What I'm Playing - No. 32
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:
- LEGO Harry Potter Collection (Switch)
- Fire Emblem: Three Houses (Switch)
LEGO Harry Potter Collection (Switch)
There was a small power outtage in our area this week, so PatronusLight and I were without power for a few hours. Though we were without electricity, we still had our fully charged Switch, so we decided to pass the time playing games on that! We decided to play a bit of LEGO Harry Potter for what I think is only the second or third time since buying our Switch.
The LEGO games are always a relaxing co-op experience. Just run around a LEGO world breaking things, solving simple puzzles, and collect stuff. The Harry Potter games have a ton of charm too. These were made before they started using voice lines from the source material during cutscenes, and the characters all act things out without speaking. The end result is adorably silly.
Fire Emblem: Three Houses (Switch)
So I kicked off this week by finishing my Black Eagles playthrough of Three Houses on Tuesday! It was a pretty wild journey!
The path to the end of the game included a number of large enemies, like the mechanical Titanus golems, and Altered Golems. I continued to find this a cool mechanic. The way you can draw their attention and break their armor using Gambits just provides further incentive to give your units Battalions.
In the interest of avoiding spoilers once again, I can’t say much else about the events that lead up to the end. Once it was over, I found the ending of the path I chose pretty satisfying. That said, there are certain elements that I’m a little confused about, but I think this is a deliberate part of the design. Playing just one path, you don’t get the full context about everything in the lore or about all the factions, so in that regard I can understand why I’d have a few lingering questions after finishing my first playthrough.
One thing that was a little unexpected is how the romance option plays out. Several chapters before the end, I was given a choice about who to present an engagement ring to. The options available depend on which eligible bachelorettes and bachelors you have an A Support with at that point. Unlike in Awakening and Fates, only the main character can form an S Support. The unusual part of all this was the timing. After I made my choice, a little dialogue box pops up basically telling you, “okay, thanks for choosing, they’ll get married at the end of the game.” And that’s that. Sure enough, after the final chapter and cutscenes, the S Support Scene with your chosen character plays out. I chose Mercedes, as planned from early in the game. Immediately afterward, I think the Battle Data recap crawl started, followed by the credits.
Like pretty much every Fire Emblem game, every surviving character on your team gets a nice epilogue before the credits. I’m happy to announce that all my characters survived! The final few chapters were a little tough too, I ended up using the undo feature several times. Overall though, I probably could’ve tackled Classic Hard mode without much trouble. Something I thought was really cool is that even though you can’t form S Supports between other units, they can get paired up or married in the epilogues if they ended the game with an A Support! I’m not entirely sure how this works when a unit has multiple A Supports, as some of mine did, but I thought the pairings were pretty cute. Dorothea and Linhardt ended up together in my playthrough, which I thought was fitting as they had a pretty sweet friendship during their Support events. Bernadetta and Ferdinand married as well, although I can’t recall what their Support events were like. What I do want to point out is that my Bernadetta was an absolute beast of an archer, with 179 battles and 105 victories to her name! Only Petra wound up with more victories in my playthrough, clocking in at 190 battles and 111 victories.
I have so much appreciation for everyone who worked to bring this title to life. Fire Emblem: Three Houses is a beautiful game, and an incredible entry in the series. It changes things up quite a bit, adding in all the social sim mechanics of the Monastery, and adding Battalions and more to combat. The end result is phenomenal. Before I publish a review of it, I’d like to play through it again as another house, but I think that alone says volumes about the game. I just finished it, and I’m already itching to start another playthrough! I mean, I might as well try out the New Game+ features, right?
