 LOOK AT THIS THING! IT'S FREAKING BEAUTIFUL! There's no way that a game that comes inside a box like THIS could be BAD! Right? THIS is my video on why I refuse to review Fire Emblem- No, I'm kidding. Ha ha ha ha, Xenoblade sucks. Ha ha ha! Uh, it took me a while to make this video! Obviously, the game came out a couple weeks ago and, uh, Nintendo doesn't ever give out early coffee to games anymore. So, I just had to grab it on release day and play through it and review it as soon as I could. I have a lot of things to say about this game, because it's a very big game. Obviously, I grabbed this big Seasons of Warfare pack, I pre-ordered it as soon as the pre-orders went live, and GameStop even sent me these nifty little badges, which I hated at first, but now after playing the game, I actually kinda like them and I plan on wearing my house's badge. Team Black Eagles, who's with me? I mean, it's okay if you didn't pick that house. We'll make mistakes. You'll do better next time. I have so much to say about this game that there isn't even time to fit a sponsor into the video. I just gotta get going before it's too late. So, pre-emptively like this video, you might end up hating it, but just like it anyway. Subscribe if you're new around here and let's talk about one of the best freaking games to come out this year, possibly even the best. The year isn't over yet, there's no way of knowing. Until the end of the year. I'm gonna shut up now. In Fire Emblem 3 Houses, you play as a guy who has sleeves but refuses to use them. I mean, I play as a guy. You can pick between female and male, so maybe the female character uses her sleeves if she has sleeves. Don't know. Haven't tried that yet. Maybe I'll next play through. I'm getting sidetracked already. Actually, speaking of the main character, who you can name whatever you want, but technically his name is Blythe, or Blythe, or Blythe-y. It's definitely Blythe, there's no way it's the other two. You don't really know anything about him or I guess yourself as you play through most of the story with only small clues to go on here and there. In fact, your character doesn't even know really anything about his own father. It seems like you learn about the father the same time he does. He doesn't know his father's age. In fact, he doesn't even know his own age. I don't know how this guy has got to this point in life, where he's by the way a professor at a school now and doesn't even know how old he is. I'm not gonna question it because it's a really good game. I'm just gonna shut up and keep playing. I went into Fire Emblem 3 Houses completely blind. I have dabbled in other Fire Emblem games, but I wouldn't say I've put more than five hours into the entire series as a whole. So if anything, I've played Fire Emblem more in Smash Bros. than in its own franchise. Because I really like Roy. Heh heh. So going into the franchise pretty much blind, I didn't really know what to expect, but something I definitely didn't expect was for Fire Emblem 3 Houses to borrow so many elements from the Persona series. And I'm actually a massive fan of Persona. In fact, I would say Persona 4 is my favorite JRPG of all time. So playing Fire Emblem 3 Houses and realizing that it's pretty much Persona, but with a Fire Emblem battle mechanic around it, I was down to clown around in Fire Emblem Persona Town. I mean, to start with, you play on a calendar day by day, and you have a set amount of actions you can do before you go to bed and move on to the next day in the week. And then, well, there's just so many similarities. And we're gonna get to those, but first I want to talk about what you actually do in the game. So you find yourself in this school, and you get to know all the students a little bit, and all the students fall into three different houses, led by one of three different captains, and all of those three characters are destined for something greater. Like Adelgard is destined to be an emperor, the dude I don't remember his name of because I didn't pick that house, is destined to be a king, and then Claude is destined to be a duke, I believe. Could be wrong on that one. And that's another thing! We're gonna get to it very soon, but whatever house you pick, you get to know those characters very well. I could tell you everything about my students, and not really at all with the other students, and I really love that, because it adds a lot to the replayability, and you're gonna get the scope of that pretty soon. I heard a lot of people pick Black Eagle because... Adelgard. I usually always lean towards the red teams. Going into three houses, I was determined not to pick the red team this time. I wanted to go a little bit out of my comfort zone, and immediately you get a choice of who you want to go to the school with, and I picked the yellow team. I picked Golden Deer with Claude, because he honestly seems like the most interesting guy out of the three of them. But then going to the school, we get to meet the students. I believe there's eight students in each class, and I found every single student in Black Eagle interesting or intriguing, and I wanted to learn more about them, and there was a couple of characters here and there in the other classes, like the beefcake guy in Golden Deer. I really like him, his personality reminded me of Goku, but as a whole, I didn't really like the other personalities. So even though ultimately I preferred Claude, there was just so many more characters in Black Eagle I wanted to learn about, so I picked that house, and I really made the right choice. Even though I wanted to play through again and pick the other houses to see what that's like, because, oh boy, doesn't the story get really interesting depending on what team you pick? I love that I know my students so well. There's so much dialogue between myself and each one of them, and I have very different relationships with each one of them, and then they even have their own relationships with each other. And I thoroughly appreciated that the entire game is fully voice-acted. There isn't a smidgen of dialogue that isn't read out loud. In a lot of JRPGs, the intense walls of tech start to bore a hole in my brain 50 hours in, but the fantastic, that is really great voice acting throughout the entire game really helped me remain invested. And it also helps that the story is extremely interesting, well-written, and featuring many, many exciting characters. When it comes to how the gameplay is, there is so much to unpack. I've even had a few friends tell me they love JRPGs, but Fire Emblem scares them due to how complex the gameplay appears. And I was never worried about that jumping into this game. In fact, I was excited to dive deep into some in-depth gameplay mechanics. And while there is a lot more going into Fire Emblem than other JRPGs, at the same time, it's all very, very straightforward. It's not confusing in the slightest and absolutely nothing to be scared of. The game does a fantastic job at laying out all the mechanics in front of you for you to clearly see and learn at your own pace. It doesn't overwhelm you all at once, and it's pretty simple at the end of the day. That being said, when I break all of this down, it's gonna seem like a lot. Remember, I'm cramming all of this into like a 15-minute video, and most of this stuff you kind of learn and experience over hours and hours and hours of gameplay. Okay, so to start, I love how many different ways there are to level up your character and your students. Not only do you have many different aspects and traits to each character you can level up, but there are multiple ways of teaching them those things to level them up. For example, you obviously play the role as a professor for your students, so each week you have the chance to lecture them and lead them during classes. Each student will have their own subjects they're concentrating on. For example, my Bernie is focusing on her bow skills. So during class, I teach her more about that and so on with my other students. I can set them weekly goals to complete, like taking care of the stables, and that will help them grow as well. You can also even invite guest lecturers in to teach your students. You can pick another professor or someone more skilled than you in a certain area to teach your students something new. And depending on what that lecturer can offer the class will depend on which students actually even turn up. And of course, there's also learning by doing. On the battlefield, students level up as they attack, heal, or contribute to the battle in some way. And sometimes during lessons, the students might approach you and let you know that they feel like they're better suited for another field or class. And you can help guide them in the right direction, or if you feel like you don't really want them to be focusing on that thing, you can shut it down and keep them focused on what they need, or really what you need. And don't think it ends there because that's just the beginning. Think about it. If you're going into battle, would you rather be standing next to a stranger or someone you trust, a friend? Building relationships between these characters help immensely. You can talk with students, get to know them, invite them to tea or a meal. You can give them gifts or find lost items throughout the world and return them to them. Listen to your students' conversations with each other as they grow and get to know each other too. Sometimes characters will leave notes asking questions about their studies or even their life in general and you can offer them advice. Sometimes you give good advice and other times you don't. That was good advice. Vegetables or sleep ain't making you any taller. All of this will help build bonds between your characters, which will directly affect their performance on the battlefield, boosting attacks or creating a stronger defense. And most of that will also boost their morale and keeping them in high spirits will increase the amount of knowledge they will learn and maintain during classes. And then, as I said, depending on what house you pick, we'll vastly change all of these experiences as well. You'll have completely different units on the battlefield, wanting to learn completely different things and interacting with you and each other and say it with me, completely different ways. And it's not all about your students either. There's also you and your character. Just because you're a professor doesn't mean you can't learn a lot more too. Not only from other knowledgeable elders around campus, but even your own students. Oh, and the reward for gaining all this knowledge beyond the obvious is that you can sit down for exams and you have a better chance of passing. These exams give yourself or your students a class that will help further boost their stats. Again, all of that seems like a lot and there's even more on top of it. But it's really not that overwhelming as you're playing. It all kind of just makes sense. The only real overwhelming parts is for one, deciding what you're going to do on the day you're given a choice. If you want to explore, hold a lecture, go into battle or rest. That's always a big toss up. But the other overwhelming thing is when you pick explore and you load into the campus and you bring up your map and you see all of those freaking conversations. It really is every single day. Every single character will have something new to say and then you have to run around this campus completing goals and quests and finding lost items while you talk to everyone all over again. Most games like this, I enjoy the strategic gameplay as much as the next guy. Games like Wargroove, for example, which was a perfect tie of a game while I waited for Fire Emblem to release. It was fun for sure, but I had no connection with the characters. Okay, maybe the main characters to some extent from what I saw in the story, but that was about it. The generic units on the battlefield, they were just pawns to be placed in battle, live or die as long as I won and my main characters survived. I didn't care. But in Fire Emblem, they aren't just random units I'm controlling. As corny as it sounds, they truly are my students. I know so much about them. They're their weaknesses, their strengths, their personalities. I've taught them everything they know. Their failures feel like my failures. I don't want to see a single one of them fall on the battlefield. Heck, Lin Hart told me straight up during a conversation we had after class. He hates killing people and wants to focus on his healing white magic. So while I'm playing, I'm doing my best to make him hang back and focus on the healing. And that feels kind of dumb because I know it's just a game at the end of the day, but I'm so invested in these characters and my playthrough that if he doesn't want to kill anyone, I'm not gonna make him. You know, until we're fighting giant beasts and birds and then he's slaughtering things all over the place, but that's a different story. He didn't say anything about that. Oh, and I guess while we're on the battles, I don't think I really have to dive into them too much. Each player takes a turn moving their units, chess pieces, characters, whatever you want to call them around the battlefield. Each unit gets to move once and then do one action. There are exceptions to that rule, obviously, but for the most part, that's the rules. And one thing I really appreciate is that you can hire battalions to work for each individual character. They can do a range of different things from attacking to healing, but the thing that I like is seeing them during the battle animations. It adds to the scale of the battlefield. But if I'm getting nitpicky, there are a few things they could have done a little better and maybe it's just me, but maybe it's not. The inventory menus are clunky and I never got used to them. Trading items between characters is a confusing mess. You only have a few slots to work with for each character, which is fine, but it gets annoying on the battlefield every time you find a rusted bow and it halts the gameplay to ask you what you want to do with it because your character's hands are full. Like, just throw the freaking thing into the convoy. That's obviously what I'm going to do with it. Why can't it automatically just default to the convoy? Same goes for even if I have a free slot. If your character does have one, obviously it just goes on its post no matter what it is or how irrelevant it is to that character. So at the end of every battle, I have to go into the inventory, the clunky inventory, and take out whatever it was and then put it in the convoy myself. That's a very, very small complaint, but when there's already so much to do, the last thing I want to do is constant inventory management, which it feels like that's what it is after every battle. And also, hmm, pretty much the entire story outside of the really amazing animated cutscenes, which I love and there's not nearly enough of. Everything else is delivered by the character standing in front of still background images. Now, this is a perfectly fine way of doing things, even though it's not preferred for me. I did know that's what Fire Emblem was like before going into it, so I can't complain about that. I bought into this knowing. But at the very least, they could have created some cleaner set pieces. Some of the backgrounds are just an eyesore, especially while playing on a TV. It's fine. It doesn't really ruin the experience for me at all, but having some nice, clean, crisp, beautiful background visuals that maybe even have like moving water or something, would add it to the overall polish of the game. Doesn't change anything, doesn't take away from the game, but nicer backgrounds definitely would have added to the game. These are two very, very, very tiny small complaints on an otherwise near perfect package. Honestly, I would give this game an 8, maybe an 8.5, maybe even a 9 out of 10. I am absolutely in love and adoring my experience with Fire Emblem, but having said all of that, there's like a billion cats and dogs throughout the world, which is great, except you can't pet any of them. You can't interact with any of them in any way. In fact, you just go to walk right through them. I think that's just a crawl and unusual form of punishment. And for that, it knocks the game down to a three, a three out of 10. Better luck next time, Fire Emblem. It's still like a solid eight, maybe nine, but a two because of the dogs. Oh, and again, all of that was like the part one of the game. Going into part two. I mean, depending again on what house you picked, it's where things really start to shake up and change. And I don't want to spoil any of it. Almost a completely different direction, but following the same structure, but it's better. It gets a lot better. It gets really interesting. But yeah, it starts going all over the place. A lot of it is really ham-fisted. I just didn't even really pay attention to any of it, but you are picking a house that has a leader in it, a captain that's destined to, you know, as I said, be an emperor or a king or whatever Claude's going to be of the different regions. So, I mean, eventually these people are going to grow up, leave school, be like the leader of people. If anything goes wrong, I wonder what team you picked to be on because you're going to be stuck with them, baby. All right, whatever. If this video helped you in some way, if you learned a little something or if you just had a good time here, make sure you Sakurai Super Smash that like button. Hey, flip all over that subscribe button. Click on top of one of these videos because they were probably also good, more fantastic content coming your way soon. Whatever, I don't know when I make it. Sometimes things just work out perfectly. This camera is literally about to die any second and there's only two minutes of space left on the SD card and my video is done. I have nothing left to say other than wait for it to die. Which could happen any second? Oh, there's one more thing I forgot.