Fire Emblem: Three Houses

[Nester the Lark]

Nintendo Direct segment:



And a special edition:

To be honest, I'm still trying to figure out what they're going for from a gameplay perspective. Obviously, there are a lot of customization options. Still want to know what the "group" unit combat is all about.

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EDIT: Apprently, Koei Tecmo is co-developing.

[Leon]

It's an interesting development to have you selecting how your units develop class wise. There have certainly been times where you get a character, but their stats don't really mesh with their class, so this will be good for that.

[Da Robot]

CALENDAR TIME.



The game certainly sounds interesting with the whole be a professor, teach your students different skills to become different unit types though how long is it going to take to have to teach entire armies to do things is my only concern.

Feb 13, 2019 18:02:36 GMT -5 Nester the Lark said:

Obviously, there are a lot of customization options. Still want to know what the "group" unit combat is all about.

Always thought it was trying "bulk" up the size of the armies fighting one another so wasn't just lone combatant vs lone combatant but still interesting to hear that Koei Temco is helping.

[Leon]

On Nintendo's website, they mention Koei Tecmo's experience with strategy games, so I guess in a way we're getting Fire Emblem x Nobunaga's Ambition.

[nocturnal YL]

This looks a bit too complicated for a Fire Emblem game.

One thing that got my attention is that the three countries do not cover the whole continent. There's a small, uncoloured area between the Kingdom of Faerghus and the Adrestian Empire. In terms of real-life politics, this may be disputed territory. Or some other, yet-to-be-named party holds that land. Or it's just an extention of church-held land.

Also, the player character seems to be fixed this time. You can only choose between male and female. This has the advantage that the player character can now appear in cutscenes.

[Leon]

Honestly I prefer having the fixed design. In this game Byleth is like Link, with a sex toggle, rather than a create a character.

[nocturnal YL]

A few days in, and I still can't get used to the characters' outfits. They don't look like Fire Emblem characters at all. They're unifromed (yeah I know it's an academy and all), and look rather pale. It's, like some say, kind of like Persona, minus the modern school setting.

Can't say I like this style. hairstyles and outfits are two things that make realistically-proportioned humanoid characters stand out, and they're taking half of that away. (I'm aware that they can reclass and gain different outfits.)

And because of the academy background, everything just feels too orderly. Gathering comrades from unlikely sources is a very Fire Emblem-y thing, which I don't really see here.

I wonder if we're getting another trailer to shed more light on the matter.

[Leon]

I'm sure there will be lots of characters to recruit beyond your class. Assuming that you can recruit all three classes in a single play through, that's only 25 characters including Byleth, the smallest roster in mainline title. What I think will happen is that your class is going to be your central cast like the Greil Mercenaries or Altean Knights from previous games, other characters will join like normal but not be part of the classroom mechanics.

As for the outfit design, I think they actually look pretty similar to the Jugdral outfits. Edelgard and Dimitiri wouldn't look out of place next to Lex and Arvis.  

As an aside I love this promoted outfit.

[Nester the Lark]

Here's the English theme song:

You've probably also seen the official box art (same as the image above), which is, how should I say... visually unsettling to look at, for various reasons.

[nocturnal YL]

Everyone says they don't like upside-down Claude and their generic weapon-clashing pose, but I don't really see anything wrong with it. Generic and overused, yes, but it just doesn't look that bad to me.

[Nester the Lark]

Generic and over-used isn't really the problem. It's the composition of the image.

I think it was done so that they could show all three characters without one being pushed into the background, but it looks a bit awkward. The background orients us to what is up and down, and Claude is the only thing upside-down, so it looks like maybe he's hanging from something. But he wasn't drawn to be upside-down, so his hair and clothes are essentially defying gravity (although the flaring of his cape and his hair style alleviate that slightly). Not that it would look much better if he was, but as it is, it looks like the art was just arbitrarily flipped, which comes across as amateurish.

Furthermore, the tip of his bow is misaligned with the weapon clash, so it looks disconnected. However, you can't really fix that by simply moving either Claude or the tip of the bow without affecting the balance of the picture (with either Claude being just a little too far to the right, or the bow not meeting the cross section of the other weapons). It just kinda underscores the feeling that it was all just a sloppy cut-and-paste job.

[nocturnal YL]

I didn't really think that deep into it. I just assumed Claude did a backflip (which doesn't really make sense, since he looks static here).

If they are to fix the composition problem as you describe, they'd have to change everything. Right off the bat, I can't think of any way to do it while still keeping the overall theme of showing three lead characters. Have them stand together and make uniform poses? That seems to be even more boring…

It also can't look too crazy, since I believe this is also the system menu icon.

[Nester the Lark]

I suppose it's not too bad at a glance, but images can have a subliminal quality in which you can sense something is "off" about them, even if it's not immediately apparent why.

We can see what the artwork is going for, and trying to "fix" it while preserving its intent could be a bit tricky. My immediate thought is that rather than having the characters inhabit the space of the picture directly, they could be emerging from their own individual frames, or even just flashes of light. That way, Claude wouldn't have to be upside-down, and their weapons could still meet in the middle. It would also make the image feel less cluttered. It may not be a perfect solution, but it would have fewer problems.

Otherwise, the image would pretty much have to be entirely redone. Even then, it's a matter of fitting so many characters into a limited space (Switch cases are rather narrow) without making any of the three mains seem less important than the others.

But anyway, I don't mean to make such a big deal about it. Honestly, I don't really care; it's just box art after all. It's just that I studied visual media in college, and darn it, this was a rare opportunity for me to actually use some of that knowledge.

[nocturnal YL]

That's interesting to know. Art is a skill I unfortunately don't have, outside of technical skills in creativity software.

I've seen enough "bad" art that makes this image look very decent in comparison. Switch/PS4 menu images treated like small icons (something as high-profile as Sonic Mania has this problem), major software vendor Microsoft failing to supply unified icon styles for the entirety of the 2010s, software vendors like Adobe and Autodesk (you know, the biggest graphics tool vendors) making visual styles that match only their other products but not others' tools or the host OS, and sometimes not even themselves as individual teams don't really work together…

…So yeah, I still don't think the unusual character positioning is that bad.

I think what they're going for is to imitate a rather common composition with the characters lie on the ground (which is also why I said it's generic; a lot of character group images do this), but they also want to show the castle backgound and thus can't use a top-down angle.

[Evie ❤✿]

Its nice. <3 I've always liked this series for its music (and the deep meanings you can infer from it). I haven't completed Fire Emblem, but played a little of the first English Fire Emblem title for Game Boy Advance on my 3DS when it was available. On relation to Three Houses, I like the character designs in this game. I warmed up to strategy a little after playing Code Name STEAM, which my friend likes. ✿