I'm glad that more people are going back to this game and realizing it was never good to begin it.

LIS's story and dialogue are horrible and downright cringe-worth at times, the graphics look dated and uncanny even for 2015 standards, the puzzle elements are not very well-implemented and the main relationship is incredibly toxic and one-sided no matter how much the game tries to gaslight and manipulate you into liking it, the ending also completely throws away the ENTIRE POINT of choices and erases everything you did so far, making the entire “butterfly effect” gimmick POINTLESS. The game got some good moments and a couple of okay characters, but everything else is bad or messy as hell.

To say that Fire Emblem Three Houses is a disappointment is the understatement of a century. There is a solid foundation of a setting and potential ambitious narrative pieces to be told here but almost everything surrounding it's execution is beyond dreadful. First things first, it does not understand how to handle it's own story structure. There are 4 routes, 5 if you play the DLC, but two of those routes are utterly worthless and retread the exact same plot threads, events and themes with nothing but slightly different endings which even then just comes down to one of them having a cutscene chopped in half. Silver Snow and Verdant Wind are the exact same story with a different lord that does the exact same thing anyway. On top of this, there's a ton of artificial padding from them not being able to balance the pacing of the gameplay and the story. The Monastery seems cool at first but when you realize that there's nothing to do across the 200+ hours this game will take you, you get so burned out of the social aspect of this game and how worthless most of it is. Especially when almost everything in the Monastery, besides recruiting which only matters for pre-skip anyway, is accessible in menus outside of it and other things like character dialogue or cooking can only be done once every 4 times you visit. And although this is a Switch game that I don't expect The Witcher or Elden Ring level visuals, this game is extremely ugly to look at. Half of the character designs are poor, the art style is poor, there is a HILARIOUS lack of portraits that detract from the story, the graphics look horrible, the colours are bad and the art direction/architecture is very uninspired.
Gameplay, for a strategy RPG, is genuinely pathetic. I have played visual novels with better gameplay balancing and design than this. Maps in this game are utterly worthless. There's about 10-15 at a stretch that are already just reskins with barely anything unique about them scenario wise or mechanically then to get rehashed to oblivion being used in quite literally every kind of battle to the point that you get sick of all of them by the time you're done with your first route. That is genuinely pathetic.
I also think that this is the first game I've played where permadeath genuinely does not matter. The units, both allied and enemy, are so poorly balanced on any difficulty that they game just becomes "send Byleth and your Lord to solo it" after you reach about level 10. Every enemy is a straight up joke due to the freedom you get.

Narrative wise, Three Houses flops between barely passable with some good characters and moments scattered between to dreadfully pathetic. The world building is poor. Things integral to a lot of the themes they attempt to showcase aren't fleshed out at all like the class system, social systems and the general status of each nation's commonfolk as well as how they're affected by the events.
Verdant Wind is supposed to be focused on geopolitics in the midst of a civil war as well as overcoming xenophobia except other nations exist in name only. They have absolutely zero impact on the plot of the route whatsoever and only ever get brought up in support conversations and a single Paralogue. On top of that, the actual main theme and goal is never actually achieved in the story making the whole thing incomplete. They never actually get to a point to solve or even confront the issue of geopolitics and xenophobia. They just throw it in a single sentence summary before the credits.
Azure Moon is a step up but suffers in it's own way. It's repetitive, poorly paced and is full of plot conveniences that serve to defecate on the themes and subject matter present in this route along with horrendous gameplay/narrative cohesion that they abide by or ignore at their own convenience really making integral turning points of the story not hit at all.
Silver Snow I can't even justify as it being a separate route. It is quite literally Verdant Wind with a few extra cutscenes tacked onto it. There is no reason why the two had to be separate routes besides just being a lazy way to pad out the game to make it seem even bigger and more ambitious.
Crimson Flower is the route with the most drastic change but is also the one impacted the worst by the lazy writing. It's the shortest, the one with the most conveniences and probably the laziest one in terms of writing. The entire concept that this route stands on is misrepresenting the others to try and parade itself as a "true" or "correct" route while also doing everything it can to avoid confronting it's subject matter head on in a thought provoking way. It honestly feels like the Lord's romanticized echo chamber more than anything else. On top of this, there are numerous plot holes created by the ending either not explaining certain plot elements or just outright contradicting itself.

Characters are a mixed bag which is unsurprising coming from a cast as big as this one and a game with writing as clumsy. The good characters are very good with great interactions and supports with good thematic exploration but generally have no place in the story because they're "expendable;" made to be removed with as little impact as possible due to permadeath. The great ones that I personally enjoyed were Linhardt, Lysithea, Seteth, Flayn, Sylvain, Felix, Cyril and Hilda. Some were pretty middling despite great setup like Ingrid who dwells on the waifubait aspect of her character far too much in her supports and Paralogue. The bad ones are horrible. Marianne and Bernadetta are genuinely insulting. Bernadetta makes a complete joke out of her subject matter while Marianne completely trivializes it in the most insulting way possible.
The Lords aren't really mixed though as I didn't like any of their characters. They all had potential but were extremely underexplored. Dimitri's character is lazy and the depiction of his mental health issues are frankly terrible from both a narrative and dialogue standpoint. The potential dynamic with Edelgard is pretty solid but Byleth, and ironically, Edelgard get in the way of it. All of his other dynamics and supports besides Dedue are very incomplete.
Claude is probably the Lord with the most potential but also the least explored. He's characterized as charismatic and shrewd with a very particular social detachment as the game's token master tactician but none of this is actually elaborated on or confronted. He does a few morally detached things in search for his goals but we never actually see his goals to fruition and they're never actually made a talking point.
Edelgard is...a thing. And not a good one. The main story bends over backwards to remove her agency and accountability to anything she does making her seem like a bumbling idiot but also glorifying her and, to put it crudely, sucking her off at any opportunity. Never letting any of her morally reprehensible actions actually be morally reprehensible because there must always be someone else to blame whether it's the victims or the people she's fighting against. Her trauma isn't explored they just make a point that she HAS trauma that drives her with very little actual elaboration, exploration or anything to help her progress and overcome her trauma.
Rhea is honestly a solid character in anything but Crimson Flower which very much mischaracterizes her in an attempt to drive Edelgard's point across. She's morally reprehensible but they do actually confront that and make it a talking point in routes she gets a direct focus while giving her a bit of nuance.

All in all, Fire Emblem Three Houses is a mess of a a game that has potential but suffers from very lazy/sloppy writing and extremely poor game design that has very little effort put into it. I went into this hoping for a great time but came out of it with very little to like. Do yourself a favor and play a good SRPG like Valkyria Chronicles or even Utawarerumono. If you enjoy lazy world building, mostly half assed character writing/drama, terrible game design and the most underexplored themes I've experienced in a singleplayer game, you'll like Fire Emblem Three Houses.

soulless dialogues
lazy designs
poorly written characters
empty game "not many items are there" and money is pure useless
cliche ambition villain edelgard "I have to do it because... why? umm I don't know but I have to do it even if I turn into a monster"
boring repetitive unchallengeable matches
...
holyy shit this game is so bad I can't believe how much praise this game got...

This game sucks so bad, holy shit. Absolutely horrible multiplayer experience that incentivises continuous play through addiction under the pretense that "it gets good when you win" or that "it gets good once you understand it". Obnoxious, souless, uninspired characters that either reek of corporate pandering or made with the intention of pissing the player off as much as possible, a monotonous gameplay loop, abysmal balancing, this game has it all. Regardless of what happens, you will be flamed by teammates, Riot will do nothing about it, and you'll probably feel more demoralised than you ever have in your entire life. I'm convinced the content creators and esports athletes for this game aren't real people.

Do not trust anyone who says this game is fun.

Odd music choices, boring social sim elements riddled with fetch quests and monotony, reused content between routes and poor balancing among many other things make this the second weakest Fire Emblem game in my eyes. But its also still Fire Emblem so its still perfectly enjoyable. These are just my personal extreme nitpicks, and chances are if you can look past them, or if this is your first Fire Emblem, you'll like this.

It doesn't even feel like a Fire Emblem game until part II, and even then, that's where the writing falls off. Dimitri and Edelgard are hypocrites, Rhea and the church are full of shit, and Claude wants to end racism I guess?? I mean his route is honestly written far better than the others probably because his inclusion feels like a last ditch effort to add a "Neutral" route of sorts, where you don't side with any extreme party. None of your choices matter aside from the house you choose, because instead of the route split taking place at the midway point, y'know, the part of the game where the content for each route actually starts being different (at least story wise. Most of the maps are re-used between routes, lol.), its at the very beginning, and you're locked into that for the whole game, unless you chose Black Eagles because they gave that route a route split of its own and not the others for some reason.

Cursor and map movement feels sluggish compared to pretty much every game prior, meaning making satisfying, quick decisions through menuing is basically gone, though the switch's d-pad being as bad as it is doesn't help matters. Map design is definitely better than Fates' Birthright and Revelation offerings, but that isn't a high bar, and Conquest still trounces Three Houses in this area. Its clear that this game absolutely LOVES ambush spawns, especially mid-turn ones. Normally I'd praise the turnwheel for allowing players to undo strategic mistakes instead of just soft resetting to circumvent permadeath, but a lot of maps seem to use it as a crutch for bad, unfair map design (especially in maddening) instead of being a proper qol feature.

There's a notably low production value compared to not only the 3ds games, but almost everything that came before it. The cutscenes aren't as well animated and in many cases a fade to black or still image pop-up is shown instead of what's assumedly happening. Every character conversation uses the same, still, warped pngs instead of having characters actually appear in 3d areas like in awakening and fates, or beautifully illustrated stills like in echoes. The fact that supports are encouraged far more here than any other game, given the social sim monestary sections, and them basically being required to recruit characters aside from reaching the bloated stat thresholds makes this ever more apparent.

Byleth is probably one of, if not the worst silent protagonists I've ever had the displeasure of controlling. Not only does everyone consistently suck on his inflated growth rates, stats, and long, extendable prf weapon, but he has absolutely no personality, and almost all of the multiple dialogue choices are things I wouldn't say if I were in his place. At least in the cases of Kris, Robin and Corrin, they have pre-established personalities, motives and character relationships. As "perfect" as Kris was, and as much of a mary sue as Corrin was, I'd take them over Byleth any day of the week.

Actually aquiring more units sucks. They're all locked behind the social sim stuff, or high stat thresholds, which means if you want to recruit everyone you just spam tea-time, eating together and gifts. This gets boring fast, and made up a huge chunk of my playtime, since the game punishes you for not doing this. The average FE game takes 15-30 hours, but this one took 50. Don't acknowledge any of that stuff about building supports if you're Caspar or Ferdinand, by the way, because for some reason, they are the only characters in the entire game who have their B supports locked behind timeskip, meaning you need to get their desired proficiencies up...both of which being things I wouldn't normally want to invest into Byleth. Gauntlets are at least a good weapon class, but considering Byleth's prf weapon is a sword, and mounted classes are unable to use them, there's very little incentive to invest into them. In Ferdinand's case, you need to level up Armour proficiency, because the idea of making the best unit in the game a slow armour knight with truncated movement, slow speed to compliment Hard mode enemies' unreasonably higher scaled speed stats and lack of Swordfaire sure sounds like the optimal build choice. Needless to say, I only found out about this in the last month of part 1, which also gives you fewer opportunities to do faculty training, when there are only two faculty members (with one being completely abscent for several chapters) who even increase armour rank. I was able to recruit Caspar, but Ferdinand being relegated to the only unrecruited character on the route I chose really rubbed me the wrong way.

What's worse is that, during the war phase, you can't convince them to join you, like you'd normally be able to in any other Fire Emblem game. You're forced to kill them, because the clear conditions for the maps that they show up in are "Defeat all commanders", and any playable unit in part 1 is dictated to be a commander by the map designers. Oh, but there's actually a single, arbitrary recruitable character per route for some reason. Yes, some characters that you recruit in part 1 become recruitable enemies in part 2, but you just have to beat them with Byleth and you get them back. There's no unique recruitment conversation between the enemy and an army member of yours that they have a connection to, they just say "Okay! You beat me professor, since you decided to spare me I'll join you!", and become playable again going forward or in the case of unrecruitable characters in part 2 - even if their best friend, or cousin, or sibling, or whatever tries to fight them, its always a "fight to the death". Why does, for example, in Black Eagles, only Lysithea get to join you and proceed to murder her former classmates, but even though Claude can be spared on the very same map, Hilda can't? Even when confronted by Balthus, or Marianne?

One thing that I personally hate, (though this is more of a personal nitpick than a genuine criticism towards the game), is the lack of unit identity. In any other FE game, characters join with a specific class, stats, growths, but in this game, any character can be anything. Yes, Awakening, Fates and Echoes all had sandbox-y elements when it came to building characters, but they still had established roles, professions and boons. This mostly doesn't matter since unrecruited characters have specific class paths that they take as the game progresses, which they keep when joining you, and characters that you start with come with pre-existing boons and banes or have story related classes or promotions. This is still very different from the fixed classes and roles of previous entries, and it changes my choice of units from "who would be best to deploy to handle this map's enemies" to "I'll just level the girls with big boobs (and Lindhart) into mostly fliers, horse riders and support bots". My biggest complaint regarding this rears its head when it comes to the Dancer class. I hate how, instead of the game allocating a dancer for me, I have to sacrifice one of my combat units to become a support bot. I chose Marianne, since I consulted forums on who the best option was, yet she finished the game having a higher magic stat than some of my other offensive mages. I still tried giving her levels in reason and faith, but it didn't matter because she was dancing half the time anyway, especially in the late-game maps that I 1-2 turned because my patience with the game was reaching its limit. She became a valuable part of my army, yes, but she was relegated to dancing out of enemy range so that my other characters could get all the work done, instead of doing more. You can't allocate more than one student as a dancer either, so she's locked into the class, and not using it would be a waste.

I don't have much to say for the soundtrack besides it being this weird orchestral-dubstep mishmash. It doesn't sound like fire emblem until the map themes in part 2, and even then the soundtrack is very derivative of itself, with a lot of tracks using the same recycled motif. It doesn't have the same feeling as the triumphant military marches of Archanaea or Jugdral, the boisterous, striking, orchestral themes of Tellius, Ylisse and Valentia, or even the culturally relevant European and Japanese tracks of Fates. To this game's credit though, God Shattering Star is fantastic, but it also only heard at the very end of the game.

Needless to say, I didn't like this much, even as a longtime FE fan. I may get branded as an elitist, but I actually started with Awakening and still like it a lot today. I don't think three houses is actually a bad video game, but its certainly a bad Fire Emblem game.

if this were fire emblem: fates and each house leader got their own game, they'd be called
fire emblem: girlboss gatekeep gaslight
fire emblem: they don't know i have daddy issues
fire emblem: himbo hooters

Currently replaying this game and honestly, I don't really have strong feelings about it anymore. the super bland maps are pretty mind-numbing, and the minimalistic gameplay makes me want to not play. I love this game's presentation and execution as a remake but the gameplay, story and characters are pretty depthless. Regardless, this game was a contender for best fe and favorite game ever when it came out, but I guess I've grown as a gamer and I don't think I'll come back again after I finish this playthrough.

Chapter 22 of FE5 is a commentary on the idea of a "fair fight" in the context of warfare. Leif is not backed by the force of an army, he's leading a small rebel force to reclaim his homeland and unify Thracia. Up against Reinhardt, who is a top general in one of the continent's strongest military forces, Leif has no chance in a battle that would be seen as fair. As such, he has to use warp staves to kill the commander and end the battle early. This brand of tactic is usually seen as underhanded or as "cheesing the game", but is it? How is it unfair for Leif to use what little resources are available but seemingly fine for Reinhardt to come down on him with the entire force of Freege when Leif's entire army comprises less than 50 people.

To bring this back to the idea that warp strats are the only way for Leif to win, it's worth noting that you get a warp staff from a village right next to your starting position. Because of this citizen giving Leif the warp staff, it becomes possible for any player to beat this map with as little risk of failure as possible. Thracia's freedom from the empire was not won through fair strategy, it was won through the citizens working together to fight back.