Three Hopes General Discussion Thread

[Jotari]

54 minutes ago, Aedan7479 said:

A couple things I noticed on my second playthrough of Azure Gleam

 

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After Chapter 10, Myson says something about Epimenidies' core, implying it's how Shez has his powers, which raises HUGE questions, and in the Final Chapter, Thales says "all we want is a world with out rulers". These titbits are to fun spot, but I can't help but feel the developers are purposely holding back information. Though it is fun to speculate.

 

Also, if we have a rough idea of Jeralt's age now (golden wind spoilers):

 

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weird how much important info is in mid-battle dialogue.

I remember a post from a random user making a "theory" that some random soldier in the opening of Three Houses (the battle against Nemesis) was Jeralt. And people were just like "uh yeah, i cant say uts impossible but that's certainly not what they were going for."

But to actually analyse the date given here for Jearlt, 300 years ago was after the alliance and kingdoms were established. However there was an invasion from Almyra around 325 years before the war, so that's probably  the battle in which Jearlt was originally injured.

Spoiler

How do you get him and Byleth in golden wildfire? The game warned me that chapter could affect the story but I just straight up murdered him

 

Edited July 22, 2022 by Jotari

[Aedan7479]

1 hour ago, Jotari said:

 

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How do you get him and Byleth in golden wildfire? The game warned me that chapter could affect the story but I just straight up murdered him

 

you have to make sure Claude gets back to the starting point without Byleth catching up, having one unit distract Byleth helps a bit, but you need to be quick whenever Claude gets ambushed. If Byleth reaches Claude, then you can't recruit Byleth and Jeralt.

[Jotari]

On 7/20/2022 at 2:38 PM, Shadow Mir said:

Hmmm... Might not be as aggravating for a mage as Pegasus knights would be.

Also, what's with the supports? Because I find it really odd that some characters have an A support with no C or B beforehand, among other oddities.

 

On 7/20/2022 at 3:00 PM, Anomalocaris said:

There's just fewer support conversations this time around. I think it's fine, since this is an action game, not an SRPG. The previous FE Warriors did something similar where every character could gain support points with each other, but only certain character pairs had conversations (and only at A-rank).

Plus, given all of these characters already had supports with each other in Three Houses, there would be a given amount of redundancy having them all support a second time.

3 hours ago, Aedan7479 said:

 

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you have to make sure Claude gets back to the starting point without Byleth catching up, having one unit distract Byleth helps a bit, but you need to be quick whenever Claude gets ambushed. If Byleth reaches Claude, then you can't recruit Byleth and Jeralt.

 

Spoiler

Ah, I see. I assume Byleth can be recruited in all routes in a similar manner? I'd be pretty pissed if I just happened to fail recruiting him on the first route I picked and would have to play it again just for that.

 

[Sire]

Not sure where to post this find, but I guess I'll post it here.

Quality Material does not increase the maximum cap on forging, which is 50. It simply just makes it easier for the weapon to reach that threshold faster (so instead of going up by 5 each time, it can go up by 6-8).
-- I tested it out of curiosity if it did actually increase the cap (which may have been useful), but it doesn't.
-- So, it's essentially a useless skill as far as I am concerned.

[ZanaLyrander]

1 minute ago, Sire said:

Not sure where to post this find, but I guess I'll post it here.

Quality Material does not increase the maximum cap on forging, which is 50. It simply just makes it easier for the weapon to reach that threshold faster (so instead of going up by 5 each time, it can go up by 6-8).
-- I tested it out of curiosity if it did actually increase the cap (which may have been useful), but it doesn't.
-- So, it's essentially a useless skill as far as I am concerned.

Yeah, Quality Material is essentially just a waste of a weapon attribute slot, it just saves you a tiny bit of money and materials by saving you the cost of one, maybe two reforgings at most, and frankly you shouldn't be wasting money and materials on a weapon with Quality Material in the first place.

[Dark Holy Elf]

I feel like I'm doing something wrong because I'm seeing people talk a lot about needing money but I'm absolutely swimming in it, despite not making particularly extensive use of the skills which boost it (I've used Despoil some as a filler skill). The various materials are the limiter on my forging, not cash. And other things like the tactics teacher might as well be free. Is it because I'm "only" using around ten different characters instead of the full roster?

[ZanaLyrander]

3 minutes ago, Dark Holy Elf said:

I feel like I'm doing something wrong because I'm seeing people talk a lot about needing money but I'm absolutely swimming in it, despite not making particularly extensive use of the skills which boost it (I've used Despoil some as a filler skill). The various materials are the limiter on my forging, not cash. And other things like the tactics teacher might as well be free. Is it because I'm "only" using around ten different characters instead of the full roster?

Once you've maxed out all the facilities, all the resources used to upgrade said facilities become useless, so you can just trade them in at the supply master for Smithing Stones, which you can then trade in for whatever forging materials you want. Meanwhile, the more you upgrade a weapon, the more expensive each upgrade becomes, but they cost the same amount in materials forever. As a result, by that point, you're gonna run out of money way faster than materials. But yeah, prior to that, materials are more of the rate limiting resource.

[Burklight]

32 minutes ago, ZanaLyrander said:

Once you've maxed out all the facilities, all the resources used to upgrade said facilities become useless, so you can just trade them in at the supply master for Smithing Stones, which you can then trade in for whatever forging materials you want. Meanwhile, the more you upgrade a weapon, the more expensive each upgrade becomes, but they cost the same amount in materials forever. As a result, by that point, you're gonna run out of money way faster than materials. But yeah, prior to that, materials are more of the rate limiting resource.

I'll second this. In addition to this, one thing I've found myself doing is waiting until the month where "slightly increase the chance of gaining ____ when leveling up," resetting someone's level to 1, putting them in a class that compliments their growths, and then going from 1-120.  While totally worth the money if you're trying to min/max stats, this costs about 450k. Adds up very quickly.

[ZanaLyrander]

Just now, Burklight said:

I'll second this. In addition to this, one thing I've found myself doing is waiting until the month where "slightly increase the chance of gaining ____ when leveling up," resetting someone's level to 1, putting them in a class that compliments their growths, and then going from 1-120.  While totally worth the money if you're trying to min/max stats, this costs about 450k. Adds up very quickly.

Jeez, hadn't even considered that. Honestly, with how generous the game can be with stat boosting items, especially if you buy them with renown each playthrough, that feels like overkill to me. But the overall point still stands, you can never have too much money in this game.

[Burklight]

44 minutes ago, ZanaLyrander said:

Jeez, hadn't even considered that. Honestly, with how generous the game can be with stat boosting items, especially if you buy them with renown each playthrough, that feels like overkill to me. But the overall point still stands, you can never have too much money in this game.

They are quite generous with stat boosting items. But you can still farm money more easily than stat boosters. Plus, a lot of times the class you want to actually use someone in isn't the same as the one they want to level in. Hilda, for example, really wants dex and lck, neither of which WL helps with. I waited for a +str growth month, classed her as a sniper and went from 1-120. Saved quite a few stat boosters.

[Aedan7479]

10 hours ago, Jotari said:

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Ah, I see. I assume Byleth can be recruited in all routes in a similar manner? I'd be pretty pissed if I just happened to fail recruiting him on the first route I picked and would have to play it again just for that.

 

yes, you can recruit Byleth and Jeralt on all routes, but the method Is different on each route, won't say how to avoid spoilers, just use a guide when you get to it, the game doesn't make it very clear.

[Seazas]

Wow. Never have I expected that people are willing to pick apart Rhea's faults rather than the usual "Claude sucks for going against her rather than uniting to defeat Edelgard" like I see everywhere else. Awesome.

[Archeleon]

Best part about the Three Houses continuity is that every side is stupid and wrong in some way.

[Aedan7479]

37 minutes ago, Archeleon said:

Best part about the Three Houses continuity is that every side is stupid and wrong in some way.

Interesting (and blunt) take; I think you're right, after all, if there was a side that was completely in the right, then it's obviously the right side to choose. Edelgard's methods are questionable, Claude himself is questionable, Dimitri's methods take a long time, Rhea's goal is just the resurrection and glorification of Sothis by any means, and Thales is just crazed.

[whovian21]

On 7/20/2022 at 10:50 AM, ZanaLyrander said:

You know, we discussed earlier in this thread whether or not Edelgard is right to declare war on the Central Church, whether or not there was a better way to undo the cultural damage the Central Church has done with their caste system and religiously encouraged xenophobia. But looking back, what really frustrates me is that the conflict between Edelgard and Rhea, in both Three Houses and Three Hopes, is essentially entirely military. They never actually engage one another ideologically, both just kinda accepting that the other is evil and needs to die. I'm not asking them to sit down for an organized, proctored debate, but it's frustrating that they make no effort to really explain or justify their stance to one another. Rhea just treats Edelgard as a naive and wicked child who needs to be put down, and Edelgard treats Rhea as a corrupt force of stagnation that needs to be removed from power by any means necessary (though interestingly she doesn't actually want Rhea dead in Three Hopes). It just seems a shame that they don't really call one another out on the stuff that they do aside from broad platitudes.

See, this is what annoys me the most about debating the morality of Edelgard and Rhea. Not once in two games now does anyone ever even attempt a peaceful resolution with Rhea. Even at the end of Claude's route in Three Hopes he doesn't actually try to talk things out with her, he just orders her to surrender. Rhea even points out in the first chapter of Scarlet Blaze that she has no idea why Edelgard's attacking her because Edelgard doesn't care about opening a dialogue with Rhea at all and just assumes they have to fight (and starts said fight by sending an army to desecrate her mother's grave, thereby ensuring that Rhea will react as negatively as possible). Funny enough, nobody ever tries to get Rhea to justify herself (until after she's already lost, and that conversation gets interrupted when she throws herself in front of a superweapon to save an army that doesn't even like her) but somebody does try to resolve things peacefully with Edelgard in Three Houses and she throws it back in their face.

Don't get me wrong, I think both Edelgard and Rhea have some serious issues, but I have no idea how people come to the conclusion that Edelgard is the morally grey one and Rhea is a villain and the one unwilling to compromise. Three Houses literally shows us how they both react at their lowest, and the one that's willing to walk away and admit she was wrong (or in one case actively work to fix her mistakes) is Rhea. Edelgard just kills herself rather than admit to her failures or face the consequences of them.

Both games in general love to tell the player that Rhea has to die for Edelgard's goals (and Claude's in Three Hopes) but they do a really bad job of showing it. There are multiple examples to show that Rhea couldn't care less about the xenophobia that Claude wants to get rid of (she treats Cyril well, lets Shamir serve in the knights, and doesn't even raise a token objection to a foreign princess being enrolled in the officer's academy) and just allows it because she doesn't care to stop it either. Hell, she's also not responsible for creating the caste/crest systems that Edelgard wants to get rid of, she just kept it around because it was convenient. Both of them are blaming her for crap that she'd almost certainly be willing to get rid of if they could present a viable alternative but neither even pretends to try, so I guess we'll never know.

[ZanaLyrander]

6 minutes ago, whovian21 said:

Hell, she's also not responsible for creating the caste/crest systems that Edelgard wants to get rid of, she just kept it around because it was convenient. Both of them are blaming her for crap that she'd almost certainly be willing to get rid of if they could present a viable alternative but neither even pretends to try, so I guess we'll never know.

While I agree with you on the rest, this part I do have to disagree with. Rhea has been preaching for a thousand years that those who have Crests are blessed by the Goddess, placing a ton of religious importance on Crests, which of course led to those with Crests being elevated, and an importance being placed on maintaining the bloodline of those with Crests. Like, you can make the argument that she's not deliberately responsible for creating the caste system of Fodlan (and even that is debatable at best), it is still a direct result of her actions.

[Archeleon]

Rhea has been a very toxic influence on the whole continent for thousands of years.

[Fabulously Olivier]

18 minutes ago, whovian21 said:

Three Houses literally shows us how they both react at their lowest, and the one that's willing to walk away and admit she was wrong (or in one case actively work to fix her mistakes) is Rhea. Edelgard just kills herself rather than admit to her failures or face the consequences of them.

"At their lowest." Yeah. Let's ignore that Pope Hitler III's actual lowest point was burning a civilian city full of her own allies. 

[Seazas]

If Edelgard walks away, nothing changes or she gets executed by a merciless Rhea. If Rhea walks away, Fodlan is better for it. Huh, maybe it's because Edelgard's war was necessary to some degree after all.

[whovian21]

43 minutes ago, Fabulously Olivier said:

"At their lowest." Yeah. Let's ignore that Pope Hitler III's actual lowest point was burning a civilian city full of her own allies. 

I don't think the burning of Fhirdiad is a workable point to bring up in an argument about the comparative morality of Edelgard and Rhea, considering the former also potentially sets her own allies on fire at Gronder, including one she supposedly considers a friend (it's admittedly a harder to trigger occurrence, but she will do it nonetheless). Setting Fhirdiad ablaze is an inarguably awful thing to do, but not one you can use to prop up Edelgard as morally superior (which is what I was arguing about).

 

35 minutes ago, Seazas said:

If Edelgard walks away, nothing changes or she gets executed by a merciless Rhea. If Rhea walks away, Fodlan is better for it. Huh, maybe it's because Edelgard's war was necessary to some degree after all.

Not at all. Rhea's already lost at this point and is rotting away in Edelgard's dungeon, some combination of Claude/Dimitri/Byleth are the ones in power. She still kills herself (by making somebody else do it no less) rather than admit she was wrong or try and help fix her mess.

Edited July 23, 2022 by whovian21

[ZanaLyrander]

2 minutes ago, whovian21 said:

I don't think the burning of Fhirdiad is a workable point to bring up in an argument about the comparative morality of Edelgard and Rhea, considering the former also potentially sets her own allies on fire at Gronder, including one she supposedly considers a friend (it's admittedly a harder to trigger occurrence, but she will do it nonetheless). Setting Fhirdiad ablaze is an inarguably awful thing to do, but not one you can use to prop up Edelgard as morally superior (which is what I was arguing about).

I don't think setting fire to a town full of civilians is really comparable to setting a fire in the middle of a battlefield, treating those as morally equivalent and equally bad seems a tad disingenuous.

[Dark Holy Elf]

58 minutes ago, whovian21 said:

See, this is what annoys me the most about debating the morality of Edelgard and Rhea. Not once in two games now does anyone ever even attempt a peaceful resolution with Rhea

Given how we see the Central Church react to any sort of dissent over and over (Christophe Gaspard, Lonato, the Western Church, etc., etc.), the game clearly paints Rhea as someone with whom dialog is not meaningfully possible. That's the whole point of "I hope the students learned a valuable lesson of the fate that awaits those who point a sword at the goddess". Even Seteth, her close ally, she constantly overrides and ignores the advice of. Basically she behaves like a classic authoritarian. Either you believe Lonato, Edelgard, Claude, the Western Church, and others, are just incredibly stupid for not trying to talk, or you notice the pattern here.

It's not an accident that Rhea is only particularly interested in talking once all her power is forcefully taken from her.

This isn't to say Edelgard, Claude, or anyone else who opposes Rhea is perfectly morally pure either, because yes, part of the tragedy of Three Houses/Hopes is that conflict was an inevitable result of the current situation in Fodlan and the personalities involved, but Rhea's culpability for it is still significant.

1 minute ago, whovian21 said:

I don't think the burning of Fhirdiad is a workable point to bring up in an argument about the comparative morality of Edelgard and Rhea, considering the former also potentially sets her own allies on fire at Gronder, including one she supposedly considers a friend (it's admittedly a harder to trigger occurrence, but she will do it nonetheless).

Sorry, but this is nonsense.

• Bernadetta's panel is not set on fire, even if you somehow manage to trigger the event with her still alive (which is likely not intended).
• Gilbert, Claude, or Seteth also set their own allies on fire in Chapter 14 of non-CF, so every faction uses this tactic at some point.
• Setting part of the battlefield on fire is an act of war. Not the nicest thing to do, perhaps, but hardly the biggest war crime in the game. Setting a city full of civilians on fire? Yeah that's much worse.

[Jotari]

2 hours ago, Archeleon said:

Best part about the Three Houses continuity is that every side is stupid and wrong in some way.

You're not wrong, but I wouldn't say that's the best part.

1 hour ago, Fabulously Olivier said:

"At their lowest." Yeah. Let's ignore that Pope Hitler III's actual lowest point was burning a civilian city full of her own allies. 

Starting an unprovoked war is worse imo. And that's not even Edelgard's lowest point. That's her default.

Edited July 23, 2022 by Jotari

[whovian21]

35 minutes ago, Dark Holy Elf said:

Bernadetta's panel is not set on fire, even if you somehow manage to trigger the event with her still alive (which is likely not intended).

I imagine the only reason her panel's not on fire is because they didn't feel like programming a tile to be both a Balista and a fire tile at the same time.

She just stands there on a burning hill for the rest of the fight and doesn't even try to leave, she absolutely burns to death on that hill, even if the game doesn't explicitly show it. It doesn't explicitly show any civilians dying in Fhirdiad either, but you can assume it happens. It may have been unintentional, but the developers haven't fixed it in any of the several patches they've done (including at least one to that specific chapter). So yes, Edelgard is 100% willing to burn her friends alive after dragging them into a fight they didn't want to be in. The fact that other people do it doesn't make it any better, although I don't think they burn anybody they supposedly care about.

That's another thing that kind of annoyed me about Claude's route in this game, when

Spoiler

he's invading the kingdom and going on and on about his noble goals and that he's starting a war with somebody who hadn't made any hostile actions toward him because he just wants the church. He says he has no option but to fight Dimitri and get him to abandon the church, but again he doesn't even try to talk things out. You're not at war with him Claude, you can send a diplomat or something. Sure, he tries to spare any named characters (except Catherine because screw her I guess) but he still kills thousands of kingdom soldiers that just happened to be in the way and wanted to defend their homes because it's the most convenient way for him to get at Rhea without having to kill anyone in the kingdom he actually knows. Like, I get it's a musou game, but it still sort of leaves a sour taste in your mouth as you slaughter your way across the kingdom for very questionable reasons to kill someone who, again, doesn't actually care about Fodlan's relations with other countries. And when he's done, it may have all been for nothing anyways - Edelgard never commits to stopping her war with the kingdom and the epilogue leaves it up in the air, and Those Who Slither are still around with all their tools except Solon and they haven't wasted the Javelins on a pointless show of force like the morons they are in CF so they can just blast Claude with impunity and he doesn't have Rhea to take the fall for him anymore. He doesn't even manage to accidentally kill Cornelia and Thales like Dimitri does in Azure Moon.

It's admittedly kinda interesting to see him be much more morally ambiguous and screw things up rather than basically luck into a mostly-clean ending like he does in Three Houses, but it's also irritating to watch everybody just shrug their shoulders and be like "hopefully nobody we knew has to die" as though the normal common soldiers in the kingdom don't matter, which is the exact mindset Claude is supposedly against.

 

Edited July 23, 2022 by whovian21

[Fabulously Olivier]

20 minutes ago, Jotari said:

You're not wrong, but I wouldn't say that's the best part.

Starting an unprovoked war is worse imo. And that's not even Edelgard's lowest point. That's her default.

War is the nature of the franchise, and sometimes it's justified, if not necessary. I'd argue this is one of those times. And no, it isn't worse. Not by a longshot. Edelgard weighed the collateral damage and human suffering of action vs. inaction, and came to what she felt was the lesser evil. A determination that was probably correct given everything we've seen in just a year of time, multiplied over a millennea and counting. Rhea flat out does not care about collateral damage.

Edited July 23, 2022 by Fabulously Olivier