Alastor plays and ranks the whole series! Mission Complete! ...For now.

[Jotari]

2 minutes ago, Acacia Sgt said:

Eh, a hundred years ago from WWII the US didn't even had a Pacific coastline yet. Plus, they wouldn't be able to conquer Japan.

But I get what you mean. As it were, the US doesn't really have a track record on that in that era. The earliest examples would be Cuba and the Philippines, neither which were fragmented after gaining independence. They remained whole.

It still means the project of a united Fodlan wouldn't be a complete failure. Same for the UK. Maybe if we were to see Scotland breaking off and independent Irish reunification in the near of far future, but for now, the UK remains an enduring union that has lasted for centuries now.

As it is, it wouldn't be the entirety of Adrestia breaking off anyway. More likely it'd be another Ireland-NorthIreland situation. Parts of Adrestia choosing to remain in united Fodlan.

Well I wasn't seriously suggesting the logistics of an 1840s conquest of Japan by the USA (though if Japan had reacted very stupidly in 1850, then an American conquest might have been on the cards, this was the height of colonialism in general after all).

The Philippines are a pretty good example and probably what I should have pointed to as it was less than fifty years before the end of World War II yet shows how much the world's approach to conquest changed. Like most countries the Philippines got it's current sovereignty due to decolonization projects following the war (although specifically for the Philippines I'm sure the USA actually losing Sovereignty of it to Japan during the war and then it being wrecked by occupation probably was a bit of a deciding factor in them deciding they didn't want it any more). Such worldwide trends of territories gaining independence simply because they want it and the people in control of it feel sort of bad about owning it and are pressured by an international committee to relinquish control, it's not something that would have flown and basically any other point in history, at least any I can think of.

[Sunwoo]

9 minutes ago, Acacia Sgt said:

It still means the project of a united Fodlan wouldn't be a complete failure. Same for the UK. Maybe if we were to see Scotland breaking off and independent Irish reunification in the near of far future, but for now, the UK remains an enduring union that has lasted for centuries now.

As it is, it wouldn't be the entirety of Adrestia breaking off anyway. More likely it'd be another Ireland-NorthIreland situation. Parts of Adrestia choosing to remain in united Fodlan.

I think we're just going to have to agree to disagree about what we consider to be "united" and "not united" because I don't agree with what you're saying and you don't agree with what I'm saying. It doesn't have to be a complete failure for me to still count it as a failed project.

[Jotari]

Funnily enough if you search "United Kingdom Founded" in google, you get a date of 1922 (the date Ireland broke away). And there's good technical reason to actually say that's accurate (or even a later date), as the entirety of Ireland actually broke away in 1922, Northern Ireland just had the predecided ability to rejoin the UK immediately, which they enacted the very next day. But for one day the UK didn't have Ireland at all and would have  been just "The United Kingdom of Great Britain and no one else". Or their old title of the Kingdom of Great Britain. So while it obviously didn't last long enough for anyone to get around to changing official documents, one could say the UK is on it's second UK, with the first being from 1801-1922 and the second either being from Northern Ireland's stated intention to rejoin Great Britain in 1922, or as late as them actually establishing the border in 1925, until the modern day (a state of affairs I expect will not last for much longer than 30 more years, putting the two technical UKs in roughly the same age of about 120 years each).

Edited July 31, 2021 by Jotari

[ZeManaphy]

58 minutes ago, Maof06 said:

Relevant:

True, but Claude makes it very clear that he does not want to use bloodshed or force to obtain his ideals; he even states that he and Edelgard have similar ideas, but he cannot support Edelgard due to the sheer amount of lives she wishes to sacrifice. Your meme is a gross simplification of Claude’s ideals. 

Edited July 31, 2021 by ZeManaphy

[Alastor15243]

6 minutes ago, ZeManaphy said:

True, but Claude makes it very clear that he does not want to use bloodshed or force to obtain his ideals; he even states that he and Edelgard have similar ideas, but he cannot support Edelgard due to the sheer amount of lives she wishes to sacrifice. Your meme is a gross simplification of Claude’s ideals. 

He still doesn't see anything wrong with refusing to give the kingdom and all of the dang alliance houses their autonomy back after Edelgard took it all.

[Jotari]

1 minute ago, Alastor15243 said:

He still doesn't see anything wrong with refusing to give the kingdom and all of the dang alliance houses their autonomy back after Edelgard took it all.

Well yes and no, in the sense that he doesn't actually make that decision. He hands Fodlan over to Byleth for him/her to rule it at their desecration, while he meanwhile runs off to become King of Almyra.

[ZeManaphy]

4 minutes ago, Alastor15243 said:

He still doesn't see anything wrong with refusing to give the kingdom and all of the dang alliance houses their autonomy back after Edelgard took it all.

The Kingdom and Empire lost their only successors to the war. If they were left to their own devices, a civil war would very likely break out between power hungry nobles in order to gain access to the throne. As for the Alliance, Claude was already the leader when the war started. That’s probably the primary reason why the SS and VW the church takes over both nations at the end of the route.

Edited July 31, 2021 by ZeManaphy

[Shanty Pete's 1st Mate]

1 hour ago, Alastor15243 said:

He still doesn't see anything wrong with refusing to give the kingdom and all of the dang alliance houses their autonomy back after Edelgard took it all.

Edelgard never took autonomy from any of the Alliance houses. Each house of the Alliance has some measure of self-governance, and some measure of collective governance (effectively a confederation). Claude is regarded as the "head" of the Alliance, which gives him some authority not over just Riegan territory, but over the Alliance as a whole. Such as controlling relations with the Empire, Kingdom remnants, and Almyra. If enough powerful nobles in the Alliance object to his actions, presumably, they can displace him as "head" (via a vote of no confidence), and install someone else to guide policy into a different direction. That doesn't happen.

As for the Kingdom, how exactly they're "dealt" with is unfortunately absent in Verdant Wind. Is Cornelia defeated? Do Rodrigue and Margrave Gautier retain control over their respective lands? Do the nobles of the eastern Kingdom face any consequences? There's no clear moment, in Verdant Wind, where anyone from the Kingdom appeals, either to Claude or to the Professor, for their autonomy, and is denied. Some may want a return to the Kingdom, but with the whole royal family dead, and the pretender Cornelia completely evil, there's no clear person to take the reigns over the Kingdom as a whole. So there's no figure who could feasibly be recognized as ruler over all the Kingdom, yet nowhere else.

2 hours ago, ZeManaphy said:

True, but Claude makes it very clear that he does not want to use bloodshed or force to obtain his ideals; he even states that he and Edelgard have similar ideas, but he cannot support Edelgard due to the sheer amount of lives she wishes to sacrifice. Your meme is a gross simplification of Claude’s ideals. 

Didn't you know? Thinking about doing something, and actually doing that thing, are morally equivalent! Checkmate, Agarthans!

2 hours ago, Jotari said:

Well yes and no, in the sense that he doesn't actually make that decision. He hands Fodlan over to Byleth for him/her to rule it at their desecration, while he meanwhile runs off to become King of Almyra.

Oh yeah, that too. Not even gonna defend this ending. Teach getting to be in charge comes across as the height of avatar worship (like, at least Corrin only took the throne in Valla, where they had a birth claim to it). And Claude following up his big speech about "the bonds of friendship" by... abandoning all his friends to go rule a country we've never even seen is... not the most compelling.

[Alastor15243]

8 minutes ago, Shanty Pete's 1st Mate said:

There's no clear moment, in Verdant Wind, where anyone from the Kingdom appeals, either to Claude or to the Professor, for their autonomy, and is denied.

Honestly, that's kind of the problem. The narrative doesn't even acknowledge how messed up the fact that we wind up ruling the continent is, it's just treated as a happy ending and a natural result.

Edited August 1, 2021 by Alastor15243

[Acacia Sgt]

I have a feeling that, in the situation of the lack of a Kingdom heir, they'd rather just go with the unification so long they retain what power they already have, than another war for control of the Kingdom.

[lenticular]

12 minutes ago, Shanty Pete's 1st Mate said:

Edelgard never took autonomy from any of the Alliance houses. Each house of the Alliance has some measure of self-governance, and some measure of collective governance (effectively a confederation). Claude is regarded as the "head" of the Alliance, which gives him some authority not over just Riegan territory, but over the Alliance as a whole. Such as controlling relations with the Empire, Kingdom remnants, and Almyra. If enough powerful nobles in the Alliance object to his actions, presumably, they can displace him as "head" (via a vote of no confidence), and install someone else to guide policy into a different direction. That doesn't happen.

As for the Kingdom, how exactly they're "dealt" with is unfortunately absent in Verdant Wind. Is Cornelia defeated? Do Rodrigue and Margrave Gautier retain control over their respective lands? Do the nobles of the eastern Kingdom face any consequences? There's no clear moment, in Verdant Wind, where anyone from the Kingdom appeals, either to Claude or to the Professor, for their autonomy, and is denied. Some may want a return to the Kingdom, but with the whole royal family dead, and the pretender Cornelia completely evil, there's no clear person to take the reigns over the Kingdom as a whole. So there's no figure who could feasibly be recognized as ruler over all the Kingdom, yet nowhere else.

I'll add to this that Fódlan is still very much in a faux-medieval political structure with feudalism, vassalage and the likes. There's no Westphalian Sovereignity, no principle of territorial integrity, nothing that we really associate with the modern concept of statehood. Instead, we see borders shift as nobles shift their allegiance from one liege to another (eg, when House Galatea splits from House Daphnel to join the Kingdom of Faerghus). If we do assume that the various noble houses of the Kingdom retain their titles -- and I don't see why they wouldn't -- then it would probably be a fairly orderly transition with very little of the existing infrastructure of governance needing to be overturned.

19 minutes ago, Alastor15243 said:

Honestly, that's kind of the problem. The narrative doesn't even acknowledge how messed up the fact that we wind up ruling the continent is, it's just treated as a happy ending and a natural result.

I do agree with this, though. All of the endings were far too rainbows and bunny rabbits for my tastes, in a way that didn't feel earned at all. I generally think that the most satisfying Fire Emblem endings are "and by winning the war we stopped the killing and prevented the evil-doer's plan". Because that's enough. That's a victory. It doesn't need to be followed with "and then we all lived in a wonderful golden age for ever and ever", especially when there hasn't been meaningful talk of how that will be achieved.

[Acacia Sgt]

Personally, I don't see the problem with that. It's fiction. Give me escapism from this bleak world if I'm in no position to change it! Seriously, though, if the story is meant to be final, I don't see why we can't have a "And they lived Happily ever after". Gives more satisfaction to all the effort the player puts into the game.

[ZeManaphy]

32 minutes ago, Shanty Pete's 1st Mate said:

Oh yeah, that too. Not even gonna defend this ending. Teach getting to be in charge comes across as the height of avatar worship (like, at least Corrin only took the throne in Valla, where they had a birth claim to it). And Claude following up his big speech about "the bonds of friendship" by... abandoning all his friends to go rule a country we've never even seen is... not the most compelling.

I don’t see how Byleth being in charge of Fódlan is a bad decision at all. Byleth is not a nobody that Claude just appointed out of the blue. Byleth fought alongside Claude to stop the empire and defeat Nemesis. Rhea even appoints Byleth as the head of the Church in case something happened to her. Byleth ends up succeeding her, and since the Church is the only dominant power remaining, it makes sense that it takes over to resurrect the land. 

 

36 minutes ago, Shanty Pete's 1st Mate said:

Didn't you know? Thinking about doing something, and actually doing that thing, are morally equivalent! Checkmate, Agarthans!

I don’t know what you are trying to say here. Thinking and doing are completely different things. You cannot punish someone for thinking, but you can punish someone for actions. “ Actions speak louder than words “ as the saying goes. Regardless, Claude does indeed achieve his goals of reforming Fódlan without bloodshed through opening the borders allowing cultural diffusion between Fódlan and Almyra, something Edelgard does not accomplish with her methods. 

 

23 minutes ago, Acacia Sgt said:

I have a feeling that, in the situation of the lack of a Kingdom heir, they'd rather just go with the unification so long they retain what power they already have, than another war for control of the Kingdom.

Highly doubtful the Kingdom would be unified. We know for a fact that not all the noble houses support the royal family in AM and CF. The House Kleiman servant reveals that his house and Rowe participated in the Tragedy of Duscur because they disagreed with King Lamberts policies. Also, in non-CF routes several Kingdom lords defect to the Empire and support Cornelia’s rule. Also in CF, Hubert openly states that the Kingdom is not united, and only the Houses of Bladdyid, Fraldarius, Galatea, Gautier, and Charon needed to be defeated to conquer the Kingdom. 
 

If the Kingdom was left to their own devices after the death of Dimitri in SS and VW, it would most likely turn into a civil war of traitors versus loyalists, with each side hoping to gain access to the throne in order to spread their reform ideas. That’s probably why the church annexes the territories in SS and VW.

[Acacia Sgt]

6 minutes ago, ZeManaphy said:

Highly doubtful the Kingdom would be unified. We know for a fact that not all the noble houses support the royal family in AM and CF. The House Kleiman servant reveals that his house and Rowe participated in the Tragedy of Duscur because they disagreed with King Lamberts policies. Also, in non-CF routes several Kingdom lords defect to the Empire and support Cornelia’s rule. Also in CF, Hubert openly states that the Kingdom is not united, and only the Houses of Bladdyid, Fraldarius, Galatea, Gautier, and Charon needed to be defeated to conquer the Kingdom. 
 

If the Kingdom was left to their own devices after the death of Dimitri in SS and VW, it would most likely turn into a civil war of traitors versus loyalists, with each side hoping to gain access to the throne in order to spread their reform ideas. That’s probably why the church annexes the territories in SS and VW.

That's what I meant. Not much fuzz to being incorporated into United Fodlan since they consider better than starting another war to fight over the Kingdom's control. Better keep what they have than otherwise.

[Interdimensional Observer]

4 hours ago, Sunwoo said:

Besides, I ... don't agree with the Japanese Empire example. They went overboard and conquered a bunch of countries in Asia (something that some of my older Korean relatives are still salty as fuck about).

I think you're speaking of different Japans. Acacia is referring specifically to the reunification of Japan during the Sengoku period.

During the Heian Period (794-1185 AD) of Japanese history, the archipelago had began to undergo feudal decentralization of political power. The Kamakura and later Ashikaga Bakufus/Shogunates tried to reunify the Japanese islands, but both failed to establish real centralized control. The Ashikaga declined into total anarchy, resulting the Sengoku -"Warring States"- Period, wherein the Shogun was powerless outside of Kyoto and individual warlords did as they wished.

Then, Oda Nobunaga  began effectively reunifying Japan by force. Nobunaga was assassinated before he could finish the job, his underling Toyotomi Hideyoshi finished the conquests of Japan and had peace with a unified country for a while. Unfortunately, Hideyoshi died with an infant for an heir, and some warlords retained Sengoku ambitions, namely Tokugawa Ieyasu, who took advantage of the situation and usurped power from Hideyoshi's brat at the Battle of Sekigahara in 1600 AD.

After this, Ieyasu established the Tokugawa Bakufu/Shogunate, the last of the three Shogunates, which lasted for about 250 years. Other than Sekigahara and later the Siege of Osaka Castle in 1615, and maybe the Shimabara Rebellion if it counts, Japan: Honshu, Shikoku, Kyushu, southern Hokkaido, and some small islands, was entirely at peace. Although not perfect as Early Modern governments couldn't be, political authority was fairly centralized and stable in the capital of Edo/Tokyo under the Shogun's control. It could've broken apart, again, lot of centuries of rebellious warlords in the recent past, but it didn't happen, Ieyasu established a firm, lasting rule.

The "Japanese Empire" you're referring to comes after 1868 when the Tokugawa Shogunate collapsed during the Meiji Restoration. With the exception of some colonization of Hokkaido, placing the king of the Ryukyu Islands (think Okinawa and the like) under Japanese vassalage, and Hideyoshi's foolish and failed invasion of Korea (which Ieyasu never considered doing, as it ruined Japan's reputation with its neighbors, he wrote nice and unthreatening letters to the King of Korea instead), Japan had not engaged in imperial activity prior to 1868. Japan was outright isolationist most scholars would say, refusing to interact with the outside world.

The Japanese Empire from Meiji to the end of World War II has nothing to do with the Japanese reunification of centuries prior. Nobunaga, Hideyoshi and Ieyasu were reforming what had been territorially accepted as Japan for centuries. Conquering Korea, Manchuria, Taiwan and other some other places was motivated by modern European imperialism and the Japanese desire to be a predator and not prey in the modern imperial world order.

I'm not saying you're wrong that there was a Japanese Empire, but it's wholly separate phase in the country's history from its reunification (of what's really a Kingdom of Japan- but in English, the Emperor of Japan is well, an Emperor, even if the Japanese archipelago ain't worthy of the "empire" designation). And the example of the reunification of Japan at the end of Sengoku is not entirely appropriate, nor entirely inappropriate, for Fodlan I'd think.

 

4 hours ago, lenticular said:

They also seem to have the same language.

I'm feeling this a convenience for the sake of narrative. Would be harder to write a story if the only way the characters could communicate with each other was through writing down Latin because Dimitri spoke Old Church Slavonic, Edelgard Middle High German, and Claude Farsi. And heaven forbid we let some poor person speak and their rustic tongue be incomprehensible to all three of the above. -Although, the educated could learn to speak in fluent Latin, as was required in Medieval universities, so a lingua franca existed. But you still shouldn't expect the peasants to even then, since they don't have the time and resources to learn Latin.

[lenticular]

17 minutes ago, Interdimensional Observer said:

I'm feeling this a convenience for the sake of narrative. Would be harder to write a story if the only way the characters could communicate with each other was through writing down Latin because Dimitri spoke Old Church Slavonic, Edelgard Middle High German, and Claude Farsi. And heaven forbid we let some poor person speak and their rustic tongue be incomprehensible to all three of the above. -Although, the educated could learn to speak in fluent Latin, as was required in Medieval universities, so a lingua franca existed. But you still shouldn't expect the peasants to even then, since they don't have the time and resources to learn Latin.

That is almost certainly the out-of-universe explanation, I agree. But there ought to be an in-universe explanation as well, and the obvious one would be that they all seem to be speaking the same language because they are, in fact, all speaking the same language. I can't think of any other tidy explanation that accounts for everything that we see in game. Possibly some sort of situation with a lingua franca might work, but given that we also speak with bandits and peasants, it would have to be an extremely widely recognised one. Maybe it could also double as a liturgical language like Ecclesiastic Latin or Modern Standard Arabic, but if even peasants are fluent in it then that doesn't really speak of a great linguistic and cultural divide.

[Acacia Sgt]

If the continent is that well connected, then we're looking at a 19th Century US situation. Wasn't it stated that Fodlan was like 2/3 the size of Europe? Well, the CONUS is only slightly smaller than Europe, but English even back then was pretty much present from California to the East Coast. Certainly "no English zones" all around, specially on the Great Plains, but even then with time that changed even before the turn of the 20th century.

Edited August 1, 2021 by Acacia Sgt

[Venger_06]

17 hours ago, Acacia Sgt said:

Give me escapism from this bleak world if I'm in no position to change it!

Jokes aside, I think the problem is that all the endings feel the same, so the only meaningful choice is which Lord you want to survive.

Edited August 1, 2021 by Maof06

[Jotari]

11 hours ago, Maof06 said:

Jokes aside, I think the problem is that all the endings feel the same, so the only meaning choice is which Lord you want to survive.

I would also add that they sort of feel unrealistic. Like sure, if Marth destroys the big bad evil dragon an then the ending says everyone loved Marth for a thousand years, then that feels sort of natural and correct, because Marth's story really isn't that complicated. There's a big bad evil dragon who is bad and once he and his wizard are dead everything is peachy. It defies getting complex by just ignoring legitimately complex stuff like Pyrathi or the source of Medeus's motivation. But Three Houses is different. It's actually trying to tell a complex story with a clash of ideologies and more nuanced and grey sides. Edelgard's big bad dragon isn't some random ugly looking conqueror, she's someone who set up an institution that educates the upper and lower class alike preaching a religion of peace and love, while still trying to maintain soft power over the continent for eternity like an actual real church. So when the ending of the game says BTW Claude solved racism forever because he told everyone it's okay, then it sort of feels like it's at odds with the rest of the plot. Because the whole story up until this point has not been a simple thing, why should the Almyrians be accepted as equals when the people of Fodlan have been conditioned to believe they're infidel savages for centuries, if not millennia? The logic the story itself presents leaves the endings on really shaky material, because it's a complex story that decides to offer simple solutions the moment the story reaches its arbitrary end point.

[Alastor15243]

Three Houses Day 5: First Class

Alright, back to the grind. In more ways than one. And yet none of the fun ways.

Dimitri: Professor! I've been looking for you!

...I can't help but notice this implies Professr just fucking bolted right after the mock battle, if the whole class running after her and finding her in the hallway is the first opportunity Dimitri's gotten to invite her to eat with the class. Was this supposed to imply that Professr is distant and emotionally detached from her class and is only interacting with them as much as she has to? If they wanted that to be the case, and to have her eventually getting close to them be a sign of character growth... uh... you think they'd maybe not have her invite them all to think of her as a friend and equal literally the first chance she gets. If not, then why is this conversation happening with everyone catching up to her in a hallway instead of just having this conversation happen on the field after the match?

Dimitri: Well, I understand how hard it can be to accept joy sometimes.

...What, pray tell, might he mean by that? I'm curious, but not hopeful.

Anyway, moving on to another talk with Rhea and Seteth, as happens basically every month.

Seteth: Of course, the mock battle was just practice. The real fight is the Battle of the Eagle and Lion, which will take place during the Wyvern Moon.

...Okay, this isn't a huge deal, but it still annoys me that they say this like I have any concept of what that means. I, like most people I imagine, didn't stop to memorize the progression of this fantasy world's months on the birthday selection screen. A first-time listener has no idea whether Seteth is talking about next month or nearly a year from now. Hell, I still don't know what number month specifically Wyvern Moon is.

If I were to be writing this, the obvious quick fix would be to say the specific number of months away it is. But if I were to go the extra mile, I think a cute way to introduce basic facts about this setting, I mean stuff even a ten-year-old in this universe would have down cold but we don't, would be to exploit the fact that this is a church. A church of an ostensible “love and goodness and all that crap” religion.

Put an orphanage on campus, and have it be part of the explorable area of Garreg Mach. Show little kids singing nursery rhymes, the kind we teach kids in real life to help them memorize basic information. A “these are the months of the year” song for starters, but this would be a great way to exposit information to the player without talking down to the protagonist like a child. Just let the player overhear conversations with actual children.

But moving on, Seteth further explains the basic premise of chapter progression in this game: shit only happens at the end of the month, and this is originally justified, as here, by these being scheduled monthly missions the students have to go on to help those in need and demonstrate their progress. But of course, this rapidly devolves into “this is a world where things only happen at the end of the month”.

Speaking of... I've seen some people comment on how this game seems to be setting up tons of the framework to make a great FE4 remake, especially given how good the game is at conveying a sense of a large timescale between missions.

...Yes. Yes, Three Houses is very good at conveying a sense of a large timescale. It is so good at it, in fact, that when I play it, it genuinely feels like I'm spending a month on each chapter.

Sothis speaks up, and Professr is yet again shocked and confused by this turn of events. The game even seems to be explicitly implying it is indeed taking this long for Professr to mentally absorb this information.

It then cuts to a scene between Kostas the bandit and the Flame Emperor, a mysterious masked figure with a deep voice and oh cut the bullshit it's obviously Edelgard. I knew this from the instant I heard her voice. It is trivially easy to tell when a woman's voice is being deepened to sound like a man's. The feminine inflections are still clear as day. I don't know about anyone else, but this never, ever fools me.

...That being said, due to being mostly blind about the story of this game on my first playthrough, and not knowing the nature of the timeskip... I came to some weird conclusions about this. I genuinely thought it was some future Edelgard or something. And then I was theorizing that Death Knight was future Dimitri or something, and... yeah, it was a dumb, weird mess and I was completely off-base, but excuse me for thinking the devs had a point to introducing the concept of time manipulation into the story.

But yeah, Flame Emperor's all “you have failed me” and leaves Kostas to his eventual fate of being killed... at the end of next month.

And yet if the mountainous scenery of this cutscene is any indication... he does absolutely nothing to move his base of operations in that time to flee the Knights of Seiros.

...Yes, while the game is uncomfortably good at making you feel like massive lengths of time are passing by in-game, it's frankly terrible at making what anyone does with this length of time remotely believable. Almost every meaningful event in this game happens with a whole damned month of warning no matter how much sense that makes, and this will get frankly ridiculous at some points in Part 1 and basically the entirety of Part 2.

…

“In honor of the saints whose births or deaths took place under this moon, the people perform music once beloved by these divine beings”.

...Saints are referred to in the Church of Seiros as divine beings? Isn't that reserved for gods, or, bare minimum, angels?

...We apparently have... an entire week off from studies right after the mock battle. What? Why did it skip that free time and that Monday study session?

Anyway, I buy flowers for Annette's birthday, and... now let's get to the monastery again.

Ah yes, and I can travel to Abyss now, months before the events of Cindered Shadows canonically happen, and just instantly recruit the entire Ashen Wolves house.

Professr: A girl's voice... what could it mean?

What exactly is the writers' motive for making Professr this goddamned dense about this?

So, I check out the quests, and the first one I do is the “feed the adorable animals around the monastery” quest. And this game apparently thinks it's cool to feed turnips, tomatoes and onions... to cats.

Cats are obligate carnivores.

...And yet apparently this cat munches on a turnip without any complaint at all. Allegedly it loved it.

Anyway, I enter the marketplace, and when I see the cutscene of people wandering around with their awkward walking animations, I can't help but be reminded of the most infamous jank of early RWBY.

I was honestly taken off guard when talking to Alois had him talk about him being “just about to head out for a mission”... and then he actually left. Honestly, I was expecting him to be “just about to leave for a mission” for the entire rest of the month.

Ah yes, and then I run into Hilda, and I'm introduced to the “recruit” option.

I expected a tutorial to pop up, but either there isn't one, or it was shown earlier and I skipped over it.

But anyway, I really don't like the “recruitment” mechanic for numerous reasons.

First of all, it makes no goddamned sense that this is even possible. If it were really possible for students to switch to a different house than the one tied to their nation... you'd think there'd be a single student who canonically did that. But no, near as I can tell, everyone's in the house of their country of residence until Professr comes around with her infinite plot charisma to seduce half of them into committing house-treason.

Second of all, it drastically reduces the gameplay variety between routes by making it so that there's only three route-exclusive units for any given route, and in Golden Deer's case there's just one and in Silver Snow there are no route-exclusive units at all. Which also is frustrating from a story perspective as it makes it seem like the vast, vast majority of the cast has absolutely no values of their own and can easily be convinced to betray their homeland and families to fight for literally any cause imaginable out of loyalty to some teacher they've known for less than a year.

Third of all, it utterly invalidates the emotional tension of having to fight the other students after the timeskip, because thanks to the fact that you can recruit all of your favorite students, the odds that you'll have to fight a given student are inversely proportional to how much you'd give a shit. Because almost anyone you'd actually feel torn up about fighting... will have been recruited by you. Anyone you didn't recruit and thus will have to fight... will be someone you most likely had no interest in, and maybe even have had no interaction with at all.

This is another reason for a change I personally would have made that I'll discuss in a bit, once we get to lessons at long last.

So, I have to say, as I explore the Monastery... a lot has been said about the massive number of recycled maps, and how it's probably because each map was so resource-intensive to make due to how detailed they are on zoom-in. If that's the case, isn't it a massive waste that we never fight a single battle inside Garreg Mach Monastery? Oh, there are battles that ostensibly take place in the Monastery, but they're underground or in some remote part of it we're never allowed to explore. None of them happen in the parts of the Monastery we're actually familiar with. Wouldn't it have made the Part 1 finale's siege/invasion of Garreg Mach Monastery far more impactful if it actually took place... in the Garreg Mach Monastery we've come to know and presumably love, and not in some generic nondescript battlefield allegedly just outside of it? If that explorable campus we've run through constantly until we know it like the backs of our hands... suddenly turned into a massive battlefield we had to fight to protect?

I'll be frank, I was really hoping for such a moment back when Three Houses was still in development. I even made a thread about it. Alas. One of this game's many, many disappointments for me.

Now we're introduced to choir practice, which practically screams “the last vestige of cut content” to me. Why would there be a campus activity specifically devoted to raising your students' faith skill... when there's no corresponding task for basically any other skill?

...Either that or, alternate theory, this was given for faith magic because the other weapon skills have arena tournaments devoted to them or something. Still feels weird, especially if it turns out that arena tournaments don't boost weapon skill at all. Also, still nothing for authority, riding, flying or armor.

Anyway, I'm told to find some students who like to sing, and seriously, who finds this fun? These quests would be outrageously tedious and trial-and-error if they didn't flat-out tell you who to talk to with a flashing dot on your minimap, but with that flashing dot, it's just “go here and come back”. I can picture people tolerating this, but does anyone actually find it fun?

And hilariously, I'm not even talking to students who are interested in joining the choir, I'm just finding a piece of paper with a list of interested names on it. It's just lying there, forgotten and discarded behind a barrel, right there for us to find with our psychic powers.

I repeat: I wasn't asked by this woman to find this missing list. I was asked to find students who are interested in music, and the solution was to find the randomly discarded work of someone else who already went around asking who was interested in music, and apparently did nothing with that information.

Anyway, I have Annette and Mercedes take part in choir practice, and like with the dining hall, unless the two people you picked have a special interaction with each other, they always say the exact same thing every time. Which gets old fast. But them, I'm rarely gonna use this thing, I'm just doing it because the game prompted me.

Seteth asks me to find an informant who can spill some dirt on any concerning behavior of the Western Church. For some reason he expects a student will know, and even crazier, he's right.

Ah yes, and the most infuriating part of the “fast travel” system: you can't freely move the control stick to select a room, and if you're going for one of the rooms in the middle, it can be a pain in the ass to maneuver the selector onto it since they aren't in a grid, and indeed rarely even spatially relate to each other in logical ways. For example, press down on the Officer's Academy, and you won't go to the dining hall directly beneath it. You'll go to the reception hall, which is slightly lower than it on the map but... also almost completely to the right of it.

Of course, if you even need a fast-travel system to get around a place that serves this place's function, that's a sure sign the place is way too big, but they couldn't even get the fast travel right.

I talk to Sylvain and he says he “lost [his] own brother to bandits”...which, I will admit, is an amusing little half-truth.

I talk to someone who tells me about how there are some people who “don't take too kindly” to foreigners... and then just flat-out hands me completely unrelated quest information about what the Western Church is doing. Unless this intel is supposed to be that the Western Church don't like how said foreigners are allowed at the church. Is that really secret information that Seteth wouldn't know?

Aaaanywho... time to get on to the big red mandatory quests.

Ah, so here's the recruitment tutorial. With Dimitri. I see.

Ah yes, and now we see Jeralt, talking with Leonie. I'm not sure if I've said this already, but can we stop and appreciate just how much more ridiculous the existence of Leonie makes the pretense of Jeralt hiding from the church for 20-odd years? There's a fangirl of his... at the fucking school.

Anyway, Jeralt claims to not know how old he is, because apparently he's trying to keep a secret that he's way, way older than he looks due to... Crest transplant magic, I guess? If it's not that, I don't remember what their explanation was. Anyway, it's absurd that it isn't common knowledge that he's way older than he looks given that people who knew him closely back when he was originally a knight are still at the Monastery, and that he hasn't visibly aged a day since.

For that matter, what the fuck is the deal with Seteth and Flayn? Seteth looks thirty at the oldest, and yet he spoke of the events of 20 years ago like he was personally there. But, like, he couldn't have been, right? He can't have continuously been a public presence at the Monastery for the last twenty years. He's an immortal dragon trying to hide the fact that he and his “sister” are immortal dragons, and that must naturally involve only staying in public view until your lack of aging would start to get suspicious, and then either moving, or going underground for a while until you can pretend to be someone else. Which would logically mean waiting until everyone who was working at the monastery the last time you went public (like, say, Alois) is either gone or dead. But like... Rhea, Seteth and Flayn... is it ever mentioned what their strategy is for doing that? Because Flayn has to make it something that at least she and Seteth have to do all the damned time.

Anyway, I did the mission from Jeralt and got the battalions. And god damn it, that's another thing I want to rant about, but I want to rant about everything in this game and I'm struggling to find the appropriate times.

Right, time for the dining hall, where after an annoying, pointless detour I unlock “cooking together”, a minigame where you get one of the students or faculty to cook stat-boosting meals for the class, as opposed to the motivation-boosting meals you can also feed them independently of this. Does that make any sense? No. Do I care that it doesn't make any sense? Yes! Yes I do!

But anyway, Professr needs to pick a student to do this, presumably because she's exactly the sort of incompetent buffoon that infomercials seem to think need their products.

...If you don't know what I'm talking about, please, for the love of god, look up “Infomercials are filled with very special people” on YouTube. You will not regret it.

Anyway, I have Dedue cook immortality stew to boost our defense by 1 for the rest of the month. It's just a single stat point, but unlike in Fates this stacks with additional cooking sessions you do in the month, so if you visit every week you can rack up 3 or 4 boosts to a stat.

...Okay, I joked about Professr doing nothing for “cooking together” because that seemed to be what was going on, but Dedue implies Professr is helping cook somehow, despite not visibly doing anything at all, not even magically igniting the stove with a gesture like the cooking partner always does.

Anyway, free time is over. So...

...It's finally time for lessons. Yet again Dimitri provides the tutorial for something he should not conceivably have any knowledge in, and we begin.

...Hoo boy.

Here we go.

Instruction.

Instruction is, at its core, just the bonus experience system from the Tellius games, except applied to weapon ranks.

...Except like literally everything in Three Houses, it's made way, way more time-consuming and complicated than it has any business being.

But I'm getting ahead of myself. There's a bigger thing I need to discuss here.

So, I deliberately avoided hearing as much as I could avoid hearing about Three Houses, both story and gameplay, once information really started leaking. There was stuff I couldn't help but overhear, including some disquieting things about the turnwheel being a thing again, and the fact that there was a timeskip, and also all the stuff that was in the first few trailers, but past that I mostly went into this blind.

And, uh...

...I misheard and misunderstood a lot of stuff I saw about the school and class system that made it seem... infinitely more fun than it wound up being.

See... I was under the impression that Three Houses was going to break away from the traditional class system and use its system of training in various weapon and movement types in school to... essentially let you create your own classes. Combine any movement type you want with any weapon type (or types) you want, a la Fire Emblem Heroes.

All the way up to release, I was fantasizing about using every crazy combination of movement type and weapon types I could think of, everything the franchise either rarely or never let me do. I was thinking of making an army of sword-and-sorcery mageknights, where everyone from the flier to the armor knight was proficient in magic. I wanted to make a spellslinging bowslinger who specialized in hitting any enemy where it hurt the most and doing it all from afar. I wanted to make a badass armored white mage healing her allies from the front lines, heedless of the danger. And needless to say I wanted to make an army of flying magic users to literally rain fire down upon my foes.

The game... turned out to not be like that. And in a sense, it isn't fair to hold that against the game. I mean, it never claimed to allow that, as far as I'm aware. But it doesn't change the fact that, wholly divorced from my own, personal, immeasurable disappointment... this entire complicated class system amounts to literally nothing but wasting my time.

It's literally just the standard class system with extra steps.

Emphasis on the extra steps.

Yes, you can use almost any physical weapon type in any class... but they also systematically removed damn near every reason you'd want to. Especially with the three primary weapon types, swords, axes and lances.

Someone, at some point, presumably once asked the question: “Can I use axe as a falcon knight?”.

Fire Emblem's answer used to be “No”.

Three Houses changed it to “Sure, I guess, if you're an idiot”.

There's no weapon triangle to make axes situationally more useful unless you spend a skill slot to put that situational bonus there, you need to spend another skill slot to equip the skill that provides massive hit/avoid/crit/dodge bonuses while using axes to make them worthwhile, and falcon knights, like damned near every late-game class in existence, have a class-inherent faire skill that makes them do 5 more damage with their class's weapon of choice, which in this case is lances. Meaning that there isn't a single axe in the game where you wouldn't be faster, more accurate, and more powerful using the equivalent lance. Unless of course you spend another skill slot and waited until the end of the game to unlock axefaire and put it on.

Of course, the question gets a bit more complicated with things like gauntlets and bows, which provide utility that can potentially outweigh the reduced damage in certain situations.

But then we get to magic.

They were way, way stricter on magic than they needed to be, by locking it behind only specific classes.

The mage classes have skills that do things like double spell charges and boost your magic damage or healing.

That's great. That's fine. That's all the incentive I would have needed to use a magic-specializing class.

Magic could easily have been something you're capable of using in any class, as a sort of limited-use special attack available to anyone who did the proper training. It could've made the str-mag dichotomy a lot more interesting by having both stats be something you could conceivably get a use out of in any class if you had a good score in it, meaning that physical fighters who have magic as their dump stat would actually suffer consequences for dumping magic. But instead, access to magic is locked behind specific classes that usually fall under the very strict framework of “squishy wizard”. And at launch, there wasn't even a single one of them that could fly.

Essentially, in practice, Three Houses lets you get less creative with your character builds than basically any other game with a reclassing system. So what are we left with?

We're left with, like I said: the traditional class system with extra steps.

As for what those extra steps are...

...No, I can't get into this today. I'm sorry. I'm all ranted out. I'm running on fumes and a half-can of Monster. I've gotta proofread and be done for today. I'll continue this discussion tomorrow.

Stay safe, everyone.

Edited August 7, 2021 by Alastor15243

[Jotari]

14 minutes ago, Alastor15243 said:

It then cuts to a scene between Kostas the bandit and the Flame Emperor, a mysterious masked figure with a deep voice and oh cut the bullshit it's obviously Edelgard. I knew this from the instant I heard her voice. It is trivially easy to tell when a woman's voice is being deepened to sound like a man's. The feminine inflections are still clear as day. I don't know about anyone else, but this never, ever fools me.

I can't say I knew from the very first appearance of the Flame Emperor, but I played Black Eagles first and my oh my is it hilariously telegraphed in that route. They're sure to include a scene before or after the Flame Emperor shows up in which a character says "Oh my, I wonder where Edelgard is. She's just mysteriously vanished the same time this armoured emperor fellow showed up *wink* *wink*". Largely though I thought the reveal probably came right out of nowhere for people who played the other routes, especially Golden Deer first. Because who the hell even is Edelgard anyway? Post choice she has zero presence in the story as a character until reveal.

14 minutes ago, Alastor15243 said:

Second of all, it drastically reduces the gameplay variety between routes by making it so that there's only three route-exclusive units for any given route, and in Golden Deer's case there's just one and in Silver Snow there are no route-exclusive units at all. Which also is frustrating from a story perspective as it makes it seem like the vast, vast majority of the cast has absolutely no values of their own and can easily be convinced to betray their homeland and families to fight for literally any cause imaginable out of loyalty to some teacher they've known for less than a year.

 

I think this hurts the Black Eagles the most. Particularly with the whole existence of Silver Snow. It makes their loyalty to Edelgard and their empire seem entirely false when there's a route in which they all unanimously side against her. It'd have been a very bold move in terms of gameplay, but I actually would have had all the Black Eagles, except maybe Petra, side against you should you go down the route of Silver Snow.

14 minutes ago, Alastor15243 said:

...Either that or, alternate theory, this was given for faith magic because the other weapon skills have arena tournaments devoted to them or something. Still feels weird, especially if it turns out that arena tournaments don't boost weapon skill at all. Also, still nothing for authority, riding, flying or armor.

Riding, flying and armour do have the stables and stuff you can assign students too for additional wexp.

 

[Interdimensional Observer]

59 minutes ago, Jotari said:

It'd have been a very bold move in terms of gameplay, but I actually would have had all the Black Eagles, except maybe Petra, side against you should you go down the route of Silver Snow.

So Chapter 13 becomes a solox2 fight? Or are we looking at yay insta-automatic complete Swiss Guard!? 

In the latter case, pls come as something better than a Villager, Cyril.

 

1 hour ago, Alastor15243 said:

and can easily be convinced to betray their homeland and families to fight for literally any cause imaginable out of loyalty to some teacher they've known for less than a year.

Well, almost a year is better than six days, albeit most of those peeps only made their decision the day before.

I remain unseriously convinced a certain game is a better Three Houses.😛

You didn't say it, but I can smell "Let's ignore Revelation and say Fates was right here to keep most characters exclusive" in your criticism.

Edited August 3, 2021 by Interdimensional Observer

[Alastor15243]

2 minutes ago, Interdimensional Observer said:

So Chapter 13 becomes a solox2 fight? Or are we looking at yay insta-automatic complete Swiss Guard!? 

I assume you mean the church members?

3 minutes ago, Interdimensional Observer said:

Well, almost a year is better than six days, albeit most of those peeps only made their decision the day before.

Hm? What game are you referring to? Only game I can think of is Fates, but I can't remember anyone who unconditionally sides with Corrin on every route despite only knowing them for six days.

[Interdimensional Observer]

13 minutes ago, Alastor15243 said:

Hm? What game are you referring to? Only game I can think of is Fates, but I can't remember anyone who unconditionally sides with Corrin on every route despite only knowing them for six days.

A non-FE game you haven't played, one that, again not seriously, comes to mind when I think of 3H. In part because I can loosely reimagine someone as Edel, and one of their opponents who is both intentionally and unintentionally a little insane like Dimi. Although the games are very different.

 

13 minutes ago, Alastor15243 said:

I assume you mean the church members?

The Swiss Guard (now-entirely-ceremonial) is the name for the Pope's personal bodyguards. Known nowadays for wearing some funny clothes.:

So yes, I meant the Church. If Silver Snow is supposed to be the pro-Rhea route, then why wouldn't her hired swords flock to you?

Edited August 3, 2021 by Interdimensional Observer

[Alastor15243]

11 minutes ago, Interdimensional Observer said:

So yes, I meant the Church. If Silver Snow is supposed to be the pro-Rhea route, then why wouldn't her hired swords flock to you?

...Christ, I think you're right! They don't all join until after the first timeskip battle! I forgot because I had been so proactive in recruiting all the ones I could!

Yeah, siding with the church should have most of your army abandon you in favor of Edelgard, and the church soldiers should join you immediately. And maybe if this were a game where having high supports meant jack shit, maybe only the students you're on really good terms with stick by you.

Edited August 3, 2021 by Alastor15243