#tbh I kinda wanna restart her playthrough

[sashthesloth]

💤 any of your bg3 pcs

Pov you just woke up your sleeping camp member and she didn’t like that

[harusha]

Is 3 Houses "New Player" friendly? I kinda wanna pick it up, but only played Awakening (and that was a few months ago, so not much history with the franchise). Also, how does it compare with Awakening in terms of level up/reclass/skills/etc?

It’s very new player friendly imo! There’s no Phoenix mode or anything, but you have features like the Retreat option (which lets you retain experience and restart the battle with all of your equipment durability set back to before you began) and Casual is back.

I do think there’s a lot of features, and that can be overwhelming, but you’ll pick them up quickly.

Honestly, I prefer Awakening in terms of skills and classes. Three Houses’s system is just tedious on a first playthrough, and the chosen master classes are super wonky. Some feel like a straight up upgrade (ex. War Master) and others are sidegrades (ex. Mortal Savant which is also kinda slow but that doesn’t matter if you have someone like Felix or Hubert who are already fairly fast). Also there’s no grounded mounted class for beginner class so riding is a pain to level up early on.

There’s also less skills (or at least what it feels like) than Awakening which I don’t really care for since I don’t get to customize the units as much. And the Dark Mage/Dark Bishop class is locked behind a certain limited enemy which is annoying. Plus, there’s no flying mage in this game which sucks (I like Dark Fliers and Malig Knights so).

And imo, the maps (at least for Blue Lions) are kinda forgettable and bad for the most part. There’s no gimmicks like Conquest, and Fog of War isn’t utilized enough. And there’s a lot of reused maps. I know they take place at the same location, but imo, the timeskip should have made some changes to the terrain instead of the same map but with more enemies spawning.

Reclassing is also a pain with certification exams because it is a random chance that’s decided as the day begins (so no save scrumming unless you go back to before the week began). You can raise it to 100% ofc, but you waste time if you don’t try every week when the option opens. For a first playthrough, you don’t have the benefits of new game+ to make it easier to get to the classes you want.

There’s also the garden where you can farm stat boosters, and cook to temporarily raise stats if you end up getting bad level ups.

And mounted units are super good with Canto and Dismount, and the size of the maps. The only thing they’re missing is Rescue (carrying units not the spell) and Hunter’s Volley (they restricted it this game). Not to mention the higher level armored battlelions and the Stride command (give all alies within range extra movement).

It’s still a good game ofc, and the lords are overpowered (not a Roy situation where he promotes super late and has kinda average growths across the board). Like... you can most likely solo maps w/ Dimitri by plopping him into a hoard of non magical enemies in Normal. The only maps I had problems with was 12 and 22 (b/c the first one had surprise spawns of certain characters, and I was collecting encounter quotes) and the latter b/c a deluge of enemies pop up.

Storywise, I think it’s fantastic (I have problems ofc w/ it, I wouldn’t call it above Geneology or the Tellius duo, but it’s up there). For me (as someone who started with Blue Lions and still needs to go through the other 3 routes), Dimitri is honestly one of the best lords in the series character-wise. His story is very much “classic Fire Emblem” but it shines in the interactions between the characters, especially Byleth and Dimitri, and on his personality post-skip. It’s honestly one of those routes where I’d recommend F!Byleth over her counterpart to take the Dimitri S-support since it ties in so nicely. I’m still saltly about M!Byleth not having the option to tbh.

That’s another of Three Houses’s strengths, the interactions between your chosen House. It feels very much like a group of friends.

As a side note, if you choose Edelgard as your first route, explore at least once every month and make sure to talk to her.

Overall, good game and a contender for GOTY, but also some obnoxious problems like the barren calendar system, split route (a lot of content and replayability but also threads are often left loose or left to epilogue), questionable reclass/skill system, etc.

Absolutely worth $60+,if you decide on the expansion pass which will eventually come with more classes and story, and a return to form after Fates’s kinda lackluster story (though I wouldn’t say it does better than Fates in some aspects like self-contained and satisfactory routes or gameplay at least for Blue Lions). Self-contained as in threads aren’t left too jarringly loose.