up until playing Three Houses, I didn’t really know what Fire Emblem music was. I had no idea if the series had any themes or iconic songs and in the little time that I spent with both Warriors and Heroes, I barely paid any attention at all to the tunes. But that changed a couple hours into my original playthrough of Three Houses as I started to hear what the music was like.

I heard the “theme” when first starting up the game and I didn’t really care for it much but after just a few minutes of playing, during one of the first cutscenes, The Spirit Dais was playing, and I really liked that song. It wasn’t iconic or even catchy but it sounded good and flowed so well, especially with the overall tone of the game. I eventually started to warm up to the main theme but that also didn’t feel iconic or like what you normally expect out of a theme, but I still liked it.

I’d probably go as far as to say that the Three Houses soundtrack didn’t have any songs that were truly iconic but there were some great songs and boy were there a lot of them. The entire soundtrack is just massive, in fact there’s a grand total of 89 different full length tracks throughout the game? You want to know how I know the exact number? It’s because there’s an actual music library in the main menu of the game that allows you to go back and listen to all the songs whenever you want after you’ve unlocked them in the game.

Having the entire soundtrack available to listen to nearly whenever you want from directly within the game is an amazing little treat that only a handful of games do and it’s something that needs to be done a lot more because it makes the music way more accessible and can even make the songs feel more personal since you basically own these copies.

Those 89 tracks cover a grand total of nearly 5 hours worth of music, which is a lot. Whenever a big musician releases a new album, it’s usually like 30 to 50 minutes’ worth of music but this soundtrack is a whopping 277 minutes long. That’s like three movies worth of soundtracks, and I think it’s crazy that just one game can have that music.

When I did my last big review back in January of Immortals Fenyx Rising, I was gushing about how long the soundtrack was and it was just under 3 and a half hours long. The soundtrack for Three Houses makes that one look weak in comparison since it’s more than two hours longer. With that much music, you’d think that the composer was bound to make at least a few songs that weren’t as great as the rest, but I’d like to think that nearly all of them were at least okay.

Though I’m not entirely sure if the total number of tracks and length is for the base game or with all of the DLC songs included, plus there is one small downside with the soundtrack. The only downside is that the soundtrack was composed by a team of three composers. Now don’t get me wrong, that’s still an incredibly impressive feat to pull off, but the 197 minute long soundtrack for Immortals Fenyx Rising was all composed by one guy.

That’s also kind of fitting though. Three composers, three houses. The three composers are Takeru Kanazaki, Hiroki Moris***a, and Rei Kondoh, who all had at least a decent bit of experience with game music before joining Three Houses.

Kanazaki has been working directly for Intelligent Systems for more than a decade and he was the composer for three other Fire Emblem games before Three Houses, including Fates. He also worked on two Paper Mario games and two Wario games, meaning that he had a decent level of experience and was ready for the challenge of making such a massive soundtrack.

Moris***a basically had the same career as Kanazaki. He pretty much worked on all the same games since he joined Intelligent Systems at the same time but he also went on to work on Fire Emblem Awakening, Fire Emblem Heroes, and Super Smash Bros Ultimate, leaving him with a slightly better resume.

Lastly, Kondoh has been an absolute powerhouse when it came to music, especially within Nintendo. Like the other two, he’s worked on multiple Fire Emblem games before Three Houses but he also worked on Okami, Bayonetta and its sequel, The Wonderful 101, Star Fox Zero, Snack World, and two Mario Party games.

Between the three of them, they must have worked on dozens of games including all of the recent Fire Emblem ones, which made them the perfect team to bring such an ambitious project to life and all their hard work paid off in the end. I wouldn’t be surprised if this was one of the longest soundtracks to produce ever time wise.

Also while this isn’t part of the game, it’s a really nice touch that just a couple months ago the entire soundtrack was made available to purchase for all the diehard fans out there. This physical version had a lot more than the 89 songs because not only was it all the base songs and DLC songs, but a bunch of remixed ones and other tunes, which sounds epic. This version is nearly twice as long as the game soundtracks to all the bonus music and is more than 8 hours long, or around 500 minutes.

As for the actual music itself, like I said before many of them are great but I didn’t find any to be truly epic. But I did really enjoy the tracks that included bits and pieces from the theme. While those weren’t really iconic or catchy, they all felt very strong and powerful, and could pretty much carry the story.

Some of the songs I heard that I thought felt like this included Between Heaven and Earth and The Crest of Flames. One song that I really did enjoy was the thunder version of The Long Road. The song is very intense throughout and has a cool rhythm. I even ended up downloading a 30 minute long version just so I could listen to it while I’m outside walking or working out. I also really liked Fodlan Winds because of how upbeat it was.

As a whole, I think that the entire soundtrack is just brilliant but other than those songs I just didn’t feel like any of them were crazy good just yet. However, I think that’s something that might change in the future as I invest more time into the series as a whole. After all, this is exactly what happened when I did my review of Pokemon Sword last year.

I said something similar, how there weren’t really any songs that interested me. But it’s now been maybe eight months since that review, and I put another hundred hours into the game since then and started growing to love some of the new music later on. I’m hopeful that something happens here and that I start loving the music more with my second or third playthrough of Three Houses.

If you have the money to spare and you love the music, you should invest in everything that the game has to offer. If you get the game, the expansion pass, the physical soundtrack, and some Fire Emblem Amiibos, you’re going to ended up with one of the best, biggest, and most expansive gaming soundtracks of all time with more than 10 hours of tunes to go through.

The music alone would be enough to get the Sound category a perfect 10 out of 10, but the soundtrack is just one half of what makes this section so brilliant in my opinion. Next up we have the wonderful voice acting. The actors all did a fantastic job with each of their characters. They all sound great and many of their personalities really shine because of how good of a job the cast pulled off with their roles.

It also helped that the voice cast was mostly spearheaded by some insanely well-known talent from other shows and games, which further helped nail this aspect of Three Houses. For instance, Rhea was voiced by Cherami Leigh. Over the last few years, she voiced Lucy in Fairy Tail and Asuna in Sword Art Online. According to this chart I found on Youtube, they’re the two most popular waifus of the last decade, which means she did something good. Plus she also voices Makoto in Persona 5, V in Cyberpunk 2077, and a hundred other characters.

The same thing can be said about Veronica Taylor, who voices Manuela. She has just as crazy of a resume because she’s the original voice actress for Ash Ketchum as well as a ton of other roles. The rest of the game features a bunch of other impressive cast members that’s probably seen thousands of combined professional roles.

In all seriousness, this is easily one of the best voiced games that I’ve ever seen, up there with games like Red Dead Redemption II in my opinion. In addition to the way that they sound and the acting itself, my favorite aspect of the voice section has to be the quality in different areas. I don’t know if I’m the only one who thinks this, but I’ve seen lots of games where the quality of voice acting between cutscenes, battles, and generic gameplay changes.

I’ve seen plenty of games where it sounded like all the sound design effort went into cutscenes and big animations and then the voice audio just seems a tad bit worse in other areas of the game. I’ve personally seen that in the Persona series at times and a couple other games but I haven’t in Three Houses. In this game, it feels like there’s never a drop in quality for the voice acting whether you’re in beautiful cutscenes or other gameplay areas.

It also didn’t hurt that there were a couple voice actors in Three Houses who were returning from Fire Emblem Warriors which came out a few years earlier. Whoever did all the casting already had a good sense of what was going to work based on the past and built on top of that.

This is another reason why I think that the sound of Three Houses is as good as it can be. On the other hand, I’m not too big of a fan of the generic sounds and battle noises. For me it just felt like the volume was a bit off at times, either too loud or too quiet and every now and then some of the regular noises felt a bit mechanical.

But that’s a very minor issue that you might not even notice or pay attention too or can be drowned out by the music and voices. But if you have to, you can always mess with the volume settings, which is another minor thing that I have a sort of issue with. There are four audio settings which are for music, voices, sound effects, and system volume.

In most games, sound effects and system volume would be rolled into one setting. Or system volume would control the volume of everything, including music. Not only is that not the case in Three Houses, but they each control individual sounds within their area. For instance, if you turn off sound effects, you won’t hear your footsteps anymore when you run. But you’ll still hear sounds that come from menus and most buttons. It just doesn’t really make any sense.

I personally would put system volume down to 40% or lower and I would drop sound effects to around 60% or so. This puts the focus on the music and voices and kind of makes it feel more like what you’d hear from a movie. But like I said before, those are just some minor issues. For me, the strengths of both the voice acting and music are alone enough to get a 10/10 for this category.

DIFFICULTY: 5

Three Houses is a very unique game because there’s so many different possible combinations for how easy or hard the game becomes, and the overall difficulty will be entirely up to you. If you want a fun and easy experience, you can make the game as easy as you want. But if you hate yourself and really crave a challenge, you can make the game incredibly difficult.

There are two game modes that you can choose from which are called classic and casual. The classic mode is the standard Fire Emblem experience and makes it so that when one of your characters dies in battle, they’re gone for good. Casual on the other hand is a lot more forgiving because it’s a lot more like Pokemon when they faint. If one of your allies is knocked out, once the battle ends, they’ll get right back up as if nothing happened.

In addition to those two game modes, you also have three difficulty levels that are called normal, hard, and maddening. Notice how there isn’t even an easy mode at all? Well don’t worry because the normal mode is kind of an easy one if you know what you’re doing. Between the three difficulty levels and two game modes, that makes six total options for how easy or hard you can make it. That’s in addition to a bunch of things that you can do once you start playing to make it much easier.

When it came to my experience playing the game for the first time, I had a very hard time picking through all of these settings my first time through. I had no experience with Fire Emblem at all so I originally wanted to play on the easiest levels possible so that I could best experience the story and game itself.

But once I started doing some research and looking into the game, all the advice that I ended up getting was that I should start on classic mode since I can change back to casual mode at any point if the game gets too difficult for me. I eventually went with classic mode, but I gave up on it an hour or so later, but I still very much recommend classic mode to be the best way to go if you know how to play.

The fact that when allies die, they’re gone for good is an impact that really spoke to me. Every single action counted, and I had to focus so much more on each character as well as my strategy. Classic mode made me feel way more invested in the story and each character’s journey, and every action and event felt way more emotional. This makes the story so much better, but the only problem was that I was so bad at combat when I first started playing.

I ended up losing one of the early training battles and in my first real battle I already lost a few units and it ended up becoming too much for me so I quit so that I could start a new game mode on the easier setting. Playing on normal and casual can be tough for new players, but these settings offer so many freedoms and abilities that make the game a breeze if you want to mostly focus on the story and fun stuff.

But then you make it to the other end of the spectrum because if you really hate yourself, you can play the hardest combo possible which would be maddening difficulty with classic mode. The maddening difficulty is definitely a whole lot harder than the hard one and should never be attempted by someone who is bad at these kinds of games or by someone who just doesn’t want that kind of challenge.

But why is this mode so difficult? Well not only are the enemies a lot harder in maddening, but you also get experience at a much slower pace along with a bunch of other small nuisances. But if you are one of the few who really want to be challenged, then there are a couple things that you should do in order to make the experience more manageable.

For starters, you’re never going to want to start a brand new game from scratch on the maddening difficulty. It’s going to end up being way too difficult, no matter how much experience you have had with the game before trying this challenge. If you’re going to torture yourself, only do it with the new game plus mode so that you can spend all your renown.

Starting the game on this difficulty with all your supports maxed out or all the ranks and stuff maxed out won’t make it incredibly easy but during the first couple of hours you’ll get a decent leg up.

One thing that you really shouldn’t be doing in this mode is relying on swords and other weapons that are close combat. The enemies are going to be so much more powerful than what you’d expect and if you’re close enough to attack with a regular sword, then it might already be too late for you. The enemy will get a few counterattacks in and you’ll be dead.

Using bows or different kinds of spells will be the best way to attack so that you’ll be a few spaces away when you attack, and most enemies won’t be able to counter your attacks. It will also be harder for enemies to reach you during their turn. If you want to go with bows as your weapon of choice, my personal recommendation for characters to use would be Bernadetta and Shamir. You’ll also want to make sure that your magical units are capable of using healing spells and you’ll want to use those often.

Another thing that you’re going to want to focus more on will be exploring the monastery but you’re going to be way pickier towards where you spend all your activity points on. You’re not going to want to spend those points on things like eating together or choir practice. Sure, those are great activities for boosting your support points, especially since you do it with two characters each time.

But there’s more important things to be spending your activity points on. You shouldn’t even be focusing too much on support levels when playing on the maddening difficulty. If you really want to work on your relationships, you need to use your renown to restore your prior support levels and then you should slowly work from there.

The two most important things that you should be spending your activity points on will be cooking together and the tournament that you can access in the training grounds. Each time that you cook with someone, you’ll get a small stat boost for that month, which is something that you should never look over. Plus, you also get some support points here.

For the tournament, you’re going to get some gold to buy more stuff and every now and then you’ll get some items. If you use your activity points on these two as often as possible, getting stronger will be a little easier which will make this difficulty a little less challenging overall.

You’re also going to want to focus on fishing and gardening a whole lot more than you would in your normal playthrough. Once you unlock the merchant that sells you bait, you need to buy the maximum 40 each month and use them all up each time. All the fish that you catch will be super helpful when you sell them for gold or to cook better meals.

As for gardening, there’s so many benefits when it comes to planting the best seeds. For starters, you’re going to want to focus on planting seeds that will lead to items that offer permanent stat boosts. On top of that, you can get some flowers here and there that you can use for easy support points. If you follow all these tips, the maddening difficulty will be a lot easier, but it will still be quite the nightmare.

If you’re playing on this difficulty and it’s also bundled with classic mode, then I have to give the overall difficulty a 10 and it will be nearly impossible, especially if you don’t know what you’re doing. Even if you’re playing on casual mode with this difficulty, it can still be as high as a 9.

If you love the challenge, you’re a fire emblem veteran, or you just have a death wish, then you won’t really have any challenges with this game mode and difficulty. But everyone else needs to stay clear.

Regardless of which game mode and difficulty you’re playing on, there are a few extra things that you can take advantage on to make sure that the game becomes easier if you’re needing the assistance. The first thing that you can take advantage of is changing the game mode to an easier one. For instance, if you started the game in classic mode but in every single battle you’re having a few near death experiences, you can drop the game mode to casual.

The only issue here is that once you drop the game mode to casual, you won’t be able to increase it back up to classic if you ever wanted to. If you get better at the game later on and you want to get the extra challenge back, you’re going to have to start a brand new game file.

So basically, if you start the game on the highest difficulty possible, you can drop it to the easiest if you so choose. The next thing that you can do to make the game easier is to grind as much as you possibly can. If you’re playing on the easiest mode possible, all you have to do is do a handful of free battles and after a couple of hours, all of you units will be one hit overpowered heroes. The game might even become too easy.

If you’re on the harder modes and difficulties, then grinding a lot will be a very helpful way to make battles more tolerable. The free battles are such a great way to grind, especially if you do auto battles because you’ll get so much experience and a bunch of gold and items every time you win.

If you’re already playing on an easy difficulty and grinding a lot, you’ll become very overpowered, and the game will be super easy. The only thing you’d want to worry about when grinding like crazy on the harder modes is making sure that your units survive each battle to begin with. So don’t try to overdo it when playing on the harder modes or make sure to use divine pulse as often as you can.

Divine Pulse is going to be super helpful in fixing mistakes and will help you win, but if you’re playing in classic mode, it will literally be a lifesaver. Remember that if a character dies while playing in classic mode, they’re gone for good. So, if you’re playing on classic mode and someone dies, you use divine pulse to rewind time and try a different strategy in the hopes of saving them.

You also really want to take advantage of the online stuff that the game offers you. If you’re connected to the internet and you’re exploring the monastery, you’ll be able to see travelers from other games and they will be selling you items from their game. Most of the time it will be fish or repair resources, but you can also get some really good items for pretty cheap or items that aren’t obtainable until much later.

During my first playthrough, I was able to buy a bunch of Master Seals early on and I was able to get the Viskam sword for 1 gold early on in chapter 10, which made Byleth unstoppable. Buying what they have whenever you can is a good way to make yourself stronger and the overall game a little bit easier.

But if you tried everything and for some reason it’s still a bit difficult or you’re getting impatient, there’s one other thing that you can do and that’s pick up an Amiibo. If I’m not mistaken, you can use any amiibo with Three Houses and they’ll get you a variety of cool items when you visit the amiibo gazebo during your weekly exploration of the monastery. All you have to do is connect the amiibo and items will start appearing on the ground for you to collect.

Most of the things that you’ll get from the amiibos will be common items like seeds, lures, and some other items. However, if you’re into fishing, then this is a great way to unlock more fishing tries early on if you’re lucky and get lures. When you first start the game, you’re limited to a very small number of lures until you unlock the merchant that sells them after a few chapters. You normally won’t be fishing much but using an amiibo can get you a few extra fishing attempts before unlocking the merchant.

If you use a Fire Emblem amiibo, you’ll also unlock a music track to use during battle that’s associated with the game that the amiibo character comes from but that won’t really help with difficulty unless all you needed was a change of mood.

See, Three Houses can literally be as easy or as hard as you want it to be. The game can be played at your own pace and there are so many ways for you to make it infinitely easy if it’s too hard for you. As for an overall difficulty, the game gets a 5 from me because it can go either way. Playing on normal and casual while grinding a lot can deserve a 0 or a 1 for difficulty while playing on maddening and classic can easily make it as high as a 10.

FINAL THOUGHTS

The Switch has had some pretty amazing games and there’s no doubt that Three Houses is one of them. In a matter of weeks, I went from not caring about the Fire Emblem series at all to Three Houses being one of my top two or three Switch games and that’s saying a lot coming from the guy who has nearly 400 Switch games. I’d even go as far as to say that this was the most invested I’ve ever been in a video game, with an engagement level that’s I’ve only ever experienced with really good TV shows.

In fact, my three most favorite game franchises of all time are Pokemon, Persona, and Monster Hunter but I’d say my whole experience with Three Houses was a better experience than any single game that I’ve ever played within those series because of the pure emotion, involvement, and fun that I experienced.

In fact, because of how invested I was, Three Houses was one of the very few games where I found myself actively playing in docked mode. That’s something that I almost never do but many of the animations and the epic sound design were begging to be played on a big screen.

Over the last year, the only times I ever played on the TV was when I was recording for Youtube or the two times I was super invested in Minecraft and didn't want to stop playing to charge. Other than that, I play almost exclusively in handheld mode, but I quickly began to realize that I had to play this on a bigger screen. This is one of those games that just has to be played on the TV.

It wasn’t all fun and games though because there were a couple aspects of Three Houses that I wish were added, changed, or just better. I haven’t personally experienced any “cons” or dealbreakers that could subtract a point here and there, but there were a few minor things that I wish could have changed. The three big ones for me were quests, backgrounds, and customization.

More Engaging Quests:

One thing that I would have loved to see in Three Houses was a better variety when it came to all of the quests. If I had to guess, I’d say that at least 90 percent of all the quests were broken down into three categories. They are fetch quests, battle quests, and interact quests. There’s nothing wrong with battle quests since the battles never get old but the fetch quests and interact quests are repeated a lot and kind of get old after a while.

What do I mean by interact quests? I mostly mean where you have to find information, or you need to look for a specific person. There are so many quests where the goal is to talk to different students until I find the information that I need. There was even one quest from Seteth that told me to go to Jeralt for the quest. I personally feel like these kinds of quests were only put into the game to force yourself to talk to characters that you normally wouldn’t interact with. After the first dozen or so, I just started fast traveling everywhere to get these quests over with.

It's not a big deal for me since half the game is very story driven while the other half is very battle driven, but it wouldn’t have been a bad idea to have either some variety in the quests, to have quests that were just a bit more challenging, or to have some that were more creative and puzzling. Half of the quests that weren’t story driven and interesting just weren’t really engaging, didn’t offer any real motivation to become invested in them, or didn’t really offer any good rewards.

There were lots of great quests but there were just so many that ended up being lackluster and even predictable at times. I ended up doing many of these other quests fast or I would entirely skip over some of the optional ones unless they offered rewards that I really needed.

Better looking Backgrounds:

I already mentioned this a little bit earlier in the graphics section and it’s still very much true. There are so many really good graphics used throughout the game, especially in battle and in animations, but many of the backgrounds are just so bland and boring. Again, it’s just a small issue, but it’s something that could have made the overall experience a little bit better if more effort was put into the backgrounds.

During many of the non animated cutscenes, the game just uses a bunch of static backgrounds and it’s usually boring, ugly, or out of focus. The game is usually full of life but with these scenes, it really feels like the lazy way was taken. It would have been really cool if each of these scenes had a dynamic background or if we would have been able to see other characters interacting or moving in the backgrounds. That would have given these scenes so much more life.

More Character Customization:

All things considered, this is another minor annoyance that I have with the game since it’s still an amazing game, but this is probably the aspect of Three Houses that I ended up being the most disappointed by. There is very little customization in the game when it comes to your characters, and that’s easily the thing that excites me the most in games. I just love it when a game has a ton of customization options to choose from and Three Houses just didn’t give me that experience.

When I played and reviewed Hollow Realization, I was ecstatic about all of the customization options that the game had. There were a million different ways to customize the way that your character looked and then another million ways to upgrade and customize all of your weapons. Then when I played Pokemon Sword, I was pleasantly surprised by how many clothing options were added to the game.

I thought that a game as big and engaging as Three Houses would have a great customization system but unfortunately that was not the case. Other than picking your gender, there is no way to customize how Byleth looks. I get that this could be a way to become more invested and also as a way to have an iconic character, but there are lots of great games that had great character options, and this could have been one of them.

Plus the options for clothing are lame and far between. For Byleth, there’s barley any options that you can start with. When it comes to customization, the only real options that you get is when you’re dealing with the classes because each class has a unique outfit and there’s dozens of them. But the only problems with those is that they’re obviously preset and you have to do a lot of work to unlock them.

But these are all things that I wish were in the game or were better, so they don’t hurt the game in any way. Overall, this is an amazing game not only because the story and gameplay is great, but also because you get so many hours worth of content for the low price that you play. If you put down the full $60 and price tag and you only play the game once and then give up, you’re still going to get your money’s worth because you can easily be lost in the game for 40 to 60 hours.

But if you are really invested in the game and you try for all the different paths, all the different romance and support options, and everything else that the game has to offer, then your $60 investment can easily turn to 100 to 300 or more hours of fun. Plus, if you can get the game for less than $60, it will be an even better steal. There’s been a couple times where the game dropped to $60, and I’ve seen some copies go as low as $30 in which it would be a no brainer to buy at that point.

In general, I’m still pretty bad at Strategy RPG’s and I still don’t understand half of the combat but my views on the genre had definitely changed because the game is so much fun. I had a blast with the game, especially when it came to the story and I know you will too if you give this game a chance. My overall grade for Fire Emblem: Three Houses is going to be an impressive 9.5 out of 10 and I think it’s one of the best games that you can get on the switch.