lenticular

I'm not sure that will really hold. I know that as games get older, I generally tend to play them less. Even my personal favourites, I'm probably only to replay maybe once every five years or so. As it gets older, the proportion of people playing it four times in a row is probably going to decrease. Back-to-back replay value is not necessarily the same as "drag it out of storage every five years" replay value. I also wouldn't be surprised if the perceived wisdom for first time players becomes "it's fun, but only play through one route of it unless you're really into it". My guess on how Three Houses ages is that it depends a lot on where the series goes from here. If the future direction of the series borrows a lot from Three Houses, then things will probably be refined a lot going forward and Three Houses will be remembered as having an important role in the direction of the series but being very rough around the edges. On the other hand, if future games in the series go back to being more like older, more traditional Fire Emblem, then Three Houses will be remembered as a bit of a black sheep that did it's own weird thing that some people will like and others won't. I'm thinking of games like FE: Gaiden or The Adventure of Link that do weird stuff that is not really representative of their series as a whole but which still have their fans.

For all that I do not hate to defend Byleth, I am pretty sure that if I ever started to hear the voice of a literal goddess in my head, it would probably take me a long while to get used to it. Still would have been nice if they'd added some sort of hint of recognition, though. "Either I'm imagining it, or it's that girl again" or something like that. From memory (and from the "no monastery" run I'm now doing), I believe that the only monastery quests that are the initial quests from Rhea to speak to the house leaders and then pick a house, the quest from Jeralt to go up to his room and grab battalions, and the quest from Jeritza to unlock the battalion guild. Everything else is optional. Definitely Ashe. Mechnically speaking, female-Ashe would gain quite a bit by getting access to Pegasus Knight and Falcon Knight, whereas female-Dedue would lose out by not having access to Grappler or War Master. In terms of story and character, I like urchin girls as an archetype, I think that having Ashe be female would alter the dynamic between Ashe and Ingrid in interesting ways and -- most importantly -- female-Dedue would make the dynamic between Dedue and Dimitri a whole lot creepier than it already is, and it's already pretty creepy. I've always assumed that it was just out of a desire to ease new players in gently by not going straight into larger deployments. It would also be highly unusual for a Fire Emblem game to have 9 units deployed in Chapter 1. Thinking about it, though, what I wish they'd done was a somewhat extended prologue that ramped the number of units up gently and also gave us a chance to get to know at least a few more characters before we pick our house.

Yeah. I may be a bit of a Three Houses apologist/fangirl, but I'm not going to even try to claim that it's anything other than a terrible game to ironman, and I can definitely understand that trying to ironman it would make even a saint resentful. Mind you, I'm not sure that that's necessarily the game's fault, per se. I don't think that it's trying to be an ironman game and failing, I don't think that it's really doing anything to encourage ironmanning. Maybe you could say that the existence of a Classic mode is tacitly encouraging ironmanning, but equally, you could say that the existence of Divine Pulse is trying to discourage it. Not that I blame you for trying to ironman it either, mind. It's one of the perils of doing spoiler-free ironman runs of games generally. You never really know beforehand whether an ironman is a good idea, and the only way to find out is either to try it out or to spoiler yourself. I'm not going to comment on most of the specifics of this because I'm actually trying to do the run and will report back when I am done, since that seems better than theorycrafting over what we think would happen. However, I do want to point out that this is just factually inaccurate. If you choose to skip ahead to a future date then the game will automatically do Auto-Tutor for tutoring sessions and Rest for free time. It's impossible to skip ahead without getting the effects of Rest. So while other stuff might be an issue (again: I'm trying it, so we'll see), I'm certain that this won't be.

That's fair. A lot of the grumbling I hear about Three Houses is how the monastery really doesn't stand up to replay, but for people who just hate it immediately, it's true that you don't have a sense of exactly what is and isn't needed. I also do have some sympathy to the "use it or lose it" dilemma of limited grinding. That can be a genuine problem. However, for the most part, I found it fairly easy to tell what monastery stuff was and wasn't needed, even in my first playthrough (and without guides, spoilers, etc.). For instance, I gave up on teatime very early on because I didn't enjoy it and correctly assumed that the little bits of Charm I could drag out of it weren't going to be worth it. I haven't, because I generally enjoy the monastery, but I am absolutely going to try doing so now and see how it turns out. I don't know how long it will take (though it will probably be considerably quicker than you are, due to a combination of skipping everything and not needing to playlog everything) but I will post back when I am done (and be willing to eat my words if it turns out that it sucks).

So, I totally get why a lot of people don't like the Monastery. What I do not understand is why people don't like the Monastery but then do all the Monastery activities anyway. And what I doubly don't understand is why people don't like the Monastery, do it all anyway, and then complain that the game is too easy. The game is balanced to be beatable without any bonuses from the monastery. With the exception of the small number of mandatory activities in the early-game that serve as a tutorial, it's completely viable to just skip through every month doing nothing but resting and auto-tutoring and still get through the game (at least on Normal and Hard difficulties). I tend to think of the Monastery as being similar to skirmish grinding in Awakening, social stuff in My Castle in Fates, or sidequests in Shadows of Valentia. It's there for people who want it, is a part of "optimal" play and will definitely make the game easier, but it's fine to skip some or all of it if you don't want to engage with it. The other issue with trying for authentic pronunciation is that there's no way most of the voice actors are going to manage to nail all of the phonemes from languages other than English. If they tried for an authentic Old Norse pronunciation of Hræsvelgr then they might get something that sounds fairly similar to an Anglophone ear but it would probably still sound weird to any native speaker of any nordic language.

I don't really like the way that sword is obtained, since it's so easily missable. It's reasonably easy to clear the map before Rodrigue even shows up, and even if you don't then it's likely that Byleth won't be anywhere near him unless you're specifically going out of your way to talk to him. Which you really don't have any reason to do unless you know that he has the sword. The sword itself is also pretty underwhelming. There are a lot of good swords available (Wo Dao, Rapier, Brave Sword, Levin Sword, etc.) and the Sword of Moralta just doesn't do anything well enough to justify being repaired with Mythril. It also doesn't even have a unique appearance (sharing the the Sword of Begalta) which bugs me more than it reaosnably should.

It was fun. Thank you for taking the time to run it. (I will also add that I did change my mind a little bit on a few gambits through the course of the discussion. That I didn't change my grades wasn't because I'm entirely happy with the grades I gave, but because I figured I'd probably be equally unhappy with any other modified set of grades I gave.)

Although, weirdly, Dominic himself is physically oriented, with higher strength than magic. If they'd made Gilbert have a Crest but Annette lack it then they'd have presumably given it a completely different effect, and had Crusher work completely differently too, which would make Dominic make sense as a unit too. It could also be presented as Annette not inheriting the family Crest and that being what motivated her to study magic instead, I get the feeling that the Aegis Shield is one of the many victims of "was only tested on Hard" in Three Houses. On Hard, I think it works fine on Felix. He's strong enough and fast enough that he can still reliably double most things on Hard (provided you're in a fast class like Swordmaster or Assassin). On Maddening, though, yeah, I agree that it doesn't really have anyone who it fits on. Here's my suggestions for a set of changes: Change the crest of Dominic from a magic-oriented crest to a physically-oriented crest that is suited for tanking. Either a health-regain effect or a counterattack-prevention effect would work well. Give the Crest to Gilbert and take it away from Annette. Add a story beat or two about how Annette didn't inherit her father's crest, how that motivated her to study magic, etc. Change Crusher so it's a Sacred Weapon instead of a Heroes' Relic. (It loses Dust that way; little of value is lost.) Change the Aegis Shield to be linked to the Crest of Dominic rather than the Crest of Fraldarius. Have Gilbert show up in Chapter 13 carrying the Aegis Shield. Create an entirely new relic from scratch for Felix that's actually useful for him. I would suggest a sword with a high crit rate. I presume that the one-to-one connection with the Gregorian calendar was to allow Byleth's birthday to match the player's real life birthday. Which I would consider very much not worth the cost of verisimilitude of the world building.

That's largely to be expected. Half of the characters are members of prominent noble families who the house leaders would absolutely be familiar with. Of the rest, most of the others are at least somewhat prominent: famous opera singer, foreign princess, adopted son of a noble, graduate of Fhirdiad School of Sorcery, sons of prominent merchant families, etc. The only character who wasn't somewhat prominent in society prior to Garreg Mach is Leonie. And even if the house leaders didn't know (or know of) all their classmates already, they'd probably make it their business to get to know them quickly. I'd always interpreted that as him running away while they were travelling to the monastery for the start of the year, rather than running away after having assumed his post. That's fair. Maybe a few classes had already been taught with Hanneman and Manuela splitting duties for all three classes between the two of them for the very start of the year before a replacement teacher was found?

Are you sure about that? The impression I've always had is that we are arriving at the start of the year. I haven't really paid that close attention to be sure of this, but I also don't remember anything that contradicts my reading of things. What is it that makes you think it isn't the start of the year? My understanding is that this was a theme that was fairly heavily present in the original Japanese script that mostly got cut out of the localisation, except for a few weird relics like that one that are left feeling very out-of-place. Overall, my feelings about most of your complaints this time are either "that just wasn't my experience at all" or "yeah, that's kinda weak but very minor and not a big deal". Which, honestly, is probably the result of cognitive biases all around. I like Three Houses so am more likely to look for things to like about it and overlook its flaws; you dislike Three Houses so are more likely to find its strengths less convincing and its flaws more damning.

I quite like the story implications of him not having a Crest while Annette does, since it's a nice demonstration of how Crests in general are weakening, skipping generations, etc. It is, admitedly, a very minor benefit to keeping him Crestless, but I think that allowing him to use the Aegis Shield would be a very minor benefit to giving him the Crest. It's only a marginal difference either way. I look forward to the rousing chorus of boos I will receive when the time comes and I try to (partially) defend that paralogue.

Yeah, this feeling is never a fun one, though it is completely inevitable. For any long-running media franchise, in any medium, there are two basic options: either they stay the same, stagnate, and alienate some fans who grow bored, or they try something new, change, and alienate some fans who don't like the direction of the change. There's no way to avoid it, but that doesn't make it any less frustrating when you're one of the fans being alienated. It's happened to me a few times in the past and is one of the reasons I'm wary of ever getting too emotionally invested in any media franchise these days. That's a shame that you're not going to play on Maddening, if understandable. I think that saying that it's easy to softlock is a bit of an exaggeration, though it certainly is possible to softlock, which is not good for a playlog. The big gap in difficulty between Hard and Maddening is one of the thigns that irks me about Three Houses, but I do think that -- potential softlock excepted -- Maddening is probably closer to the sort of experience you'd be looking for. Yeah, OK, that made me laugh. You're not wrong. I am generally of the school of thought that not everything has to be explained. Especially not when it's something that many people won't even notice. So long as something seems plausible and I can think of a potential explanation, then that's good enough for me. Giving explanations for all incidental story elements just comes across as needelessly dragging and pedantic to my particular tastes and sensibilities. Personally, I'm happier with the Three House cursor movement than the 3DS cursor movement; I find it less twitchy and less prone to overshooting and having to compensate. Different strokes for different folks. That said, have you played with the settings for cursor movement in the options menu? I don't know if they'd help you, but they might be worth looking at if you haven't done so already. I think that it's definitely worth asking whether or not enemy targeting AI ought to be deterministic or not but given that it is deterministic, I definitely prefer for it to be clearly communicated to the player through the UI. Difficulty through obscurity is one of my personal bugbears, so I am always going to celebrate making more information available to the player. The instant feedback on "exactly which units am I moving into range of here?" is very nice too, as is the combat preview for the damage the enemy will do on enemy phase. Overall, I love this particular UI innovation and very much hope for it to become a series staple. That said: Yeah, I agree with this.Three Houses is generally pretty good about letting the player customise their experience, and this would be such an easy thing to provide. "Improved them greatly", you mean? (I am well aware that is not what you mean.) Yeah, I agree with this. I like how the combination of age and youth was handled. It gave her a slightly alien, not-quite-human feeling to her, which was appropriate both for the "I don't know who this is" part of the game and the "now I know who this is and it makes sense" part of the game. Bringing over the bonuses from the Saint Statues is automatic, unfortunately. I'd prefer if it had been optional too. But otherwise, yeah, NG+ is mostly pretty good about letting you have as much or as little overpowered nonsense as you want.

Yeah, I don't see a whole lot of benefit to you doing more than one route. If you were a reviewer who was heavily focused on story, then it would make sense, but you aren't. A single route is almost certainly enough to be able to fairly rank the game. Yes, you will miss out on some things, but they will be broadly similar in tone, quality and design philosophy to the parts that you do see. Obviously, you'll need to consider the fact that you're not seeing the whole game and not deduct points for, e.g. plot hooks that are left unresolved. I'm sure you're savvy enough to do that, though. Frankly, life is too damn short to waste your time torturing yourself by playing a game you don't enjoy four times in a row. Hell, I'd advocate skipping out on a bunch of the parts of Three Houses that you don't like (monastery stuff, 80% of the supports, etc.), but I can see that maybe that would compromise the integrity of the project. I don't see that there's any detriment to the project by only doing one route, though. Maybe just ask people if there are any specific things from other routes that they'd like for you to comment on or consider? For instance, I'd be curious to know your opinion on God-Shattering Star? It's a music track that you'll miss if you're only doing Azure Moon, a lyrical piece which retains its Japanese lyrics even in the localisation, and also my personal favourite track in Three Houses.

I don't want to go too far into the weeds on this, since it's wildly off-topic for this thread, but the summary version is that in Three Houses I find that they don't do enough to be worth it and drop off too quickly, whereas in Fates and Awakening, I think that they can be extremely powerful but require an awful lot of setup to reach that point and I'm generally not a fan of late game builds that require a lot of setup. (And I'll also add that this is a "my personal opinion" type of thing, not an "objective analysis" type of thing. I don't have the detailed knowledge of Fates and Awakening necessary to do proper analysis.)

As I understand it, the modern sense of "lich" as an undead mage or necromancer is a fairly recent one, only about 50 years old. Prior to that, it had occasionally been used for any sort of undead, and prior to that it had just been another term for a corpse (cf. "lichgate"). So while it's certainly odd to see the term used that way, I don't think it's necessarily wrong, per se.

Oh no, I said 'Fire Hamblem'. That's what I call hamburgers.

I am fully expecting to disagree with over 90% of what you have to say about Three Houses, but it should be fun anyway. I promise to argue respectfully!

One thing that I've personally wished for (even though I doubt it will ever happen) is a Fire Emblem game based in the far north. If that ever happens, then I think that having the Fire Emblem be the in-universe name for the aurora borealis would work nicely. Failing that, and assuming the more traditional setting based loosely on high medieval Western Europe, how about a book? Or maybe a specific arcane rune or sigil that is used in the casting of magic? It's been too long since we last had a full-on mage lord, and having the Fire Emblem itself be connected to magic would be a good way to make that happen.

In terms of gameplay, I would say that Conquest has a lot more going on. It has more map gimmicks, more enemies with skills or special weapons that you need to account for, and so on. I don't think that inherently makes it better, per se. It largely depends on your personal tastes. For me personally, I prefer Birthright, because I found Conquest to be a little bit too busy and a little too bloated. There was just a bit too much going on and it added an extra layer between me and my tactics that I didn't really enjoy. However, I know that other people really enjoy all the extra bells and whistles and find that they add to the experience, so your mileage may vary. In terms of story, I didn't really enjoy either of them. Birthright's is probably a little bit better than Conquest's, but definitely not to the point where it's a game that I would recommend playing specifically for the story.

Not only are these far worse than the rallies of Awakening and Fates (which I find to be decent but overrated), but in some ways they're also worse than the rallies of Three Houses (which I find to be poor but overrated). Obviously, the area of effect that these have is better than the single-target effect of rallies, but there are pretty substantial trade-offs as well. Rallies have infinite uses; these do not. Rallies can (on the right units) combine multiple effects; these do not. In theory, the action economy of being able to buf lots of units at once should be more than enough to counterbalance those weaknesses, but in practice, I've found it often doesn't work out that way. In order for these to be worth it, you not only have to have multiple units within the AoE, but also need to have the buffs make a meaningful difference by allowing the unit in question to pass some sort of break-point. When these let you score a kill or survive an attack you otherwise wouldn't have been able to, that's great. When they're applied to units who are already able to get a kill or units who won't be able to tank a hit even with the buff, they may as well not exist. These probably are better than even the best rally-user in Three Houses, but it isn't a complete walkover. And that's damning, partly because rallies are pretty bad and partly because rallies don't take your gambit slot. Whenever I've brought one of these along to a battle, I've found that I just don't use them. The circumstances hardly ever line up to make them reach their theoretical potential, and I almost always have something better to do with the unit who has them. And that's when the unit doesn't have another gambit. Of the two, I think I'd rather have the defense buff. Partly because 6 is bigger than 4, but also because it has less competition from rallies (by my count, five people have rally str but only two have rally def). Regardless, I'm unimpressed with both. Absolute Defense: 3/10 // Battlefield Cafe: 2/10. I'm pretty sure that including Hapi is an error on the site and that she actually only gets Rally Dexterity.

I can't speak for Genealogy since I've never played it, but I'd say that a single use of Galdr in PoR and RD is considerably less good than a single use of Dance of the Goddess for a few reasons. First, you can't use it to refresh your dancer since it effectively is your dancer, which means that you can't do ridiculous "use your most powerful unit four times" strats. Path of Radiance and Radiant Dawn also have fewer tools in general than Three Houses. There's no Warp, no Stride, no gambits, no combat arts, very little range >2, and so on, which means you're left using it much more "honestly" than the tricks you can pull in Three Houses. Finally, you're stuck only being able to use it when Reyson is transformed, which is quite a big limitation, or using it on Rafiel, who has garbage availability. It's still fantastic, of course, but I don't think it's outright broken the way it would be if Dance of The Goddess had more charges and better availability.

Blessing: I'm not really sure how to rate this. On the one hand, it's very useful with Vantage/Wrath, Defiant and Vengeance builds, either for setting them up in the first place or as an insurance policy against having one unlucky hit somehow manage to sneak through. On the other hand, if you aren't using this kind of setup then it's borderline useless. Just throwing it on a few people at random as protection against dying doesn't really do anything. Unless you are specifically set up for it, surviving on 1hp often just means you get killed by the next enemy attacking you instead. Yeah, you can get some use out of it even if you just play it straight and don't look for synergies, but it really isn't a lot of use. This is maybe an 8 if you're using specific builds that have good synergy with it and maybe a 2 if you aren't. I'm going to split the difference and say that overall, this gets a 5/10. Dance of the Goddess: In terms of action economy, despite having a five-tile AoE, this only actually gives you an extra three actions per turn. You can only refresh 4 units at maximum since you need to stand in the fifth space. then it also takes1 action to activate this, so you're only gaining a net of three extra actions. Well, I say "only" but three extra actions on a turn is pretty huge, especially since it also has the regular benefits of Dance: namely, being able to use it on your best unit (or more specifically, whichever unit is best suitred to deal with the threats you are facing at a particular time). Being able to use your best unit four times in one turn can let you pull off some extremely powerful feats. Regardless of whether you're using this for one-turn shenanigans or just more casually to get a super powerful turn, this is going to do great things. Only having one charge and requiring slightly finnicky positioning are its biggest drawbacks and hold me back from giving this a 10, but this is still absurdly good and easily warrants a 9/10.

Sure, I'll play. (With series names included because whenever I read through other people's lists for this sort of thing, I always think "who even is that?" for half the entries.) Alex Kidd (Alex Kidd series) Birdo (Mario series) Chun-Li (Street Fighter series) Dixie Kong (Donkey Kong series) E. Gadd (Mario series) Frog (Chrono Trigger) Ganon (demon pig form) (Zelda series) Mike Haggar (Final Fight series) Inteleon (Pokémon series) Junko Enoshima (Danganronpa series) The Kid (Bastion) Hershel Layton (Professor Layton series) Madeline (Celeste) Tom Nook (Animal Crossing series) Océane Louvier (Endless Ocean 2) Prince of All Cosmos (Katamari series) Mr. Qi (Stardew Valley) Captain Rainbow (Captain Rainbow) Shepard (Mass Effect) Captain Toad (Mario series) Ulala (Space Channel 5) Vivian (Paper Mario: The Thousand Year Door) Wooloo (Pokémon series) XCOM Soldier (XCOM series) Yuri Kozukata (Fatal Frame: Maiden of Black Water) Zak McKracken (Zak McKracken and the Alien Mindbenders) These range from "actually my most wanted character" to "I've never even played their game but couldn't think of anyone else". I also tried to keep to at least vaguely realistic options, except for awkward letters where all bets were off.

I would be Linhardt. Absolutely no proficiency for any kind of weapon and very fond of napping? Yeah, that's me. Only difference is that I'd be allowed to certify as a Gremory. And that I don't like fishing.

Stride. This is similar to Retribution, in that it has so many potential use cases. +5 movement to multiple units at once is very powerful and it's up to the player to decide what they want to do with it. Want to combine it with Warp and Dance and send a unit to the opposite corner of the map to kill the boss on turn 1? You can do that. Want to turn Raging Flame Wyvern Lord Edelgard into even more of a wrecking ball than she already is? Sure. How about using it on turn 1 to completely reposition your entire army and fundamentally shift how the entire engagement for the map is going to take place? That's good too. Or how about putting this on some ranged attackers with Canto like Bow Knights or Dark Fliers to give them ridiculous effective range for hit and run attacks? Or making sure you can chase down a secondary objective in time before you finish a map? Or desperately trying to get a unit where they're needed if you get yourself into a tough situation? Or throwing an enemy-phase unit far forward into the middle of the enemy formation and watching the carnage? Yes, yes, yes, and yes. And because it has so many different uses, you don't even necessarily have to know exactly how you're going to use it beforehand. You can just stick it on one of your main units, bring it along every time, and be safe in the knowledge that you will always be able to find some strong use for it. The only question in my mind is whether to give them a 9 or a 10. While I agree that there are some uses of Stride that are not as strong on Maddening as on lower difficulties, I also think that there are other uses (eg, hit and run attacks, claiming secondary objectives) that are better -- or at least more often necessary -- on Maddening. Due to the sheer wide array of uses, I think I'm going to give Stride 10/10. Recovery Roar. From the sublime to the ridiculous. This is straight up just a worse version of Restore. If you had access to both Recovery Roar and Restore on the same character, then there would be some cases where they're basically the same, some cases where Restore is better, and basically no cases where Recovery Roar was better (technically it's possible to think up situations where you'd prefer Recovery Roar, but they're so unlikely that they can be safely ignored. Add to this the fact that Restore isn't particularly good in the first place. Or rather, Restore is completely useless for 99% of the game and then suddenly critically important on the two or three times per game when you do need it. Except that we aren't rating Restore, we're rating Recovery Roar. Which is useless 99% of the time and then probably also useless the other 1% of the time because you probably already have Restore on someone else. (Linhardt, Mercedes and Flayn all have it, as do Balthus and Jeritza if you have them in half-magic classes, and a few other people who generally have no business going anywhere near magic classes.) However, while you're probably going to be running one of these characters, you might not be. Recovery Roar also has the benefit that you can put it on a character with higher movement. Linhardt, Flayn and Mercedes will typically all sit in either Bishop or -- where available -- Gremory, which are low-movement infantry classes. Having Recovery Roar on a flier can make it easier to get it where you need it to be. But, ultimately, even in the situations where you cna't just use Restore instead, this still isn't very strong because there just aren't enough dangerous conditions out there for it to be useful. It has enough about it to barely save it from the absolute bottom of the barrel, but only barely. 2/10.