lenticular

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.

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.