At a time when the egotism and idiocy of a generation of private schoolboys threatens to plunge Britain beneath the waves, there is something strangely comforting about Fire Emblem: Three Houses, a fantasy role-playing game in which you essentially train up a bunch of budding Etonians on behalf of the Spanish Inquisition. Set in the “olde worlde” of Fódlan, the game casts you as a young professor at Garreg Mach Monastery, a warlike religious school for the offspring of princes from three rival nations.
Over the course of an 80-hour plot (with the option to play through twice more for different outcomes), you’ll side with the ruler-to-be of one country, hone a class of privileged whelps into fearsome warriors, and unravel a conspiracy involving diabolical relics and ancient gods. Oh, and there’s a peculiar girl trapped in your subconscious mind who gives you the power to rewind time when battles run awry. It’s quite the epic, and takes a while to get into its stride, but once you’ve acclimatised to its baroque mixture of boarding school daydream and turn-based strategy, Fire Emblem: Three Houses absolutely sings.
The story unfolds according to an academic calendar, each month concluding with a battle, and it’s up to you how spend that time. You can hold classes, tutoring your pupils individually to work on particular skills and setting group assignments like cleaning out the stables. You can wander the sumptuous campus, socialising with students and faculty members, chasing down the owners of lost items, weaselling out optional quests and indulging in a spot of fishing or gardening.
It is a slice-of-life game with a mercenary edge. You’ll throw tea parties, buy gifts from the market and butter people up with chitchat, all with a view to boosting each student’s motivation. You’ll put the most advanced through exams to unlock new character classes and skill sets, from archers to Wyvern Knights. You might also kindle a romance with one of your disciples, a slightly queasy prospect even though nothing goes beyond flirting until everybody graduates – and not helped by the odd sleazy or infantilising scene involving female characters.
Above all, you will sift through ream upon ream of dialogue. There are dozens of characters in Three Houses, and they each boast a novella’s worth of dialogue. The Teflon-coated aristo with a rose in his lapel; the opera diva who needs booze to get through the day; the class lech; the low-born girl trying to marry into wealth – there are so many personalities to unravel and, while there are awkward notes the script is crisp and colourful, done full justice by energetic panto voice-acting.
In battle, you move your pupils around a grid, not just matching the right skill set to enemy (wielders of black magic fare well against hulking knights in armour) but ensuring that fighters are paired with their best mates. Combat in Three Houses lacks the puzzle-game immediacy of previous Fire Emblems: positioning feels less vital, and there’s no longer a simple rock-paper-scissors relationship between types of weapon.
However, the game offers more depth, with optional support battalions and characters whose abilities can be tweaked by instructing them to focus on different techniques in class. Playing in “classic” mode means that characters disappear from your lineup forever once killed; this brings a thrilling element of danger, though the narrative consequences are surprisingly mild.
It all adds up to a new lease of life for one of Nintendo’s younger series, bolstered by revised combat and a gorgeous new look that endows these 3D characters with the grace and style of older games’ portrait art. By turns grandiose and silly, but always engrossing, this bubbling school soap opera is a game to spend a summer with.
