Fire Emblem: Three Houses was released for the Nintendo Switch worldwide on July 26, 2019, and quickly soared to popularity due to its impressive voice acting, elaborate story and setting, and amazing strategical gameplay system. The game is welcoming to new players, such as myself, but also differs from the previous Fire Emblem games to bring a breath of fresh air to veterans of the franchise. While the game does become a bit repetitive and slightly slow at times, it is an incredible game overall that is well worth the cost.

The story begins with you taking up a job as a professor in a monastery. You choose a house of eight students to lead, and each house represents one of the three territories within the land of Fódlan. Dimitri is the prince of the Holy Kingdom of Faerghus and leads the Blue Lion House, Claude is the future leader of the Leicester Alliance and is in charge of the Golden Deer House, and Edelgard is the Adrestian Empire’s princess and leader of the Black Eagle House. Each of the house leaders has a unique and dynamic personality and backstory, and it’s a pure delight unraveling their story as your own unfolds. Regardless of which house you pick, the game is bound to draw you in for hours and hours of gameplay, which, in short, consists of free days and battles. Free days can be spent exploring the monastery, hosting seminars, battling, or resting. Exploring enables you to complete side quests and bond with your students, seminars and battling raise their skills, and resting raises their motivation. Battling is a turn-based system and is reminiscent of chess in several ways. The strongest similarity, though, is that different “classes” of units have different ways of moving and attacking (ex. a cavalier unit can move farther than an archer unit, but archers can attack from further away). You can move, heal, and attack during your turn, and after all of your units have taken action, the enemy’s turn begins and so on until there is a victor.

The replay value for FE:3H is immense considering each path leads you through a different story, especially after the five-year time skip. The issue with this, however, is that the paths are largely the same until the skip, which occurs about halfway through the game. During my second run-through of the game, I didn’t mind very much since I was now armed with more knowledge about the plot and was able to understand the overall story better. However, by my third run, the first half of the game became extremely tiring because of repetitive, reused battle maps and especially during the free day monastery portions. While exploring is fun every once in a while, tasks quickly begin to become repetitive and boring. I found myself only using the “Explore” option to quickly strengthen the bonds with my students and largely ignored the optional sidequests. The more I played, the mild boredom the free days induced was replaced with annoyance, since in my eyes it began to evolve more and more into filler content to stretch the length of the game and to block me from progressing the story. While I did need the pacing sometimes, 3 or so free days between every major story event eventually became extremely tiresome.

Although I know many people find the graphics to be subpar compared to other Switch games, I honestly didn’t mind it that much. Anything the (admittedly, rather grainy) character models lacked was more than made up for by the voice acting. Every single line of dialogue in the game is voiced, which I was astounded with, considering a single run lasts around 40 hours, there are multiple storylines, and about 35 prominent roles. While some characters, like Claude, have a better voice actor than others, all of the acting is extremely well done considering how much dialogue there is within the game. It immersed me a lot more in the story and added another facet to their personalities. The “Support” cutscenes, although mostly useless from a gameplay standpoint, also enabled me to become much more attached to the characters than I otherwise would have, and presented yet another insight to their personalities as well as sometimes providing some comic relief.

Overall, Fire Emblem: Three Houses was an absolute delight. I had never played a strategy game before, but FE:3H hooked me on the genre and I will definitely be seeking other strategy-based games in the future, as well as other Fire Emblem titles. If you can get past the repetition after your first run and the slightly disappointing graphics, it is still immersive, fun, and well worth your time and money. The story is great, the characters are interesting and dynamic, and the gameplay is extremely enjoyable and easy to learn. I’d highly recommend it to any story lover or RPG fan, as well as anyone who wants to try something rather different and sink their teeth into a game they’ll find hard to put down.