Backlog: Fire Emblem: Three Houses

Like many Americans, my only exposure to Fire Emblem was the 37 sword characters in Smash Brothers. Fire Emblem just never sounded like a game for me. Maybe part of that was that I constantly got it confused with Dragon Quest. Maybe part of it was that both of those franchises are smashed in my brain as a throwback grinding JRPG. Something I loved in my childhood, but sadly do not have time for anymore. 

Fire Emblem: Three Houses came out when I was traveling a ton and I didn't have any Switch games that were holding my attention. 

If I had to describe it, it's part Persona, where you interact with peers and build relationships. (Although, the relationships you build in FE are much personal) It's part tactics game, in that when you aren't wandering the school interacting with other characters, you're on a tactical field fighting. It's an incredibly deep RPG, that even 60 hours in, I don't fully understand all systems. 

Fire Emblem is good. It might not seem like I think it based on the next couple paragraphs, but it is, as long as you don't do what I did. 

So every week of the school year, you get to choose what to do. You can roam the grounds and build relationships, fish, plant flowers, build up the motivation of your team which is important for the end of the week. 

You can do nothing. (Hint: Never do nothing.)

You can battle. Sometimes there's side missions available, sometimes special monsters, sometimes just skirmishes.  I did this a lot in the beginning. I thought, this is probably a grind type JRPG. I should do it early, get money in the bank. 

Now the problem with battles is that you can do an unlimited amount of the generic ones. And I did. I did it a lot, not really realizing that I was breaking my special weapons which require rare materials to repair. Not realizing I was leveling up too much. Not realizing that these battles were infinite.

So I've played more or less the entire game over powered. Battles that should be hard fought and won by the best tactics strategy, I can easily breeze though. Sure, I may misplace a rogue character that gets overwhelmed every now and then, but the only real thing holding me back from beating the mission in a turn is the movement speed of my characters. 

I started spending more time at school. 

Your main job at the school is to build up enthusiasm among your students. The more their bar is filled, the more you can teach them. You soon you start finding out the more efficient ways to raise the motivation and really if you could build a macro, you could play about 70% of the RPG portions via the macro. 

After a while, instead of exploring and talking to everyone, you immediately run to cook food or sing in the choir or have tea time. 

So now I'm completely overpowered. I'm starting to get board but I want to see what happens in the rest of this game. 

The last two missions were some of the few I was challenged on. And I remember what made me so addicted to the early game when every move had a consequence. 

The game overstays its welcome by about 25% of the game. There's an entire middle part that probably could've been cut and we wouldn't have lost anything from the game. You would've gained a lot. There are two other storylines that I've not played, but I don't have it in me to slog through another 50 hours to see them. If this was a solid 30, I could totally see going back to Fire Emblem every other year to see how the other two teams played out.

I mean, I went blue. My friend went red. Red had a nuclear missile in it's penultimate mission. I didn't have a nuke. And that's completely discounting team yellow, which I literally know nothing about their storyline. What the hell does yellow get up to?