Fire Emblem: Existential Warfare
Fire Emblem: Three Houses delivers the action, dialog, and irony of a Shakespeare masterpiece.
Oh, and it’s a video game.
Fire Emblem gets portrayed as some kind of chess on steroids -and it is- but the turn-based strategy warfare is just one facet of this many-sided marvel.
Don’t get me wrong: it does come with the learning curve of chess.
It took me weeks to figure out how to get an archer to stop running and fire off an arrow from a particular place. Before that my archers were just running run up to the enemy infantry and getting hacked down.
While chess is elegant, you never really get to learn about the individual pieces, they have no opinions about you, there’s no backstory, character progression, or life reflection.
You get all that with Fire Emblem: Three Houses.
Faith and Loyalty as Absurd and Wonderful
One of the most interesting characters in the game becomes shaken by the tragic loss of his family and sets his life aflame to destroy his enemies before coming to a point of clarity and a change in perspective.
Many of the flaws of the characters are gigantic, but you’ll often find yourself sympathizing with them and looking for the place they went wrong.
One of my favorite aspects of the game is the secret relationship you have with a divine entity who is portrayed as a child. The characters wrestle with this secret as it reveals itself over the chapters. Some are believers and some are not (full disclosure: I’m a Christian and a believer).
The monastery serving as the headquarters in Three Houses belongs to a religion that is clearly intended to parallel Christianity as it was practiced by the medieval Europeans: genuine and often well-meaning, hierarchical, and sometimes quick to go to the sword for their beliefs. At one point Gilbert and Dmitri set aside their differences to take a protestant-sounding shot at something that sounds like purgatory.
Rhea, the leader of one branch of the Church of Seiros, is not interested in subjects you would expect an ambitious leader of a large organization to be interested in. She is very personal and genuine. While being secretive in her work, she’s also presented as a benevolent leader. She also insists that “punishing sinners” is a major component of the Church.
I’m not sure of any church council or place in the Bible where “punishing sinners” is part of the church’s agenda. Perhaps it describes the way medieval Christianity is presented in history classes.
Your relationships with your fellow soldiers (also your students at the monastery) have a direct affect on their battle effectiveness through something called a ‘support points’ system. This means that if you fuss over how you are interacting with your students -throwing them tea parties, fielding their questions about whether to fire the cook, and calling out their life mistakes- they will either grow in respect for you and fight with increased motivation or lose interest and do little on the battlefield.
Plot Twists Ahead!
The battles themselves vary from interesting and original monthly adventures to semi-repetitive skirmishes that play out in predictable ways. The latter of which is a good way to grind up your stats, but not particularly interesting.
But oh do those monthly battles have plot twists!
A game has to enter a high level tier before I tell my wife about it. I think I am starting to wear her out with the stories that lend themselves to sounding very explosive and amazing:
Today one of my students ran away, raised an army, destroyed the school, and then tried to take over the world. Then one of the kids in my class went from burning everything in his life for her destruction to changing his perspective and even wondering if somehow her world domination had some kind of benevolent intent.
My wife is a teacher, so stories like this are very peculiar to consider.
There are a lot of directions your story can go. Many of the Fire Emblem forums are filled with gamers just trying to wrap their heads around all the avenues you can take.
An old existential adage is if you want to understand life, you have to go to the edge. Oh how Three Houses delivers.
Memento Mori
Three Houses pushes you to the point where not only are you taking a side, you will also be held to account for it. If your students are defeated on the battlefield, they don’t come back (in the classic mode anyway … which is a better way to play and helps understand the story better).
Death is treated in a very striking way.
Since you can make the deaths permanent or not, the dialog treats the finality of the defeat in an ambiguous way. Sometimes this openness has the character looking back on their goals and ideals and how they don’t regret them or how they do regret them.
Unlike a lot of Shakespeare productions, there isn’t much or any blood. That doesn’t mean there aren’t a fair amount of grisly scenes. Just from the opening scene I won’t even play it around my under ten year olds. Also there is some swearing in the game.
Final Thoughts
Fire Emblem: Three Houses not only takes some of the best action that could have come from the Medieval era combined with engaging characters and dynamic plot changes -it also brings you to the point where you learn how to wrestle with your own story and your ideals are challenged.
I definitely recommend this game for any Switch owners looking for a challenge and life understanding.
Many thanks to Rene Asmussen for providing the photo. And to Min An for her photo of the church.
