gameplay The Odd One Theorem: Why "Fixing" Crimson Flower isn't Straightfoward

[Moltz23]

A few weeks ago, I did a keen analysis on how Three Houses manages difficulty for every one of its four routes which I’ve been slowly improving thanks to the feedback I’ve received on it (many thanks to those who helped btw!). From all the notes I’ve gathered, something very interesting stood out about how the game handles challenges with each path, which reminded me of a certain possibility I raised a past post I did in reddit surrounding Black Eagles’ development and the hidden intentions lurking within.

And you know what? I think it’s time I make it into an actual theorem because it’s really bugging me out that much. After all the stuff I’ve seen about 3H’s gameplay and how it handles challenges per route, I am convinced that “fixing” Crimson Flower isn’t as straightforward as people make it up to be.

Before getting into why gameplay evidence of all things has convinced me of such, I wanna cover all my bases first just in case someone (and somehow, ‘cause a part of me finds it unlikely) has no clue what I’ll be talking about.

So… Here's context:

Why “Fix” the Odd One?

 

...Also known as Crimson Flower.

Three Houses has four routes overall. From those, Crimson Flower is the only one which has 18 story chapters while the others get 22 (or 21, in Silver Snow case). Saying this made people mad back when the game was new would honestly be an understatement given there’s a youtube video called “Edelgard deserved better” done sometime after its launch which has over 250k views as of this post.

Incidentally, the idea of “fixing” CF is far from new, and the go-to direction most attempts I’ve seen, do it by crafting a small 4 chapter arc after the main plot (so it can reach the 22 Chapter quota Dimitri and Claude’s routes follow, which the idea inherently assumes it was the original goal of the route), eventually leading Edelgard and co. fighting “those who slither in the dark” in their headquarters, something which is mentioned it will happen a few times during the route, but as a very distant… thing, due to Edelgard’s n°1 enemy being not them in the main plot. This gets to the point that an S-Support and even a few solo endings touch upon it in a way that might or might not be mean spirited from the devs’ POV???.

Anyways, now that’s out of the way, it’s time to jump into the actual meat of the theorem:

No House Stands Equal - Three Houses' Difficulty from a Design Perspective

The key findings of my exhaustive attempt at analyzing 3H’s difficulty (which you can check by clicking on the title above) is that Three Houses, from a gameplay perspective, handles difficulty by messing with factors like:

• Average Enemy Level between Chapters (+ their Suggested Level, which is directly related to the AEL).

• Available resources, and the timing in which new ones are unlocked and/or lost.

• When the game stops using Intermediate Classes for enemies (in a more conventional Fire Emblem context, this would be like saying “when the game stops throwing Unpromoted Enemies at you).

• And more.

Thus, at a macro/superficial level and, according to the info at hand, Three Houses does the following:

• The Average Enemy Level almost always increases by 2 per Chapter, regardless of the chosen difficulty.

• The Armory/Vendor/Battalion Guild stock is updated 3 times; first in Ch. 3, then in Ch. 8, and last in Ch. 14.

• Part 1 ends in Ch. 12 with a Suggested Level of 23.

• Your chosen House Leader gets their unique battalion in Chapter 13.

• The most number of bosses you’re forced to take down to clear main story missions is 4 in Ch. 16 once (3 if you play carefully), and then 2 for other maps that do this.

• The game stops throwing Intermediate Class enemies around Ch. 18~ for main story maps (17 for Silver Snow, 16 for Azure Moon, and 18 for Verdant Wind, for those curious).

• Your chosen House Leader’s paralogue is unlocked around the second half of Part 2 (Ch. 19 for Dimitri, and Ch. 17 for Claude).

• The difference in enemy levels between the successive Enbarr invasion missions is always 1.

• And finally, the route ends in Ch. 22 (or 21 if you’re in Silver Snow) with a final Suggested Level of 42.

This pattern is followed religiously in all the routes which happen to share a lot of content up until Chapter 17 (or 16, in Silver Snow’s case) due to story reasons, yet despite this, there’s still many quirks exclusive to certain routes which make one experience different from the other.

Silver Snow, for example, is meant to be really hard according to the devs, and as the spreadsheet reveals, it does this by handicapping the heck out of the player (very squishy starting cast with no Relics besides Byleth’s; one deployment slot less, far less resources; losing your House Leader + N°2 midway through the game; etc). Due to this, Azure Moon and Verdant Wind by design are more beginner friendly by simply having none of that (AKA more balanced casts that stays with you; more Hero Relics; more resources, etc), while still deviating in other areas. Azure Moon for one, gets the most resources between all routes to play with, still gets their exclusive units handicapped in other ways, and in the late game, it has a “turret & mage infestation problem”, for a lack of a proper term. Conversely, Verdant Wind gets just a pretty decent amount of tools, has no actual handicaps for their cast, and their late game isn’t so overly specific in enemy variety as Azure Moon’s.

Fairly straightforward stuff so far. But as you might have noticed, I haven’t mentioned Crimson Flower once, and that's for a reason.

Crimson Flower, by design, is not built like the other three routes.

 

♫ One of these is not like the others ♫

To explain what makes CF challenging, I need to go back again into into how 3H manages its difficulty, because unlike the other three paths, this one follows its own set of rules:

• The Armory/Vendor/Battalion Guild stock is updated one third and last time in Ch. 12.

• Part 1 ends in Ch. 12 with a Suggested Level of 25.

• Edelgard & Hubert get their unique battalions in Chapter 12 (is Hubert a lord too…?).

• The most number of bosses you’re forced to take down to clear story missions is 4 in Ch. 15 once (3 if you play carefully), and then 5 for both Ch. 16 and Ch. 17.

• The game stops throwing Intermediate Class enemies in Ch. 14 for main story missions.

• Edelgard’s paralogue is unlocked in Ch. 15, midway through Part 2.

• The difference in enemy levels between successive story missions goes as follows:

  • Ch. 11 to Ch. 12: 4 in Normal & Hard, and 3 in Maddening.

  • Ch. 17 to Ch. 18: 2 in Normal & Hard, and 3 in Maddening.

• And finally, the game ends in Ch. 18 with a final Suggested Level of 37.

And this isn’t even considering how every story mission from Ch. 12 onwards is exclusive to it for story reasons, or even factoring the other tweaks exclusive to CF, such as: having one Chapter less to receive funds and recruit students/teachers; having 2 units that join in Part 2 with innate access to Mastermind; its second half of the game being full of enemy pegasi/wyvern riders; its last chapters having a high number of monsters with anti-magic barriers, and with weapons used in no other route; and more stuff which I won’t cover here for brevity’s sake.

Dedue's Monster form is legit the strongest Giant Demonic Beast in the game in both raw stats and weapon.

Everything mentioned so far about Edelgard’s route highlights that, compared to the other three paths: it scales up the difficulty earlier; makes its resources available earlier as well; and raises the challenge of its last two chapters considerably. Incidentally, this in turn explains why the path is a viable option to obtain the “Yellow Title Screen” after finishing it on Maddening difficulty despite having fewer Chapters; it's because its difficulty was optimized to work with that specific length in mind.

Here is where the crux at hand lies. Why “fixing” Crimson Flower isn’t just adding more chapters to it and calling it a day.

Edelgard’s route, structure-wise, does not feel it was meant to be as long as the other three paths.

This is important because, as well-intentioned the idea of “fixing” the route is, adding more chapters over what’s already there would completely throw off its balancing and potentially and unintentionally make it the hardest route of the four by numbers alone (and this is is still accounting that you would have to fight even more bosses later on…).

To illustrate what exactly I mean by this-

I'm going to propose 2 experiments.

First, let’s imagine an hypothetical scenario where KT and Intelligent Systems listen to the fan uproar over Crimson Flower’s shortness and add more chapters to it. The catch? There won’t be any other changes done to the base game. As a result, CF’s unique scaling stays due to the assumption it's presence is unrelated to its short length, meaning:

• There's still 4/3 levels of difference between Chapter 11 and 12, for Normal & Hard/Maddening).

• The level scaling remains consistent with no alterations unlike the other routes, up until the Last Chapter in Maddening Difficulty where the Average Enemy Level increases by 3.

This is how the route’ Suggested Levels' would look like for its chapters, compared to Dimitri and Claude’s stories, as well the Church's.

Now everyone's finally- Wait a second...

(Click here if you wanna check it on the spreadsheet)

^{(Note: Suggested Level is the value shown when you're about to start a mission. In-game, it's used as an indicator of the map's difficulty and the level the game expects you to be in order to beat it})

From my understanding, the whole point of the idea of “fixing” CF comes from the desire of making it a proper equal to Azure Moon and Verdant Wind, not unlike how in Warriors: Three Hopes, Scarlet Blaze, Azure Gleam and Golden Wildfire are equal in length and difficulty scaling (at least by the time the game ends). From the get go, we can see how this experiment has failed, because now Crimson Flower has the highest average enemy levels for its late game. To properly “fix” Crimson Flower in this instance, we would need to either redo its difficulty scaling from scratch to make it match the other routes, or just simply give it one Chapter less like Silver Snow, in which case, it still fails the experiment's purpose.

As a result, we now move to our Second Experiment: We will make Edelgard’s route unfinished. To do this, we will assume CF was meant to always have 22 Chapters, and as logic dictates, it's unique difficulty scaling would serve no purpose. This means that, as far difficulty parameters go, there's now a 1 level difference for enemies between Chapters whose missions are played back to back, impacting now both Ch.11 to Ch. 12, and Ch.17 to Ch. 18.

Here’s how the Suggested Levels' would look like in this case:

(Scaling it for Maddening wasn't easy...).

(Click here if you wanna check it on the spreadsheet)

These numbers look far more harmonious, yeah? Not only that, in this one you can clearly tell by the sequence the numbers follow that something is very off with Edelgard’s path- Not only it's somehow easier in Normal and Hard, something which is meant to come after Ch. 18 clearly isn’t there. Will it come around later as free DLC, as the rumors say? The evidence says it’s likely, though we dunno if it will happen yet.

This isn’t our reality though, and I have a big hunch on why it was never on the cards in our case. Both interviews which speak about the route’s development always coincide on one vital area:

 

Quote

 

–On top of that, [Black Eagles] also had a hidden story branch.

Yokota: We kept it hidden, but the idea to have a story branch was there since the creation of the Black Eagle route.

–Did you have plans to implement a story branch for the other houses?

Yokota: No. We only decided it for the Black Eagle house and to keep it a secret.

 

 

———————————————————————————————————————————————

 

Quote

 

Kusakihara: [...] Walking with Edelgard in “Crimson Flower”, or rather known as the, “Supreme Ruler Route” is something we honestly meant to be much more difficult to enter.

Yokota: I’m really sorry to you, Kusakihara-san too, but I was also someone who battled with Koei Tecmo on it. The exploration event split was initially too difficult and there were no hints at all.[...]

Kusakihara: Compared to what I envisioned, it’s about 3 times easier to enter, but that’s fine, I think.

 

 

From all four routes, CF was the only one which was meant to be a secret.

Picture this: you’re developing a video game with four routes that happens to love recycling its own content a lot, and you even have solid in-universe reasons for it too! And yet, you decide to hide one of the four just because. The reasoning here isn’t important. What is, however, is its secrecy. You want people to play the game, and have some of them stumble across it by accident and be surprised. Under this train of logic, I ask the following question:

Would it work to its benefit, if it was very similar to the other three routes regardless?

The answer to this question would be probably not. From then on, it becomes important to have that one route be different. Not follow the same rules the others do. Otherwise, what is the point of having it be a secret?

 

 

Edelgard’s route, as the theorem, proposes is the odd one out on purpose. Its identity stems from how it was conceived as the route which would be super hard to access, before the plan changed because Silver Snow was received poorly by KT’s testing team + devs. And because it’s the odd one out, trying to make it fit a very different mold isn’t gonna be an easy job, to the point you have to wonder if it would be best to just redo the whole thing from scratch instead.

In my humble opinion, this very well explains why the route is so different in both gameplay and outside of it, but I'll digress on the latter since that one's not the point of this post...

Edited July 29, 2023 by Moltz23

[lenticular]

I've never really had much of a problem with Crimson Flower, but in as much as there is a problem with it, I think it stems from two sources: first, it's too easy to access and second, Silver Snow isn't very good. This leads people to see Crimson Flower as the default route for the Black Eagles and Silver Snow as the branching side path. And under that mode of thought I can see why people would have the expectation that Crimson Flower should be comparable to Azure Moon and Verdant Wind.

So, my "solution" (in as much as there needs to be a solution to something I don't really see as a problem) would be to improve Silver Snow. Make it more distinct from Verdant Wind (by changing either of them), give it the same number of chapters as AM and VW, make it so the church-affiliated units don't suck there, give us a better replacement for Edelgard (maybe Seteth gets a unique Relic and battalion?), make the end boss be better tied in with the story rather than coming completely out of nowhere. In short, make SS feel like the equal to AM and VW that it always should have been.

Then, make CF a little more difficult to access. It doesn't have to be super obscure, but if SS were good, it would matter less if people missed it on their first time around. All of which would make CF feel more like the secret side route it was originally intended as and less as the default route for Black Eagles.

(One possible idea: allow Black Eagles to recruit Catherine and Cyril as usual (making them more viable for SS) but make "didn't recruit Catherine or Cyril" one of the prerequisites for going into Crimson Flower.)

I think it's reasonably likely that something broadly along these lines was the developers' intent, and that what we ended up with was due to lack of time.

[Etrurian emperor]

For me the solution to fixing Crimson Flower would be to add some stages. Not ones where you fight the slitherers. Goddess no! Its to flesh out the Kingdom and the Alliance. Both nations fell a bit too quickly due to the lack of stages in Crimson flower. You have one stage about taking a border fortress and then BAM! You're at the enemy capitol already.

Filler doesn't have a good reputation but I think it be worthwhile to make Edelgard's enemies and thus her inevitable victory more impressive. The stages could also incorporate the worldbuilding into the battle. Take the Alliance campaign for instance. Before arriving in Derdriu you have to fight in Gloucester territory. The gimmick of the stage being if that you have the upper hand the Gloucester troops defect to your side, but if you aren't playing well enough they'll fight for Claude and descend on you.

 

[Dark Holy Elf]

You've definitely made a long, detailed post, and obviously put a lot of thought into it. Forgive me for wanting to zero in on one aspect in particular, because it's one I feel pretty strongly about.

2 hours ago, Moltz23 said:

Three Houses has four routes overall. From those, Crimson Flower is the only one which has 18 story chapters while the others get 22 (or 21, in Silver Snow case). Saying this made people mad back when the game was new would honestly be an understatement given there’s a youtube video called “Edelgard deserved better” done sometime after its launch which has over 250k views as of this post.

I'll first observe that a video having hundreds of thousands of views does not necessarily mean people agree with its conclusion. It's got a title that cynically be described as click-bait and more generously might have some thought-provoking things to say. Doubtless some people agree with "CF is too short" but plenty of others disagree. I disagree pretty strongly.

First of all, Three Houses, on any route, is a long game. I've been watching a good friend of mine play through the non-portable English-released games over the past couple years. His game clock on 3H is longer than any previous FE by a wide margin, with the exception of Radiant Dawn (which I believe is similar, but would have to check). It's almost unthinkable to me that this would not be the case for most players.

In terms of raw chapter length, some might argue that 18-22 is on the low end for FE. Well, sure (although FE8 sits at a similar 21). But a lot of problems occur if you try to use that to argue that it's a short game:

• Paralogues exist. Even on a zero-student-recruitment, no-DLC CF run, there are at least nine (Dorothea, Sothis, Manuela/Hanneman, Alois/Shamir, Flayn/Seteth, Edelgard, Hubert, Bernie/Petra). Already, adding this number onto the number of CF chapters brings us to 27, which is comparable to or greater than the majority of other games in the series. And depending on the other variables I mentioned, there might be up to 10 more, bringing the number to 37.
• Auxilary fights exist. The player is forced to do one (in chapter 2), and several more are suggested as quests, with at least two (the ones that allow for more merchants) being basically expected by the game.
• There's more to Fire Emblem than battles, and any route of 3H has a lot of non-battle content.

If every route had 18 chapters, I don't think you'd see people complaining that the game was too short, because to me that's just a ridiculous proposition; it's factually one of the longer strategy RPGs on the market. The only reason people might argue CF, specifically, is too short, is because of the comparison with other routes. Personally I'd just as soon argue the other routes are too long. But regardless, all the routes are in what should be, hopefully, to most players, a perfectly acceptable length for a game.

2 hours ago, lenticular said:

I've never really had much of a problem with Crimson Flower, but in as much as there is a problem with it, I think it stems from two sources: first, it's too easy to access and second, Silver Snow isn't very good.

I agree. One additional problem is that it's not just that SS isn't very good, it's just that it's not really clear what the route offers players (except perhaps the angst of your closest companion betraying you, which apparently was the key idea for the first draft of the game). If I'm playing Edelgard's route, I want to see Edelgard. I don't think this is just me; everything about the game's advertising, presentation, and introduction are designed to get you interested in the three lords; the initial route branch is about whose story you want to see. As a result, even though SS is officially the "default" route, it ends up feeling more like a swerve from her route onto a "Church route", starring characters that are much less important to the overall narrative and themes of the game, and who I imagine most players are less invested in compared to the big three. To make matters worse, it has virtually no content I can't see while playing Claude's route, which has the added benefit of seeing Claude.

[Aedan7479]

23 minutes ago, Etrurian emperor said:

For me the solution to fixing Crimson Flower would be to add some stages. Not ones where you fight the slitherers. Goddess no! Its to flesh out the Kingdom and the Alliance. Both nations fell a bit too quickly due to the lack of stages in Crimson flower. You have one stage about taking a border fortress and then BAM! You're at the enemy capitol already.

Filler doesn't have a good reputation but I think it be worthwhile to make Edelgard's enemies and thus her inevitable victory more impressive. The stages could also incorporate the worldbuilding into the battle. Take the Alliance campaign for instance. Before arriving in Derdriu you have to fight in Gloucester territory. The gimmick of the stage being if that you have the upper hand the Gloucester troops defect to your side, but if you aren't playing well enough they'll fight for Claude and descend on you.

I agree with this, but I would also like to mention how it makes no sense that the great Bridge of Myrrdin is a Chapter in CF, when the Empire already occupys Garreg Mach. On the topic of maps, something I noticed in terms of maps is that each country has three major location: a field, a fortress, and the capital (Adrestia also gets the castle), though that's also me assuming that VW Chapter 22 is supposed to be Leister's field map, and one could argue Firihad has two maps. 

I can appreciate all the analysis done in this post, but I would say that while of course the gameplay is very important, Three Houses' story was considered more important, based on all the reused maps, the simplistic cutscene backgrounds etc. While it does make sense for a secret route to be shorter, as others have mentioned, CF just doesn't have enough room to breath. Now, yes, the empire had the upper hand from the get go, going from the border of Liester straight to the Capital doesn't make much sense. 

That said, you're right that fixing it isn't an easy task when it comes to balancing difficulty; just look how much fighting games have to adjust whenever they add one new fighter. Yes, we want a more... filled out? Story, but it's not an easy task.

[Moltz23]

2 hours ago, Dark Holy Elf said:

I'll first observe that a video having hundreds of thousands of views does not necessarily mean people agree with its conclusion. It's got a title that cynically be described as click-bait and more generously might have some thought-provoking things to say. Doubtless some people agree with "CF is too short" but plenty of others disagree. I disagree pretty strongly.

The point I tried to make with that paragraph was to highlight hows strong and widely believed is the "common knowledge" that CF is "unfinished" even though there's no actual data to back that up besides production values for animated cutscenes (and even that has a far better - if somewhat mundane and anticlimatic - explanation), which is given away by the replies that got the most amount of views in it.

It's also worth noting the video was done super early around 3H's launch and made by a Mekkah who had only played/seen the Crimson Flower and Verdant Wind's routes by then, so dude had no clue whatsoever about what kind of game he was talking about when he said, and I quote, that CF is "the path the developers put the least amount of effort into".

2 hours ago, Dark Holy Elf said:

If every route had 18 chapters, I don't think you'd see people complaining that the game was too short, because to me that's just a ridiculous proposition; it's factually one of the longer strategy RPGs on the market. The only reason people might argue CF, specifically, is too short, is because of the comparison with other routes. Personally I'd just as soon argue the other routes are too long. But regardless, all the routes are in what should be, hopefully, to most players, a perfectly acceptable length for a game

I agree as well, which is why I made emphasis on the idea that CF is thought as incomplete simply because it's far shorter than the other stories all while ignoring everything else surrounding it.

2 hours ago, Etrurian emperor said:

For me the solution to fixing Crimson Flower would be to add some stages. Not ones where you fight the slitherers. Goddess no! Its to flesh out the Kingdom and the Alliance. Both nations fell a bit too quickly due to the lack of stages in Crimson flower. You have one stage about taking a border fortress and then BAM! You're at the enemy capitol already.

Filler doesn't have a good reputation but I think it be worthwhile to make Edelgard's enemies and thus her inevitable victory more impressive. The stages could also incorporate the worldbuilding into the battle. Take the Alliance campaign for instance. Before arriving in Derdriu you have to fight in Gloucester territory. The gimmick of the stage being if that you have the upper hand the Gloucester troops defect to your side, but if you aren't playing well enough they'll fight for Claude and descend on you.

It's a solid idea, but then we run once again into the issue CF's balance would need to be redone from scratch to account those chapters are there. Best case scenario, the Alliance & Kingdom get only one more map each as that would disrupt the difficulty scaling the least, but that would still fail to satisfy everyone given it would be a half-measure which pisses off both the camp that likes CF's current lenght, and the one which wants the route to be just as long as AM/VW.

As the title of the post goes, "fixing" Edelgard's route is nowhere near as simple nor straightforward as people make it up to be.

1 hour ago, Aedan7479 said:

I can appreciate all the analysis done in this post, but I would say that while of course the gameplay is very important, Three Houses' story was considered more important, based on all the reused maps, the simplistic cutscene backgrounds etc. While it does make sense for a secret route to be shorter, as others have mentioned, CF just doesn't have enough room to breath.

1. As the analysis shows, CF not having enough room to breathe from a gameplay standpoint was more or less intentional, so there's not much one can do about it given the devs never really planned it to go on for more chapters. Realistically, a 3H remake could adress that complaint but mainly because those often add a ton of content to the OG game anyways.

2. About the story being important to 3H, oh man you truly have no idea (I go more in-depth into my other post if you're interested).

4 hours ago, lenticular said:

I've never really had much of a problem with Crimson Flower, but in as much as there is a problem with it, I think it stems from two sources: first, it's too easy to access and second, Silver Snow isn't very good. This leads people to see Crimson Flower as the default route for the Black Eagles and Silver Snow as the branching side path. And under that mode of thought I can see why people would have the expectation that Crimson Flower should be comparable to Azure Moon and Verdant Wind.

So, my "solution" (in as much as there needs to be a solution to something I don't really see as a problem) would be to improve Silver Snow. Make it more distinct from Verdant Wind (by changing either of them), give it the same number of chapters as AM and VW, make it so the church-affiliated units don't suck there, give us a better replacement for Edelgard (maybe Seteth gets a unique Relic and battalion?), make the end boss be better tied in with the story rather than coming completely out of nowhere. In short, make SS feel like the equal to AM and VW that it always should have been.

Then, make CF a little more difficult to access. It doesn't have to be super obscure, but if SS were good, it would matter less if people missed it on their first time around. All of which would make CF feel more like the secret side route it was originally intended as and less as the default route for Black Eagles.

Yeah, I also feel CF not being a secret in the final game more or less distorted people's views on it, Death of the Author style.

I agree as  well Silver Snow also needs something unique to truly stand out (as by structure, it's the sort of experience that works best as a standalone game rather than as a story branch of a multi-route game), with but it's admittedly hard to say what exactly, given the main source of it's challenge largely stems of how much you're handicapped compared to AM/VW. Maybe Byleth getting an exclusive battalion or heck, even the Knight-Captain's Sword  from Warriors: Three Hopes could be a cool addition from a gameplay perspective.

4 hours ago, lenticular said:

(One possible idea: allow Black Eagles to recruit Catherine and Cyril as usual (making them more viable for SS) but make "didn't recruit Catherine or Cyril" one of the prerequisites for going into Crimson Flower.)

The devs did admit CF was originally 3 times harder to access than what we got, so it is plausible to claim that could've very well been a prerequisite at some point given how strongly KT's dev team reacted over having been railroaded into SS against their wishes (there's sadly not much evidence to back up the idea however).

Edited July 29, 2023 by Moltz23

[lenticular]

1 hour ago, Dark Holy Elf said:

I agree. One additional problem is that it's not just that SS isn't very good, it's just that it's not really clear what the route offers players (except perhaps the angst of your closest companion betraying you, which apparently was the key idea for the first draft of the game). If I'm playing Edelgard's route, I want to see Edelgard. I don't think this is just me; everything about the game's advertising, presentation, and introduction are designed to get you interested in the three lords; the initial route branch is about whose story you want to see. As a result, even though SS is officially the "default" route, it ends up feeling more like a swerve from her route onto a "Church route", starring characters that are much less important to the overall narrative and themes of the game, and who I imagine most players are less invested in compared to the big three. To make matters worse, it has virtually no content I can't see while playing Claude's route, which has the added benefit of seeing Claude.

Another thing that makes Crimson Flower seem like the default option is the way that the choice is worded. In my first time through the game, I was playing as Black Eagles. And I did the steps necessary to go onto Crimson Flower entirely by accident. And then I got to the Holy Tomb and the choice as to my route. I knew nothing about the route split at that point and was playing the game entirely sight-unseen. And my thought process at the time was along these lines: "Well, I don't trust Rhea or Edelgard at this point, so I really want to hear more from both of them before I pick sides. The options the game is giving me are either to kill Edelgard or to protect her, so I'm going to choose to protect her because that's the less commital option. If I kill her now and it turns out I was wrong, I can't change my mind." I've spoken with others who have had similar experiences as well. More neutral wording for the options ("side with Rhea" versus "side with Edelgard", maybe?) might have made CF be slightly less of a default.

And another problem is that Part 1 pushes the "Rhea can't be trusted" angle really hard. Pretty much from the moment you arrive at the monastery, Jeralt starts warning you about her, and then throughout White Clouds you see more and more evidence that he had good reason for doing so. On the other hand, you don't really see much indication that Edelgard might be shady and untrustworthy right up until the moment of the choice. Yeah, there's bits here and there, but nothing like as much as there has been telling you not to trust Rhea. So, again, when presented with the choice, I think it's going to be much more natural for the player to trust Edelgard than Rhea. If Rhea was a more sympathetic character and/or Edelgard a less sympathetic one, that also could have shifted the balance somewhat.

I agree that Silver Snow really doesn't offer much of anything beyond the one plot twist  of Edelgard's betrayal. I guess there's also the final boss, which is mechanically pretty interesting even if it doesn't fit very well in the story. But that's about it. The obvious and relatively low effort fix would have been to have Rhea be your main character in that route. She's massively more important to the plot and the themes of the games than anyone else you have on Silver Snow, and could easily have had a unique class (Archbishop -> Saint), weapon (Seiros Shield and Sword of Seiros) and battalion (maybe something with good mixed-attack stats and a two-use faith-magic Resonant Flames variant as a gambit). Having a point of divergence of "Rhea doesn't get captured" could have led to more differences between teh routes as well. It also wouldn't be too hard to justify: maybe because Edelgard didn't have the support of the other Black Eagles? Maybe because siding against Edelgard at the Holy Tomb made Byleth and Rhea trust each other more? This would also mean the final boss would have to be scrapped (unless they wanted to have a second instance of your main character "betraying" you in a single route), but that would be a pretty simple fix too: just swap around the final bosses of SS and VW. Having Nemesis be Rhea's final boss makes all the sense in the world, and having Claude's finale be to effectively take out both the Agarthans and the Nabateans and take back rule for regular humans fits him thematically too.

14 minutes ago, Moltz23 said:

The devs did admit CF was originally 3 times harder to access than what we got, so it is plausible to claim that could've very well been a prerequisite at some point given how strongly KT's dev team reacted over having been railroaded into SS against their wishes (there's sadly not much evidence to back up the idea however).

That they felt railroaded into Silver Snow speaks of the problems of that route, I think. It would feel bad to be forced into it because it isn't a fun or satisfying route, either in gameplay or in story. If it had said to the player, "OK, you lose Edelgard, but here's what you gain in return" then I think it would have been less jarring.

It'll be itneresting to see if any of the development team speak extensively about Three Houses in 10 years or so. Once there's more distance from the game's release and it isn't still up for sale on a current-gen console they might be willing to be more candid about things and talk more about what their ambitions were for the game, how much they ended up having to cut due to time constraints, and what they ultimately were and weren't satisfied with. I don't believe for a second that they were completely blind to the faults that we're talking about, but projects have deadlines and games have release dates, and sometimes they just have to call things good enough. I'd love to hear what they would have most wanted to change or add if they'd had the time and resources to do so.

[Dark Holy Elf]

3 hours ago, lenticular said:

I agree that Silver Snow really doesn't offer much of anything beyond the one plot twist  of Edelgard's betrayal. I guess there's also the final boss, which is mechanically pretty interesting even if it doesn't fit very well in the story. But that's about it. The obvious and relatively low effort fix would have been to have Rhea be your main character in that route.

Agree with this. Aside from Byleth, who exists in their own unique space as the player avatar, 3H is a game with four dominant characters. If there are going to be four routes, surely it makes sense for the fourth to feature Rhea in a starring role. Give her a bunch of supports which really dig into her, the way the other lords do. Make her an extremely strong playable character; goodness knows it fits the lore.

One place I do think KT made the right choice, and perhaps where I disagree with you a touch, is that I don't think CF should have been particularly difficult to get. I think "side with Edelgard" vs. "side with Rhea" (perhaps presented more neutrally, as you suggest) is a wonderful opportunity for a meaningful player choice in a genre which often advertises it but rarely delivers, and I think having some players miss that choice because they didn't jump through [arbitrary hoop X] would be a bit of a waste. I don't mind what's currently in the game (there's an argument that if Byleth doesn't know enough about Edelgard to reach C+ support, they wouldn't trust her enough to side with her after reveal as the Flame Emperor, which strikes me as legitimate) but I don't think I'd have enjoyed the feeling of being railroaded into a key choice because I didn't check a guide.

[Jotari]

I don't think people suggesting Crimson Flower gets more chapters are really saying "Literally just add four chapters to the end and do nothing else." Of course difficulty scaling is going to be factored into something like that. One thing where I think they absolutely failed with the difficulty scaling was Edelgard's personal class, Emperor, however. She gets it in Chapter 16/18, which is Roy levels of bad when it comes to promotion (of course unlike Roy, Edelgard has other options). Unless you're intentionally putting off doing Paralogues it's highly likely you'll never unlock the Combat Art Flickering Flower and be able to equip for a chapter (I unlocked it at the very end of the final chapter). Of course, the response would be "Why even use Emperor? That class sucks", which, yes, it kind of does, but probably not as much as you think. As Armoured Lord, really sucks as a class and if you're insisting on using Edelgard's personal class then you've probably been trying to use Armoured Lord this entire time. The extra three attack and defense of Emperor makes it much more tolerable to use. And in comparison to Fortress Knight you have slightly less defense for slightly more speed (something Edelgard could probably actually work with if you're not playing Maddening) and one more point of movement.

Of course, the solution to this was to obviously ditch Armoured Lord, High Lord and Wyvern Master entirely and just give you the lords unique classes for all of Part 2. Byleth already has Enlightened One before the end of Part 1, we shouldn't have to wait around for half of (or almost the entirety of Edelgard's) Part 2 before we have access to these for completely arbitrary reasons. Of the three Dimitri is the only one where they even half attempt to work the promotion into the story (and even there it was less a getting stronger moment and more a symbolic costume change which you actually could have achieved even with the same class as the game already let's you change costumes while retaining classes).

15 hours ago, lenticular said:

(One possible idea: allow Black Eagles to recruit Catherine and Cyril as usual (making them more viable for SS) but make "didn't recruit Catherine or Cyril" one of the prerequisites for going into Crimson Flower.)

I really like this idea. Though more for the units sake than making Crimson Flower less accessible. I'd also be on for having them be recruitable but leave your party if you go Crimson Flower. They already do that for Flayn. I guess someone could be making a party out of Flayn, Cyril and Catherine when playing blind Black Eagles and then lose all three, but it's also completely possible, and I'd say even likely, to play Black Eagles and lose a heavily invested Edelgard and Hubert.

Edited July 30, 2023 by Jotari

[vikingsfan92]

Will go into more detail and other stuff later but I will say the idea that the route should be harder to get into is something that I cannot disagree with more. Plus I would argue it defeats the point of having a choice to begin with if its locked behind numerous arbitrary requirements and makes the story more unbelievable that you cant side with who you want. 

Now I have been on record quiet often in saying I don't think Crimson Flower and the black eagles may not have been the correct spot for the choice (golden deer would be better imo) but if they are going to make it a choice it should not be hampered with gatekeeping.

[SnowFire]

I agree with the conclusion here, but not the reasoning.   Let's back up: why is CF different in the first place?  The reason has nothing to do with it being a "secret" route or difficulty concerns or the like.  Rather...  it would make negative plot sense for CF to be fighting the exact same battles as SS/VW/AM.  There's a few cute cases where CF fights battles on the same map as other routes but "in reverse" (e.g. the Bridge of Myrrdin), and I guess the Defending Garreg Mach chapter manages to be similar in all 4 routes despite swapping out who's attacking, but CF needs to be mostly fighting not in Adrestia.  So we're getting different chapters. 

Okay, the next concern.  Every time a chapter is made, that means writing dialogue for each and every resident of Garreg Mach to comment on it.  Each and every named character, too, probably with voiced lines, on the assumption you recruited everyone.  To switch gears to lenticular's suggestion: if Rhea joined your team in SS, that would mean having to rewrite some of the dialogue in otherwise very similar chapters between SS / VW / AM, as some references to Rhea being missing would no longer make sense (and yes, people at the monastery talk about that!).  This isn't like an FE8 ROMhack where you just go into a map editor and plop some units on the field and call it a day; the structure of 3H means that everybody is going to need to comment on it, voice actor lines recorded, translations done, Q&A, etc.

Put together, what happens seems clear enough to me (and soft-confirmed by other interviews?).  3H was delayed twice from its intended release date.  However, the team felt really strongly that they wanted to ship a CF route to meet the goal of letting the player see things from all sides.  But the way you hit your ship date is you cut features.  To make sure 3H actually shipped, CF was kept shorter to make sure they could actually finish everything on time.  The map designer may very well have had 30 great ideas for maps from a strict gameplay perspective, but shipping a map is about much more than just the gameplay: it's about skits between characters introducing the Paralogue / Mission that have voice acted lines, voiced lines in battle, etc.  Basically, even if KT / IS hypothetically had a perfect plan for handling wacky difficulty swings in short-CF vs. long-CF, it wouldn't matter if they ran out of time & budget.   (Also, I agree with Etrurian Emperor that if CF was ACTUALLY expanded, the additional maps would be better spent on fighting the Kingdom & Alliance, not on the lame Slitherers anyway.)

--

I will say that when talking about actual difficulty, this comes down to 90% map design, and 10% everything else (i.e. characters, relics, battalions).  The most powerful tool for shaping how difficult things will be, class choice, is generally available about equally to all routes (yeah, yeah, Lord unique classes, but those only matter so much - more of a GD buff). So I don't think focusing on the things in this post are the right place to look.  CF could have been expanded from a sheer gameplay perspective, just a game is a lot more than that: does it make sense?  Is this playthrough already too long?  etc.

(And further, some of the way 3H difficulty panned out in reality clearly didn't quite match the design stage anyway - I highly doubt that Reunion at Dawn was intended to be the most infamous mission in the game, given that it's against random bandits.)

Quote

Silver Snow, for example, is meant to be really hard according to the devs

I suppose there's no point in repeating ourselves, but I will state again that IMO you're reading way too much into that developer interview about "Silver Snow was meant to be really hard."  That was a single question about a single plot point that screws over the player in an unusual way for the series which they knew would be an unpleasant gameplay surprise, e.g. if the player had been feeding XP into Edelgard.  I don't think it was meant to say "we planned to make SS the hardest route;" the only thing you can take from that interview is "The plan of SS involved losing your Lord (as a dramatic plot point), which (as a gameplay side effect) will make things tougher".  Which is not quite the same thing.

[vikingsfan92]

I honestly can't see them doing much more with alliance conflict. Especially with the context of three hopes even more solidifying that Claude and Edelgard have interests that are not mutually exclusive so it probably would be hard to make that conflict any different than it is.  Its already in the base game of 3houses especially the spare Claude option but it just kind if highlights to me why a longer fight with the alliance probably doesn't work without massive overhauls.

Plus it would kind of ruin the "master tactician plot line for Crimson Flower Claude if we beat him up multiple times. If they had to do something outside of the kingdom or slither it probably would be better if they had an actual chapter with Almayra, Brigid, or another neighbor to Fodland over more alliance stuff tbh.

 

The kingdom and Slithers being expanded on is much easier to see. And as much as people might hate it I think a final attempt at the slither is probably most important.,

[Jotari]

3 minutes ago, vikingsfan92 said:

I honestly can't see them doing much more with alliance conflict. Especially with the context of three hopes even more solidifying that Claude and Edelgard have interests that are not mutually exclusive so it probably would be hard to make that conflict any different than it is.  Its already in the base game of 3houses especially the spare Claude option but it just kind if highlights to me why a longer fight with the alliance probably doesn't work without massive overhauls.

Plus it would kind of ruin the "master tactician plot line for Crimson Flower Claude if we beat him up multiple times. If they had to do something outside of the kingdom or slither it probably would be better if they had an actual chapter with Almayra, Brigid, or another neighbor to Fodland over more alliance stuff tbh.

 

The kingdom and Slithers being expanded on is much easier to see. And as much as people might hate it I think a final attempt at the slither is probably most important.,

It wouldn't ruin Claude if the conflict is extended because he actually beats Edelgard. Have Edelgard's attack on the alliance be repelled just like the other routes. Edelgard is forced to retreat back into Adestria, then you have Crimson Flower Grondor. One of my biggest issues with Crimson Flowers pacing is that it makes the conflict feel kind of piss easy for Edelgard. She just waltz in and wins despite the five year stalemate. The only time they even half attempt to make it seem like a struggle is during the Garrek Mach battle where supper important and relevant character Randolph dies.

[vikingsfan92]

5 hours ago, Jotari said:

It wouldn't ruin Claude if the conflict is extended because he actually beats Edelgard. Have Edelgard's attack on the alliance be repelled just like the other routes. Edelgard is forced to retreat back into Adestria, then you have Crimson Flower Grondor. One of my biggest issues with Crimson Flowers pacing is that it makes the conflict feel kind of piss easy for Edelgard. She just waltz in and wins despite the five year stalemate. The only time they even half attempt to make it seem like a struggle is during the Garrek Mach battle where supper important and relevant character Randolph dies.

I will be honest and say that would be a horrible idea imo. Forced loss when when the players actually win is extremely hard to pull off. But more importantly I don't think it really fits  the story in a believable way to have one in any route tbh without it feeling unearned and cheap. 

 

Even existing examples that are close to this are probably some of the most criticized moments of the writing in general (Byleth's dissapearence for the time skip and Jeralt death both have issues they raise with the story than feel a bit forced without answers). The timeskip one in particular feels like weak justification for time to pass.

It just makes more sense to extend the kingdom or do slither chapters than it does to try and write a chapter in a matter that is notoriously hard to do for the alliance conflict which already feels unnecessary as is given that the two leaders are more aligned in what they want than not. As seen by all the direct dialouge between Claude and Edelgard. 

 

[Jotari]

24 minutes ago, vikingsfan92 said:

I will be honest and say that would be a horrible idea imo. Forced loss when when the players actually win is extremely hard to pull off. But more importantly I don't think it really fits  the story in a believable way to have one in any route tbh without it feeling unearned and cheap. 

 

Even existing examples that are close to this are probably some of the most criticized moments of the writing in general (Byleth's dissapearence for the time skip and Jeralt death both have issues they raise with the story than feel a bit forced without answers). The timeskip one in particular feels like weak justification for time to pass.

It just makes more sense to extend the kingdom or do slither chapters than it does to try and write a chapter in a matter that is notoriously hard to do for the alliance conflict which already feels unnecessary as is given that the two leaders are more aligned in what they want than not. As seen by all the direct dialouge between Claude and Edelgard. 

 

Narrative loss isn't the same as gameplay loss. For example, the river crossing in Radiant Dawn.

[vikingsfan92]

1 hour ago, Jotari said:

Narrative loss isn't the same as gameplay loss. For example, the river crossing in Radiant Dawn.

Sure but it still can feel put in there or plot armory for the other side. Kai Leng from Mass effect is a go to example of every single victory he ever gets is forced as hell against the main cast and unearned. 

While mass effect and three houses are vastly different games and stories I do think there is more of a chance of expanded alliance plot of this nature to give a similar vibe to Leng's "wins" due to the circumstances around what is happening in the war. 

But the main issue still is we are extending a battle that doesn't even make sense to extend tbh.  Claude and Edelgard are more similar than they are apart as seen by the end of their fight in the route we are discussing. Heck even the kill Claude option kind of points to that still.

[Jotari]

1 hour ago, vikingsfan92 said:

Sure but it still can feel put in there or plot armory for the other side. Kai Leng from Mass effect is a go to example of every single victory he ever gets is forced as hell against the main cast and unearned. 

While mass effect and three houses are vastly different games and stories I do think there is more of a chance of expanded alliance plot of this nature to give a similar vibe to Leng's "wins" due to the circumstances around what is happening in the war. 

But the main issue still is we are extending a battle that doesn't even make sense to extend tbh.  Claude and Edelgard are more similar than they are apart as seen by the end of their fight in the route we are discussing. Heck even the kill Claude option kind of points to that still.

I'm not against a Claude Edelgard alliance, I think it's particularly important for Claude's character for something like that to happen. But it was simply never something they tried in Three Houses. Instead Edelgard invades a neutral alliance for basically no reason. I think her opening up another front of war she didn't have to is absolutely something that could bote her in the ass.

[vikingsfan92]

2 hours ago, Jotari said:

I'm not against a Claude Edelgard alliance, I think it's particularly important for Claude's character for something like that to happen. But it was simply never something they tried in Three Houses. Instead Edelgard invades a neutral alliance for basically no reason. I think her opening up another front of war she didn't have to is absolutely something that could bote her in the ass.

For my point its not so much they have to go as far as an alliance (I was extremely happy with it being a thing in three hopes) it's more so they are both better off with it ending as soon as possible so adding to it doesnt really contubute much to the plot in meaningful ways imo. I  would argue it benefits Claude more than Edelgard in CF granted what he gains is mostly off screen and implied other than free from the war.  He did always have the whole being an Almyrian prince thing in his back pocket.

In the kill Claude option he pretty much implies that he had a read on the situation that he could get he at least part of what he wants and be spared he just wasn't correct about the living part (which is players choice so not going to go to much into that).  But I do think it gives some insight to the letting him live option.

Edited July 31, 2023 by vikingsfan92

[Shanty Pete's 1st Mate]

On 7/30/2023 at 4:42 AM, Jotari said:

Of course, the solution to this was to obviously ditch Armoured Lord, High Lord and Wyvern Master entirely and just give you the lords unique classes for all of Part 2.

Yep. Even on AM and VW, you don't exactly have the time to gain 350 class EXP post-skip, without quite a bit of Aux battle grinding. Just give them their "Master Class Equivalents". If 8-move Claude is too strong in chapter 13, then just drop Barbarossa to 7-move. Anyway, give each class both "Pomp & Circumstance", and their combat art, upon mastery. That way, they have time to, y'know, use it.

On 7/29/2023 at 6:43 PM, lenticular said:

More neutral wording for the options ("side with Rhea" versus "side with Edelgard", maybe?) might have made CF be slightly less of a default.

Yep, agreed there. I think if they do that, then they don't need to make CF "harder" to get. Because even players who do what it takes to access the route, will still pick SS.

Regardless, a radical take would be "make SS the secret route". Make it so you can only access it if you reach an A-support with Rhea pre-skip. Maybe add an extra scene with Rhea, to help justify why the Professor is siding with her (with a side-glance to her eventual degeneration). If it's the harder route to get into, then it's fine for it to be "worse", since most players who get into it will know what they're getting into.

On 7/29/2023 at 1:03 PM, Moltz23 said:

First, let’s imagine an hypothetical scenario where KT and Intelligent Systems listen to the fan uproar over Crimson Flower’s shortness and add more chapters to it. The catch? There won’t be any other changes done to the base game. As a result, CF’s unique scaling stays due to the assumption it's presence is unrelated to its short length, meaning:

As others have said, I don't think the commonplace demand is "keep CF13-18 as they are, then add 2-4 more chapters at the end". Rather, it's "Edelgard's route is too short, it should have more chapters, and also more cutscenes and CGs". That said, I broadly recognize that most of the resources went into WC and SS, and (indirectly) into AM and VW. A "full-length" version of CF would require another delay, which the devs and the community had no appetite for. Personally, I find CF as-is to be the most interesting route, if not necessarily my favorite one.

For my part, I've stated before that I would've like an expanded CF to have two extra chapters... but front-loaded, not back-loaded. Have a rebellion in the Empire, led by the escaped Count Varley and Duke Aegir. One map at Enbarr, the next in Aegur territory. This would give those characters a function as enemies, while having Teach help Edelgard confirm her authority and rule over the Empire. Still doesn't answer the "Slitherers" question, but it does mean the Empire route will have maps actually set in... the Empire.

On 7/29/2023 at 3:50 PM, Dark Holy Elf said:

First of all, Three Houses, on any route, is a long game. I've been watching a good friend of mine play through the non-portable English-released games over the past couple years. His game clock on 3H is longer than any previous FE by a wide margin, with the exception of Radiant Dawn (which I believe is similar, but would have to check). It's almost unthinkable to me that this would not be the case for most players.

Building off of this, by the time I reached chapter 12 on my original (GD Normal) playthrough, I had put roughly 50 hours into the game. I remember thinking that the game doesn't even need a timeskip! Just give me 3-4 more chapters, and we're at an excellent game length. Not enough route-unique content, sure, but I was still hopeful that "hey, maybe White Clouds will have some appreciable gameplay differences if I lead the other classes!" Not to say the game should be shorter, but it could be shorter, and still have a solid length.

[Moltz23]

On 7/30/2023 at 9:21 PM, SnowFire said:

I agree with the conclusion here, but not the reasoning.   Let's back up: why is CF different in the first place?  The reason has nothing to do with it being a "secret" route or difficulty concerns or the like.  Rather...  it would make negative plot sense for CF to be fighting the exact same battles as SS/VW/AM.  There's a few cute cases where CF fights battles on the same map as other routes but "in reverse" (e.g. the Bridge of Myrrdin), and I guess the Defending Garreg Mach chapter manages to be similar in all 4 routes despite swapping out who's attacking, but CF needs to be mostly fighting not in Adrestia.  So we're getting different chapters. 

Okay, the next concern.  Every time a chapter is made, that means writing dialogue for each and every resident of Garreg Mach to comment on it.  Each and every named character, too, probably with voiced lines, on the assumption you recruited everyone.  To switch gears to lenticular's suggestion: if Rhea joined your team in SS, that would mean having to rewrite some of the dialogue in otherwise very similar chapters between SS / VW / AM, as some references to Rhea being missing would no longer make sense (and yes, people at the monastery talk about that!).  This isn't like an FE8 ROMhack where you just go into a map editor and plop some units on the field and call it a day; the structure of 3H means that everybody is going to need to comment on it, voice actor lines recorded, translations done, Q&A, etc.

Put together, what happens seems clear enough to me (and soft-confirmed by other interviews?).  3H was delayed twice from its intended release date.  However, the team felt really strongly that they wanted to ship a CF route to meet the goal of letting the player see things from all sides.  But the way you hit your ship date is you cut features.  To make sure 3H actually shipped, CF was kept shorter to make sure they could actually finish everything on time.  The map designer may very well have had 30 great ideas for maps from a strict gameplay perspective, but shipping a map is about much more than just the gameplay: it's about skits between characters introducing the Paralogue / Mission that have voice acted lines, voiced lines in battle, etc.  Basically, even if KT / IS hypothetically had a perfect plan for handling wacky difficulty swings in short-CF vs. long-CF, it wouldn't matter if they ran out of time & budget.   (Also, I agree with Etrurian Emperor that if CF was ACTUALLY expanded, the additional maps would be better spent on fighting the Kingdom & Alliance, not on the lame Slitherers anyway.)

I know this thread's meant to be mostly gameplay related, but I'll be going over some datamine-related stuff now that people are bringing up more interesting points.

1. Fair enough. The Crimson Flower maps are even stored on a separate place inside 3H's data compared to the other routes, so there's no actual evidence pointing the ones from AM/VW/SS were once meant to be used there as well.

2. Also a fair point. I will say though, that the internal order for the Monastery Exploration data also points out Crimson Flower's slots might've been potentially saved in advance compared to the other routes, so it's left ambiguous if what we have with CF is truly a voice acting/recording and line-writing issue, or if it's simply a side effect of the route being envisioned as being different from the start.

The full order in case you don't wanna check the link is the following btw:

White Clouds > Crimson Flower > Silver Snow > Dummy Slot(?) > Azure Moon > Verdant Wind > Junk > Cindered Shadows.

3. Perhaps? On one hand, it's no secret a lot of fat had to be trimmed from 3H to get it out on time (like seriously, it's page on The Cutting Room Floor is massive). On the other though, Three Houses is also a very narrative heavy game, meaning that if it doesn't have a good reason to reuse a map available, then it just...won't (which is noteworthy, 'cause the generic Kingdom map is reused a ton in it), so that already cuts away the pool of locations Edelgard's route can use compared to 3 Hopes.

22 hours ago, Shanty Pete's 1st Mate said:

For my part, I've stated before that I would've like an expanded CF to have two extra chapters... but front-loaded, not back-loaded. Have a rebellion in the Empire, led by the escaped Count Varley and Duke Aegir. One map at Enbarr, the next in Aegur territory. This would give those characters a function as enemies, while having Teach help Edelgard confirm her authority and rule over the Empire. Still doesn't answer the "Slitherers" question, but it does mean the Empire route will have maps actually set in... the Empire.

It's a neat idea tbh, though I think Fort Merceus could also be a location they could've used in said instance, not unlike how Ludwig takes over it for Three Hopes' Scarlet Blaze at one point.

On 7/30/2023 at 9:21 PM, SnowFire said:

I suppose there's no point in repeating ourselves, but I will state again that IMO you're reading way too much into that developer interview about "Silver Snow was meant to be really hard."  That was a single question about a single plot point that screws over the player in an unusual way for the series which they knew would be an unpleasant gameplay surprise, e.g. if the player had been feeding XP into Edelgard.  I don't think it was meant to say "we planned to make SS the hardest route;" the only thing you can take from that interview is "The plan of SS involved losing your Lord (as a dramatic plot point), which (as a gameplay side effect) will make things tougher".  Which is not quite the same thing.

In this case however, Silver Snow (and only Silver Snow, because as far the devs were concerned: Silver Snow is the Empire route; and Crimson Flower is the Supreme Ruler/Hegemon route) was meant to be the hardest route from the begginning, which is backed up by two different translations of the developer interview:

Quote

We originally envisioned the Black Eagles route to be the most difficult due to the fact that you lose the house leader. - Nintendoeverything's translation

Quote

As the Class Leader would leave, the Black Eagles were initially decided to be the most difficult route as imagined (gameplay difficulty). - Serenes Forest's translation

...And the means of which they did so - AKA losing Edelgard - does have noticeable effects in gameplay:

• You lose her as an unit. So like you mention, it's not really worth training her at all during SS and that gets annoying given how much she's forcefully deployed in the main story.
• You lose her unique relic and battalion, meaning you get no Raging Storm, and no 2-use-Raging Flames gambit which would've been awesome to have.
• You lose the House Leader deployment slot, meaning that, even if you had previously trained another unit which could fulfill Edelgard's niche, you're still gonna end up playing with one unit less compared to Azure Moon & Verdant Wind anyways for most of the main story.

And while this comes off -and in my opinion, is-  cheap, the findings of my 3H difficulty spreadsheet did identify that most of that route's difficulty is entirely unrelated to what you have to face in it 99% of the time, so I see no point with arguing against it unless you wanna elaborate a bit more on your point I guess.

On 7/30/2023 at 4:42 AM, Jotari said:

One thing where I think they absolutely failed with the difficulty scaling was Edelgard's personal class, Emperor, however. She gets it in Chapter 16/18, which is Roy levels of bad when it comes to promotion (of course unlike Roy, Edelgard has other options). Unless you're intentionally putting off doing Paralogues it's highly likely you'll never unlock the Combat Art Flickering Flower and be able to equip for a chapter (I unlocked it at the very end of the final chapter). Of course, the response would be "Why even use Emperor? That class sucks", which, yes, it kind of does, but probably not as much as you think. As Armoured Lord, really sucks as a class and if you're insisting on using Edelgard's personal class then you've probably been trying to use Armoured Lord this entire time. The extra three attack and defense of Emperor makes it much more tolerable to use. And in comparison to Fortress Knight you have slightly less defense for slightly more speed (something Edelgard could probably actually work with if you're not playing Maddening) and one more point of movement.

I agree as well with Edelgard's unique class being perfectly usable as long you're fully commited to make her an Armor from the start. From personal experience (as in, by having everyone stick to their canon classes while trying to make them work no matter what), I dare say Dimitri got the worst unique lord classes of the House Leaders as he ends up as a sort of jack-of-all-trades for infantry units that really struggles to function in Maddening without his Battalion Vantage + Battalion Wrath combo (then again, I must also admit Dimitri in my last Maddening run also got horribly RNG screwed, so the odds were never really in his favor).

And before I forget: apparently there's evidence the Armored Lord, Great Lord and Wyvern Master classes were pretty late additions in the game, which explains a lot about how the final lord classes ended up implemented while also raising a few questions in the process (like, most of non pre-rendered animated movies must have been added near the end of development... right????).

Edited August 2, 2023 by Moltz23

[Shanty Pete's 1st Mate]

16 minutes ago, Moltz23 said:

It's a neat idea tbh, though I think Fort Merceus could also be a location they could've used in said instance, not unlike how Ludwig takes over it for Three Hopes' Scarlet Blaze at one point.

...Did I say Enbarr? I was honestly thinking Fort Merceus, as where you'd face Count Varley. Can't believe I mixed those two up!

18 minutes ago, Moltz23 said:

I agree as well with Edelgard's unique class being perfectly usable as long you're fully commited to make her an Armor from the start. From personal experience (as in, by having everyone stick to their canon classes while trying to make them work no matter what), I dare say Dimitri got the worst unique lord classes of the House Leaders as he ends up as a sort of jack-of-all-trades for infantry units that really struggles to function in Maddening without his Battalion Vantage + Battalion Wrath combo (then again, I must also admit Dimitri in my last Maddening run also got horribly RNG screwed, so the odds were never really in his favor).

At least Dimitri's class has something unique about it, being the only infantry class with Lancefaire. I think it could've warranted a "Lance Crit +10" as well, but that's neither here nor there. What makes Emperor intolerable to me, is the fact that it actually loses Speed, relative to Armored Lord. And unlike Fortress Knight, it doesn't have innate Weight -5 to offset this loss. Charm would be great... if you could get Edelgard into a position to make use of it... which you usually can't. Emperor is just such a blah, middling class, only really "worth it" if you want to ignore Edelgard's other ranks, and just bum-rush her Axe and Authority.

I will grant that "High Lord Dimitri" leaves a worse first impression than "Armored Lord Edegard", since he's trapped in that class for the infamous chapter 13. At least Edegard doesn't have to spend any time in her personal class hell.

[Dark Holy Elf]

1 hour ago, Shanty Pete's 1st Mate said:

At least Dimitri's class has something unique about it, being the only infantry class with Lancefaire.

To be fair, since he doesn't need to invest riding/flying/armour ranks to get his special class, "infantry" is a purely negative tag in this case. That said, the class does have a slight niche anyway; it's the only Lancefaire class available to men with a speed mod better than +1 (at +4); if you want Dimitri in a lance class with the best non-move stats possible, it's probably your choice.

Emperor also has a slight niche, being one of two classes with a +8 defence mod with more than 4 move. Granted, Great Knight has this too, but that's fairly difficult to qualify for. Granted, in practice I find Emperor even less tempting; Edelgard has good enough speed (unlike e.g. Dedue/Raphael/Alois/Gilbert) that just dumping the stat entirely isn't tempting to me, and there's a really, really good Axefaire class with a far better speed mod. Wyvern Lord with a good shield just completely stomps Emperor with a March Ring, for instance, and March Ring is arguably Emperor's best accessory choice.

[Shanty Pete's 1st Mate]

14 hours ago, Dark Holy Elf said:

To be fair, since he doesn't need to invest riding/flying/armour ranks to get his special class, "infantry" is a purely negative tag in this case. That said, the class does have a slight niche anyway; it's the only Lancefaire class available to men with a speed mod better than +1 (at +4); if you want Dimitri in a lance class with the best non-move stats possible, it's probably your choice.

So, I technically lied. Dimitri can also be Lancefaire infantry... by going Paladin, and Dismounting. Comparing Dismounted Paladin to High Lord, we have +1 Str, +2 Dex, +1 Def, +2 Res, and +1 Mov; but also -1 HP, -2 Spd, and -2 Cha. Great Lord closes the gap on Str and Mov, and expands its HP and Spd lead, but retains the deficits in Dex, Def, and Res. So, hard to say which one is really "better", in either case, although the personal classes have the advantage of coming for free.

14 hours ago, Dark Holy Elf said:

Emperor also has a slight niche, being one of two classes with a +8 defence mod with more than 4 move. Granted, Great Knight has this too, but that's fairly difficult to qualify for. Granted, in practice I find Emperor even less tempting; Edelgard has good enough speed (unlike e.g. Dedue/Raphael/Alois/Gilbert) that just dumping the stat entirely isn't tempting to me, and there's a really, really good Axefaire class with a far better speed mod. Wyvern Lord with a good shield just completely stomps Emperor with a March Ring, for instance, and March Ring is arguably Emperor's best accessory choice.

Wyvern Lord broken, more at 11.

...Ahem. The crazy thing about Emperor is, it feels like Warrior, of all classes, is competitive with it. Comparing the two, Warrior has +3 Strength and +5 Speed, but -5 HP, -7 Def, and -2 Charm. Different niches, obviously, but I can definitely see preferring to do more damage, and double more often, in Warrior. Finally, one last kicker - while Fortress Knight has 2 less Speed than Emperor, it also has innate Weight -5, meaning that a "fully weighed down" Edelgard will actually have a 3-point AS advantage in Fortress Knight. Wild stuff! Still, I guess the class is considerable if you want a semi-decent defensive tank without taking any time to invest in Armor.

[Dark Holy Elf]

5 hours ago, Shanty Pete's 1st Mate said:

...Ahem. The crazy thing about Emperor is, it feels like Warrior, of all classes, is competitive with it. Comparing the two, Warrior has +3 Strength and +5 Speed, but -5 HP, -7 Def, and -2 Charm. Different niches, obviously, but I can definitely see preferring to do more damage, and double more often, in Warrior. Finally, one last kicker - while Fortress Knight has 2 less Speed than Emperor, it also has innate Weight -5, meaning that a "fully weighed down" Edelgard will actually have a 3-point AS advantage in Fortress Knight. Wild stuff! Still, I guess the class is considerable if you want a semi-decent defensive tank without taking any time to invest in Armor.

Warrior is definitely a class that I think might attract more attention if Wyvern didn't exist, because it does have an ability to do big damage with axes, but it's a hard sell to do that at 5 move when you could do it with 7 move and canto... plus the point we've hammered before about how a solo A requirement is actually much more onerous than B axes + C flying (yes, even for units with a bane in flying). Good point that it's yet another point of competition for Edelgard's unique classes, though.

in the slight defence of Emperor not having Weight-5, Edelgard does have very high strength so often she'll be able to avoid being weighed down much, especially if you have a spare slot for Weight-3, which she qualifies for easily (though obviously, that's a slot that Fortress Knight can use on something else). Ultimately I really like Emperor just having +1 move on Fortress Knight, but you're right that this comparison is much more muddied than it should be. Emperor really should have had something else to distinguish it from other armour classes, be it actually decent speed and/or the ability to use magic

[Shanty Pete's 1st Mate]

3 hours ago, Dark Holy Elf said:

Warrior is definitely a class that I think might attract more attention if Wyvern didn't exist, because it does have an ability to do big damage with axes, but it's a hard sell to do that at 5 move when you could do it with 7 move and canto... plus the point we've hammered before about how a solo A requirement is actually much more onerous than B axes + C flying (yes, even for units with a bane in flying). Good point that it's yet another point of competition for Edelgard's unique classes, though.

Oh yeah, I agree that Wyvern Rider -> Lord takes the cake for Edelgard. ...And, like, a good third of the cast. Although, I'm not gonna hold that one against Emperor, because everyone recognizes how broken it is. Was using Warrior as a point of comparison, since it's regarded as a "not good" class. Of course, part of that "not good" reputation comes from the shadow of wyvern wings, so... it's inescapable. 

3 hours ago, Dark Holy Elf said:

in the slight defence of Emperor not having Weight-5, Edelgard does have very high strength so often she'll be able to avoid being weighed down much, especially if you have a spare slot for Weight-3, which she qualifies for easily (though obviously, that's a slot that Fortress Knight can use on something else). Ultimately I really like Emperor just having +1 move on Fortress Knight, but you're right that this comparison is much more muddied than it should be. Emperor really should have had something else to distinguish it from other armour classes, be it actually decent speed and/or the ability to use magic

While accurate, I do think players (myself included) tend to overestimate how much their Strength stat is offsetting weapon weight by. Like, take Aymr, with a modest 11 Weight. To totally offset that, organically, Edelgard would need a whopping 55 Strength. Even with Weight -3, it still takes 40 Strength - a tough sell, even by Endgame. Whereas, with just 30 Strength, a Fortress Knight Edelgard isn't losing any Speed. Incidentally, the builds "break even" here, since Emperor has 2 more Speed, but I'm not sure how fair a comparison it is if we're giving one a skill slot (for Weight -3), but not the other.

And this is magnified for heavier weapons, such as the Bolt Axe and Hammer, with 15 Weight apiece, or the 14-Weight Brave Axe and Axe of Zoltan. Throw a shield, or any weighted equippable into the mix, and the weight keeps piling on. Again, it's situational, and there'll be plenty of cases where Emperor outspeeds Fortress Knight. It's just funny to me, with the class's reputation for slowness, that Fortress Knight can (under the right conditions) outspeed Emperor.

I didn't say it, but I will acknowledge: 5 > 4. Higher movement is always better. I don't know how much of a difference it makes between these two, but it makes some measure of difference, in a direction that favors Emperor.

4 hours ago, Dark Holy Elf said:

Emperor really should have had something else to distinguish it from other armour classes, be it actually decent speed and/or the ability to use magic

All I would really ask for is that she gets to keep her Flame Emperor outfit. Such a cool suit of armor and mask, only to be replaced by a mess of red amd gold. ...Okay, her post-skip outfits aren't the worst, but we were robbed of a chance to play as Flame Emperor!

Actual gameplay answer: yeah, letting her use Magic, like a Baron, would be cool. Even if they have to cut her down to half uses for "balance". I would also consider an additional class skill, such as Commander, which she held as an enemy. Could be great for the class thematically, too.