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Part I makes this a twelve chapter (Or, worse, six-seven chapter) game


Naoko_Akamori
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So... Overall, I like Three Houses. I like the story and most of the characters. I like the music (Especially the Endgame music). 

But, after a first playthrough, it really feels like we're playing an eleven-twelve chapter game (Or six-seven in the case of Crimson Flower)

Part I just doesn't change that much from route to route. I noticed a few extra scenes with Claude in GD which I appreciated (Including one that leads into his exploration dialogue in a particular chapter), but the battles are all the same (Admittedly with different stakes depending on whether you're playing Blue Lions or not). 

There's also the issue that all of the maps are bog-standard "Kill everything" or "Kill the one guy in the important pants" maps, but that's been an issue with the series for a while. 

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Well okay, but it is a second playthrough.

its a bit like saying ‘the second playthrough of Radiant Dawn is a 0 chapter game, because I’ve played these maps before’

 

yes, that’s right, but... a bit obvious. Of course when you replay the game, you replay some maps. It’s a game with alternate routes, not 4 separate games.

 

 

I do get your point though, it is pretty tedious to replay the game to get to the route split to see more content. But, I think it’s worth considering that we already finished the game once - we’re just replaying for the sake of completionism.

Edited by Noonsal
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Although there's technically different routes, it's not a set of completely individual games like Fates was. Three Houses wasn't the first one to have this kind of route split. Binding Blade had 2 route splits that had different characters but I don't think you would say its a six/seven chapter game. It's just how the game is.

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It's one story with three different perspectives more than three wholly different stories.

Which, personally, I can appreciate because I often wonder "what was x thinking when x happened" in fiction. But if you're hankering for true novelty with choices that drastically change the trajectory of the story, best look elsewhere.

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Eh.

There's bits of character-building in the first twelve chapters, at least for the lords.  How I approach each chapter varied wildly - for example, I'm playing the early chapters a lot more recklessly, because Dedue makes a wonderful punching bag (as in, his stats do, not his face. . .I'm cool with him as a character).

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This is one of those games where with all the moving, imperfect, somewhat unpolished parts, the game ultimately gets quite messy for me due to a few key reasons -- you have the relatively redundant story routes (one of which is practically a straight copy of another until the final level), the messiness of the overarching plot post time-skip in all of the main acts, the repetitive maps, and the messy and unbalanced nature of the classes. But, the base of the game is so good that oddly enough, the massive imperfections end up adding to the overall charm of the game to me and making it seem even more like a human creation with lots of love poured in.

Sure, the game's pacing and narrative could have been even better with another year or so of development to benefit additional rewriting (it seems like budget and time resources perhaps ran low during the making of Crimson Flower; I wouldn't be surprised if it was the last route planned). Crimson Flower could have benefited from a couple of additional chapters. Some of the other routes actually could have lost 1 - 2 chapters. More differentiation between the pre time-skip portions of each route would have been nice. In the end, at least for me, the game exceeded the sum of its parts because of the requisite effort that was put in that helped the game exceed a mysterious emotional threshold.

I felt surprised that I ultimately didn't mind going through the same pre time-skip content so much. There is a handful of neat situation dependent dialog that I've only been able to discover my second time through that really reminds me of Trails in the Sky. The creative team sure as heck had the voice actors record a ton of lines. Perhaps that can explain why it looks like there wasn't much budget left for cutscenes (and of course, I would take robust and consistent voice acting through a whole game over cutscenes). Only played it with Japanese audio so far, so I can't comment on whether the English voice acting stayed strong throughout. With the vets and legends that are on the Japanese seiyuu cast, it looks like a lot of budget was (appropriately) allocated to the voice acting end.

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I didn't know that the first 9 chapters of Sacred Stones ceased to exist once you beat it once...after all, they don't change at all prior to the route split.

I think you're only noticing it with 3H because of how much time is spent in the Monastery versus SS where you can blaze through the early chapters in about an hour.

Edited by De Geso
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I'm fine with Part 1 staying mostly the same. I wish they introduce more variations, like being given different assignments to discover different things; but even without those, just the fact that you're talking to different students is enough to drive me to try other routes. I do wish the church route isn't branched from Black Eagles, though, since in that case you really are repeating 11 chapters.

I do wish Part 2 was longer. It's much shorter despite being a major war, with lots of implied battles not played out. It also feels weird to spend a year training, and then just 8 months to conquer the entire Fódlan. Like how does that even work?

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9 minutes ago, nocturnal YL said:

I do wish the church route isn't branched from Black Eagles, though, since in that case you really are repeating 11 chapters.

Well, and there's the fact that Silver Snow is almost an exact copy of Verdant Wind.

That's probably why some folks will say to just look up Silver Snow on YouTube.

 

I'll say that I find myself skipping through dialogue in repeat playthroughs of Part 1.  But I never skip scenes outright unless they're pre-rendered cutscenes because some dialogue choices affect your affinity with your allies.

I also skip supports I've already seen, even the ones involving Byleth.  Only exception is Rhea's because, like other scenes, there are dialogue options that increase your support with her, and opportunities to actually increase your bond with her are quite limited.

As for the maps themselves?  Well, I've sunk hundreds of hours into Awakening and Fates playing the same 20-or-so maps over and over, so I can bear playing the same 11 chapters over and over again.

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I remember people saying that Church was a copy paste of GD and, having not played the Church path, I wondered if they actually meant BL instead since 90% of the maps in BL were the same as GD. 

If anything, 3H made me understand why IS sold Fates as separate games.

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4 hours ago, UNLEASH IT said:

I remember people saying that Church was a copy paste of GD and, having not played the Church path, I wondered if they actually meant BL instead since 90% of the maps in BL were the same as GD.

Just look at this chapter list for each of the paths.  Between Church and GD, all but three chapters have the exact same names, and the order is exactly the same, too.

Now, I don't know how much is copied between the paths since I am the slowest FE:TH player on the planet and have only ever seen Crimson Flower, but I have a strong feeling those chapters wouldn't all be named the same things if they weren't entirely the same in other respects as well.

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