#ugh im so excited to read it but i also hope it doesn't suck ass bc im always nervous when celebrities

[yrieso]

omg it's april which means only one month until my copy of the girls like girls book ships out......

[protagonistheavy]

Finished Three Houses and also season two of Kipo. And both were disappointing! But neither were bad experiences! Just lackluster! Yeah! Im gonna talk about 3H first.

3H was a fun experience, but it's a let-down how suddenly it grinds to a halt. I totally spent way too much of this game overthinking stuff, especially since at the end of the game, it doesn't seem like there's anything else to push for. It doesn't seem like there's ANYTHING to do on a completed save file, except beat the final mission again. Unless Im missing something?

But if that is it, just that, then... dang. That sucks. Feels like I spent so much time playing so meticulously, only for the game to have given me no reason to care since nothing comes after that point. I guess there's new game+ to look forward to, but, sorry, Im not really interested in playing 3H again. I had my fun, I think it'd be cute to see the other routes, but the whole experience isnt worth multiple run throughs imo. I can already get the feeling that I know what to expect from the other routes, so it'd be very repetitive for someone like me...

It sucks that because of this route-split storytelling, a singular route gives you a faulty amount of information to complete one story. There are so, so many fucking loose threads that will just remain a mystery to me until I read it up on a wiki, because I'm just not gonna be assed to play the other routes to fill in the gaps. God knows I wouldnt even remember all the holes of information Ive noticed in Edlegard's route.

Even then, even if I knew all the lore, the story I saw just wasnt exciting. After the timeskip, it felt like I was disconnected from the world, and just didnt care about things as much. It just felt like a bunch of steps forward, with no serious twists to really make me reconsider the story... No, all the twists are done by the mid-point, and the rest is just going through the tRaGeDy of wartime. Very overdramatic monologues fill the runtime of the game, with characters just constantly repeating what the next mission is about... what the overall reason for the war is...... how everyone wants the war to be over........ The status quo just never gets rattled, not like how it does in the first half. The plot with Edlegard's uncle goes literally nowhere, the plot with "those who slither in the dark" is just an epilogue note, nothing comes back regarding the Yellow Guy........... Even your marriage to a unit is just slapped on at the end, nothing more than just a page of one-sided dialogue from the one character. Groooooaaaaaan.

So many bad decisions come up in this game to sour it. So many great ideas underutilized. I hope the next FE game can learn a lot about 3H, because it made a lot of excellent choices in some regards, and mistakes in others that can easily be fixed going forward. But honestly, the most crippling flaw in the game is just how rushed it clearly was, with story routes that end abruptly, cutscenes that are pasted together, dialogue that is unrefined from characters that lack charm, bloated mechanics that make the game too easy, and clashing tones that take away from the story's better moments.

Id love to see a future installment revisit the academy aspect of the game. Garreg Mach was a great idea and I dont hate its implementation, but it needs some serious polish. I love the idea of a hub location that you live in, so take it to the next level. If the area is going to be big, make it meaningfully big with locations you WANT to visit. More minigames and more events you can take part in. Maybe instead of summarizing everything by weeks, just play it out day-by-day; seriously, the micromanaging to teaching your units what to specialize in, maximizing your free time slots to make the most of your time leading up to a mission, was really engaging! I hope to see more of that come back, maybe a game focused on you teaching multiple generations of students. And remove the teacher-student romances, like, ugh, I could stomach it in 3H since I just sorta had to, but next game, maybe focus on a handful of avatar-NPC romances between the teachers/staff? Less options, but better crafted developments. So much about 3H would be great if they made some wiser decisions, and maybe gave the game one extra year in the oven to be optimized.