Fire Emblem: Three Houses first released back on July 26th of this year, so it is safe to say that I am a bit late to the party even if I picked up the now critically acclaimed strategy RPG back when it first launched.

My history of the Fire Emblem series is pretty limited. I have only ever played half of Awakening on the 3DS and I have to say I wasn’t all that impressed with it. I found it to be a little complex, I couldn’t get into the story and only a few characters attached themselves to me. Though I did love the music, art and design the gameplay was the ultimate turn off for me. I’m not sure why but all I knew that it wasn’t for me and so I moved on.

Now we come to a few weeks before Three Houses releases, listing to a podcast I heard the game was a combination between three of my favorite franchises, Persona, Game of Thrones. and Harry Potter. So needless to say when I heard this I jumped straight onto the Fire Emblem train and picked it up a few days after launch. It is quickly earning itself a spot on my small list of favorite games of all time and deservingly so.

I have put over 30 hours into the Three Houses and I have completed the first battle after the time jump. I know I have so much more to go but at this point, I wanted to share my impressions of how Fire Emblem: Three Houses is (so far) my game of the year.

Fire Emblem: Three Houses has the benefit of learning from years worth of mistakes in the franchise; refining ideas set out in earlier games of the series. Having played around 30 hours of Awakening I can say that the improvements made in Three Houses are drastic and much appreciated. The weapon triangle has less emphasis put onto it, relationships are easier to foster and the story and characters are much deeper and more varied, even the menus and upgrading paths are more streamlined.

Three Houses is set in the world of Fodlan where three factions rule the land, the player takes control of a newly hired professor who is tasked to teach one of the three houses, The Golden Deer, Black Eagles, or The Blue Lions. Each house has their own set of students, and each will have their own strengths and weaknesses making Three Houses both deeper and more replayable.

Each student can be taught different skills, and each will have their own unique goals on what they should focus on. For example, the leader of the Golden Deer house Claude, will ask if his focus should be on bow and axe skills, but then the next month he can request to change his goals to bow and riding skills. This little addition help make the characters feel like real people and go a long way to help flesh out their personalities.

Fire Emblem Three Houses’ gameplay is split into two parts. The first part is the turn-based strategy battles and in the second part, you explore Garreg Mach Monastery fostering relationships with your peers, learning and improving on skills, weapons and teaching.

I am currently playing on “classic mode” on normal difficulty and for someone who has very little experience with SRPGs I am finding the game only now ramping up in difficulty. Each battle has a sort of intensity to it as in classic mode if a character dies in battle, they are dead permanently. Even though you can turn back time, you can only do this a few times and using it sparingly is most recommend.

Each unit is set up on a grid, before battles you can survey the map and see what units the enemy has so you can pick the best team to counter-attack with. The objectives for each battle are mostly very similar with “Route the enemy” being the most common, though I have run into “Defend objective” or “Survive 12 turns” a few times. These are mostly few are far between and are normally found in side quests.

Battles can take anywhere between 10-40 minutes depending on what strategy you use. The longer the fight goes on the more intense it gets, as you know each move could mean certain death for your favorite unit. Battles demand tactful thought and tend to be on the slower end of things, which may not be for everyone.

In between battles you will explore Garreg Mach; here time runs similar to the Persona games as each activity you take on takes up a portion of your time and you have to pick activities that will maximize your time. You can cook with a student to not only bond with them but also add temporary boosts to your team. Alternately, you can take a seminar with other professors and students who will all earn more experience in whatever that seminar may be teaching, or you can go fight in the arena tournaments. There are a ton of things to do and each is beneficial in some way or another.

The week to week life at the monestary, combined with mission battles at the end of the month keeps Three Houses going at a pretty steady pace that never seems to be either to fast nor too slow. This pace kept me engaged and always coming back for more. One of my biggest problems with the game is also one of its greatest strengths. As soon as I start playing Three Houses I can not stop.

Some of the criticisms are that the developers choose to go with a silent protagonist and in Three Houses I have to say that it doesn’t really work. Most of the conversations that side characters will have with you, make it feel like you are being talked at rather than being talked to.

The last few issues I have are small but still need to be addressed. The text is so small and there isn’t any way to enlarge it, the frame rate drops to a crawl while exploring Garreg Mach, and the 3D animation style they chose for the animated cutscenes tends to look a little on the cheaper side of things for me personally. Other then those complaints, Three Houses is quite an amazing experience that is well worth the price of admission.

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