This reminded me of Knights in the Nightmare which is one of the most novel games I have played.
Yeah, Sting developed both of those, along with Baroque, Riviera: The Promised Land and a number of other endearingly bizarre games. Relevant to this thread, they did Gungnir, which I seem to remember being pretty good as well.
A brilliant game I wish somebody would remake or clone.
I have to recommend Valkyria Chronicles 4 for Switch, which fixes most of the issues I had with Valkyria Chronicles 1. Truly a great game, and if you haven’t played the first one, it’s going to feel fresh as hell. It also has the best production quality other than Three Houses. And has the personal story management too to boot. The only thing I think VC1 has over it is the story, and only by a little. and it will be the less jarring move from Three Houses when exploring the genre. Everything else of note is/feels older.
As for the best tactics game… Despite all the other great recommendations, the Tactics Ogre remake for PSP I think beats everybody else. Truly a great game with amazing usability redesigns from the original that make it feel modern enough. The time rewind of Three Houses is directly lifted from it.
The Sting games and Devil Survivor are also great recommendations.
Picked it up this weekend. I’m still early on. I got most of my guys in their first Beginner class (fighter/myrmidon/etc). The class XP seems slow to fill. It’s around 70 xp to fill up. Is it gonna be a few months?
The battle thing, I notice some battles are “free”, no 1 sword cost. Seems one can grind the free battles forever until you hit the 1 sword cost battle?
No, they will consume time. The sword thing is for battles with extra rewards.
You don’t need to grind: you are overpowering pretty much right away, after the tutorial.
Thanks! I’m stressing out over builds.
For the recruiting member thingy, does that mean I should raise my main character’s skills all to D? Seems I need a lot of magic/faith/etc. Or do I just do whatever I want (doing swords now), and unlock magic and stuff in newgames?
I think generally you shouldn’t stress too much about your builds, but you should definitely look at the skill requirements for master/end-game classes. Almost all the master classes require either riding or flying and two additional skills, for example. Getting riding to rank A that late in the game can be tricky if you’ve been ignoring it. On the other hand, those classes’ stat growth isn’t actually better than the advanced classes and it makes total sense to leave some characters in an advanced class and never worry about switching them to a master class.
It’s probably more effective to simply raise your support level with whichever character you want to recruit. You can do this by returning lost items, spamming them with gifts, or taking them as guests into battles with you. I’d recommend doing that instead of trying to get a high-skill level in something you don’t care about, especially since they usually require C-ranks and you do not have that much time to spend in the early game.
You can do either. It is tricky to unlock the MC’s first reason-magic spell since you have to do faculty training or seminars to raise it, but it’s certainly viable. Faith magic is a more natural fit for the MC, but the MC can basically specialize in whichever skill they want and be godlike in this game.
Here are some helpful links with spoilers blurred out or hidden where appropriate (that said, maybe just read the top part for the recruitment one and not the character-specific stuff at the bottom if you want to have no inkling of what happens story wise).
I think @wisefool is right - the sword icon means the battle uses activity points. The column header even says ‘Activity Points’.
If there is no sword then it doesn’t take up any time and you can keep fighting it over and over as many times as you like.
I think I’m probably going to try to tackle this soon. Is there any, like basic “before you play” things I should know going in? Major gotchas / major differences from previous FE games, etc?
Are you expected to play through 3 times, one for each house?
You don’t have to, but the storyline changes a lot depending on the path so you’re certainly encouraged to
And it’s 4 times
Only thing I’d suggest is playing on hard otherwise the combat becomes trivial pretty quickly. Just turn permadeath off if that worries you.
Agreed. Hard is the way to go if you don’t want it to be trivial ( it will still be easier than many other tactics games or older FE games).
You might also want to eschew the generic grinding missions and rotate characters in and out to keep them evenly leveled and avoid getting ahead of the experience curve and making things too easy.
And after a few months you might look ahead at the requirements for the endgame classes and train your characters accordingly so you don’t get there and realize you would have liked to use a particular class but needed to train Riding or something. But at the same time, don’t feel like every character has to end up in one of the classes that unlocks at level 30. The lv.20+ ones are equally powerful and are viable all the way through the end of the game. They’re just more specialized than the lv30+ ones, which tend to be hybrid archetypes.
When your guys max a class you can access the Reclass menu to change the class. Don’t need to wait for the end of the week before doing so! Maybe obvious for others. There’s other good stuff in that same menu as well (character sheets then press A or something)
You can also unlock classes ahead of time because of this Reclass thing and never waste any xp!
So this is pretty good! Playing on Hard/Casual, which is challenging, but doesn’t feel punitive yet. Maybe a dozen hours in, and it’s definitely already more engaging than Fates was.
I’m sure there’s been a ton of ink spilled on this already, but it seems like it really leans into the RPG elements (allowing you to customize your team pretty freely), which really works for me. It feels like I have a lot more control over the characters, which makes it feel less arbitrary.
On the other hand, the inventory / character management UI is pretty terrible. It still does a bunch of “complexity through obscurity” things like having stat ups tied to each class and having per-class unlock abilities, but not communicating them at all in-game, or having arbitrary goals or reinforcements appear halfway through missions. I usually give up on Fire Emblems at some point when I have to replay a mission through no fault of my own, so that’s still possible, but for now I’m enjoying it.
So when does this game get going? When it came out I played some, ran around the cathedral, got bored and quit. Figured I would give it another go, and I’m bored with it again. I met everyone, planted some seeds in the garden, caught a fish using some crazy interface, and now I am supposed to go have a meal. I’m bored to tears with it though. I keep hearing how great it is, so I need to stick with it, but when does the game start?
It sounds like you’re playing it, except you did not mention doing any battles. There’s one big story battle each game month, though admittedly the first few are probably less compelling than later ones. Otherwise, you’re doing all the things you mentioned. It’s possible that some of the unit management and customization isn’t opened for you yet as it gets introduced gradually and that’s one of the better aspects of the game. Otherwise, if that stuff doesn’t do it for you, it’s probably time to move on.
Nope, no battles yet. I guess it just starts slow, but it’s definitely not sucking me in so far.
I haven’t played this particular iteration, and you might well never enjoy this game - but the battles are the whole point of the game!