Fire Emblem seems to be one of the most divisive series out there with it's constant 'old crowd versus new crowd' community disagreements, but personally this is my most anticipated game of the year. I just really have fun playing these games and I'm super excited to play this, no matter how it turns out.

How are we feeling about this one guys?

Probably going to be my 1st day one Switch game.

I’ve only played Path of Radiance so I’m a FE novice but 3Houses looks great.

I hope it turned out well. Review embrago’s up tomorrow so we’ll find out soon.

this will be my first FE and i've got it sitting on the ol switcheroo waiting to unlock.

pretty stoked tbh- will check in with this thread once i dig in!

I'm hyped. I had some doubts from the first few trailers, but all of the recent previews have set my mind at ease.

Loving the positive responses so far! I was thinking the lack of posts on this forum a doomsay to the general GB feeling towards it.

I should have added to my original post, what house is everyone thinking?

I'm having a super tough time deciding, but I think I'm maybe swayed by Black Eagles.... This seems to change 2 hourly though.

At this point I'm 100% down the hype train, especially after hearing positive things from press previews and early leaks. Gonna go with Black Eagles for the first playthrough, but I think it's probably inevitable that I'll do all three.

@el_tajij that's more that the GB forums are mostly dead, but yeah I'm excited. Just trying to figure out how I'll fit this game on top of the pile of other interesting ones I've started recently.

Listening to Austin Walker’s thoughts on it has sold me. I’ve only played Awakening, but this looks even more up my alley.

Very excited, but I still have yet to play FE: Fates, so it'll probably be quite some time before I get to this.

@dochaus: I've noticed the forums are alot more quiet recently. Any reason why?

I'm excited about playing it but worried about the narrative after Fates happened.

I'm definitely excited, it's the first Switch game that I'm buying on day 1. The positive buzz has been good to hear after the less-than-great writing in Fates and I'm really digging this new framing device.

Can't decide between Black Eagles or Golden Deer for the first playthrough so hopefully I'll figure it out sometime soon.

I'm excited. Not sure if I'll buy it right away for reasons outside of gaming, but it's on my list to pick up sometime this year. I've kept myself relatively in the dark about the game, but I've been hearing generally good reception from most places it seems.

I'm excited, but I have to finish Awakening and Fates before I let myself pick this up! I have no fear of it selling out, so I can wait to finish the two I've already bought. Looking forward to sinking my teeth into this later though ^_^

As for house, I'll wait until I get to that point in the game. Running a pretty effective media blackout for this one.

I can't wait!! I must have put 1000+ hours into Awakening over the earlier years of the 3DS. I haven't played any of the other games.

The reviews have hit and are almost universally very positive. Hype increasing!

Not sure if to pick this up, the reviews have been positive and I enjoyed Awakening on the 3DS but not sure if it's really for me.

Honestly just hearing that the romance stuff has chilled the fuck out is a tremendous relief.

Like I liked Awakening a lot and it worked well in that game, but it was one of several things ruining Fates.

Haven't touched a FE game since the Wii, but I'm intrigued. Will likely grab it after my current backlog clears out in a couple of months.

I loved the Fire Emblem series, but haven't played one since Radiant Dawn 12 years ago. Very excited to get back into it.

I was already excited for it when it was announced, but the early previews and reviews that have been popping up the last two weeks have gotten me extremely hyped for it.

@efesell: Yeah, I didn't have a 3DS but friends told me Awakening and Fates got...weird with the romance options.

I'm on the hypetrain, been playing Wargroove but I'm gonna put that down for Fire Emblem. Good reviews and the Persona-esque stuff has only got me more excited.

My biggest worry is one house's story is significantly worse/better than the others; I don't wanna read which ones are better ahead of time, but it sounds like they're different enough that there's a chance of a "bad" house choice.

@theflamingo352: Awakening is honestly fine with it, they designed a significant mechanic around a core narrative that it made sense in. It was something that turned out to be very popular.

Popular enough to warrant just..putting it into Fates. Where they very much did not make any effort whatsoever to tie it into anything sensibly and that's where it just felt weird and dumb.

Pre-downloaded today. Stoked.

Maybe this is the wrong place to ask - but is classic mode a must? I'm down for it, but I am also shit at games and am worried I'll just lose the entire team.

@aiomon: It's not a must in my opinion (some hardcore fans will certainly disagree).

However, Three Houses reduces the risk by allowing some limited rewinds in battle, so it should be significantly easier to get through classic mode without a death.

@aiomon: I think Classic helps to create a pretty unique tension in these games but I wouldn't say it's a must. Especially if, like me, you already know that if you lose someone it just means that you start the whole map over if you have to. At that point it's not a choice that matters all that much and is just frustrating.

To me there's only one defining aspect of Fire Emblem that if you lose that you lose the whole point and that's the stat growths.

It's not a must, but I do think that you should bump the difficulty up to Hard if you play on Casual. Part of what makes Classic so much more difficult is that if you lose a unit in battle, that unit is gone - with that aspect of the game gone, you suddenly have a "suicide unit" tactic available to you and you only have to worry about losing that character for the rest of the battle, not the rest of the game. I played Awakening on Casual the first time and managed to cheese large portions of that game with this tactic.

Not ecstatic since I don't own a Switch. But interested and hoping that it's just not Fire Emblem Waifu Wars.

I don't have a Switch, but I'm a little torn on the matter. It looks great, and I'm hearing a lot of great things about it. But it does sound like something that is a departure from both Awakening and Fates, the two games that got me invested in the franchise. If I ever get a Switch and buy the game, I'll do my best to keep an open mind.

@raycarter: It is as much of a departure from Awakening/Fates as those games were to what came before them. The core element of Fire Emblem, the maps themselves, hasn't changed very much but the rest of the game built around that is completely different.

So it depends on what about those games drew you in.

Loving it so far, but man oh man is having to unlearn the weapon triangle is maybe the hardest thing for me so far in this game.

I'm extremely into this game.

Really loving it so far... except for how it looks. The characters are fine, but the Dynasty Warrior DNA really shows through in the environments. The worst of it is the laughably bad conversation backgrounds that were rendered at super low resolution with broken perspective in many places.

The game is good enough in other areas that you can learn to ignore the ugly bits, but they stick out in what is otherwise a very polished package.

This is my first Fire Emblem and I'm loving it. The classroom/monastery stuff is neat, and a nice way to break up the battles.

I played through maybe 20 hours of the 3DS one and dropped off, but I'm looking to pick this up and give it a go

The game seems like it has drawn a lot of inspiration from The Legend of Heroes games in regards to its world building, which is actually really good and doesn’t feel like window dressing like in the 3DS titles.

This is my only issue with the game as well. This may be my favorite Fire Emblem since Awakening (and it's probably better than Awakening) but the game looks like Jaggie City with horribly aliased characters. You can mitigate most of these issues by playing docked but I'm currently in a situation where I can really only play handheld.

ALSO WHY THE HELL ISN'T ANYONE TALKING ABOUT THE FUCKED TEXT SIZE WHEN PLAYING HANDHELD?! OH GOD, MY EYEEEEEEEEES!!

@colourful_hippie: I feel like all games lately have been bad about text size and nobody is making any effort to be better in spite of everyone talking about accessibility more.

Even docked everything in this game is too small, I have to be way closer to my TV than I want to be.

@colourful_hippie: @efesell: I’m only 10-12 hours in, and yeah, my biggest complaint is also the visuals. The actual game part is good fun, but there are weird visual problems.

Whatever visual lighting pass they’re doing on the character models means they have this weird jaggy outline relative to the floor and wall behind them. It’s really noticeable on all the humans, cats, and dogs in the monastery.

And yeah, man, some of the background detail on the monastery is not great. It seems like they had decent photo reference material for the monastery, but the fidelity is super low on most environmental objects when you look at anything up close. This has kinda been a long-standing issue with Fire Emblem where the characters receive all the graphics attention and the environment looks like junk. The skybox is especially terrible, every cloud is like a 100x100 pixel texture.

The text size is at least a couple points below acceptable. At least on handheld mode you can hold the screen close enough that it’s readable, but on a TV across the room from you when the Switch is in docked mode, the text size is pretty rough on the eyes.