Although it wasn’t the biggest highlight at Nintendo’s E3 direct, Fire Emblem still managed to make quite the appearance. What we got was a trailer pertaining to the story of the game. Fire Emblem Three Houses is gearing up to be the biggest entry in the series yet, as it’s the first to be in HD, the first console entry in over 12 years, and many other aspects that the developers are adding. We have already seen so much of this game, yet this trailer goes even further into the story of Three Houses — which might mean that this game could be very cut scene heavy.
This whole trailer was made up of cutscenes of the game and if you pay attention, you can tell that it’s made up of many different points in the game. Although past games have all had cutscenes, they are usually far and few in between, or they are usually at the beginning and end of the game. What this could mean is a very different take on storytelling that isn’t like the rest of the series.
The story of Fire Emblem games has mostly exclusively been told through character dialogue. Usually between 2-4 character models on screen at once, talking to each other. Essentially, playing these games meant you would be reading a lot. Like, a lot. Fire Emblem games also feature support conversations, where characters can build their relationships by talking to one and other, either during battle or during downtime. Each character can usually have supports with around 5 characters, and can have 3-4 conversations with those characters. That is a lot of reading, which can get very exhausting.
Obviously, the support conversations in this game are not going to be animated and be cutscenes, but maybe more of the story parts will be. JRPG’s are known for being egregiously dialogue-heavy, meaning the player has to do a lot of reading. It’s an interesting conversation to have on whether or not dialogue or cutscenes are a better way of telling a story in a video game.
The plot of Three Houses features the player taking the role of a professor at the Garreg Mach Monastery. The player will eventually have to choose between the titular three houses that are made up of the three countries that make up this game’s world. Each house has different characters you get to have in your party, as well as different Lord characters. We have seen thus far that characters from different houses get to interact with each other since they are all going to the same school. We still don’t know if the houses are going to cross over and if you will eventually get to have all three houses in your party, but so far it doesn’t look like it. So each house could have its own story elements but still have the same overarching plot. Time will tell if these diverging paths will have their own dedicated stories and cut-scenes.
Fire Emblem: Three Houses seems to be following the typical Fire Emblem clichés that longtime fans are getting sick of, but it seems like Intelligent Systems are doing what they can to make this game’s story as good as possible. Fire Emblem: Three Houses releases on July 26th, 2019 and is looking to be a smash hit.
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