Returning to Three Houses, is it as bad as I remember? ; Part 1: Snoring Clouds Verdant Moon

[Eltosian Kadath]

It has been a long time since I last played Three Houses. Back when it was first out I rushed my way through all four routes in way too short of time, and was so burnt out on this game that I felt a visceral hatred for it that I felt was a bit unfair to it even at the time. I was very happy to ignore this game for a LONG time, but after the thread about changing one thing about my least favorite Fire Emblem game, and finding Three Houses really did feel like my least favorite, it got my brain to percolating. It was finally time to replay this game, and try and give it a fairer shake than before. Time to replay it, and see if it was as bad as I remember it being, and make sure to play something else between the routes to hopefully mitigate the burnout this time around. My plan with this thread is to share my thoughts at the end of every part, my complaints, my compliments, and my general comments, and hear how others feel about the game in return. Those of you who chat up in the TeeHee thread know I have been sharing early thoughts over there, and this will sound rather similar, but at this point I have gotten to the end of Part 1 on a Hard Verdant Winds playthrough, and I feel this is the perfect place to start sharing my thoughts about this replay with people more inclined to actually like Three Houses, so without further ado, let me start with an expansion on what I felt needed fixing most about Three Houses back in the thread that started this retread.

And that one thing I said I would want to fix about Three Houses was to add a mechanic similar to Fate's Branch of Fates, that way you didn't have to play through snoring clouds 3-4 times (depending on your willingness to save scum) to see the whole game's story. If the game were built that way to begin with, I might not have hated it as much, although I seem to remember there being a lot of rehashing of maps in part 2 as well, so it might not have prevented that feeling entirely. In the thread itself I wasn't sure how I would want it to work, but this replay has given me an idea, and it would be to change Part 1 such that instead of picking a house immediately, it is more designed similarly to Fates early game, where they alot three chapters to give us a taste of each of the four routes, with use leading the three houses on three missions apiece, and the "fourth" route involving us joining the faculty and knights on three missions as well for the church route. The early chapters are already designed generically enough that you could play them with any house, and the only chapter I feel they would really need to change to make this work would be the prologue, it would more be down to just allocating the chapters to the groups that felt most appropriate for them, with the split point right at chapter 12 where you decide which of the forces you commit to joining the side of in the coming war. This would even have the added benefit of ensuring you had some exposure to all the class members, so when Edelgard or whatever acts like the two of you interacted in any meaningful way in part 1, you actually would have, making the conflict more emotionally impactful. Now it would also change the monotonous grinding curve of the game, and the way a vast majority of recruitments work, but both of those mechanics kind of suck anyway.

Speaking of which, let me express why I think the recruitment mechanics kind of suck, and would have much preferred a more traditional recruitment system. Three Houses discourages recruitment from a gameplay perspective in two big ways, first with deployment limits very close to your class size, and using the threat of the first part 2 chapter softlock at dawn to keep you from benching most of those initial classmates to make room for new recruits, although it does also encourage you to recruit bench warmers with its part 2 paralogue requirements and part 1 bonus rewards. It also discourages fun challenge runs in two ways, first this pushback against recruitment makes challenge run involving specific characters more of a hassle to navigate, but also the way it front loads recruitment, with part two recruits coming once in a blue moon as one of the ways it discourages ironmanning, although I can't blame recruitment alone on what makes it a worse than average game to ironman. While I dislike this discouragement of fairly normal challenge runs, they are more detriments to replayability, and shouldn't be the biggest deal on what is supposed to be a vanilla run like this. What isn't great on a vanilla run is that a vast majority of the recruitment requirements are just a form of grinding, and the micromanaging nature of Three House's grinding is going to be a recurring theme of the things I kind of hate in Three Houses. Now I am OK with the simple level requirements of the knights and faculty, that is a very basic form of grinding that doesn't require much micromanagement to it, and I can see the logic in restricting units with higher tier classes and/or abilities until it would be level appropriate. The recruitment I dislike the most is the combined stat and weapon/movement rank requirement. The stat requirement feels especially arbitrary due to the random nature of levelups, but admittedly I find most of those benchmarks fairly achievable, and you can grow stat boosters in the back garden (although realistically speaking you are going to need to look those up from outside sources, which isn't great for the game as a narrative experience as it is weakens the verisimilitude of the game), or drink boatloads of tea for the charm ones, so there are a few extra avenues for grinding that out. The weapon/movement rank requirements I hate for just how tedious, and requiring micromanagement the whole system feels. You can lower these requirements with supports, but the only way to meaningfully change most of the rank requirements, the ones I would most want to reduce, require me to reach a B support anyway, and support grinding up to B is already a means of recruitment, which really neuters that mechanic. Now I used to think grinding up supports was the way to go, but on this replay of the game I made the mistake of actually engaging with the mechanic's random elements at first, instead of save scumming them, and that really soured me on that method of recruitment. Due to how Three Houses discourages recruitment, I only tried to recruit Bernie (as she is my spirit animal) at first, and with only one recruitment to get, I didn't bother to save scum, as it felt like I had all the time in the world to do it. The first bit of save scummable RNG problems I ran into I found kind of charming at first, and only really soured on it when I started going for the paralogue benchwarmers later on into part 1, and realized it might not be intentional, as the reclusive Bernie was very reluctant to accept my invitation to tea. It took me the better part of a month to get her to accept an invitation, and if the tea invitation acceptance rate is based on the character, I would actually rather like this quirk as a means of characterization, but as later recruitments showed me it is both random and save scummable, and I don't know if I just had serendipitous bad luck, or if Bernie's reluctance was intentional. The RNG that made me really dislike this method of recruitment is that when a B support recruit joins you is RNG based. I waited for well over two month for her to join after getting to B support, to point that I ended up just spending a pair of Faculty Trainings (one of which I needed to save scum into a great to get enough useless weapon exp), to recruit her in time to do the funny option of making her my dancer. Later recruitments I would save scum (side note fuck Fernand's recruitment requirements, so sorry Lysithea I wont be seeing your paralogue this time around), and the way I felt forced to break the verisimilitude of the game's world to get a basic mechanic to work properly felt especially bitter given the way the game tries to maintain that in other RNG laden mechanics

Now I have been rather negative on the game so far, so its time to talk about some things I think it did well, to emphasize why the RNG issues were such a letdown (don't worry, I will have  more good things to say, I am just starting with Three House's weak point, the gameplay). This is probably an unpopular opinion, but I like the way the game in other places discouraged the cheesing of its mechanics. The most pointed example is the way they discourage the save scumming of certification exams by setting the RNG at the start of the month (I will have more negative things to say about class changing soon, but this isn't one of them). The way you can no longer cursor dance to change the RNG after divine pulses is another little example. Similarly I like how they use timers to discourage the cheesing of the advice box, and tea times, although these examples aren't really RNG related, and it randomizing with save scumming act to maintain that difficulty with cheesing (so you can't brute force the answer) rather than necessarily facilitating it. Sure there are still ways of cheating these systems, but making these forms of cheesing slightly more difficult is a level of care that is telling when compared to the recruitment mechanic, and makes it feel as if the reason recruitment suck in Three Houses is because it is a mechanic that the creators didn't really care about.

I have never been the biggest fan of recleassing, I generally see it as a nice bonus incentive to replay a game (which is a good thing to have), but generally prefer to stick to base classes on most runs...which is so counter to Three House's philosophy on how things should work mechanically that this was never going to be among my favorites. On a vanilla run like this I would vastly prefer to mostly stick to "canon" classes, but doing so in Three Houses would literally require me to research what class you see the units in when you recruit them late from other houses, or when you face them in combat, and having to do that kind of research for a vanilla run sounds ridiculous. I guess there are also the unit's suggestions after lectures, but I have seen those suggesting what seem like contradictory advise already (Ignatz wanting to go both Sniper and Mortal Savant). Also the way you need to micromanage your weapon exp, and movement experience for class changing as well as regular promotion, with class exp added in to acquire vital skills makes the whole experience miserable. That is all before how easy it feels to fall into the very boring paradigm of Oops All Wyverns, (which I definitely did, like over half my crew are Wyverns) which is the sign of a very poorly designed class system...ugh I want to move on to something at least a little positive, as the way this game's micromanagement systems are designed compels me to engage with them in spite of the enjoyment I would have ignoring them.

The maps are a lot better than I remember them being. To be fair, I think this is one of the places where replaying this game too many times too rapidly skewed my perspective in the past, and these maps definitely aren't perfect either. The way they use chests isn't great (I have never felt pressured at all to go after any of them in a timely fashion), and the way the game uses reinforcements is very stupid (when they spawn too close they are either useless as non-ambush spawns as you trivially wipe them out before they can act, or annoying as ambush spawns). Despite those quibbles the map quality is still an overall positive. Also I remember this game having way too many boss kill chapter, but part 1, its optional maps , and paralogues so far have provided enough variety of objective to keep it from being a problem (although I have been warned this is a bigger issue in part 2). Another positive for Three Houses mechanically is how the game's magic system works (excluding the fact that getting spells is a part of Three Houses horrible grind machine). Getting a reasonable discrete number of uses per map works really well, and keeps me from doing that silly too good to use hoarding of the best spells, while still making it a meaningful choice of which spells I use when. In very similar ways, beyond how you get them, I rather like combat arts as well, as another way of strengthening player phase.

Time for some things that I have minor quibbles with before I move on to bigger fish. First off is Adjutant, as the mechanic feels mostly useless, beyond being another way to get some more units into the Three Houses grind machine. In a similar way the mission support from other houses option also has that useless feel, made even odder by it only being able to grind up supports. It feels like a half assed patch for the issue of how to get a unit over the C support hump after which you can start teaing them up to B. Battalions I love from a story perspective, as a way to bridge the logical gap between armies fighting and controlling a reasonable number of units, but I find they fall a bit flat mechanically. First off they are a whole new cog in the Three Houses grind machine as both something to level up, and change out as authority levels up, and while it is a far less annoying grind than some, I don't enjoy it being added to the pile. Gambits are their own mixed bag as well, as I rather like how the support oriented Gambits function, but when using them to attack I have real mixed feeling about how their accuracy works. There is also clearly an attempt to reign in the Oops All Wyvern problem with limited flying Battalions, but it is somewhat mitigated by an attacking Gambit's ability to freeze opponents (without the enemy getting a chance to retaliate) being at its most powerful when used by a unit that can canter and fly. I just don't think the penalty of not having a battalion is a strong enough deterrent against making too many fliers with how strong the game makes them (and for personal reasons I get far more joy than I should out of how many units I can give the Triangle Attack).

Alright, its time to cover the big mechanical bugbear in the room, the Monastery mechanics. I kind of like the monastery portions of the game a lot, but I find that they are ruined by one major thing, Professor Level. First off, the way Professor Level increases your capabilities in the game's down time leads to a perverse incentive to maximize that Professor Experience in a way that turns the otherwise fun little fishing minigame into a chore where you save up bait for the extra experience event (fist full o fish), and then just ruin it by overplaying the minigame almost 200 times in a row to optimize Professor Exp. There are a few other micromanagey thing with regard to optimizing Professor Level experience as well, but the fishing minigame is just the easiest to articulate and by far the most egregious, and feeling the pull to optimize in this way makes the game less fun to play. That is before getting to the other massive issue with Professor Level, that getting it above C tier also leads to unfun behavior due to how much it lengthens the between time. I picked C rank for three big reasons, first getting one rank higher gets you to the point where you can now do multiple battles in a week (which is an exhausting way to stretch the between time, and below Maddening at least makes you feel overleveled after doing it); secondly getting two ranks higher gets to the point where you have more lecture points than half the deployment limit for the army (at least so far deployment limit hovered between  9-11), which leads to some nasty incentives where you either micromanage the bonus sources of motivations (thing like timing supports with the MC, manipulating MVPs, save scumming for end of lecture choices, or over engaging with lost items and gifts), or you feel pressured into doing even more explore moments than you should to raise motivation (which are made longer by the increase in activity point, leading to a nasty cascade) or else waste the lecture points; finally I find the 5-6 exploration activity points is just about the right number for them. Both battles and exploration scaling with Professor level then devalues Seminars which don't scale in the same way, made all the worse by the way they give out class/weapon experience decreasing as your ranks increase, making them effectively less valuable over time on their own, which is a shame as I kind of like them as a third option to balance out the other two, and I feel the mechanic has fallen off completely by chapter 6. It is a shame that such a good thing was ruined by Three House's desperate attempt to make you micromanage and grind everything.

So far I have talked about the game mechanically, but I think we all know that the story was always Three Houses strong point, and truth be told future updates will probably focus on this aspect of the game (so hopefully they will be shorter?), although snoring clouds isn't all that interesting from a story perspective. First off, Fodlan has some solid world building attached to, no real notes to add, it is just quality stuff. Admittedly the game does not respect travel time in the slightest, which is odd considering it has a calendar system that could easily be used to account for that. Also the Serios Church's super elite knights policing the world makes for a weird position to start the game in, but I guess they needed some excuse for us to be involved in conflicts all over the continent during peace time while still being disconnected enough from the other powers to be the part 1 of all four routes. Plus it lets the most massive army on the continent sufficiently break itself upon the most elite army to keep either of them from dominating the world during the 5 year time skip. As for the characters I am using (Teach, the Golden Deer, Flayn, Cyril, and Bernie so far), I would say I like about 1/3 of them, don't feel strongly about another 1/3, and want to throw bricks at the last 1/3, so a real mix of characters so far. Now snoring clouds doesn't move the plot all that much, but there are a few points I want to talk about so far.

First off Claude is a fraud; other characters will talk all the time about his wily schemes, and we are never shown him doing any of them. The closest we get is him cheekily foreshadowing the burning of the Grondor hill in the battle of Eagle and Lions, but I remember that point latter in the game...AND HE ISN'T EVEN THE ONE TO FUCKING DO IT LATER IN THE GAME. He teases us with talk about poison induced stomach aches that go no where. The bit where he talks Rhea into letting teach attack Jeralt's killer is especially grating, as he talks up how he has a brilliant strategy, and it isn't about revenge, only to admit to us not five minutes later that he has no plan at all, and it totally is just about revenge. This is beating a bit of a dead horse I guess, I definitely had this complaint before, but noticing the foreshadowing about Grondor fields was a detail I didn't remember, and is such a double edge sword of momentarily thinking this was a place where they tried to show his cleverness only for the future plot to make it explode in his face. If this game had any guts at all, they would have given the three house leaders more unique personal skills, with Claude's being a page right out of Fates with a DV like mechanic that can change the map in some way with his schemes.

Another thing I personally disliked was how they handled the chapter with rescuing of Flayn, where you either had to make a weird story situation where you are just waiting for a month to rescue her, with Manuela bleeding out the entire time, or miss out on a full month of activities. I remember some attempts to excuse this back in the day, as this being done to reduce the writers workload, so they don't have to write alternate dialogue for everyone talking about things before and after Flayn is saved, and that excuse is made entirely bullshit by the very next week giving everyone alternate dialogue for before and after the fucking fishing contest. I guess it is nice that they give a token reward to try and encourage you not to cheese it, but the Professor Level grind has already proceeded to the point that multiple week are way more valuable than the items offered.

I guess I can add a few more controversial positive opinions about the story, that I like how they handled the existence of divine pulse in the plot with Jeralt's death. I thought that was a good way of showing us a shorthand explanation for why that power isn't able to fix everything, so negative events can still happen in the plot. I have enough media literacy to not have to see 30 very similar failed attempts to change bad events from happening in the story, seeing it once was enough. Admittedly Sothis's comment about it after the fact was both counter productive, and came across as a bit insulting, like the writers thought they needed to spell things out egregiously explicitly for the children who lack that level of media literacy to get it. I also have a soft spot for the dramatic irony of Solon basically making a greater threat to his people by trying to off teach with the forbidden timeout corner magic.

Two last very cold takes about teach to finish things off. First, the whole plot bit about teach being an emotionless robot before the story starts is just plain stupid. In a similar way the fall off a cliff to trigger to time skip feels extremely anticlimactic after we escaped from the magical void (that would have made for a far more interesting reason for a 5 year time skip).