Image source: Azim Islam

What I'm Playing - No. 31

Welcome back to another weekly wrap-up of the games I’ve been playing over the past week!

Be warned, minor spoilers may be contained within. Generally, I do try to keep things spoiler-free but this isn’t always possible/practical! If you want to totally avoid all potential spoilers so you can play these games yourself in a blind run, you shouldn’t continue reading! Games contained within this post:

• Super Smash Bros. Ultimate (Switch)
• Fire Emblem: Three Houses (Switch)

Super Smash Bros. Ultimate (Switch)

A new update, 4.0.0, and a new DLC character, the Hero from Dragon Quest, released for Smash Ultimate this week!

In his default costume, Hero is the protagonist from Dragon Quest XI, but he has several alternates that turn him into the heroes from other Dragon Quest games, and each of them has an alternate color palette variant too.

Hero is pretty cool. I haven’t played the Dragon Quest series (yet), but I think it’s really cool to see this franchise represented in Smash Bros.. Hero’s moveset pays homage to the classic turn-based nature of Dragon Quest with Hero’s down special opening a menu of attack choices. He also has an MP meter which gradually recharges, and MP is required for most (maybe all?) of his special attacks. To an outsider like me, it seems like they’ve been quite faithful to the source material once again with this DLC! One interesting fact they revealed in a livestream prior to the DLC’s release is that each of the heroes in Ultimate has a different voice actor, and one of them is actually the same voice actor that voiced Link in the original N64 Smash Bros.!

With the new update, a number of new goodies besides the DLC content have been added too. The one I’ve spent the most time in is the new Online Smash Tourney mode. Basically, they’re going to have tournaments running online. I never had to wait very long to find a tournament to join, so it seems like a lot of people are trying out this feature right now! I did my best as Joker, and sometimes Lucina or outright Random characters, but I suffered many, many losses! Very rarely though I made it past the first found in 4v4 tournament they had running, which technically put me in the Best 16! Of course, that doesn’t mean much when these tournaments run constantly, and you can just enter another one immediately after you lose!

Fire Emblem: Three Houses (Switch)

If you recall from last week, I mentioned how I wanted to recruit Mercedes onto my team. She was in another House, and wouldn’t switch over to join my House, the Black Eagles, until she was more impressed with us. After reading a bit online, it sounds like once you get someone from another House to a B Support Level with your main character, they’re much easier to Recruit. Luckily, Worm reached B rank with Mercedes at the beginning of this week, so I immediately tried to Recruit her again. This time, she asked to join the Black Eagles and I immediately accepted! After she joined, I realized I should have waited just a few more in-game days for the next month to come around, because then I assume she would have been a more comparable level. As it is, she joined at level 11, while the average level of the rest of my team was around 15 at the time. After a few battles though, her level caught up with the rest of my team!

One of the events going on at the Monastery during my playtime this week was a fishing tournament. The goal was to catch the specific kind of fish Flayn wanted to eat, which I eventually did. I also made sure to catch enough fish to show up all the students, and prove my fishing superiority over them.

I do enjoy the fishing mini-game, it’s a simple timed button press system. The UI for it is really charming though, the stamina bars for you and the fish resemble the health bars of older Fire Emblem games, which is a really cute touch!

Like previous Fire Emblems, there are some optional Paralogue missions that feature smaller side stories. I did a few of these this week, one of which pitted my team against a bunch of Giant Beasts. These Beasts are a cool element of Three Houses. There are various forms, from giant wolves to demonic beasts, but they’re all large, powerful enemies that take up 4 tiles on the map. They also have armor that you’ll have to break through to deal damage more effectively, and can be stunned by Gambits to prevent their counterattacks and draw their attention to a specific unit. They also have several health bars, and you’ll have to wipe out their health several times to truly defeat them. These factors make fighting them an interesting twist on normal strategy. I’ve found swarming them with several units, and having a strong unit attack them with a Gambit to draw their attention works pretty well.

/figure> I also got to the point where my units are eligible to become Advanced tier classes. For example, I've made Petra into an Assassin, Ferdinand a Paladin, and Dorothea a Warlock. The class change system in Three Houses feels really good. There's a sense of progressions and accomplishment from instructing these students, and getting them the skills they need to advance to higher classes. There's also a ton of flexibility, and a lot of classes. It's so much fun!

/figure> I made a lot of progress over the weekend. So, prior to release it was revealed that there's a time jump in the game, where you jump 5 years into the future. Well, my class promised to meet up at the Monastery in 5 years time, and after the time jump everybody showed up as promised! Some of them look quite different, like how Mercedes cut her hair! Edelgard has a new style as well.

It's hard to talk about post-time-skip stuff without venturing into spoiler land. I was enjoying the game and the plot before, but hoo boy, right around the time skip things *really* took off. This is an incredibly solid Fire Emblem plot! I'm beginning to get an idea of how each path is probably like its own complete Fire Emblem game. It's so cool. Anyway, here are some screenshots that shouldn't spoil anything when taken out of context like this.