lenticular

Yes. Lorenz's paralogue ("Land of the Golden Deer") is a good example. To quote Lorenz himself, "while the Alliance may appear to be at peace, the reality is that internal conflict is a routine matter". I don't believe there's any actual full-blown wars (prior to the big one), but there are definitely a lot of smaller scale conflicts, skirmishes and feuds. Best of luck with that! Trying it on Maddening is one step further than I was willing to go. I'm interested to hear how you get on.

So, I may be wrong here, and please correct me if I'm grossly misrepresenting your opinion, but I think that part of the issue here is the question: why do we optimise? Is optimisation a means to an end or is it an end in itself? I think that in discussion, we tend to phrase things as if optimisation is a means to end. "If I perform exactly these tutoring sessions then that will get this character to this skill level by this chapter which will let them learn this skill which will let them more easily kill this boss" and so on. But I also think that this can often be a bit of a convenient fiction. A lot of the time we don't really care about how easily we can kill the boss. We're actually just optimising because it can be fun to optimise things. Even things that are completely pointless. Especially things that are completely pointless. I actually think that this is one of the biggest tensions within Fire Emblem as a whole. It is fun to build people up to be superhuman demigods who can solo endgame maps without breaking a sweat; it isn't all that much fun to actually have those superhuman demigods. At least, not for very long. It can be fun to break out the maniacal laugh and declare "cower before me, you puny fools!" at your console when you finally bring your unstoppable build online, but that fun only really lasts for about one full map, after which it just becomes a monotous slog of "oh look, Robin killed everyone again, must be thursday". If we optimise the strategic and logistical parts of the game then we often end up optimising the fun out of the tactical parts of the game. Still, we persist in optimising these games to within an inch of their lives, even when we don't actually care about the end result, even when the end result can actually make the game less fun. Why do we do that? Well, I think there's two main reasons. One is that, sometimes we just can't help ourselves. We get into the mindset where we focus on beating the game rather than on playing the game. We make it all about the destination and forget about the journey. This is, frankly, daft, but it's an easy trap to fall into. I know that I fall into it sometimes, no matter how much I try not to. But the other reason -- which I touched on before -- is, I think, a better one: oftentimes we will try to optimise the game because optimising is fun. It's fun to look through all of the different skills/abilities that you can put onto a character and dream of all the different synergies that they might have with each other. I suspect many of us had a moment at some point in the past when we realised "wait, what if I put Vantage and Wrath onto the same person?" (and possibly then got destroyed by an enemy archer, and had another eureka moment of "but what if I give them a hand axe?"). It's fun to figure out what works and what doesn't. It can fun to micro-optimise every single turn to squeeze out as much xp as possible even when it would be far easier to just kill the boss straight away instead. So, when we look at Three Houses and compare manual tutoring with auto-tutoring and we note that manual tutoring is the optimal choice, I have to ask, what are we optimising for and why are we doing it? If the idea is that we are optimising as a means to an end, because we desire the results of the optimisation, then I would dispute that. The actual results of the optimisation are largely (though I admit not entirely) inconsequential. To anyone who doesn't enjoy tutoring but is worried that avoiding it would unduly weaken their characters, I would reassure them that just isn't the case. But that's not the only reason why people optimise. I do have a lot more sympathy with the position of "I want to optimise because I enjoy doing so, but I don't like this particular form of optimisation". Because I know that in games if I try to ignore one feature but then optimise everything else, then I often have that nagging feeling in the back of my head of "yes, but I could be doing more". And sometimes I manage to look past that, but sometimes I find it hard to. In Three Houses, for instance, I dislike tea time so I've managed to basically pretend that it doesn't exist. I play the game as if it weren't there at all, and I don't have a problem with that. However, in Fates, I hated the social aspects to My Castle and didn't use them at all, but that also left me feeling less willing to engage with the rest of the game. I was always left with the feeling that I was losing out by not having a chef's hat or an arena shield, or enough of whatever ore I needed, or whatever else was bugging me at the time. Did I actually need these things? No. Was the game perfectly playable without them? Yes. Did the lack of them still detract from my enjoyment of the game out of proportion with how much I would have gained if I had them? Yes. So, yeah, I guess I do sort of get it. Even as I also sort of don't get it? This has got long and rambling and is basically just me thinking aloud, but I hope that at least someone will find it a little useful or interesting.

If you're talking about design intent, then I can also easily say that if they weren't intending for tutoring to be skippable then they wouldn't have included the auto-tutor option. The option exists so that people can use it. Would they prefer that people engage with all the systems that they built? Absolutely. Did they also recognise that not everyone would want to do so and therefore added an option to skip it? Again, yes. Let me put it this way: let's get back to basics. What do you think you will be missing out on if you just auto-tutor every week? How do you expect that you will have a worse experience in the rest of the game if you do so? I feel that we're talking past each other a little bit here, and hopefully pulling back to the fundamental issues will help prevent that.

That makes sense. I know that I've put people as adjutants to fortress knights when I want them to gain some quick class xp. However, for my personal play style, if I'm using a dedicated dodge tank (or any other build that can effectively solo the game), then as soon as I've reached that point then I'll rush through the rest of the game. I generally find the "I've already won but the game doesn't realise it yet" phase of games to be pretty boring, so I don't usually do my due diligence on the last few maps if I know I can easily solo them without thinking. That's a playstyle thing, though, and I know that other people prefer to get a chance to see their overpowered builds in action as much as possible, or to really squeeze out as much as possible to make them even stronger. Not my thing, but I wouldn't want to deprive anyone else of their epic victory laps. I don't know that I'd consider it excessive grinding, but it's certainly more than I do. On the subject of tea time, I want to add that I would personally never use a build that required dozens of tea times simply because I don't enjoy tea time. At all. I once made Ignatz my dancer and had tea with him two or three times to make sure he met the charm requirement, and even that much was miserable for me. Now, obviously, not everyone is going to have the same disdain for tea parties that I do and people who enjoy them should absolutely feel free to turn Ignatz into his suave and debonair best self, but I do think that any build that requires extensive engagement with otherwise completely optional parts of the game should come with a fairly big asterisk.

Not sure if you're aware, but you can just hold A through the entire thing to repeat the same instruction four times, which is slightly quicker and slightly less likely to give you RSI than button mashing through it each time. The only time you actually need to release and repress is when you get "praise" or "console/critique" choices. Not a huge improvement, I'll grant, but good to be aware of. Being able to split the tuition between multiple categories can occasionally be useful in the early game, if you're trying to chase multiple break points in time for a specific map. Like if you need to unlock a specific spell or combat art but also need to get to a certain rank in a different weapon for the class you want to go into. It's not something that comes up often, and I don't think the flexibility that it offers is really worth the added busywork, but it's not completely useless. I don't think it's fair to call it only technically optional. It is genuinely optional. Getting everyone to their needed weapon ranks wasn't even remotely an issue in my no-monastery run. There are other parts of the monastery that I'll concede are only technically optional but tutoring isn't one of them. Auto-tutoring is absolutely fine. Yes, you lose out a little by not doing it, but you also lose out a little by not doing skirmish battles in games where they're available, and I'm not sure I've ever seen anyone suggest that they're only technically optional. Yeah, I've never seen the appeal of in-universe tutorials. It can work, very occasionally, but most of the time I just find that the breaking of the fourth wall brings me out of the epxerience, while at the same time, putting the words of the tutorial into a character's voice makes them less clear and concise than they could otherwise have been. Huh. I've never noticed that. I'll have to look for it next time I play. Can confirm that it is a mock battle. I think it mentions in passing that it's "to hone your skills" or "further your training" or something like that, though it doesn't really dwell on it. But you can have people "die" in it and still be fine afterwards. Though, I think it's actually bugged and plays the "I'm dying" voice line rather than the "I'm retreating" one. (All of this paragraph is from memory, so take with a grain of salt.) One of my big issues with gambits is that I almost never even notice when the enemy actually has them up until I'm being hit with them. Which is the same problem I have with Fates. Too much stuff going on that's too easy to miss. At least (for my tastes) I can just rewind time in three Houses when I die due to stuff I didn't see. Yeah, I agree with this. Higher avoid rates makes the terrain actually be meaningful. Too low and it turns into something that I don't really actually care about as anything other than a micro-optimisation that won't actually make any real difference.

It depends. One big factor for me is how often I'm expected/allowed to switch out my party composition. If all of my characters level up even when I'm not using them, then I'll probably rotate people in and out a lot to keep things fresh. Or there are games where that doesn't apply but that give you new units regularly, meaning there's going to be a lot of turnover. In either of these situations, I much prefer to have generalists. It's far easier to switch people in and out if I'm not having to match up the incoming and outgoing roles perfectly. On the other hand, if I'm going to have a single party that stays the same over the course of the entire game, then it becomes much more tempting to train people up as specialists. It's usually going to be better to train one person as a dedicated healer and one as a dedicated damage dealer than to have two people who can do a little bit of both. Because it's a nice balance between giving the player enough options to be interesting but not enough to be overwhelming or tedious, I'd assume. Why would you even want that, though? Is there some sort of weird build that I don't know that relies on having both Apothecary and Oni Savage skills? Or is it just one of those things that you theoretically can't do even though you'd never actually want or need to?

I would definitely consider that to be grinding, yes. If that’s how you have fun playing then that’s great and fair play to you, but that wouldn’t be fun at all for me. And no, it also isn’t quick or convenient to master Warrior (or any other Advanced class) but even without any grinding, I find that I will actually get there. Even without any auxiliary battles or grinding or any other special consideration, I’ll pick up the mastery in time just by playing the game. Not fast, but I get there. With Master classes, I find that I don’t ever get there naturally. That’s the big difference for me.

The big difference is the timing. You certify into Warrior at level 20, but into Wyvern Lord at level 30. Even at a baseline, that means that you're getting the skill a full ten levels earlier. Given the choice between having my build work now or having my build work ten levels from now, I'll take now please. But it's actually worse than that. The time between levels 20 and 30 typically corresponds with the end of Part 1 and the start of Part 2, which is also the part of the game that has the densest concentration of battles because that's when most paralogues unlock. You have a lot more battles after hitting level 20 than after hitting level 30. I'm guessing that maybe you do a lot more auxiliary battles than I do? Personally, I find that if I don't use a knowledge gem, then I'll typically finish the game before my master classes have picked up their masteries, and if I do use one then I can finish up but only with maybe 3 or 4 levels left before the end of the game. If I want to get the mastery ability for master classes then I have to go out of my way to do so. If you're playing the game differently how I do then maybe you're picking them up sooner? If you do pick it up, then sure, why not use it? Well, provided that you have a build that is suited to it, which not all builds are. But again, I won't typically master a master tier class at all unless I go out of my way to do so. I'm genuinely curious: for people who are routinely picking up mastery skills for master classes, about what chapter are you tending to hit level 30, about what chapter do you finish mastering the class, and how many auxiliary battles are you doing along the way?

Those screenshots are all well and good, but all of that could just as well be achieved with Wrath instead of Defiant Crit. Sure, you don't get your guaranteed crit on player phase if you're using Wrath, but you also don't need it. Just go and stand near the enemy and let them attack you instead. If you're running an enemy-phase build (either with vantage or a dodge tank) then there's little difference between the two. Player phase builds are possible with Defiant Crit, of course, but there are other glass cannon builds that are a lot easier and quicker to set up (Vengeance builds, for instance, or Magic Bow Hunter's Volley). Ultimately, it comes down to this: are you playing NG+ or are you willing to do a lot of grinding? If yes to either, then Defiant Crit might be worth looking into. If not then it really isn't. At least, I don't think it is. The benefits it offers aren't enough to justify how awkward it is to pick it up.

I'm not opposed to new weapon types, but I'd prefer that they focus on making the existing weapon types feel more distinct. There just isn't that much to differentiate between swords, lances and axes in most Fire Emblem games other than a sliding scale of trading off might for weight and accuracy. In comparison, gauntlets in Three Houses or Shuriken in Fates both feel far more distinct with their own unique niche, and I'd rather something like that for the main weapon types too.

You can use it with Vantage/Wrath, but there are other reliable ways to get to above 100% crit chance. There are killer weapons, crit rings, crit boosting battalions, weapon crit +10 skills, and so on. If you're runnign a Vantage/Wrath build, you should probably have set all of these up already so you can bring the build online much sooner. And sure, if you get Defiant Crit then it might let you swap some of those out for something else, but that's realistically only going to be a marginal improvement over what you already had. Marginal improvements that you only get in the very late game (if at all) aren't something that I'm ever going to get excited about.

Interestingly, I've heard that exact same criticism used against Pokémon and the features that are removed there. Stuff like pokémon following you in the overworld, mega evolutions, ride pokémon, the national pokédex, etc. have all been removed. And how any individual feels about their removal is going to depend on how much they liked those features. Personally, I liked ride pokémon so I see removing that as a retrograde step, but I didn't like mega evolutions or the national pokédex so I see removing them as removing clutter. Ask someone else and you'll get a different opinion. It's the same with Fire Emblem. I didn't care for Dragon Veins or the Maid and Butler classes, so I'm personally glad they didn't show up in Three Houses. I did quite like the Malig Knight, though, and think that would have been nice to have. But that's just me. I'm also generally cautious around any claims that something or other is popular with fans in general. I know what I like, I've a pretty good idea of what my friends like and what people on this forum like, and a moderate idea of what the wider English-language online Fire Emblem fandom likes, but even that is only scratching the surface of the games' player base. I've no idea what's popular in Japan or Brazil or Korea or Germany. I've no idea what's popular with the millions of people who buy and play the game but then never once talk about it online. But the game companies often do. They have community managers and market research and data analytics and all that sort of stuff. That's not to say that they know everything about what's popular and what's not, but they have a better idea than we do.

I don't think that going full branching paths could ever really work well in a Fire Emblem game. And not just because of things like voice acting and animated cut scenes and the costs of producing them, etc. I also think that one of the joys of text adventures and interactive fiction is the ease with which you can replay them and explore the other options. The good ones at least always leave a sense of the road not taken and make me want to play again and try taking different decisions to see where they lead. This is great in a text adventure which lets me quickly and easily skip over stuff that I've already read, but I can't imagine it working for something like Fire Emblem. I can see three possible ways that could work. You could replay the whole game every time you want to try a single different decision, which would be the same problem that White Clouds has except magnified. Alternatively, the game could keep track of every node and branch that you've visited and let you restart from that point, but then you lose out on raising and customising your units up to that point, which is fairly core to Fire Emblem's identity. Finally, you could keep a whole lot of save files and use them to skip around navigate between different decisions, but that sounds incredibly fiddly and un-fun to me. Regardless, I just don't see it working. If not branching paths, though, then what would extra choices actually do? They could be meaningless non-choices that very quickly converge back into the same scene and don't matter at all, but after Three Houses, I'm not sure there's anyone clamouring for more of that. They could also be tied to something more along the lines of a morality scale or a faction alignment system. For instance, I can easily imagine a system whereby you don't pick a house at the start of the game, but instead have shifting alignment and loyalties based on your decisions in part one, which then reflects which house you are permanently alligned with for part 2. I'd personally enjoy something like that, but I can see problems with it as well: How would it work for people who weren't interested in engaging with the system at all? How does it deal with the potential for your best units leaving your group? And so on. Regardless, outside of a branching paths style of narative, I don't think that most other ways of handling narative choice would increase the requirement for voice acting by all that much. Probably by a little bit, for sure, but not to the extent that it would stop it from being practically viable. So I don't really think that the trade-off between voice acting and player choice really exists. I will say, though, that full voice acting is pretty important to me. It's not the be all and end all, but the voice acting in Shadows of Valentia and Three Houses made me enjoy both of them considerably more than I would have done otherwise, and I would be sad if it went away for future titles.

There's also Locktouch. Regardless, I would guess that Shove and its cousins are combat arts because a combat art slot is less valuable than a skill slot. I don't know about anyone else, but I find that I often have more than five skills that I'd like to bring if I could, but rarely feel the desire for more than three combat arts.

The game is weird. It doesn't force an explore on you for chapter 3, so it's still possible to skip the quest at that point. But then in chapter 4, it does give you a mandatory explore. Seemingly, this would be so that you can do the quest to investigate the Holy Tomb, except that the game doesn't care if you end you completely ignore that quest and end your exploration session early. What it does care about is the battalion guild quest. It won't let you end your exploration until you've finished that. Even though it was perfectly content to let you ignore it in chapter 3 by just resting every week. No, this doesn't make any sense to me either, but that's how it works. Or at least, that's how it seems to work as far as I can tell.

You absolutely can bench any character you aren't using, though. In fact, generally, it's more efficient to do so. There's an upper limit on how many characters can ever be deployed at once (12 on the field plus 3 adjutants) and unless you're grinding, there's also an upper limit on how much experience you can get, so it generally makes sense to divide that experience only between the characters you're actually going to be deploying. In this sense, Three Houses isn't any different from other Fire Emblem games. Yes, there is flexibility in how you train and class your units, meaning you never fall into situations of "welp, I like both Gatrie and Tauroneo but I only want one general so I guess one of them is getting benched" but that hasn't really been an issue in Fire Emblem since reclassing was introduced. I also think that you're overselling thigns a bit by referring to characters as blank slates. They all have distinct bases, growths, skill strengths and weaknesses, budding talents, learned spells, learned combat arts, personal ability, etc. which shapes who they are and makes everyone suited to some classes and not to others. Personally, I like this mainly because it keeps characters distinct but also because I am a masochist who enjoys making deliberately bad choices and running with them. In theory, I see where you're coming from here, but in practice, I don't think they really work out like that. A lot of answers make sense, but there are also a good number that just seem entirely too arbitrary. Yes, of course Catherine is going to want to talk about "Someone you look up to" or "Mighty weapons", but why is she interested in "Gardening mishaps" or "Classes you might enjoy"? I have no idea. And if, at the end of the tea time, she says "We should train together" then the correct responses are either to laugh or sip tea? But if you nod or chat instead, then that's wrong? I have no earthly clue how that even begins to make sense. This theme is definitely present, but I have to say it's not one that particularly worked for me. I think that this is because the main characters are also the main actors who are driving the war. If anyone has the ability to end the war peacefully, then it is our people. Edelgard especially is the single primary instigator of the war, so it is particularly jarring to have a song from her point of view about how terrible war is when it is literally all her fault. I think that the real question here is to what extent monastery activities should be mechanically tied to battle performance. Personally, I enjoy (most of) the monastery as an end in itself. I like walking around, interacting with the characters and learning more about the world. For me, that is an end unto itself. I find it fun, so I don't need the extra little carrot of making my people fight a little bit better. What I want, ideally, is to be able to engage in as much monastery content as I want without having to worry that I'm going to trivialise the battle content, or as little monastery content as I want without having to worry that I'm setting myself up to fail. With that said, though, I'm sure that for some people, the integration of the two systems is entirely the point. For some people, the monastery is all about the rewards that it grants and being able to see the fruits of one's labour, so to speak. And I'm not going to tell those people that they are wrong. And then there are still others who have no interest in the monastery at all and who would rather just skip the whole thing if they could, and I won't tell them that they're wrong either. And the challenge in the game's development was how to keep all these different types of people happy? How can you make it rewarding for people who want to be rewarded, skippable for those who want to skip, and a goal in and of itself for people who just want to take a break from their tactical combat game to play a walking sim for a while? It's a difficult challenge, but I think that IS mostly did a decent job of it, though with a few exceptions. (As an aside: Can you please try to use more paragraph breaks? It's difficult to read single unbroken paragraphs like the one I'm quoting from. Thank you.) That is a definition of "species", but not the only one. (For other definitions, see, for instance, the Wikipedia article for "species".) Even in the real world, the definition can break down in several cases, such as ring species or asexually reproducing species. As ever, nature remains more complicated than our ability to fit it to neat boxes and definitions, and we live in a world which isn't further complicated by Weird Magic Stuff. I don't think it's particularly meaningful to ask whether laguz and beorc are the same species and whether they suffer from racism or speciesism, when we can just say that they face bigotry and discrimination and leave it at that.

39:12. Though I will say that a. I tend to be a fairly slow player and b. I sometimes get distracted or wander away from the console while leaving it on, so I'm not sure you ought to read that much into my play times. For comparison, I have regular runs of Three Houses ranging from 98:10 to 203:30, depending on the difficulty I was playing on, how completionist I was being, how much I left the game running while I was doing something else, and so on. For further comparison, I also looked up my play times for other games in the series: Path of Radiance in 57:21 // Awakening in 64:33 // Birthright in 41:35 // Conquest in 35:25 // Shadows of Valentia in 53:12. (Those were the only ones I could check conveniently.)

I've finished up my no-monastery run and am here to report back. For the most part, it worked out just fine, with relatively few problems. The whole thing was done on Hard/Classic with no NG+, no online, no amiibo, and no DLC (well, I have the DLC, but I didn't use any of the stuff it gives). I explored only when the game forces it, and then did the absolute minimum possible before ending exploration. I also never did manual instruction, only ever automated. I did set study goals, though. I also set up a group task once at the start of part 1 and then again at the start of part 2, but otherwise left it be. All story elements were skipped with + where possible or by mashing A in the cases where it won't let you skip. I did paralogue battles but not auxiliary battles (except the one mandatory one near the start). Other than paralogues and the few mandatory exploration sessions, I always either rested or (more usually) skipped to the end of the month (skipping is equivalent to always choosing rest and auto-instruct through all the time you skip). I also didn't use any sort of exploits or grinding: no save scumming for exam results, no broken weapon grinding, no using divine pulse for RNG manipulation, etc. (I did use pulse to prevent deaths and undo fat-finger mistakes, though). (I decided to allow paralogues and setting study goals, partly because I felt it was the way to show the game in its best light and partly because they felt similar to things that have existed in previous Fire Emblem games. Paralogues, of course, actually have existed, so I felt no reason to exclude them. Setting goals feels comparable in amount of faff to something like assigning bexp in Tellius. Which is to say, very little faff. At the same time, I also recognise that there'd not have been any value if I'd come back saying "yes, the game is totally beatable this way just so long as you play on Normal/Casual, grind for 50 hours, and then use this exploit!" so I wanted to be sure not to do that.) So, which parts worked out, and which didn't? Weapon skills were fine. They were slower to raise than if I'd hadf all the saint statues and was tutoring manually, but not too much slower, and it was never really a big deal. There were two times during the game where I felt the loss at all. The first was at the very start of the game, not being able to rush specific breakpoints, like getting C Faith on Mercedes to have her learn Physic faster. The second was much later on, getting the necessary weapon ranks for master classes on the characters who were going into them. They still got there, just not as fast as I'm used to. Overall, this just felt like there was a different ebb and flow to picking up skills, but it still worked absolutely fine and felt completely balanced. Everyone was able to get the skills for the classes I wanted to put them into. Everyone other than Byleth had their main weapon rank somewhere between A and S by the end of the game, with A+ being the most common. Everyone also had at least a B rank in Authority by the end, with several of them being at A rank. From the Saint statues, the only big miss was the class xp bonus from the Cethleann statue. Not having that kina sucked. For beginner and intermediate classes, it wasn't all bad. It meant having to pick and choose which classes were the most important to master, and focusing on them, rather than being able to pick up multiple skills on everyone. This was definitely a reduction in my overall power level, but it led to some interesting choices, so I didn't mind it too much (for instance: I had both Dimitri and Felix skip getting Death Blow because I figured they'd probably be doingmore than enough damage anyway and I wanted to spend the extra time in their beginner classes to grab reposition and shove instead). For advanced classes and beyond, though, it kinda sucked. Luckily, there aren't many that are actually worth mastering, and knowledge gems are a thing, but I definitely felt the absence here. Getting Hunter's Volley online for Ashe took way longer than I was happy with. Supports were mostly fine, with one glaring exception. I didn't actually try to build supports at all, only picked them up passively from what I was doing anyway, and even then, my people mostly ended up with a healthy mixture of A and B supports. I don't think that my play-style is particularly suited to passively building support (I am the person who nearly missed that Fates had child units, after all) so I think it's fair to say that it would be easy to get any specific pairing to A support if someone were actively trying to do so. With one glaring exception. That being Byleth. I assume that the number of support points that Byleth needs to unlock each rank of support is way higher than everyone else, due to all the opportunities to gain them in the monastery. Byleth didn't get higher than a C support with anyone, and had no support at all with a couple. Happily, I didn't actually care about Byleth supports in this run, but it would have been different if I'd been recruiting or if I was doing Crimson Flower. It's probably possible to get enough support between Byleth and Edelgard to enter Crimson Flower if you really focus on gluing the two of them together on the battlefield, but I can't say I'd want to try it. In short: Byleth supports are bad, all other supports are completely fine. Speaking of recruiting, that was obviously lacking in this run. Other than the initial blue Lion students, the only units I got to add were Flayn, Seteth and Gilbert. Still, this wasn't bad, per se. It's enough people to fill out a complete deployment roster and that's really all that you actually need (unless you're doing an ironman, which you shouldn't be because ironman Three Houses is dreadful). It's different from typical Fire Emblem, and I do prefer having a selection of units to choose from, but just having a set selection of units to use worked fine too. That said, if I had wanted more units, then a single visit to the monastery could have netted me any or all of Cyril, Catherine, Shamir, Alois, Hanneman, and Manuela. It wouldn't have been within the confines of this run, but it's a pretty simple thing to do. Professor Level was basically a non-issue. I think I ended up at C+ just from randomly answering the lecture questions each month. That seems bad, but there really isn't much need for more. Activity points for exploration and battle obviously weren't a concern, and I've already explained that lack of tutoring wasn't a problem. There were only two times that professor level came up at all. First, it wasn't high enough for me to have more than one adjutant slot, but given that adjutants aren't very strong anyway, this wasn't a big miss. Second, it stopped me from forging silver weapons into their + versions. this was a minor annoyance, but really not a big deal. Access to the blacksmith for forges and repairs wasn't nearly as big an issue as you might think. It wasn't accessible at all in part 1, since it's locked behind a monastery quest. Honestly, though, this wasn't that badly missed. Part 1 is mostly all about basic weapons anyway, and not having the blacksmith just means not having the + versions and having to buy replacement weapons instead of repairing old ones. This wasn't a big deal at all. It then becomes available automatically at the start of part 2 (as do all other monastery facilities that you haven't unlocked) so it's available for repairing relics from that point on. (Interestingly, the Sword of the Creator proved far more useful on this run than it usually is. Regular resting meant that I could use it with impunity and have it fully repaired for free every month.) Not having access to the other merchants was a bit of a bigger issue, though still not huge. Not having access to Arcane Crystals or Black Sand Steel was a little annoying (and made sure that my one Bolt Axe was a very limited resource). If I'd had access to them then that would have been another time when professor level would have been an issue too, since I think that forging Bolt Axes and Wo Dao both need high professor level. The other thing I wanted to buy but couldn't was more Master Seals. I actually forgot that I was workign with a limited supply of Master Seals, and wasted a few on speculative unsuccessful certifications. That ended up with me not being able to promote Gilbert or Seteth as I had planned, though that was as much my fault as anything else. It also didn't matter too much in the end, since Advanced classes are also fine for end-game, and Advanced Seals aren't limited in availability. Other stuff from the extra merchants wasn't missed, though. There are plenty of shields, rings and staves given out from chests or as drops or mission rewards, so the extras from Anna's shop weren't needed. Money wasn't an issue at all. Just from the automatically gifted funds from part 1 plus the bullions I got from missions, I had more than I ever needed. Nothing more to say about that, really. Not having a dancer was annoying. It was all completely playable without one, of course, but the game just felt smaller for not having one. Dancers are fun, they let me do fun things, and I missed having one. I think that's about everything that I had to comment on. Overall, it did feel like a decently balanced and well-rounded experience. I felt as if I was playing the game, not like I was struggling against the game and trying to force it to do something it wasn't intended to. The overall power level of my people was certainly a bit lower than it otherwise would be, but honestly not that much. I'm not sure I'd want to do Maddening this way, but Hard was absolutely fine. (And for anyone who would struggle on Hard, Normal is still an option.) There are a few spots which feel a little bit shaky, but honestly not many. To anyone who wants to avoid the monastery, I'd recommend to unlock all the merchants, get the class xp bonus from the saint statues, unlock the dancer, and recruit any church units you want. They seem like they're sufficiently low effort and high reward to be worth it. Everything else? Nah. Totally skippable. And even those things aren't needed; they'd just have been nice to have. Having actually played through the game this way, I stand by my initial assessment. Except for Byleth supports. They suck.

A lot of the problem with hybrid classes is the opportunity cost. If you want to go into Mortal Savant, you're losing the benefits of being in Swordmaster or Assassin or whatever other class you were in before. If you just allow Swordmaster and Assassin to use magic then there would be no associated opportunity cost. That means you oculd get a bit of use out of magic in the few niche cases where it would be useful. It needn't necessarily be for increased damage either. It could be for range, for ignoring terrain, for healing, etc. And while Felix (with his high strength stat and terrible spell list) isn't going to be getting much use from magic, it would be much more useful for units like Manuela, Ingrid or Lorenz.

For me, I always took a lot of the weird time nonsense as being a gameplay abstraction, so it doesn't bother me. Just as I don't imagine that all the units in a battle are actually standing in one place and waiting patiently while everyone moves one at a time and then taking turns to swing their swords at each other, I also don't assume that the exact ordering of events in and around the monastery should be taken literally. I basically take it as "hey, here are some things that happened this month", and not "and then the professor ate 7 large meals on Saturday and fasted for the res tof the week". Though I will say that the end of Part 2 with its constant returns to the monastery did get a little bit much even for me. Agree with this. One of the things that I like about the monastery is that it adds a sense of place and attachment that isn't typically present in other Fire Emblem games. It's a huge wasted opportunity that they didn't take advantage of that to really raise the emotional stakes. For me, personally: yes and no. Did I find that particular individual quest fun? No, I can't say I did. I didn't mind it, it didn't meaningfully detract from the overall experience for me, but I also can't say I particularly enjoyed it. What I did enjoy was the more general and wider experience of wandering around the monastery, talking to people, learning a bit more about the world, having some downtime, etc. Last vestige of cut content does seem likely but I do have a different guess as to why it was specifically the activity for the faith skill that survived. If you use it semi-regularly, you're going to passively gain a bit of faith skill on Byleth which means there's a good chance that you have at least the Heal spell when the game suddenly dumps you into a White Magic class near the end of Part 1. Which you likely wouldn't otherwise, since most people are going to be training Byleth in a physical class. OK, so there's not really any good reason to use an axe if you're a Falcon Knight. (I can think of a few circumstances, but they're all either contrvied or very situational, so wouldn't contest your point.) But are there times you would want to use a bow as a Falcon Knight? Or use a lance as a Wyvern Lord? Or a sword as a Bishop? Yes to all of the above, and more. And that's just for end-game classes. For Beginner and Intermediate tier classes, mixing and matching weapons becomes much more important. If you change the question to "can I use an axe as a Pegasus Knight?" then the answer is resoundingly "yes, and there are a lot of circumstances where you probably should". The class system isn't the wide-open sandbox that you hoped for (and that I would also have loved to see), but it is more free and open to experimentation than you seem to be implying. Another benefit to that would have been to improve the viability of hybrid builds and builds that use magic weapons or magic combat arts. Builds like magic bow sniper for Hanneman or lightning axe wyvern for Annette are fun, but they'd be a lot stronger if they could retain spell use as well, even if it was at half-uses. As is, only Mortal Savant and War Monk/Cleric have both a weaponfaire skill and the ability to use magic, which is a little sad. My other gripe with magic is that "can use magic" is an all or nothing affair with no differentiation between white and black magic. This generally just makes the white magic classes bad. Holy Knight is notoriously terrible, but I'd also say that Priest is almost as bad and that Mage is usually a better pick, even for healers. I'd have liked for them to give White Magic classes only half uses of Black Magic spells and vice versa, to differentiate the classes a bit more and make the White Magic classes actually useful (Bishop is already useful, mind). That could potentially fit with giving half-magic use to all classes, too.

I think that the existence of all the gacha, lootboxes and microtransactions is the excuse not to try the game before criticising it. I know that I have the type of personality that is susceptible to the sort of psychologically manipulative tricks that go into this sort of game. I've over-spent on them before. Not the sort of crushing over-spending that goes beyond what I could afford, but definitely more than I intended to spend. So these days, I mostly just won't touch any game that I can overspend on (and am extremely careful to always be monitoring myself with the few exceptions). There's certainly no way I'm going anywhere near Pokémon Unite. That said, I do agree that Pokémon has always been a predatory franchise, and is only growing even more so recently. I'd normally prefer to buy a full priced game that play a "free"-to-play one, since a. there's a maximum upfront cost that can never be exceeded and b. you know in advance exactly what you're getting for your money. Except that Sword and Shield managed to break both these things (with Pokémon Home and the version exclusive DLC respectively). So overall, yeah, I'm not at all surprised by the nosense in Unite. But I also don't feel that I need to play it to be able to call it out as nonsense.

The quest that unlocks the Battalion Guild is forced/unskippable. The only unskippable monastery quests are the ones from Rhea to meet the house leaders and choose your house, the one from Jeralt to grab the tactics guide from his room that unlocks your first three battalions, and the one from Jeritza to unlock the battalion guild. Everything else can be skipped, but the game devs were really keen to make sure you knew about battalions. The Forge is locked behind a quest, so is unusable for all of part one. However, I believe that all basic monastery facilities unlock automatically in part two even if you haven’t done their quest, which I didn’t know until I did a no-items challenge run recently. I can’t say absolutely for certain that you can use the forge from the menu at that point, but I can’t imagine that you wouldn’t be able to. (My no-monastery run is currently coming along nicely. I beat chapter 12 last night so will probably get to the point of being able to check this for certain today.) Edit: I have now completed chapter 13 and can confirm 100% that the blacksmith is available via menus in part two even if you skip the monastery quest to unlock it.

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.

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. 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.

Fódlan generally does share all those things, though. All three polities share the same religion (and to the extent that there is variation, such as the schism of the Western Church, this is a problem within the states, not across state lines). They also seem to have the same language. Notably, Petra is presented as not being fluent in the Fódlan language but everyone else is shown having no difficulty communicating. In terms of ethnicity, I don't think there's really enough to go on to say that they're definitely all the same ethnicity, but I also don't think there's evidence that they aren't either. Culturally, they have a shared history (having once been unified as a single country but having since fragmented), a shared institution in Garreg Mach, very similar systems of nobility and feudalism, etc. Characters from outside of Fódlan comment on aspects of Fódlan culture that are strange to them. And so on and so forth. Which isn't to say that the reunification would inevitably be successful and lasting, but I also don't think that things are anywhere near as bleak as you're presenting.