Enduin

It's entirely possible the singer is not meant to be/represent anyone character like in Fates w/ Azura, but instead just be a theme that is in fact referencing multiple characters.

Kind of feel like it's about Sothis and not Edelgard. While I wish Edelgard was the clear lead everything we know about the game and choosing the houses etc kind of makes all three Lords equal, so having the theme song focus on her would be a bit odd. And as you point out a lot of the song segments don't really make sense for her and seems more appropriate for Sothis. While not a student or participant in the school life, she does appear within Byleth's mind according to the trailer so she might see and experience everything Byleth does and that connection however removed from her might mean a lot if she's been trapped for so long and this is the most interactions she's had with others in ages. Still a lot of the tone at the end does feel more like a student's admiration/adoration for a teacher, which feels out of place with how Sothis so far has been presented. I really don't know at this point. Could go either way I guess.

Best I could manage with the shitty headphones I have at my disposal right now, most of it's pretty clear save for a couple spots. Reach for my hand, I'll soar away Into the dawn, oh I wish I could stay Here in cherished halls, in peaceful days I fear the edge of dawn, knowing time betrays Faint lights pass through colored glass, in this beloved place Silver shines, the world dines, a smile on each face As choice abounds/arounds(?) compared to bounds, and I can feel I'm breaking free For just this moment lost in time, I am finally me Yet still I hide, behind this mask that I have become My blackened heart, scorched by flames of force I can't run from I look to you like a red rose seeking the sun, no matter where it goes I long to stay where the light dwells, to guard against the cold I know so well

I would like to see a SoV style game with more open world and dungeon segments as it would be a great way to help expand the scope of the series and sense of scale to different scenarios and the world at large. I really enjoyed the chapterless narrative of SoV and felt that was a much better fit over the mixed style of Awakening and Fates(minus Conquest) of both chapters and open world. I like having the world map as it helps to provide a sense of scale and progression to the world, but being able to actually walk around certain locations like towns, castles, forts, forests, etc would be a great experience. "Dungeon crawling" could be a great way of really enriching the experience of even like storming a fort as we could literally make our way through several fights going room to room, floor to floor rather than just have a single map/battle that encompass all of it in one go. Or fleeing in forest having to actually run through a winding forest escaping the enemy and quickly trying to resolve small fights that you run into. The major issue/caveat to all that though is grinding. While I like freely traversing a world map and dungeons, especially in SoV, the ease of grinding really kills the game and saps all challenge from things as it becomes effortless to over level and make certain units really OP even if you don't go out of your way to do so. They need to find a way to limit effortless EXP grinding. What I would like to see is a two tier battle system where story battles operate as they always have with any action or kill rewarding units with EXP, but then outside of those fixed/mandated story battles all others would only offer small amounts of Bonus EXP for the player to distribute as they like. The amount of Bonus EXP could be dependent on performance and clearing certain battle challenges, maybe other rewards too like Gold or items. If balanced\scaled right this would still provide an incentive and reward for skirmishes but wouldn't be enough or easy enough to just break the game. By limiting the Bonus EXP to a rather small amount it could be useful for helping to keep underused or harder to level units inline with your core units, but not enough to be able to really beef up your whole party. At least without the player really going out of their way to farm EXP, which at that point is their choice.

Main issue with one of the three Lords being the antagonist is the fact that we can choose our House, Byleth looks quite important and it would be very surprising if they didn't have us stay with that House throughout the game. While I want and would love for each to have a distinct and unique role in the story that doesn't change at all due to our House selection and we simply see the story unfold from their PoV, meaning we could end on the bad/losing side of things, I doubt that is the actual case. Most likely all three Lords will work together and there will be very little variation between our House selection and how the story unfolds and the true enemy will be the Church or some other exterior force to them. The only alternative to that is to basically make it a Fates style situation where whoever we decide to choose as our House through the magic of Byleth become the heroes of the story and one or both of the other two Lords magically become the enemy and the only difference is who ends up in those roles. Which would most likely suck as they would have to make all three potentially interchangeable as both Hero and Villain and that sounds like a recipe for really bland and contrived characters and story events to work for all three. To customize it to fit and be unique for all three would be way more work than to just have everyone have a fixed role that we see from from their PoV. I can't say I agree with this. That we haven't seen them in either trailer fight doesn't really mean anything. The first was a teaser that was super sparse on details and the second was almost entirely focused around introducing the school elements and selling that experience with virtually no other information about the game. If the whole intention of the Academy is to be a kind of first Act only setting, as many of us suspect it is, it makes sense that they haven't really shown us much of anything later in the game. Let alone the three Lords becoming enemies if that is the case. Establishing character history and relationships before they become challenged is super basic and common and it would be really foolish to spoil that later conflict so early on in the marketing. Heck if they were smart they wouldn't actually spoil it at all and intentionally not tell us that there is ever conflict between the Three Lords so that it's a real surprise for players when they actually get the game. Comparing it to Fates is questionable at best because the whole premise of that game was around changing Fate and how one person's choice tipped the balance. If Three Houses really is about Three friends who for one reason or another end up on opposite ends of the battlefield and our choice as Byleth doesn't alter that in any way it would make sense to not advertise that. Especially since there aren't multiple SKUs and DLC campaigns they need to justify and market to people. It's all just one game. That all said I think it's all quite unlikely and all three will just end up working together, as boring as that is.

It was Mercedes who is at least still part of the Blue Lion House that Dimitri heads in the initial combat and then later on we see Edelgard and Byleth fighting Hilda, Mustache Teacher and Purple haired guy from Golden Deer House. Ashe is also among them as an enemy unit even though he's from the Blue Lions. In all likelihood that was a mock battle exercise while at the Academy where we have to face the other two houses in a challenge. Someone did a deep dive analyzing the map and it's almost certainly at the base of Garreg Mach Monestary and the same map in those scenes. Though I guess it could potentially be something like Edelgard and her House attempting to escape from the school and them trying to stop her. But that's a bit more unlikely.

My hope is one of the three Lords, namely Dimitri, in conjunction with the Church in a kind of tragic conflict. Most likely it's just the Church and/or some god whose been pulling strings behind the scenes, potentially Sothis as a kind of late game twist after releasing her or something.

I kind of really want the game to be the anti-power of friendship/love storyline. Claude x Dimitri would be great and my preference over any kind of Love Triangle or other romance setups among the three Lords. I would love to see the three of them being very close friends while at school and that relationship between Claude/Dimitri to be explicit and not just implied, but then they are forced apart and against one another as Edelgard stands against the Church and current order while Dimitri stand with the Church and current order and Claude is in the middle eventually forced to choose a side. And in the end Claude chooses what's best for his people as the head of his nation rather than what he wants the most and Dimitri goes down at the hands of the other two. I need some real heavy drama and tragedy in my FE life. That's the only reason I'm at all interested in the school setting as it could be a really fantastic way of establishing relationships and bonds between all the various students with us as a participant and active facilitator in it all before the real plot pits them all against each other. Instead of just telling us X, Y and Z were friends in school and now they face each other on the battlefield, we actually get to see and be involved in the development of that friendship and love. And then get to see it all fall apart as their duties and obligations as royalty forces them against one another. But I get plenty of people just want to see a gay couple have a happy ending for once.

I do hope we see a much greater diversity in all aspects with regards to the characters, LGBTQ+ representation among them. Just on that subject the games generally have quite large casts of 30-60 playable units alone so it really shouldn't be a big issue if 1/4 or so are non-hetero/cis-gendered. Even if there happen to be S-Supports which many treat as a Zero Sum game if they miss out any potential partners. Beyond that though so far we've seen 24 playable characters, including Byleth and the two other Teachers, with 3 other students likely unseen if we accept each House has 8 students. That's half the cast going by most games average units of around 52. And so far they are extremely same-y looking, overwhelming white, young and of high social standing. We'll definitely get a couple that are from common stock, but chances are the vast majority of those 24 will be from Nobility. Which makes for a really poor sampling of the larger society. Some of the best games in the series were ones with more diverse casts of characters from all walks of life and backgrounds that really helped to flesh out the world and give a broader perspective on events and life. So from the remaining cast, if we're lucky another 25+, I really hope we see a much greater mix of people in terms of race, age, body shape, social rank and overall life experience than what we've seen so far. The series has always been extremely poor with regards to racial diversity and I hope they improve upon that here somehow. I'm still holding out hope that they've continued on from Fates by branching out beyond purely generic Medieval European cultures, Hoshido was if nothing else a breath of fresh air and they should really keep going down that road. There's so many great cultures they could pull from that would be great additions and really help to round out and flesh out their worlds into more realized and believable settings. The current homogeneity of the current character could potentially be less of an issue if the game doesn't have all three Houses combine forces eventually and we only have access to a portion of them throughout our entire playthrough based on which House we choose. But it's hard to tell right now exactly how any of that will play out. If we do get all of them eventually it's going to be hard to balance that out.

A time skip 1/4 or 1/3 way through the game to a post Academy section A story about testing the bonds of youthful friendship and their ultimate failure as adults are forced into conflict by competing loyalties and obligations(Kind of like FE4) Fixed roles within the story that do not change based on house choice, just the PoV we happen to see things from. So if you pick the one of three Lords who becomes the antagonist and loses that's the story you'll experience - no Fates like story changes and victory just because the Avatar is present Dimitri is the antagonist route, Edelgard the primary protagonist and Claude the neutral that eventually comes to the side of Edelgard Each route has different focus combat/difficulty wise: Dimitri hard & primarily defensive, Edelgard easy & primarily offensive, Claude normal & a balance of both offensive/defensive maps A morally complex church that is not explicitly and/or secretly Evil, especially due to manipulation/control by some Evil deity, but is a mix of real people with varying motivations from greed, religious zealotry and misplaced senses of duty/honor/order Sothis is a trickster god who neither good nor evil, simply there to facilitate events Despite appearing to be the chosen one, with special time reversal abilities, Byleth in fact cannot change the ultimate fate of his former pupils to become enemies that go to war with one another and even die as a result I have very little faith or expectation in the vast majority of this occurring beyond the first two in some limited fashion.

If it's just the typical Cultural Festival designed to pander and create melodrama, I'd rather they not do anything. It would be super out of place and anachronistic for the time and setting, if they are actually go for a military academy training Nobles and Royalty to be officers and not just some thin facade to replicate the typical slice of life Japanese HS experience in an FE setting. In which case anything goes. I would love for there to be a unique event, or events, that feel authentic to the setting and provide meaningful insight and development of the world, setting and religious beliefs of the Church of Seiros to help flesh out and round them out. That doesn't mean such events have to be super serious or dramatic, there can be lighthearted elements and interactions too. Those kinds of events and stuff more than have their place, especially for character interactions, and can still be meaningful but they need to fit the setting and serve a greater narrative purpose for either the world development or character development.

My thoughts/hopes on the subject as well. The current school systems and mechanics just seem extremely problematic once you scale things up beyond the initial 8 students. If the average games has 50 units, even if we only get half of that, which would be just the characters from the Three Houses, it would still be a ton of units to have to manage and require an inordinate amount of time spent in menus tracking and managing your units and not actually playing the core of the game. It definitely seems far better suited for the early game when we have a limited number of units in a kind of halcyon days for both us and the students during the opening hours of the game that will eventually come to a close. Not to mention there's huge implications to the gameplay if we have free reign to mold and shape each unit, what skills they have regardless of class, etc for the entire game beyond just the logistical issues of having to actually manage all of that.

I'm somewhat skeptical this is the actual intention of the system they showed. Teaching/Tutoring mechanics seem focused on preparing Students to pass Class Certification Exams which look to have pretty specific Skill criteria in order to pass. That seems to run counter to the idea of optimizing characters and being able to free-form choose whatever skills you want them to have, especially after they've been promoted. All the Students are starting out as a Trainee class, Nobles, where it's easy to justify and allow access to any weapon type, but once you promote to a real class that makes way less sense as does a lot of the Teacher mechanics. Thematically it would make a lot more sense for the Academy to be a first Act where we spend time teaching our students until they all "graduate" from Noble Class to a normal base class and after the the game departs from the Academy setting.

The solution to that would be to simply gate the main story event that forces you out of the school to not trigger until all the students have been promoted to a base class. And seeing how each Class Certification has requirements to pass there's really no way to not properly train your students. The only real way to screw up that would be to train them all to be the same class and even then that would only be a real issue if it was a class like Priest or some non-offensive/low-offensive class, which at that point if you do something like that you're kind of hopeless.

You won't? Like it makes sense thematically that during the school period as their Teacher that you are training your students to become professional soldiers/leader and have full control over their growth from Tier 0 Noble classes to graduating up to Tier 1 Un-Promoted Classes. But after that it would make sense for class progression to just work more or less the same as it has in all the past games, with at best maybe some carry over of teacher systems in a much more limited fashion. The whole idea that we will be able to pick and choose what Skills units use and progress regardless of class even after they move on from Noble class seems like a massive departure, a core feature of the FE class system is the limited access to various weapons which plays a major part in how you utilize and build up your units. While they may very well be throwing that out it would be an absolutely huge change for the overall gameplay as any unit could potentially use any weapon type. Which would have profound impacts on encounters. But I don't think they are as we saw during the Edelgard exam window that passing Class Certification requires the unit have a proficiency in specific Skills. So most likely once you graduate to a proper Class you're going to be locked into that class's Skill set and not able to just freeform pick and choose what skills to use and what weapons you have access to. At best we might be able to demote troops back down to Nobles to then prep them to qualify for a different class.

That entirely depends on how the story goes. Very good chance there will be a hard split with the Church which would make the Academy completely un-accessible since it is located at the very headquarters of the Church.

If the school setting is just part of the first 1/4 of the game I don't see there being a lot of the cliche anime school stuff like a school festival, but if the school setting remains for most of the game yeah it's probably inevitable along with a lot of other cliche events and aspects.

Crests are likely physical objects and not simply the symbols themselves, though it's certainly possible. We see one of the 21 symbols from the Goddess Mural etched onto a stone/orb that is embedded into the hilt of the Dragon bone chain sword up close in the trailer and it's freaking out with some malevolent purple miasma coming out of it. That object is most likely an aforementioned Crest, which explains why the sword is so important. And also fits into the idea of a "Crest Stone." I think it makes sense that these Crests are sources of power and people invoke said power through the symbols etched onto them. Like Edelgard's House symbol in whatever magic she is displaying in that scene. As well as the other symbol we see in the center of the Healing and Fire magic spell circles. Crests either are the power source themselves or some kind of conduit that channels magic/power. We also see a shot of a hand with a similar purple miasma as the Crest emanating from an object they're holding and then crushes it in what seems like releasing its power. Could be the Black Beast is a result of such an action of releasing the Crest's power all at once and being infused with it. Or could be the result of some weak willed person being consumed by the power of the Crest either after releasing it or just possessing it like a Beast/Dragonstone and other stronger individuals may not turn feral like that and manifest in different ways like the one super evil., almost non-human, guy we got a glimpse of in the trailer as well.

Yeah plenty of stuff, but I'm still pretty upbeat about the game and looking forward to it all the same. Somethings likely won't be to my liking and where I wish they would go, but it doesn't mean the game or series is doomed. Just wary of certain things and possibilities: Too much school focus and time spent there overall Quality of writing overall and the chance for some really cliche stuff with regards to the Church and school Byleth as an avatar looking to be heavily plot relevant and key figure, which so far has not been a positive thing in past games Gameplay quality and potential effects the Teacher Mechanics and possible class switching might impact map and encounter designs as well at overall difficulty/challenge Three House choice and what that might mean for the story at large, how that affects 3 Lord's plot relevance and overall progression of the story depending on each choice Supports and S-Supports - latter seems inevitable yet slightly problematic given the setting. While the former is in need of some shakeups and changes if they want to continue to have such quantity between all the units without the quality suffering a lot, which bleeds into S-Supports and their general lack of decent development and lead up

Given her sword, as best we can make out, kind of looks like the one we see in the Goddess Mural I'm wondering if she's maybe an agent if the Church. Kind of like the right hand of the High Priestess and defender of the church kind of thing.

I'd be down for this, but I'm kind of expecting an assault on the Church as an end-ish game battle(s) more than a defense. But it certainly could work as an early game fight that ends the Academy Arc and acts as the major inciting event for the main conflict and departure from the church and school. Would be novel and interesting to experience a map, or series of maps, from both the perspective of a defender and then later on as the assaulter.

IN the real world Prophets tend to be liars cause you know Gods don't really exist, so it would great if they played around with that in the game. Sothis potentially complicates things as she's clearly more than just a normal being, and the Crests are surely quite magical and supernatural, but it would be interesting if Seiros was a big fraud, doubly so if she was for good intentions and not evil ones, and the whole Goddess/Revelations thing was BS and she just happened to either find the Crests which offered immense power and/or she made a deal with Sothis or some other Manakete who wasn't exactly a god but just pretty powerful in order to bring peace to the world. Mix that in with just run of the mill religious zealotry for some like the Priestess we see, as well as run of the mill bad people looking to abuse power and get ahead by any means necessary like some other nobles and church heads and you've got a decently interesting setup and premise for a game with potentially interesting conflicts and motivations by antagonists. Going for a plot of the Church is secretly and knowingly Evil with a capital E and there are real gods, potentially Evil and Good, working things from the sidelines would all kind of be lame and cliche at this point. Even just having a plot of them imprisoning the Goddess in order to use her power, not for pure Evil, but just "maintaining order" would be novel enough.

I'm not sure where I stand on the age of the Church of Seiros. It could be really old or relatively recent. I'm leaning towards the latter. While the Direct trailer says the the continent has existed since "time immemorial" and is protected by a revered Goddess, it doesn't say anything about the church's age. While the E3 trailer simply states "Long ago" with regards to when the Goddess gave Seiros her divine revelation, which could mean anything from a couple hundred to couple thousand years. If the Three Kingdoms are on the brink of war in Three Houses I feel like the last major conflict will still need to be somewhat fresh in their minds and not like a millennia ago. If the Church emerged say 300+ years ago and over the span of a century helped to establish the "relative harmony" the Three Kingdoms are now in with no major conflict in 100+ years that would make a lot more sense to me. But this is a fantasy setting so anything is really possible. Being that Faerghus is the "Holy Kingdom" that to me sounds like it was something that was born after the Church was founded, or at least dramatically reshaped by its emergence. While then Leicester Alliance definitely seems like it will be the youngest nation which may have been born from the dissolution of another Kingdom and Dynasty entirely or it may have broke off from one or both of the other Fodlan Kingdoms in a more recent conflict, which may only be a century or so old and the veritable seeds of conflict that still linger to this day. Back to the topic at hand of the Adrestian Empire I think the fact that it's potentially much older than the Church could be an important one. Especially when it comes to Edelgard's views on the Church, Crests and so on as we heard in the E3 Trailer. Being the heir to the Empire means she has access to records and archives likely spanning much much further back than anyone else if the lineage of her family and kingdom are true and the other kingdoms were formed after the Church came into being and before it could really quell all conflict. It may be that at some point she's able to leverage that to find records dating from before or during the rise of the Church of Seiros and uncover hidden truths long forgotten and suppressed by the rest of the world. But that's likely wishful thinking on my part.

This is the major thing for me, both thematically and mechanically. Just looking at things from the latter's perspective on average FE games have around 50 units, since FE6. That's a colossal number of characters to manage on an individual level with the shown Teacher Mechanics and Sub-systems. With that many units you're basically going from an SRPG to a Management simulator. Even if you prioritize the characters you like/use the most that's still a tremendous amount of menu and subsystem management. The only potential solution to this is to either dramatically reduce the total number of units to maybe 20, which would still require a large deal of management time but still significantly less than 50, or to limit it so that only the core 8 units from the House you choose are subject to those Teacher Mechanics and every other unit operates in the classic FE way. Either option seems highly unlikely and extremely controversial. The Thematically it makes a lot more sense as an extended prologue type setting to set up our characters, establish relationships and dynamics for the larger story. It's a setting that has been used several times in the series to establish connections/relationships between characters but made manifest here as an actual playable and fleshed out chapter of the story and not simply a reference or footnote. I mean could they make a school setting work for the entire game, maybe, but I'm having a hard time seeing it though.

Wouldn't the most logical reason be that Curved Shot is tied to the Iron Bow Bernadetta is using, the same as it was tied to in SoV, and in the sparring match they're simply using Training Lances which would likely do not have a Combat Art/Weapon Skill associated with them? I think that Weapon +Ranks grant access to a weapon's Combat Art makes sense. As does the idea that mastering a Class grants a permanent Skill or Combat Art. Somewhat related does anyone think we might see a separation between Class and Level this time around? We see that Petra needs 110 EXP to go from level 2 to 3 which suggests each level requires more EXP than the last. I wonder if there is just a straight level cap and we can freely promote or not without fears of missing levels for not going the full 20 for the class. This would make sense if they expect people to switch up classes more than in the past. So just having a permanent level not tied to your class would be a somewhat reasonable shift. That said between the addition of +Ranks to weapons, the rather slow accumulation of exp for Weapon ranks and the requirements for class promotion it doesn't seem like we'll be advancing classes all that fast, but that doesn't necessarily mean we won't be able to switch around a lot eventually later on.