Whether you’ve already put hundreds of hours into Fire Emblem: Fortune’s Weave or you’re waiting until later to pick up a copy, it’s always a good time to revisit Three Houses. Intelligent Systems’ 2019 installment of the strategy RPG series takes place in the same universe as Fortune’s Weave, and there are even a couple of characters who appear in both games. While the latest Fire Emblem game lets you complete the storylines for all four main characters in a single playthrough, with Three Houses, you’re locked in with one hero all the way through.
Whether you’ve experienced Edelgard, Dimitri, and Claude’s stories before, or this is your first time playing Three Houses, these self-imposed variations can make the experience even more memorable and challenging. For this playthrough, you’ll have to dance with the girl (or guy) that brought you. For instance, if you choose the Black Eagles as your house, your roster must only consist of characters from Edelgard’s class, namely Bernadetta, Caspar, Dorothe, Ferdinand, Hubert, Linhardt, and Petra.
You can use the other professors who join as part of the story in Act One, but no recruiting students from other classes this time around. You’ll have less flexibility later on, but it’ll save you time making new friends in the halls of Garreg Mach. Alternatively, consider taking the complete opposite approach: recruit everyone you possibly can from every other house, and ditch the seven friends who got you there as soon as you can manage it.
This will be far easier to pull off on a New Game Plus run, where you’ll be able to spend Renown to upgrade your Professor Rank, boost Byleth’s skill levels, and unlock supports right off the bat. Unlike previous Fire Emblem games, Three Houses allows you to experience its toughest difficulty level right from the start, without ever completing a playthrough on normal. Be warned: Maddening is not for the faint of heart.
Every turn, every square on the grid matters, and enemies hit extremely hard. Battles will take longer and feel far more punishing. You’ll want to think through your class choices well in advance and learn more about what your characters’ stats mean.
Also, you’ll learn to love wooden weapons, because you’ll be using a lot of Combat Arts and they’re much cheaper to replace. There might be three houses, but there are actually four routes through this game. The “church route,” also known as Silver Snow, is a variant of the Crimson Flower route where you betray Edelgard at the end of Chapter 11 of Act One and shift your allegiance to the Church of Seiros.
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