21 Things I Wish I’d Known When I Started Playing Fire Emblem: Three Houses (spoiler-free)

Okay, it’s been a while, but I’m stepping back into this Domain for a hot sec because I have things to say, and this blog still reaches thousands of people a year who are interested in my thoughts on video games. So for the benefit of future generations of gamers, here we are.

I recently finished Fire Emblem after 85 hours (though a couple of those were probably idling). I played it on Classic Mode on Hard Difficulty (and frequently scoffed at the Divine Pulse rewind function, but I later ate humble pie and ended up relying on that mechanic quite a lot in some of the riskier levels). I learned a lot of things along the way that I wish I had known from the outset, and when my brother picked up the game a few days ago I rushed to share my wisdom with him. It ended up being a pretty comprehensive list, but I still wasn’t compelled to share it publicly. Until this morning.

Having finished the main story, I booted up the game again to look at the DLC Side Story, and as I was preparing for the first battle I was having an extra-thorough look through the menus. I discovered in that moment that you can only have three Combat Arts equipped at any one time, and these were usually the first three that your character learned (and therefore most basic/weakest). I rushed back into my final chapter save file and went to the same menu, and then… I just started laughing. I laughed and I laughed so much I scared the cat, and I wiped tears of mirth from my eyes as scrolled through the most powerful Arts in the game that my high level, master-class characters had unlocked hours ago. Arts that would have won me many battles and saved many lives, ridiculously powerful abilities that would have made all the difference (especially in that final stage, which took so many hours to conquer).

I don’t think I’ll have the heart to play the game on New Game+, so here, good reader. May you learn from my mistakes and benefit from my experience.

How To Min/Max the Shit Out of Fire Emblem: Three Houses

1) Don’t worry too much about classes – every House has access to all of the classes pretty early. You can make pretty much anyone a mage or a thief by the time they’re level 10 if you level them carefully, but of course some characters are more inclined towards certain classes than others.

2) Think about what classes you want your units to be well in advance. Got someone who will make an excellent Wyvern Lord by the time they’re level 30? Make sure their goals are set to learn Flying early so that they’ll ace the exam by the time they get there.

3) You can change classes at Level 10, 20, and 30. Unlike previous Fire Emblem games, it’s best to change classes as early as possible to learn new abilities.

4) You can only use a handful of abilities at a time, but you can swap between them. Once you’ve started learning useful abilities, make sure you swap out the useless ones. You can do this by going to the Inventory menu and choosing Abilities. This way you can, for instance, have a Bow Knight who can also steal items from enemies because they once trained as a thief. The more you battle with a particular Class equipped, the more Abilities you unlock until you “master the class” and unlock their super class-based skill, which is usually pretty good. This means that it’s sometimes worth mastering more than one class of the same tier, if there are really good abilities you want a unit to be able to use at will. (I only discovered this before the final chapter of the game T_T)

5) Half the game is spent in the monastery and half on the battlefield. For the monastery, press the R button to fast-travel. (I only found this out about halfway through the game >.<) Quests and quest items will also appear on the map. The latter will be visible as yellow glowing dots, and conversations to increase support levels between Byleth and their students will appear as little chat bubbles.

6) The most important goal in the monastery is to raise your Professor level as quickly as possible. Do everything you can to raise it early so that you have more actions per free day.

7) The only actions I would recommend are Explore and occasionally Battle (if you’re feeling your units are under-levelled, or when there are special events or quests).

8) When exploring, I used to spend all of my Action Points increasing units’ motivations so I could teach them more during lectures. This is good to start with, but as soon as you unlock the Merchants, start buying gifts to increase motivation that way instead. I recommend looking up guides for what gifts will have the biggest effect.

9) Lost Items are also excellent for increasing motivation, so make sure you scour the monastery carefully each time you Explore. Try not to double-up: if a unit already has maxed Motivation, hold onto their Lost Item until the next free day.

10) So what should you use your Action Points on? Either things that will increase support levels between students, or raising Byleth’s own skills through training.

11) Training Byleth’s skills is particularly important because if you want to recruit students from other Houses you’ll need to have certain levels of skills as well as a baseline level of support. If I had to estimate, you might be able to recruit half of the students from the other houses if you focus on nothing other than gifts and tea parties with them (but this will of course limit your ability to build support relationships and increase motivations of your own students). I would find the balance by picking a handful of your favourite students from other houses and working towards recruiting them.

12) Use the Sauna as early as possible every month to maximise benefits for Byleth and any students who really need to increase their levels in particular skills (e.g. Riding, because their current class doesn’t actually give them Riding experience). Don’t be afraid to save-scum: it’s super important that both parties feel “well-rested” and are glowing by the end, and it’s completely random how much the Steam or Stay Longer buttons effect the participants. Sometimes you’ll get lucky and get it in one, other times you might need to replay the sauna 5 times to get the levels to align.

13) If you get a perfect Tea Party, both participants receive +1 to CHA. This isn’t really useful because CHA is for gambits which I rarely use, but I just didn’t find that out until end-game and wanted to mention it.

14) As soon as you’ve unlocked the merchant, stop fishing (unless you really need to raise your Professor level) and save up your bait for special events. In my opinion, the best one is Fistfuls of Fish, because you can max your Professor level super quickly by catching multiple fish with the one bait (giving you bonus xp as well as extra fish).

15) As early as you can afford to, give any excess fish to the cats and dogs around the monastery: they’ll give you smithing ingredients in exchange. Just feed them fish of the same value over and over until they’re full. By the end of the game I had hundreds of four-star fish that I couldn’t offload because all the animals were full all the time.

16) If you catch two Silver Fish, hang onto those: you’ll need them for a quest late-game. Otherwise you can sell fish by opening the menu, going to the Storehouse, and pressing A on anything you want to sell.

17) When fighting Monsters (who take up four spaces on the board), do your best to break all four pieces of their armour in order to get rare ore for smithing rather than killing them right away.

18) Breaking a monster’s armour will also keep them stunned so they cannot counter attack during your turn. You can keep them perpetually stunned if you just keep breaking their armour in the same turn. Just make sure you finish them off before it’s their turn and they recover and start moving and attacking normally.

19) If you have a piece of equipment that you need to Repair, consider Forging it into an upgraded version of itself instead. If it takes 700g and 2 smithing stones to repair, it might be worth spending 1000g and 6 smithing stones to turn it into the next tier of weapon.

20) Unlike previous FE games, there’s no limit to the number of support relationships a unit can have, so there are no disadvantages to having as many as possible. They increase the stats of units when they’re near each other on the battlefield, especially when using Gambits.

21) SWAP OUT YOUR DAMN COMBAT ARTS. Just like with Abilities, you can only have a few equipped, and they’re always the first (and therefore worst) ones in the game. Master classes, learn new Arts and Abilities, equip the best ones.

You’re welcome.

Teasing

At training tonight, Kancho was explaining about blood pressure, and how you don’t want to live a sedentary life where some small exertion causes you to have a stroke (all of which was solid advice). During this, he mimed holding a controller and, casting around for a game reference, locked eyes with me and asked “Xin, what games do you play?”

I started laughing and said “Kancho please…”
Because as it so happens, I’ve had an anxious day and spent most of it playing Overwatch, Breath of the Wild and Postknight. And I find it strangely delightful that Kancho and I have this enduring joke where he keeps teasing me about video games instead of spending more time enjoying the real world. We can’t really see eye-to-eye on it, but it’s all in good fun and I don’t mind being ribbed.

But it also kinda sucks being teased about something important to me, especially in a world where the average age for a gamer is in their 30’s. I guess it’s true that most people I encounter in person probably wouldn’t describe themselves as gamers, but it’s a super important part of who I am, and if I go for more than a few days without playing something I lose touch with my sense of self.

Video games have always been super important to me, not only because it’s who I am, but as survival mechanisms during challenging times in my life. I’ve made several attepmts at writing a blog post about it, but it’s taking much longer than I anticipated; every time I start to go down the rabbit hole of that dark place I used to be in, it takes me days to crawl back out. It gives me chills to think about – I hate dwelling in and on those times.

But I do want to write that post, because I want to create the counter message that video games aren’t just silly virtual experiences. I know they have the capacity to save people, and I want to write about it. It’s just a little hard.

Not really sure where this blogpost is going. Consider it a placeholder, I guess?

General life update

So it’s been a little while since my last blog post! Of late it seems many of my posts have been written in times of distress, anxiety or vulnerability. And that’s great! Those posts are really important to share. But equally important are the ones where I’m not at such a despairing point in my life. So here’s one about the sort of stuff I’ve been up to lately!

Training stopped about two weeks ago and doesn’t commence for another couple of days. I’ve been restless, but also relieved as it’s given my body a chance to heal the odd injury (strained wrist, blistered toes etc.). This, I believe, to be very important because I’ve chosen to take up a new gong (challenge). One of the Academy’s old associates, the Traditional Okinawan Gojuryu Karate Association, recently had an open day where they were giving us a chance to use their new training equipment and check out their dojo. I noticed they placed great emphasis on sliding the foot across the floor rather than stepping. I used to predominantly slide, but after training on rubber and wooden floors, and even soft training mats, I noticed I would get blisters and rip skin off my feet every couple of weeks. I asked Shihan (our chief instructor) about it one night and he said the trick is to glide just above the floor. When I spoke to Kancho (the head of our school) about the discrepancy, he said that we too slide across the floor rather than stepping. This perplexed me greatly, and when I emailed Shihan about it he told me simply that “sliding is relative. Do fukyugata 300 times in a row and you’ll understand.”

To give you some perspective, 80 renditions of fukyugata in an hour is quite an achievement. This is sort of a four hour kata marathon without breaks. My friends and gave it a quick run through a dozen times and I already noticed moments where I dragged my foot, moments where I lost balance, moments where I didn’t fully commit to a technique before moving onto the next one. I think fukyugata is rich in the foundations of good gong fu and I have much to learn from it. Now it’s only a question of when I’ll take up this challenge! Ideally a time where I can rest for the remainder of the day, and allow a few days recovery between my next training session – I anticipate my feet will be rubbed raw.

 

In the gaming world, I recently passed Mass Effect 3. As a completionist, I absolutely nailed Mass Effect 1 and 2, and it just so happened that the choices I’d made along the progression of the game allowed me to do some remarkable things. Foremost, due to my high charisma and reputation built through dozens of hours of heroic kindness as the kickass Commander Shepard, I forged peace between the Quarians and the Geth, saved all my teammates from suicidal missions, instated a powerful leader of the Krogan who rallied to help me and otherwise made Commander Shepard, the Normandy and his team totally overpowered. It was a fantastic game, and I absolutely loved the ending (though I read about the new ending they released, and I must admit it does seem a little better).

I’ve been working my way through The Last of Us. If you’ve got a PS3, I urge you to borrow it from a friend and play it yourself. To my amazement, I cried readily during the prologue, which was done with such maturity and transparency it still moves me now. The game starts off pretty hard with only one firearm and a handful of bullets, but as you progress you get a reasonably supply of ammunition and crafting material. Plus, as you upgrade your weapons you get better at killing people. I was getting pretty cocky at how good I was at winning open conflicts, and then I was abruptly stripped of all my powered-up weapons and was forced to rely on stealth and inferior firearms once more. It sent me straight back to the start of the game where I felt scared of every enemy, overwhelmed and totally vulnerable to a brutal death if I made a single mistake. I haven’t quite finished it yet, but I think I’m pretty close so I’m looking forward to a quiet patch of uninterrupted time to enjoy it’s conclusion.

 

My mental health has been much better lately. I recently came to the resolution that in spite of how I felt at the end of my placement after my supervisors gave me some pretty critical feedback, I’m actually a pretty awesome person with a lot to offer people, and I’ll make an excellent social worker in some form or another. Finding my place in the world is very groovy – there are lots of positions that I think I would really enjoy, and that would really enjoy having me, but I’m not going to invest too much in applying for jobs just yet. With Japan about a month away, I’m going to just focus on my few shifts at Petbarn and unwinding a little. But I am genuinely excited at the thought of my future career in social work.
I recently came across this website/app called Super Better. If you have twenty minutes, this is an amazing video which will add seven minutes to your life within the next hour, or three hours within the next day, or ten years by the end of your life. I think. The math escapes me, but it’s amazing.

I’ve only spent a few days with SuperBetter but it’s so much fun. It’s a real life video game and it comes with all the thrills of mastering skills with cool names, fighting bad guys, earning experience, leveling up etcetera. I really do urge you to give it a try for a just a single day and see if you like it! And if you sign up, perhaps we can be allies and fight our badguys together!

 

Just quickly now, in terms of Japlanning, Beth, Craig and I are having another session today! I spent most of last night seriously sitting down and looking at the plans for accommodation, travel insurance and places to go/things to see. It’s fine when it’s an abstract concept far off in the distance – “Oh, Japan is way over there, it would be nice to do this and see that”. But when I actually really thought about doing this and seeing that I got supremely excited. I’m getting more organised and I’ve started learning Japanese from Pimsleur’s audiobooks – a great way to do it, high recommendations from me. I can’t even follow let alone have a basic conversation yet, but I am learning handfuls of useful phrases more-or-less every day, so I’m hoping by the time February 5th rocks around I’ll be competent at basic conversation.

 

Anyway, I’m running a tad late now. Going to go buy my friend a 21st present, and then head to Beth’s for sweet brunchin’ times. Ja, mata!

The Lost Kingdoms

The game (on Gamecube), “Lost Kingdoms” is truly remarkable. It’s my third favourite to Zelda Ocarina of Time and Starfox Adventures. It’s like Yu-Gi-Oh, except rather than duelling in an arena, you’re on the battlefield, dodging monsters while using your card monsters to fight back, and hopefully come out the victor.

Though this may not seem like a whole lot to you, it’s been a source of concentration, and joy for the past few days, and I just thought that I’d devote an entire blog entry to my epic strugle with The Enchanter- creater of the Black Fog (and thus the monsters is brings) that shrowds my kingdom.

I’m in the last stage, as far as I can tell. I’ve defeated all the keepers of the Runestones (to which the cards draw their power from) and have used their collective power to defeat Princess Helena- “The Woman in Black” who tried to kill me from early on in the game. Her dying words were to take down the Enchanter, for that was her task, and she needed to gather the Runestones of my kingdom to have enough power to attempt it.

Anyways, having met the God of Balance, she sent me to take down The Enchanter. I searched his castle, fighting demon after demon to collect the Stone of Darkness and hence open the first gate. Yon, my search continued as I traversed throughout the maze of teleporters, stopping to heal as I did, and continuing on. To my left, a pair of vampires (a boss from a previous level, except now there were two of them). To my right, a pair of puppet masters (yet another boss, again, doubled). Having battled desperately for my stand against the combined forces, I proved victorious after many a You Have Failed.

Having gathered what small treasure I could from them, and in turn recovering my strength, I moved on to the throne room where The Enchanter sat, waiting patiently. After exchanging small talk, and declining a marriage proposal, the duel began.

His cards were superior in strength and numbers, and he needed not the magic stones which were required to use a card. His deck seemed neverending, always replenishing without casting any spells. However, he had one disadvantage. Roughly a third of my fighting force was based on recovering lost cards and health. He had no such opportunity. Fighting desperately, healing and running, every time I would use a card (say, a Will-o-Wisp), it would be crushed instantly by the monsters three that followed me.

It was then I discovered what I was doing wrong. I was drawing the same cards, over and over, and had no chance of overthrowing mine enemy, for every time I replenished my deck, it would not let me draw new cards. I discarded my Mind Flayer’s (which restore 5-10 cards, when your deck holds 30) and started my onslaught afresh. He stood no match one I managed to get my stronger cards out- a Fire Dragon, Chimera, Stone Head, Banshee, Sand Worm… One after the other, I decimated thine enemy until he was no more.

At last, the God of Destruction revealed himself. He had been using The Enchanter, former king of the neighbouring kingdom, as a vessel for his power. Having no more use for the defeated royalty, he faced me himself. “Fool. You cannot defeat a god!” And thus the battle continued.

I realised that if I were to fight the God of Destruction, I would need to pull of some pretty spectacular moves. I quickly flicked through my cards, discarding those I had no use for. Ah, my faithful Will-o-Wisp. It had slain more monsters than any other in my deck, and its experience points were in the ten thousands. It could take down a field of monsters no problem. The God of Destruction raised his terrible fist, and a square of light surrounded my faithful card, and in a millisecond, it was no more. It was then I realised I was in trouble.

I ran behind mine foe and used the Dragon Knight to deliver a blow to its back. It focused a number of lasers on me, and I ran for dear mercy. I tried a frontal approach, trusting I could dodge the attacks as I oftentimes did. I was proven wrong. Once more, the patch of light surrounded me, and I was knocked off my feet with the blow, my health gauge flashing at 1hp of 300. I had two immediate thoughts. The first was, “I’m alive? Then perhaps I can’t die. I’m not supposed to defeat a God. I later reasoned that perhaps the myths were true, and the God of Creation really did exist, and had intervened. The second thought was simpler. Heal!

I did so immediately, using both the cards in my hand to recover to 181hp. Safe for a moment, I reflected. I dashed to my feet, but before I could escape, the lasers of his body guards focused on me, encumbering me for but a second too long. The divine beast raised his fist, and I was aware of only one more thing.

“You Have Failed.”