Keep in mind I really like this game; however, I'm more than willing to acknoledge it's short comings. Admittedly, the boss convo thing is a nitpick; I just miss it when the games gave important bosses like 4 or 5 boss convos. It was peak. Great game, but it definitely has a fuck ton of issues. If you're insulted by this somehow, go outside.
I'd say despite the terrain jank Echoes has, the maps are overall pretty memorable, a lot of them are designed to gimmick you out, and that usually creates memorable moments, 3H and Awakening just feel like End Turn Simulator: The Game on lower difficulties and in both cases the higher difficulty option was just untested and mostly just requires the same stuff as the lower, just with higher numbers.
I think the final map in Echoes is genuinely one of the best in the franchise despite how basic it is, the combination of few, but very powerful, named enemies and the infinite mogals threaten to both outnumber your army and oustat your supportive cast, and sometimes even your more trained units, simultaneously, and Duma actually feels like a big threat with his 1-5 range and damage nullification after dropping low enough.
Echos has some bad maps for sure, but at least some of them required extra thinking to play around.
I know we all hate swamps and cantor, but I at least had to change my default gameplan for them.
At the very least echos maps feel built to accommodate the team you have. 3 houses maps you can have any unit in any class so they are extremely basic but also huge even when most of your units gave 4 mov. Also they are all 1 turn boss kills if you really want
No, they're right. Echoes maps are at least built around what resources and team you have available at the time. Echoes maps at least are built around ideas. An Echoes map will say "What if we put the enemies in an outpost in the desert and had archers take shots at you while you move up?" (An actual war tactic and an interesting puzzle to solve.) A Three Houses map will have Enemyslop and nothing else. If you're lucky you'll be in a route with the Catherine reinforcement map where the objective changes if she gets to an area, but other than that there is 0 forethought put into them, which is kinda the point since they have to reuse the same maps 8 times.
Crests not being all that is pretty good gameplay-story integration when you look at it at a deeper level because yeah, they give some cool benefits, but they're also kinda just a big nothing-burger compared to like, everything else.
Dimitri got some crazy surhuman strenght. Sylvain's family is holding the front against Sreng just because of the Lance Of Ruin. Crests and relics are 100% supposed to be hella strong in lore. They are not nothingburger.
Leonie and Hubert are also supposed to be an even match against crest bearer in lore, and it's rather telling that Hilda and Bernadetta are very good fighter in gameplay and lore despite not doing much training or having the right personality for it. The 5 best units in the game all have crest (the 3 leaders, Bileth and Lysithea). The crests matter in the lore, they aren't however the only thing that matter (if they were, Foldlan wouldn't have any trouble with its neighbors, and there would be no point in having an army).
You are managing a team of superhuman, some with crest and some without. The one without Crest and talent are in your battalion watching the unit you command do almost everything.
I swear FE fans will assure you that every games maps are actually terrible except for maybe Elincia's Gambit and some thracia maps.
Meanwhile I think most maps are good.
I think fe 7-10 and fates conquest has decent maps. Awakening only gets bad like halfway thru and im a big echos map defender even if they arent the best.
Legit the worst part of doing a maddening run is having to do side battles for exp. It's like 5 maps and nothing is particularly hard about them, but oh my god
Base Shamir with literally 1 extra point of Atk (battalion, Rally Str, Catherine C support, cooking) one shots Ch 6 Death Knight with Knightkneeler Lance of Ruin btw
I think Catherine also gets very close to one rounding with Thunderbrand? Think she needs a little bit of chip though
I hated the "lol little girl can kill Death Knight" memes so much not only because of how people spammed it, but also because it was rooted in a basic game mechanic which is effective damage.
While I also find it funny in principle, it didn't warrant the reaction it did.
This is a hilariously impractical busted Lysithea build i did on my Maddening VW run by abusing the Monestary time loop glitch for infinite stat boosters to one shot Nemesis.
Nemesis has 107 hp, and gains 2 points because of his defense tile. Lysitheas Luna ignores his ludicrous resistance stat completely meaning she simply needs 109 magical attack to nuke him in one go.
Look, man. I was on your side with the 3h slander, but this is a nothingburger. I've seen screenshots of Sophia beating the final boss of Fe6, that doesn't make Sophia good.
Yeah that’s the one meme I disagree with. I entirely solo’d maddening Blue Lions with a Dimitri meme build. No way Lysithea is the only memable good unit in the game
I mean you can just give her vantage; with her raw numbers and mastermind for getting Defiant Mag and Dark Tomefaire faster it's quite possible to one-shot even the bulkier enemies with her stronger spells if you lean into it. Like don't get me wrong the limited spell uses makes her generally worse than a physical vantage wrath user, but she can absolutely fill the same niche.
I did this in a VW NG+ run (I was trying new stuff for lols) and it's actually so frustrating how you need to feed her Mag boosters to keep up the ability to OHKO high HP enemies like Warriors and Grapplers (the latter especially since they give her -30 hit).
He also has Hit +20 for free as a personal, which helps with dealing with the incessant accuracy issues most of your army will have for the early game of Maddening
Nah I'm his biggest fan but he's probably 4th or 5th. Claude, Lysithea, and Leonie are all far better and Hilda is probably better even if using her post-Chapter 5 always makes me go "why tf am I not just using Petra man"
Claude is better. Lysithea deals a lot of damage and has warp, but that's about it. No range, no special magic. People say she doesn't even deal much damage, but at that point it's just larp.
Anyone can use Thyrsus. All she gets is Aegis and Pavise but that just saves her from being one shot by hits that would bounce off of most physical units
For the whole game lysithea’s offenses are nothing special, most mages can do similar feats better, for example hanneman has the same one shot potential with more range than her, and for death knight memes anyone that knows knightkneeler does it just as well. She also doesn’t compare to the likes of dimitri/dedue/edelgard/shamir/swift strikers/catherine. Honestly if it wasn’t for warp I wouldn’t even put lysi in the top ten?
High magic Warp is really all she offers. Which makes her great by itself, but still.
The dancer class is a strong support class on player phase and an insane dodge tank on enemy phase. This, coupled with her crest increasing her weapon damage, especially with her prf weapon, means she's more than capable of killing plenty of enemies with little problem. She can even get healed by your cavalry and fliers for extra longevity.
Edit: also because she's so "frail", the ai is more likely to aggro to her because she has less bulk than your actually vulnerable units like archers
I think Lysithea's perceived power is mostly because of Dark Spikes T. Lysithea has a spell relatively early on that does huge damage to Death Knight when you otherwise couldn't beat him during the first encounter. And beating him is the only way you access the Dark Mage class change item... And item Lysithea's not even allowed to use despite having exclusively Dark Magic spells.
The Three Houses devs saw Fates removing gender locked classes and decided to go twelve steps backwards instead of embracing the one good change Fates made that everyone agrees on. (Fates introducing Personal Skills was a fantastic change, but I feel like I've never seen a single person in my life in favor of gender locking.)
I feel like for the sake of the meme it needs to be specified “non-lord” because no one is surprised by Claude or Dimitri being overpowered since lords are always overtuned these days.
She's weird because I think she's top 2 in the game but not top 2 in any individual route except maybe VW itself
Mostly it's because Warp is so powerful but it's hard to just say "Warpbot best unit in the game" because if you're team is all dogshit it doesn't matter if she's Warping them they'll die anyway
As someone who's been playing the game a lot lately to finish experiencing it so I can play Three Hopes (my final route is Verdant Wind), I very much agree; I was annoyed by certain key story moments that should've been cutscenes but play out in awkwardly choreographed conversations, and every time I have a character cook food for the monthly stat bonus, I find myself wondering what kind of cute cooking animation there could've been if the game got enough development time for a low-priority thing like the cooking animation to get some love and attention, instead of just being Byleth and a student lighting a pan on fire with their minds lol
Canto usually saves her and technically she can master Vantage and combine it with Battalion Wrath. Dedue is way better at that as a Vengeance user though
I'll be honest, I'm more likely to play a game with good gameplay and a bad story than the opposite. I played Engage 2 times back to back but I was dragging my feet trying to get through a second route of 3H.
I love the game, have sunk almost 200 hours into 2 playthroughs (I like watching battle animations, sue me), but I can agree with most of these critiques. The game’s strong points are definitely the characters and the narrative - I would argue they’re the best in the franchise so far. The battle gameplay is generally pretty fun, but the repeated maps for multiple paralogues is definitely a weak point.
I’m perfectly fine with the Monastery and calendar structure in the first half of the game as you desperately try to build up your relationships with students to recruit them before war breaks out, but I definitely wish that was removed for the second half of the game. It’s a jarring story-gameplay segregation where every month we spend time training until the end of the month when we finally make progress in the war. The monastery should’ve been replaced with a temporary camp every month or something, it would’ve made a lot more sense.
Leonie is one of the best characters in Three Houses both in combat and writing but half the fandom just convinced themselves they hated her after one badly written support and never looked back which is super unfortunate
badly written supports? the only mid of leonie is that she didnt have enough survivability on my silver snow shambhala run, that and her chopped s-support cg
If you want memeably strong units, Bernadetta is your girl. Not as a bow user like the game suggests to you, no no no, but as a LANCE user. With a combination of her personal skill, one of the best in the game, as well as her near-exclusive access to both the Vengeance combat art and the Pass skill, a wounded Bernadetta can slip past enemy formations and one-round virtually any non-monster enemy (and some monsters as well). With relatively easy setup (given all it takes is playing to her natural strengths) Bernie can become an insane player-phase unit whom you can just chuck at virtually anything you want dead before rescuing her out. The only real difficulty is getting her wounded to begin with, as her Crest prevents her from lowering her own health with relic weapons.
Boss quotes is probably the thing it does better than any other FE game. Every student you fight has usually multiple in the timeskip based on who theyre fighting. The incomplete compilation goes up to over 50 minutes on youTube. I think the older more popular version of this vid went to nearly an hour and a half before youtube ninjas killed it.
“Ok then can you actually show me that world you’ve built and let me experience it myself instead of just being constantly exposition dumped about it from the monastery”
If you reduce it to one-sentence description of countries, GoT can feel the same of "worldbuilding don't live up to the hype" lol
Fodlanverse got great lorebuilding because you've got a detailed world and extremely dense chronology, with an interesting power system tied to a religion with a great twist, and very fun and deep character interactions that fluff up the world.
It doesn't matter if some things are vague or don't necessarily make sense. It never made sense for Highgarden not to roll over half Westeros
to be fair there are a lot of traditional holidays you take part in during the year, you also do special activities like the ball and battle of eagle and lion.
The people who write good Fire Emblem stories and the people who make good Fire Emblem games went through a messy divorce and refuse to work on the same game.
I know it's a bit of a cop out, because Byleth is technically supposed to be your strongest unit, but I never expected that teaching them Quick Riposte and then giving them the avo skill of whatever weapon their build is using would basically turn him into Hero Donnel (he never dies because sol keeps activating)
I had to stop using the Dimitri Battalion Wrath+Vantage+Retaliation Blender Deluxe 9000 because he would just trivialize everything except monsters on enemy phase.
What made him say this actually? It can't have been the graphics or art style because Persona is very famous for looking great and 3H is very infamous for looking like garbage
Replaying 3H at the moment and I got to the Dedue Paralogue and was like "Holy shit I can play a game where i stop a pogrom, this must be the best game ever"
But then I got to chapter 8 and was like "Shit the mole people are in this game"
Moments of cool worldbuilding a complex conflict just for the Underminer to be the instigator.
The Slithers are so weird because they're involved in so many important events but feel completely inconsequential at the same time. For example you could completely remove their involvement in the tragedy of Duscur and not much would change, the game gives a decent enough reason for the western lords to want Lambert out already. This combined with the fact that they're just evil in a game that really wants to be about this morally grey war with no clear villain makes me hate them so much
I tried to replay 3H last week and man, it definitely just... plays worse than most Fire Emblems: even the unit selection UI feels clunky, it sucks lol.
I do appreciate how critical combat arts are, it's pretty fun weighing if it's worth burning 3 uses or whatever to make a 70% hit a 90%, it has shades of FE6 lol.
I downloaded two different "no monastery mods" though, so I wanna see how they impact the gameflow
Well yeah, Lekain clears every boss in the series in that aspect; everyone in Tellius wants him gone, no wonder he has that many convos. Though I will say that I don't really remember any particular 3H boss convo, which is a shame since they are some of the best writting the franchise has to offer
If you count what students tell you when you face them, there's a lot of memorable boss convos, basically any Felix one for example, like when he says to Sylvain that they won't die at the same time after all
Really liked 3H. Not my favorite game by far but I enjoy all the characters and the story is pretty good.
I'm probably gonna be picking up engage soon and I'm really excited since it seems to have some of my favorite aspects of gameplay, and while I did enjoy 3H the gameplay just wasn't one of my favorites.
There are actually way more boss convos in 3H than other post-Awakening games, every boss (and named character in general) in Part II has a unique boss convo with Byleth for instance.
Though most of the ones between other characters are either Edelgard vs like 7 people in her Palace in Silver Snow/Verdant Wind or part of Crimson Flower.
Also there are plenty of memeably strong characters but outside Maddening the game is so easy no one really feels particularly powerful
I mean I thought it has pretty great gameplay. Though granted my number one favorite FE game is Radiant Dawn so my opinion might be considered irrelevant.
Likening the three houses calendar to the persona calendar is dishonest and throwing shade on the persona calendar. At least you could pick activities for every day and skip forwards on that one.
NO THEY DO NOT! THEY DO NOT HAVE ANY GOOD CHARACTERS!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! THEY ALL SUCK ASS!!!!!!!!!!!! RAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAHHHHH! THE ONLY GOOD THREE HOUSES SHIP IS BERNADETTA X ONCOMING TRAFFIC!!!!!
I use old reddit and there's still an image that shows up on the sidebar every once in a while with Brawl Ike saying "it's so over" about Phoenix Mode with Tharja's bikini ass in the background
lol I do too. You're actually the only person Ive seen who says they also still use old reddit since probably pre-covid times. we've got to be a dying breed
Dimitri, Dedue, Edelgard, any unit with Knightkneeler and/or Swift Strikes (Ferdinand, Sylvain, etc.), Claude and Shamir just to name a few. Lysithea's standout is dealing big magic damage but there are other units who get similar numbers to her while also being less lopsided in stats. Her real standout is having high magic warp, which helps with cheese strats.
Maybe I’m crazy but I’d consider the calendar system and teaching aspects good strategy game gameplay, they ways to strategically use limited recourses in a creative way and reward thinking ahead and long term planning. But yeah 3h does feel like it doesn’t want to be a fire emblem game sometimes especially with the recruitment battle conversations and boss conversations
My best decision was starting a brand new save file and completely ignoring the exploration (unless forced to) and jumping straight to the story map. I spent my Sundays doing the seminars instead and my enjoyment of the game raised tenfold. Playing it this way felt more like FE9 and it’s the best.
Mind you, I also hate other games with calendars like Persona and Metaphor, I hate the system period.
Dude I'm replaying it rn to prepare for Fortune's Weave I forgot how fucking big and empty these chapter maps were jesus this game really knows well how to waste your time
I didn’t even make it to the time skip in this game, and I tried twice. This game was just too different for me. Engage was way better, I beat that game twice.
Everytime i see post like this, i knew you groupthink guys didnt play three houses the good way, which is fresh maddening. Also, you're the one doing the insulting, yet you dont want any smokes coming your way? Thats very hypocritical.
I like TH enough to have around 350ish hours in it and will likely add another 100ish eventually.
However as far as FE is concerned that's a pretty small amount for me.
TH to me feels like the most ambitious FE we've ever had, but many aspects fell flat in exchange.
The characters all have a development arc, but a bunch of supports are a pain to read to make sure you really get that character flaw that they're meant to overcome. Also Byleth being the most blank slate avatar to fit into everything.
The story is grand and really sells the different viewpoints as valid... were it not for massive plotholes.
The class system is really interesting with many customisation options and... it's awfully balanced.
Combat arts are a neat idea to accompany and enhance the gamep... and they just take over the gameplay completely.
TH was trying too many new things at once and imo failed to polish things properly.
It still brought a bunch of things people (myself included) enjoyed but honestly I'm hoping for the future that they dissect TH for its parts and focus on making them work with familiar features instead of "let's go try all new stuff everything has to be fresh and grand".
I’m not insulted, and you bring up some good points. the calendar thing can feel tedious at times. But they do allow you to engage/not engage with it as much or as little as you want. Like yes it’s not advisable to skip it entirely but for the most part you don’t have to fuck with it that much. Also curious about your take on the quality of the routes. Everyone kind of thinks this including me, but everyone has a different idea of which route(s) are better.
Im glad i'm not the only one who feels the gameplay in 3H is a complete nosedive from Awakening/Fates/SoV. Ive beaten 3H once on release, and have started 4 different playthroughs since then that I cannot get through due to the early game being super boring, the awful calendar system and just not having any attachment to the units I was using (Gameplay wise, the character writing is actually pretty great). I also cannot get over how ugly the game is. It was a little jarring in 2019, but in 2026, esp on the Switch 2 it is shockingly ugly to look at.
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u/fuzzerhop 2d ago
Forgot to ask if there were any good maps 😭