Take the excellent Fire Emblem Path of Radiance, for example: We learn a lot about the world, about why the lategame war is fought, and we have a personal stake in everything, but then you have people like Tauroneo and Sothe who have some immensely fascinating supports with Ike and with the other characters that paint Daein and Ashnard in a more morally grey light (as opposed to moustache twirling villainous): In Sothe’s supports specifically, you learn that for a lot of people, Ashnard was actually a symbol of hope for the people of Daein, because though he’s known as the Mad King, Ashnard places no stock in bloodline or lineage, he places it entirely on merit, and Daein, which used to be very much a land of decadence where royalty exploited the people horribly, became a meritocracy instead: It didn’t matter if you came from absolute poverty, if you were strong, you had a place in Daein, and you could always ascend if you became stronger and better. Now, I bring this up because it’s not just a “Three Hopes Addressing What I Perceive To Have Been A Narrative Weakness Of Three Houses” deal, this has been an issue in previous Fire Emblems as well. Which one might argue aligns with the overall message of 3Houses being “Fervent believers will never see eye to eye with each other, even if they want the same thing”, but to that, I argue “That’s fair, I GUESS, but you can tell that message without it affecting the narrative negatively, because framing it in that way to make that message Doesn’t Really Make For As Good A Read As It Could, in my opinion”. SImilar problems prop up in the other routes, because the routes tend to be very Your Faction-centric, which sounds like a non-issue, like, of course you’ll be primordially focused on your faction, but it is in fact an issue since it then makes the other factions in any given route sort of Very Incomprehensible at worst and nominally villainous at best.
But the Dimitri Gang kinda feels out of the left field there (with the additional hilarity of Racist Pegasus Saber being so swole that she can more or less solo all of Edelgard’s Edelgang if you don’t kill her fast enough, robbing you of a LOT OF EXP). I’ll be the first to tell you the Golden Deer route was the best in 3Houses, but I’ll also be the first to tell you the inclusion of Dimitri’s Gang in that route was completely out of the Blue (HEHE) and weird as hell, it was Not Handled Properly, so you end up with a REALLY cool three-way fight at Gronder Field with the ultrabanger Between Heaven and Earth playing in the background. It’s a much better pace, because even if you didn’t play Three Houses, it makes a lot of the intentions each side has clear and the resulting narrative feels far more alive and dynamic than just “ok we fight the Other Faction and the Other Other Faction here and there”.
#Fire emblem echoes cutscenes how to
Some will say “The Average FE Fan Doesn’t Know How To Read Because A Lot Of Them Missed This Book”, and to that, I say I respect your opinion but also disagree and also don’t really respect your opinion because the author also has to have a good gauge of What The Reader/Player Would Really Benefit From Knowing, and making that an entirely missable tidbit of info you have to go out of your way to find, presented in a format that is frankly kind of ass and I won’t hear otherwise (not everyone wants to go Read Worldbuilding Lore at the Lore Vault when they could be Playing The Rest Of The Game and one of those books happens to have This Rather Huge Bit Of Info). An example of this is how the whole “The Central Church Divided Fodlan Intentionally To Make It Easier To Control From The Shadows” bit that’s KIND OF VERY IMPORTANT TO KNOW is more or less just tucked away in an easily missable book. Now, I’ll be the first to tell you that Reading Between The Lines and Extrapolating are in fact very useful skills to have as a reader, but the author, likewise, does have a duty to not only Tell, But Also Show, and I think a weakness of 3H is that is Told Too Much But Didn’t Show Much. Basically, Three Houses tended to be pretty myopic about characters and factions that weren’t the ones you were in, so most every development felt more informed than experienced, or, in other words, you more or less were told “HEY TEACH/MY MENTOR, ALLOW ME TO EXPLAIN THE SHITUATION” and then you went and fought it out, which kinda made the narrative feel a bit too loose in a lot of ways.
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