Fire Emblem Three Houses is a game about being an academic who was given a prestigious position as a legacy hire because the dean is trying to fuck your dad, and trying to understand how to do your job that no one has trained you for while being sexually harassed by all your students
it’s hilarious if you imagine it as a sort of reverse Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court wherein you’ve been transported into an Updike novel and you’re trying desperately to respect women
there is also a hilarious mechanic where you can try to make the other students like you enough to transfer into your class, which is how you get them in your party, with the eventual goal of leaving the senior faculty (who also hit on you relentlessly) with no students at all
I am extremely good at this game
another nice realistic touch is that all of your students are extremely wealthy and seem to have no concept of how money works whereas you were basically living in the woods as of a month ago and are now expected to purchase school supplies for everyone out of the meagre salary you receive
I like to imagine the fishing minigame as the one place my poor protagonist can go to gather his thoughts for a while
meanwhile he’s deliberately calling on students whose names he can’t remember in class because the known is generally more upsetting than the unknown
there’s one older professor who mostly seems to want to do eugenics research on you and it’s comparatively relieving to spend time with him because it’s one of the few places where if something goes badly wrong it doesn’t seem like it’ll plausibly be your fault
part of the Pnin Cinematic Universe
stop making me want to play a fire emblem game felix
I can’t handle that kind of commitment in my life right now
it’s like if someone combined Harry Potter with 8 1/2
every interaction is a terrifying puzzle from which you’re trying to escape without someone fixing their big eyes on you and a heart meter steadily growing
Jesus Christ now I wanna play this dumb thing
I might move this to its own thread, I had a good time doing my deranged cao cao roleplay recently
trying desperately to find the gay students I heard about from the marketing copy so I know who it’s safe to be alone with
[something something] college admission brochures [something something]
so you thought they got rid of rock paper scissors, what actually happened?
they did
weapons just dictate which skill trees you have now and class restricts which ones you can use, just like any other strategy game
there’s still like, incentive to use ranged or magic or melee depending on positioning obviously, but no more arbitrary melee rock paper scissors
there might be piercing vs crushing defense too idk I only played for 90 minutes
well fuck now im curious too, ill play it in a couple years when its on sale
I’ve been mildly interested in these games but I’m a little nervous the battles aren’t all that deep or interesting. From what I’ve seen it’s just moving units next to each other and attacking. It would be cool if the system was as complex as Into the Breach but I don’t get that sense from what I’ve seen. Am I wrong?
it’s arguably a step behind other modern tactics games in terms of initial complexity, they really emphasize the buddying up part
I will let you know if it gets more complicated
please be patient with me on this 1
PS my actual verdict on this is that it’s fundamentally only OK in terms of how much it respects your time and makes decisions meaningful – it reminds me of how vakyria chronicles always failed to be more than OK because the maps were too large and the unit customization was almost nonexistent and it was content to carry on in this very rote japanese SRPG mold and hope that the chracterization made the extreme languidity half-work.
the good news is that this is by far the best that one of these games has ever been, and I’m including all of valkyria / fire emblem / persona in there for my purposes. most of the fundamental strategy does boil down to trying to prevent your units from getting two-shot, but you actually have a lot of movement and knockback abiilties you can pick and mix in order to customize your team from like the second battle onward, and even though your loadouts seem really flabby and the condition of “don’t lose a single ally, ever” is difficult to justify as good game design, they give you lots of tools and make you use them.
also, if it weren’t clear from my posts earlier in the thread, I think they’ve finally made the whose s-link love fest element about as contextual successful as possible; fire emblem has always seemed more like an NES design interpreted through a butter-injected mobile game to me, and the switch is about as kind to that structure as I can imagine.
also I have no idea how these fonts are passing QA
like every single menu-based game lately ships with text that’s at most 75% as large as it should be, even on PC at average DPIs
I just had laser eye and I have perfect vision! this isn’t even that much of an old man complaint!
are the characters in-game affected by permadeath? are there funeral minigames