Here I am, talking about Fire Emblem Three Houses again, and there’s a lot to talk about this time around. Today, I wanted to talk about lore in video games because that’s not something that you get a lot of when playing your average game, and it’s something that each game franchise does differently.

From my own experience, I’ve noticed that a good game series can add a lot of lore and backstory to characters and setting by adding extra content through additional games. Pokemon is a pretty good example of this, even though each region is basically a reset and a completely new set of lore.

But with Pokemon, a lot of the games do a really good job at putting in little references to other games, or add extra stuff to the continuity, which make the lore or region feel a lot bigger. A great example of this is how generation 2 continued the story of Team Rocket, the Kanto region, and Red.

In addition to that, there’s many other references in games that add minor details to other games that flesh them out. This is in addition to all the lore and backstory that’s already present in the given game.

Then you have games that are so big and massive that everything you need to know about the setting, characters, and backstory is all present within the one game. Skyrim is a perfect example of this for a number of reasons. First of all, you have the main story and the main quests which already tell you so much about Skyrim. On top of that, the side quests, exploration of the world, and random people end up telling you so much.

But even further on top of that, there’s hundreds of pages of books that you can find. These end up telling you so much more about Skyrim, the people, events, and history. Somebody actually wrote all this backstory and made it so that you had to find them, meaning most people would never learn about all this.

Most games that have a lot of content have some sort of a guide, but with Skyrim, people ended up creating so many pages, websites, documents, and even complete books because of how much stuff there is in the game. At times, it can get hectic knowing that there’s so much history and lore to a game, character, or location and knowing that you probably missed something. But at the same time, it’s refreshing as a fan of a game, knowing that not only did the developers put so much effort into giving you as much content as possible, but knowing that there’s a lot of people who are just as passionate and curious about the games’ backstory, which means that the game did things the right way.

This is where Fire Emblem Three Houses comes in, specifically the world of Fodlan. Three Houses is a mix between the Pokemon and Skyrim strategy because on its own, Three Houses itself didn’t have nearly as big of a world as Skyrim, but it did have a lot. But then Fire Emblem Warriors: Three Hopes came along and added so much more to the Fodlan lore through adding extra characters, events, and timelines.

The game is also very unique when it comes to lore because there’s different sets of lore depending on the route you take, and no one set of lore is truly canon. Since there’s at least seven different paths that you can take between Three Houses and Three Hopes, each one sets up a different set of events and story paths that only add to the overall size and scope of the Fodlan lore.

With all of its supports and chapters, Three Houses is just as much of a visual novel as it is anything else. When it comes to lore, dialogue reveals so much, and I wouldn’t be surprised if there’s thousands of pages worth of dialogue of people straight up telling you the history of Fodlan, the history of a specific place, an event, or about a certain character. Factor in a bunch of additional narration and a handful of books that you can find similar to those in Skyrim, there’s just so much written lore, and it’s kind of spectacular.

It's gotten to the point where there’s so much lore that people have been able to start documenting the amount of content and organizing them into coherent, structured documents. This led to countless timelines, thorough event and history descriptions, location and environment documents, and character profiles.

The scope gets kind of crazy here. For example, lots of games have simple descriptions of characters. In most games, you’ll learn a lot about the main characters fluently as the story progresses and you might be able to get a couple paragraphs of information on some of the supporting characters like what their histories are or what they like, but there’s rarely a crazy amount of information on characters beyond the protagonist and a few of the other main characters.

But this is where a game like Three Houses is so different, and it blew my mind. The main characters have a ton of info on them, but Three Houses is the only game I know of where you could look up the 22nd character and find 30,000 words worth of content on their history, likes, supports, and other information. This massive amount of content is just stuff that’s directly from the game such as dialogue with them, dialogue with other people, stats, or from official game pages.

But some people have taken things to the next level by adding even more content to specific characters by explaining things like why they’re good in certain roles, guides on how to rectuir/use, and discussions that while not officially from Nintendo, add a lot of additional plausible info about said character.

For instance, here’s just a sample of links for Lysithea:
https://fireemblem.fandom.com/wiki/Lysithea
https://fireemblem.fandom.com/wiki/Lysithea/Supports
https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/boards/204445-fire-emblem-three-houses/77913330
https://www.thegamer.com/fire-emblem-three-houses-lysithea-von-ordelia-secret-trivia/
https://www.thegamer.com/fire-emblem-three-houses-lysithea-best-character/
https://thenewleafjournal.com/my-glass-cannon-is-tankier-than-expected-lysithea-fire-emblem-story/
https://www.reddit.com/r/fireemblem/comments/d354bb/analysis_of_character_endings_lysithea/

People went on to create, find, or discuss an insane amount of content for a character who doesn’t even seem to be top 15 in popularity, and that’s really just the start because there’s all this content for every single character, every war that’s taken place in Fodlan, every town, and every significant event.

Then it gets even more chaotic because Three Hopes adds even more content to not only the backstory, but to what happens in the future thanks to all the extra paths and timelines there are.

I think that the reason it works so well on Fire Emblem is because it's woven so well throughout the gameplay and story to the point where it's hard to miss a lot of it Plus, the game builds such a captivating cast of characters and an intriguing story to the point where I want to learn as much as I could.

Skyrim is one of my favorite games and I put in way too many hours on both PC and Switch but I doubt I read more than a handful of the in game books. But I forgot most of the lore and story because it's either not important, hard to access, or there isn't enough of the stuff that's interesting, something that a game like Fire Emblem did very well.