Ayra

I'm really unsure about a playable soldier in this game because each character is a "commander" in this game. In the screenshot above, we know for sure that the guy with the weird "armored headband" is one of the generic soldier types a commander can have. I'd expect regular soldiers to be the same way; the ones pictured above are probably basically the "spear" version of the generics, or a perhaps "class-changed" version of them due to the relatively hefty armor. I love playable soldiers too and we'll certainly have lance-based infantry (Not only Dimitri, but we've seen Ferdinand both noble class and changed class wielding one on foot), but I really doubt they'll be called soldiers this time.

Is "roaming in villages, dungeons and base" really Open World though? I thought Open World was for games like Breath of the Wild or Skyrim, where you can (mostly) go where you want when you want, explore, do sidequests, etc. Basically, that a large part of the plot is not linear and can be done in any order. That I don't feel would work well for a tactics game, because it means that game balance would be extremely difficult and tactics game live and die by their battles. Open world also brings forth random battles to fill the void, but random battles are very long in tactics game and gets annoying pretty quickly. I really don't see "my" definition of open world work well at all for a tactics game. However, "your" definition of Open world would work just fine; it's basically what the Shining Force games are.

Thank you for this image! It helps alleviate some of my issues. While it's still the same color for everyone from a faction, I assume we'll be getting some characters from multiple factions later on so we should be getting more variety. Also, at least the clothes look different too. It's very easy to differentiate between the fighters and the mage here, which is a big step-up over the academy uniforms. And actual armor! Yay! Too bad they won't show up on portraits, art, etc, but at least it's a start that there's more variety model-wise. As a tiny aside, I'm noticing that Ferdinand's armor is not the same tint as Byleth's (?), but the armor itself looks very similar. The scene lighting is comparable in both spots, so is it due to the glowy sword, or is it a different class, or do promoted characters have slight coloring differences?

That's my main concern too. Overall, I'm now a lot more optimistic about Three Houses than I was right after the trailers came out, but this particular concern unfortunately remains. Like you, I tend to favor older characters. I really appreciate that our protagonist is the oldest we've ever had (probably) and that they are a teacher and not a student, but... The vast majority of characters seemingly being students is a hefty blow to potential character diversity. On a more positive note, I'm not sure that "school = teenager" necessarily. It can be more of a university setting, where you can have students of all ages. There's no students that we've seen that is "old" like Duessel, but there's some that really don't look like teenagers. The black-haired "scary" man in the Black Eagles, the white-haired axeman from the Blue Lions and Raphael from the Golden Deers in particular. Then there's others that are more borderline, but that I'd certainly fit more under "adults" than "teenagers" like Ferdinand, Linhardt, blue hair unknown man and Leonie (with mayyybe Petra and Mercedes). The setting kind of push away kids too like Ricken, which I personally appreciate (I've never been a fan of 10-12 years old fighting on a battlefield, killing and potentially dying). Unfortunately, even if some of the students are potentially older than teenagers, the uniform still remains and its my biggest pet-peeve. I don't like how the base uniform looks at all (flat black doesn't look good to me), and everyone is wearing a variation of it. My personal bias aside, it makes everyone looks very samey. Even I adored the base uniform, the issue would still remain. Look at this screenshot from a battle: Most characters looks nearly identical at first glance. This is pretty zoomed in and the characters mesh together. In Radiant Dawn, you can immediately know who is who at a glance. Here? You only know because of the flying face icons. How many characters are immediately visually distinct here? 1) Petra with her white shirt, bare legs and contrasting hair color. 2) Edelgard due to the huge mass of hair combined with red tights (it's the only somewhat vibrant color present on anyone). ... and that's basically it. Caspar (white sleeves) and Dorothea (skirt, small amount of leg) if you feel very generous. All the others are extremely similar to each other. They have different hair colors, yes, but all of them have muted tones (even the Ferdinand's orange) so they don't stand out at all. We'll probably get a bit more variation once our team is class-changed, but all the official art, designs (including other materials like Heroes, Cipher, possible manga), cutscenes, etc are all going to be with those same, near identical uniforms. To me, it's a huge shame, especially since every student, even from different houses, use the same uniform. I'll live with it and it's certainly not the end of the world (especially if the rest of the game is great), but I certainly hope the next Fire Emblem game won't use so similar uniforms for every character again.

I fully approve the presence of generics in the story. It certainly makes more sense for them to occasionally show up in cutscenes than the standard "We occasionally talk about them existing but we never see them" that's present in most FE games. That's a shame regarding the portraits only making it right at the end of the project, but it's perfectly understandable and makes sense from a development standpoint. I understood why the expressions were displayed that way here; it's just that two of Petricia's expressions looked strange in that size to me and I didn't know if the full-size version of those look fine or not. Based on the quality of the rest of the art, they probably do, so forget I said anything :) By the way, would it be a good idea to put maybe the lords portraits in the opening post? I assume a lot of people just poke their head in a topic to glance if there's anything that catches their interest. People seeing this nice art might be more interested in actually reading the rest of the description of the project and more likely to download the game and give it a try. That can wait until the project is finished of course (or that the portraits are in-game), but if you want to drum up more interest now it might be worth considering. Someone liking how a character looks is often enough to get them to at least give a game a try.

Whoa, even the generics are getting full artwork? They seriously look good enough to be main characters. The generic myrmidons aren't the brightest folks around it seems! "Oops, that's the sixth time I get a deep cut on my arm... maybe I should get some armored sleeves? Nahhh..." I said it before, but I adore the upcoming art for those characters. It's vibrant, colorful and it looks great. In all honesty I much prefer it over the Three Houses designs... Huge thumbs up for me regarding those. The one single "complaint" I have is that Petricia's bottom right and the column 2 row 2 portraits looks strange at that size. Maybe they look great at normal size (I can't say; I haven't seen them), but at this tiny size they look a bit off to me (but then, Fates Charlotte's berzerk portrait would too, so it might be intentional).

As previously mentioned, economics teacher Anna would be simply fantastic. Teaching morally questionable habits, selling cheat sheets to her own exams...

I was incredibly surprised that the last trailer has shown zero free roaming. If we didn't have the short running sequence from the old E3 trailer, nothing in the new one would indicate that roaming in the base was even a thing. Since they didn't show any of it during the "big" direct presentation, I assume that the roaming is very limited in this game and not important on the whole. I would expect it limited to the school and a few other choice areas (like a base camp, a tiny portion of a ravaged town, etc). Regarding "open world", I don't think something ala Breath of the Wild could work for a SRPG, but something like Shining Force 2 could. It's still linear at its core, but you have wandering around, talking to towns people, exploration, some side missions or quests, etc. I could see something like that working just fine for a more "open" Fire Emblem, but I can't imagine something more possibly working and have any sort of balanced maps.

My best guess is that Wyverns are going to require both Flying and Heavy Armor training. They are the tough and durable flyers, so it would make sense. Triangle attack I'm really unsure about; it's a possibility though.

I know I have bad taste, but I kind of like it overall personally..? I REALLY appreciate F.Byleth being featured on the cover too instead of just M.Byleth. It's very common for games with selectable protagonists to only feature the male version on the cover, and both trailers we've seen have been incredibly male Byleth-centric so I was fearing it'd be the same here. Honestly, I'd have been perfectly fine if neither Byleth appeared on the cover, but since they do, I really appreciated it's both of them. Regarding the rest, upside down Claude is unfortunate I admit. The fact that Dimitri and Edelgard are still mainly straight makes it even more jarring. But besides that, I like the colors personally and while I certainly wouldn't call the cover a great one, on the whole I like it? Edit: Thumbs up for the music as far as I'm concerned.

Besides the obvious things like good varied maps, have the game be balanced around no grinding (it's fine if grinding exists, but it shouldn't be mandatory to beat the game), etc, there's one major thing I hope for, since it would immediately "fix" the majority of things I have issues with. Have the school, classes and tests aspect be only an arc of the game, not the entire game. That by itself would ensure the following things: - Allow you to have other characters besides just students, like the other teachers for example, church representatives, etc. Characters from different walk of life gives a better understanding of the world, instead of just a bunch of nobles in school with (relatively) similar circumstances. - Give everyone a unique, non-school uniform outfit. Being outside the school would mean that characters could get actually distinct outfits and have their own look besides their variations of the same flat black uniform. As a side bonus, it would mean that in Heroes and other FE material, we'd get more than a swarm of plain black uniforms for everyone all the time. - Allow for a greater variety of scenarios. You can't logically have a gigantic war between various factions while still doing mundane tests. If the three kingdoms get in a major war with the church involvement (the school's patron), the routine schoolwork doesn't make sense anymore. I'm sure the school itself will stay important, but the "classroom" setting is what I'm hoping will change at some point. You can still certainly train people during a military campaign: that would allow them to keep the majority of the new development mechanisms functional, while still allowing you to train the other teachers for example (which would be difficult if it stays a strict school-and-classes setting). You can still have requirements on getting new classes. Don't fly well enough? You don't get to be a wyvern lord yet: you don't need an exam in a classroom for that to happen during the entire game. The way I see it, the story has to move away from just school-centric stuff at some point if we want to get to the major wars we saw in the first trailer. The question is: will this happen in this game, or is the "post-school stuff" reserved for "Three Houses 2 - coming in 2022" and the big wars were just "flashbacks from the past". My hope is for the former, really!

Is it a given? I know SoV does it this way, but do we have any indication that it's actually the case for Three Houses? It might be faulty memory on my side, but I don't recall anything pointing toward arts being learned from specific weapons. I kind of assumed that combat arts would be learned via either getting a weapon skill up high enough, or learned from being/leveling certain classes.

My initial reaction was that I really didn't like the art style (and by extension the artist's work), but thinking further on it, I'm actually fine with the portraits after all. In the first trailer there's some portraits I didn't like (Hilda's eyes in particular), but in the newest one there's no portrait I've seen that I genuinely dislike and there's a few I like quite a bit. So as far as the artist work itself is concerned, I'm actually pretty satisfied now. My real issue lies with this: And the issue lies in the color palette and the uniforms, which is probably outside the realm of the artist herself. These characters are very visually indistinct from each other. Take Radiant Dawn for example since it's the closest game visually. At a glance, you immediately knew if that unit was Oscar or Titania. Each character had their own color and class type to identify them. Here, look at Lindhart and Surly man. Yes, there are some differences if you look closely: Lindhart has a more "dress-like" clothes, has no gloves and has blue shoes... But at a glance? They look extremely similar with all that black, which is an issue for strategy games where you spend most of your time "zoomed out" looking at the battlefield in general, not at small details on their clothes. The 3ds games have little face portraits on their characters themselves so you can identify them easily at a glance. Older games don't have that, but you can still at least immediately see that this character is a mage, this one is a healer, etc. Here, looking at the characters you have no idea what they are. One is a healer, one is an offensive mage, but both have the exact same pose. Bernadette's bow is barely visible. Yes, you can identify characters and weapon types easily through the "floating" information panels, but that's more of a band-aid on the art style selected here. It's not expressive or obvious in the least, so additional interface elements had to be added to compensate. So I'm revising my opinion: the artist is just fine, but the uniforms and flat black color palette are the actual reason why I'm not so keen on this game visual style.

It can remain very similar even after leaving school. Soldiers on a campaign still gets training, after all. The second class promotion can still require specific skills to get; it just wouldn't be in form of an exam. It'd still make sense: for example, you shouldn't be able to become a dragon lord if you are too bad at flying. The "class" setup only works for students too. In the first trailer, we saw Mustache Man as an ally unit; it's an old trailer of course, but getting him (or the sexy teacher) sounds very plausible. It wouldn't make sense for you to be able to train them in class, but it would make sense to train him as part of a military campaign. The class interface as shown doesn't seem as if it would work that well either when you get more units. Surely (hopefully?) we'll get more than Byleth + 8 students during the course of the game. Right now, we see that Byleth can teach three students in that phase, with each having their own meter. It's fine for a lower pool of units, but for a large pool it seems like it would get unwieldy. So my guess (and hope) is that we'll get something sort-of similar in a post-school phase, but more fitting for non-students and a larger pool of character.

I love Fates approach, but it's going to be more difficult now considering there's now... 10 (?) Fire Emblem amiibos compared to the 4 from Fates days. Character art could always be reused as-is I suppose, but that's whole 10 additional models to make and animate (including a Tiki with dragon form). I don't think it's going to happen personally due to the effort involved, but I'd love if it did. SoV's way had zero value for me and seemed very unpopular on the whole: I don't think we'll see this version again. I think in the end we'll just get something ala Fire Emblem Warriors: bonus okay items based on their characters. TH will probably allow for grinding (school expeditions are a perfect excuse for it), so I don't think they'd shy away from giving bonus items from Amiibos.

Your idea sounds pretty decent. I'd actually willingly play your scenario. It does sound fun and has potential, but... Overall, I'm still happy we are "just" the teacher. I've never really enjoyed a single game based around a school and I'm hoping very much that being a teacher instead of a student will change that. It's been close to two decades since I finished university; but even when I was still in school I still preferred adult protagonists over those that were my own age. High school dynamics is really not something I'm looking back at fondly and I'm personally very happy those years are far behind me (probably a big reason why school games are a big miss for me). There's also a gigantic amount of school-based games available, so it's nice to see something a bit different for once. Anyway, in a strategy game like this, being a teacher makes more sense than a student. Since you are leading people in life-or-death battles, being in a position of authority is pretty much mandatory. Plus, you are selecting development for other characters. A teacher can say: "Focus on your sword skill", but a student can't really do that for anyone besides themselves.

I'll join the crowd and say: "Just Anna" as far as story presence go. From pure gut feeling alone, I think that Anna will be in Three Houses, but not be a playable character. Although, if the Amiibo are in there with zero story presence or relevance (ala Fates) I'd be happy. It wouldn't unnecessarily tie the worlds together, but it'd still allow you to play as old favorites if you want. I don't think it will happen though due to the sheer amount of Fire Emblem amiibo now; 8 comes to mind offhand, so that's a lot of new models and animations to make. If it's something like SoV I'd say don't bother: that was completely pointless in my opinion and a waste of time and effort as far as I'm concerned. I'm fine with the Cipher OCs like in SoV though: they felt like their own unique character that belonged in the game in the first place. I liked them, and they didn't feel out of place to me. I didn't mind too much the Awakening Trio in Fates personally, but I feel them being their own character instead would have made more sense (their mission didn't match how they acted in the main game). Proper distant sequels like Awakening works well (adult Tiki was awesome I thought) , but in Fates it felt super shoe-in so I'd rather no repeat of this if possible.

On one hand, I've been looking forward a lot to a Fates artbook (it's my favorite game character-design wise) and with 320 pages it seems like a must-buy. ... but that phrase up there is very worrying. What I'm wondering is if it is: A) "It's missing some characters, like the 2nd generation" or B) "It only contains the royals and a tiny handful of very specific characters like Felicia and Jakob" A is a definite buy. B... I'm not so sure. A big appeal of this book would have been to see official designs for all the characters without one. Is there going to be some new official art at all or will we have already seen all of it? If characters don't have an official finished art, will we see at least see concept design for them?

With in-battle stats after the buffs, my Cherie has close to 600 atk and my Luna has around 450; there's a massive power difference between the two for me, even including the fact that Luna got two Runestones (so more stats). That's not including the fact that Cherie has skills with much higher damage multiplier too (1.6x versus 1x), so my Cherie easily does double Luna's damage. Part of Luna's issue is that four of her skill points are automatically taken on my team: She's my team buffer so she needs the faction buff, and she needs her "damage is based on m.def" skill too, so she has a single point leftover (I'm using it for the "move your remaining points after attacking"). I have Luna as a cavalry archer since I find her more useful that way: at least, she's very potent against flyers, she can counter-attack mages while taking minimal damage, and she can "kite" slow melee units. She's critical to my team, but damagewise, Cherie >>> Luna for me by a very significant amount (except against flyers). Regarding Luna weapon as an horse archer, I got an SSR dagger that gives a tiny bit of M.Def (Nighthawk) and some Skill. I'm pretty sure it comes from a boss (Those on the map that takes 30 stamina)? It's just 2% additional m.def, but that's the best I found for her so far. And yes, you still have 2 range with a dagger.

I'm not going to touch the Guild stuff personally. Great rewards is certainly appealing (especially the bonus runestone), but I feel I'm already spending too much time on Langrisser Mobile so I'm not willing to add Guild Wars on top of it. The secret realm power boost helps of course and it's very welcome, but the time required is still pretty high in my opinion.

I really can't vouch for Gaiden Alm since I've never played it, but I disagree on the "equal importance" as far as SoV is concerned. Or at least, how the two protagonists are treated. Alm gets two unique swords. He's always right and does no wrong; people telling him he's wrong all come around a few stages later. He's the one who defeat the final boss, as well as every story-relevant enemy like Berkut and Fernand. The villagers constantly tell him how special he his, how much greater he is than them. The two times he needs to be rescued, he's in the middle of valiantly fighting the enemy and is saved from Celica from far away. Celica doesn't get any plot important weapon. She picks a string of awful decisions later on. She doesn't beat anyone significant: all she defeats are one-note brigands and pirates. Her friends are more like "normal friends" that care for her: they don't hold her on a pedestal and tell how her special and great and unique she is, and they constantly tell her she's wrong later on (they are right, not her). She needs to be rescued by the valiant Alm directly two times, plus Conrad a few times. Alm is constantly praised, Celica doesn't. Alm is never shown in a truly vulnerable state, Celica is. Alm accomplish every single important objective in the game, while Celica is basically doing two irrelevant sidequests (pirates and bandits) before walking through a swamp and turning herself in. Could you have SoV with Celica's side of the game not being playable? Easily; very little would need to be changed for that to work actually. Her side of the game is basically a side quest. Could you have SoV without Alm's side of the game? Not at all; it's the near-entirety of the game as far as plot, villains and events go.

Gameplay > story for me by a significant margin, except in extreme cases. For me, an amazing story will enhance my enjoyment of a game by a good amount, and an awful story filled with plot holes (or detestable characters) will ruin it. For example, Nier Automata's story was excellent and I thoroughly enjoyed how everything fell in perfectly by the end: what I thought were plot holes or questionable things weren't in the end, and things made sense. On the reverse, I detested Children of Zodiarks characters and the plot and setting had big holes, which led me to hate the game. However, the majority of games have their story fall somewhere between "Good" and "Bad"... and to me, it doesn't change my enjoyment much by itself. I'll prefer a game with good gameplay and bad story over a game with good story and ok gameplay. Conquest is literally my favorite game of all time (not just within the series) and I love it to bits despite the story and setting definitively falling low on the "bad" side. The gameplay is basically perfect in my eyes and I love the music, the visuals and many of its characters. There's significant story issues (Corrin-centricism in particular) but it didn't affect my enjoyment much. Would I have preferred a story ala Path of Radiance? For sure! But as is, Conquest is still my favorite and most replayed game of all time. Anyhow, regarding protagonists and avatars... I'm mostly of the same mind as the topic creator. I prefer a world which doesn't revolve around the protagonist. Fates does this the worst of course, with how Corrin-centric the world is. Chapter 6 is the most shining example: the dialog and arguing is about where Corrin go, not the massive war that is being started. Iago is the Nohr strategist, but every single moment featuring him is thinking how to torture Corrin in particular for no obvious reason instead of figuring out how to start a war. As OP mentioned, Alm shares a lot of those traits though. There's multiple scenes in the game that talk how Alm is "special", how he is "different" from the rest of them, how he was "meant for greater things than them". Alm is the player's proxy just as much as Corrin is: you just happen not to be able to customize him. I don't think the core issue is there being an avatar or not: it's how the world react to the protagonist in general. Having an avatar doesn't necessarily require the world to turn around them any more than a fixed protagonist... it just happen that avatar-lead games tends to be built like this often. Fire Emblem games have big casts and they feature an army of people working together: I feel that having a special "chosen one" is not a good idea in settings like this. Personally, I'm happy with a Robin style avatar. Events happened independently of her, she didn't receive undue praise constantly, the world didn't revolve around her, and neither her nor Chrom have the "Chosen Ones" aspect pushed too much. She doesn't even get a special weapon. She also featured her own personality and quirks; much love to Robin personally. I am worried regarding Byleth though. I never liked silent protagonists in story-heavy games in the first place: I don't self-insert at all, so a silent protagonist simply means that I'm controlling a super dull character with zero emotion (love Ys games, hate Adol due to that). The fact that there is so much emphasis on "You" instead of "Byleth" is concerning, as well as the "time warp sequence", the "special super unique sword" from the first trailer and how only "you" can hear Sothis. It does seem very likely we'll have a "You, the player, are the Chosen One" situation, but it's also possible it'll be understated quite a bit. For example, yes, Byleth might be getting the super special sword and be the primary contact with Sothis, but it's possible that those things are not that central to the plot. Many critical events (including the core plot elements) might still be occuring outside of Byleth's purview and the plot might still be mostly separate from her "special" status. Maybe.

[@Sire] I'm Ayra on the Dalsis server. I'm kind of struggling in deciding if I was lucky or not with my rolls: I had about 120 attempts saved and I did get two SSRs. Those were two Liana, who I already had. On one hand, Angelina is one of my favorite character in the franchise, and in this game she can go serpent master; I always loved unusual class like this so I would have loved to get her. On the other hand, Liana is critically important to my team and I already have a full princess team (I'd have made space for Angelina somehow). Coincidally, I also hit 50 shards from the Gates of Fate today, so it meant two whole star upgrades at once. They make a substancial difference in her healing at end of turn (higher stats + much higher heal modifier + higher range) so it's a super useful upgrade. It also saved me 50 whole days of getting shards for her. So yeah. Wanted Angelina, but I got something that is probably more useful and "powerful" for me instead. I guess I should feel happy to have at least got something useful to me! I really appreciate the new update regarding the Sacred Realm: the power boost you get from doing already-completed missions is pretty substantial, enough to be able to auto previously beaten content. I'm not sure if it will hold up to the level 45+ things (haven't done those yet), but it's a big time saver especially as far as the dragon and bonds. Still annoying that you have to still waste physical time waiting for your phone to complete the stages, but at least it cuts on the required time and tediousness. On a less tedious front, finally managed to 3* 5-3 elite. Was a fun challenge and I had to tweak my approach a few times to manage it. Only 5-4 to go before I have access to all the level 45 upgrades material; I haven't tried it yet on elite but I recall the standard stage to be one of the harder and longer one.

Honestly, that's my biggest hope. School setting for the first part of the game, with you being able to control/customize the students of the house you selected more. Then later on the school gets pushed aside as there is a need to travel and/or something major occurs that change this dynamic, characters gets their own unique non-school outfits and own classes (for the ones you didn't teach), etc. The school makes for a good first part of the game, but I'm hoping it's not all there is to it: since this is a physical location (unlike Fates castle), it would be strange for it to always remain the central hub if you are (hopefully) on a campaign somewhere else. Plus it would be uncanny if there's a gigantic war going on and that by the end, you'd still mainly be doing mundane teaching and giving tests to a bunch of students.

Well, not necessarily. It's certainly possible they don't have skills, but they might have out-of-battle skills like rally or swap, stat boosts (ala Awakening / Fates) or skills might simply not trigger in training duels. What I'm most curious about personally is how Sylvain can't use swords. The teaching interface shows how you can seemingly teach everything to everyone, and the noble class can seemingly use every weapon. We've seen that class change gives a new look (Edelgard's brigand promotion or the red skirt outfit we see her in later); he looks like he has his default outfit though. Promotion also doesn't sound like it'll happen that quickly either: Edelgard's needed a C rank in a weapon for example for a simple brigand class, Petra's D sword is the highest rank we've seen and Sylvain is just level 4. There's plenty of plausible explanations: Sylvain might be class-changed but in the school students always wear their default outfits, Sylvain is from a different house so they don't follow player rules, Sylvain is not a noble but some other generic base class that can't use swords, etc... But there's none I see as a clear "right" option.