AquaMage+

This exactly! I know I could skip all the monastery stuff, but the voice-acting is always such fun, I feel super compelled to hear everyones thoughts. If it just wouldn't take forever to track it all down is all ...

I love the Cast of ThreeHouses and the Story is much more wholesome then it was in the 3DS Games, yet I feel everything is presented so slowly that It started to bore me halfway through my first play-through. Last week I started my third run (BL) but got so tired of playing the same Maps over and over again and seeing similar battle- and talking- animations on every character no matter which house they were from, that I booted up RadiantDawn instead. I really wanted to know more about Dimitri, but the similarities per route far outshined theire differences for me and I realized that I like older titles, because they had a much more arcade style to them. Battle preparations and actual battles in ThreeHouses feel like two different games and chapters in ThreeHouses are pretty much 50% prep and 50% battle. The problem is that a lot of the preparations are completely disconnected from the fighting. Yeees, I know, you can skip that stuff, but as I said I love the cast in ThreeHouses and DON'T want to skip stuff where I can learn all about them and build them up! It's just that it takes twice the time to get similar stuff done in TH as for example in RadiantDawn. Every Chapter I run down the same paths in the monastery to get items, buffs and listen to their chatter, which could all be summed up in a few simple windows. The monastery is too big and doesn't change enough for me to be interesting after every single battle to walk around in. I unlock roughly 5 new supports per Chapter and when i start listening to all of them at once, it can sometimes feel like a 30 minute chore, completely irrelevant to the next battle, even if I like to view them. But when viewing and doing everything between chapters takes 1 or 2 hours, progression in the actual story feels way too slow. I really just wish the Monastery would be smaller or the stuff in it could be done faster. Older games had much smaller settings between battles that worked. just some tents for supports and cutscenes and some fast to access windows for rearranging skills. 3D exploration itself is a nice idea, but everything should be placed much closer to each other. Same goes for gardening, fishing and dining, which are fun at first, but once you've tried them, you take pretty much the same routine every Chapter. Skipping rewards because they take too long, isn't a very fun choice really. Teaching and watching Byleth run down the calendar every week also gets very old once weapon ranks need a ridiculous amount of teachings to actually level up and you keep skipping their "thank you for teaching me" texts like mad. Maybe they should have implemented supports that unlock during battles like in the GBA games. SOMETHING to make the time spend in the monastery more compact or connect these two game-play parts more. It doesen't help that your army MUST walk all the way back to the monastery after every single battle, no matter how little sense that makes in the story. This breaks the pace a lot and I understand why this may have been a necessity for the gameplay, but it slowes progression nonetheless. All this adds up and ultimately I spend a lot of my playtime in TH doing things I don't want to miss out on, but just don't feel rewarding enough for how much time they consume. At least that's why I felt tired. I just prefer the older titles for their fast paced chapter to chapter structure, variety in Map-design or battle-animations. ThreeHouses is much more focused on other parts that are great for other reasons but maybe just aren't engaging for me personally, which is a shame.