Prior to Three Houses, the only Fire Emblems I’d played were Awakening and Fates: Conquest. I thought Awakening was a boring slog, but I liked the tight and challenging gameplay of Conquest, as well as certain aspects of the plot. I mean, taken as a whole, the plot of Conquest was kinda bad, but there were parts of it that I felt contained interesting ideas that I wish had been expanded upon more. Unlike Awakening, you weren’t exclusively fighting against cartoon villains - you were also fighting Hoshido, the archetypical good guy hero squad faction. The coolest moments in that game came from the emotional weight of fighting decent people thrust into a cruel war.

Three Houses takes that aspect of the plot and just runs with it. And unlike Fates, it actually gives you over half of the game to get to know the characters around the school before a war breaks out and forces you to fight and maybe even kill the people you once studied and trained with. This war isn’t the result of some evil king bent on world conquest, but rather a consequence of Fodlan’s broken system of crests and nobility. Edelgard, a revolutionary leader, wants to overthrow this system and the gods in order to create a world for humanity - however, of course, this path is one of conquest and bloodshed, and so it is met with opposition from the other factions, especially the Kingdom as led by Dimitri, who is so shell-shocked by the violence that massacred his family and the Duscur people that he is unable to see Edelgard as anything other than a monstrous tyrant.

This plot might not be groundbreaking, but it’s a huge step above the other Fire Emblem games I’ve played. Each faction has its own political and moral beliefs that drive its actions, and no matter which one you choose you won’t see every side of the story in one playthrough. If you side with Dimitri, who is obsessed with the past, you’ll learn about his history with Edelgard and the events that made him who he is today. This information isn’t shown to you at all on Edelgard’s route, because she’s constantly moving on from the past and who she was before. Instead, on her route you get to learn more about her true enemy, the Church of Seiros, and their crazy hot pope Lady Rhea. The way the game divvies up this information between routes and intentionally colors the player’s worldview - even outright lying to them at points - is a really clever way of showing how all factions in a war are only operating based on what they think they know, which can have tragic consequences.

The story has flaws, of course, and sometimes can be a bit cheesy or feel a bit rushed - Edelgard’s route is pretty short and low on animated cutscenes, although it is still one of the most unique routes in the game. However, the two routes I played, Edelgard’s and Dimitri’s, really stuck the landing with their ending cutscenes, the former because of the sheer exhilaration of winning the revolution in such a spectacular way, and the latter because of how much it manages to communicate about the focal characters with basically no dialogue at all, a particularly impressive bit of storytelling from a game that can be rather on the nose at times.

The music and voice acting in the game are all excellent, a delight to listen to all throughout. Chris Hackney, the voice of Dimitri, deserves especial praise for how well he handles his role and the amount of range he gives his character. Other small touches - like how the UI changes after the timeskip as well as the way new chapters are presented - go a long way to enhance the way the game feels. The gameplay isn’t quite as good as Conquest’s, but it’s still pretty fun. Lastly, I have to say I’m very glad that the horny content has been toned way down compared to the previous games. There’s obviously still some sexualized characters in the game, but the majority of them are reasonably dressed.

All in all, I would consider Three Houses a great game and I’m glad that I played it.