(Beat Crimson Flower on Hard.)

Three Houses has one of the more interesting Fire Emblem stories by virtue of actually having themes (and surprisingly ambitious ideas about class, religion, and war--though I don't know if every path is quite as interesting or as complex as the Black Eagles') and branching paths that make at least a couple of your choices genuinely matter. However, exploration of these big ideas is occasionally too spread out by repetitive story beats. Take a shot for every "here's a never-before-mentioned place of strategic significance, we need it!" mission. These less dramatic moments are at least elevated by a charming cast of characters. Even if they lean into archetypal anime tropes a bit too much, they remain memorable, and reading through Support conversations is always a highlight--so long as you don't have so many back-to-back that you get sick of them.

Story missions are interspersed with vignettes with gorgeous, pseudo-medieval art. I honestly wish all of the game's portraits and designs were done in this style; it stands out in a powerful way. Still, the clean and decidedly modern anime-style art the game ended up with looks good in its own right.

The bulk of your time, however, will be spent on leisurely Persona-style social and teaching sequences at the monastery. These start out charming, but by the end, they start to feel like going through the motions. There is very little unique content here; it's all just a few simplistic mechanics, repeated dozens of times. This only accentuates how bare it really is. You might get to read a few dialogue boxes where characters comment vaguely on the current narrative goings-on. You might find a lost item, which involves guesstimating who might have lost it (god forbid you be able to ask other students "who do you think this might belong to?" to get to know the characters better) or, if you care enough to even bother, just asking everyone until you get it right. You might have teatime, where you simulate having a conversation with someone to raise your bond. This sounds neat--more conversations with dialogue choices, great, even if it is just a frivolous slice-of-life minigame. Except, in contrast to the support conversations, teatime offers no actual conversation to read, just the suggestion of one. It's not awful, but it all rings slightly hollow. It clearly wants to crib from content-rich JRPGs with life-sim elements like Persona. It's been a while since I played Persona 5, so maybe I'm misremembering, but I recall the depth and quality of the side content being worlds beyond Three Houses' offerings, even if Atlus's games have their fair share of padding too. It's cool to see that Fire Emblem tried something new, but it seems like there was a mismatch between their scope and their resources here.

You can automate these parts, but given that you miss out on making choices which meaningfully impact your units' performance during the fun part of the game, it just feels bad to do so. You can also spend your free time playing side battles, which are typically only interesting when tied to a character's backstory. Otherwise, they feel like shameless grinding opportunities when they're easy, and time-wasters when they're not. Three Houses has about 25 hours of the best Fire Emblem game ever in it, but the game is a generous 60 hours.

Within missions, the gameplay is as smooth as ever. The level design isn't always the most interesting, but it's consistently serviceable. Fire Embem's famous "weapon triangle"--axe beats lance beats sword beats axe--is technically gone, but it's just replaced with optional abilities that achieve nearly the same thing, so it's only sort of gone. The abilities themselves can be a bit overwhelming (and it took me longer than I'd like to admit to realize you can swap them out for new ones)--there's a lot of room for character customization and optimization, but without actually learning how the formulas for the different stats work, it's all a bit much to keep track of. I'm sure there's plenty to chew on for the hardcore challenge runners out there, but for those of us who just enjoy fiddling around with the classes and abilities that look fun, I'm not sure if all those options meaningfully improved my experience, since I never felt encouraged to experiment and actually learn how best to use them.

Monsters are one of the big new mechanics, and they kind of suck. Occasionally, they make for interesting strategic choices, but they're often just annoying bags of hit points and gambit tollbooths. They do require you adapt your strategy, but in my experience, that often just meant "do everything in your power to kill them in one turn, and if you can't, play extremely conservatively until you can." After their introduction, I don't think I ever saw a monster without groaning.

Divine Pulse feels like a great addition that reflects how people actually play Fire Emblem--sure, characters can die, but I will reload 99% of the time that happens. The other 1% is when it happens to a character I don't love in the final mission (rest in peace Hubert, Alois, and Ferdinand, who died in the name of killing the pope). Now, I don't have to reload. I can just get back to having fun in seconds rather than minutes (though I wish I didn't have to skip to my turn to use it every time a non-essential character dies; it's a difference of seconds, but I felt every one of those seconds). The later levels are balanced around having over a dozen or so rewinds, which is objectively fair, but more annoying than interesting in play. The abundance of unpredictable reinforcements and monsters in this stretch of the game feels like a deliberate attrition on Pulses. I think I would prefer a lighter touch on difficulty with more limited rewinds.

Still, for as many little issues as I have, Fire Emblem is fundamentally fun, and this game, for better and worse, is a whole lot of Fire Emblem. I would love to see a title with Three Houses' ambition and depth paired with the tightness (and the stylish pixel art, while I'm asking for things that will never happen) of the GBA games. Until then, this game will have to do.