I’ve just completed my fourth playthrough of Fire Emblem: Three Houses. I went through Crimson Flower first, then Azure Moon, then Verdant Wind, and now I’ve gone through Crimson Flower again to have a playthrough on even footing with the other two, as now I have NG+ features unlocked and have enough experience and knowledge about game mechanics that I can play the game properly, e.g. I don’t waste instruction points trying to teach Petra black magic for no reason. I don’t think I’ll ever play Silver Snow. Besides me hating the idea of going through this game YET AGAIN, from what I know, Silver Snow is the same as Verdant Wind, except less. So this marks the last time, hopefully, that I talk at length about Fire Emblem: Three Houses. On Verdant Wind I talked about Azure Moon a few months back, but I never discussed Verdant Wind. In short? I like Verdant Wind. It feels like I’ve assembled your classic “ragtag band of misfits” and now we’re going to go save the world. I don’t need to listen to Dedue and Gilbert go on and on about how their lives revolve around Dimitri. I don’t need to listen to Hubert do the same thing with Edelgard. I don’t need to listen to Hubert insulting and/or threatening everyone around him. I feel like I could get along with and talk to the Golden Deer characters. I mean, sure, Lorenz sucks, but unlike the 3 characters I mentioned above, he’s not plot-critical. Verdant Wind has one of my favorite missions, the Battle of Gronder, which also appears in Azure Moon, except here the mission makes slightly more sense. Dimitri attacking Claude’s forces along with Edelgard’s makes more sense than does Claude joining the battle for no reason in Azure Moon. Verdant Wind also has the attack on Shambhala, another one of my favorite missions for just how unique it is. It was also so satisfying to put an end, directly, to those goddamn purple fuckers. And the final battle felt so very epic, even though the premise came out of exactly nowhere. I also love the cutscenes in Verdant Wind. They’re idiotic if you think about it, but I found myself forgiving the idiocy just because the action shots were so cool. There’s one where Nader greets Claude by shooting an arrow at him; Claude shoots his own arrow at Nader’s arrow, deflecting it mid-air. It’s unrealistic and stupid (yes, let’s greet someone by shooting an arrow at him and possibly killing him if he’s the slightest bit distracted, or sleepy, or sick, or pretty much anything), but it just looked so cool. I had way more fun with Verdant Wind than I did with Azure Moon. If I really had to pick a canon route, it’d be Crimson Flower, but Verdant Wind is probably my favorite route gameplay-wise. A compilation of statistics because…I’m weird, get over it Now that I’ve gone through all 3 routes, I’m going to make a few trivia comparisons. First, in every playthrough I recruited everyone I possibly could, but I only ever fielded 12 characters per route, since the final battle of each route has a deployment limit of 12. I tried to assemble plot-relevant teams: Black Eagle Strike Force (Crimson Flower):
In Azure Moon, I grouped the characters that were most likely to want to defend the nobility status quo along with the most Church-aligned characters. I named this team the Holy Knights of Faerghus. Holy Knights of Faerghus (Azure Moon):
For Verdant Wind, I called the team the Much Better Strike Force because I feel like in-universe, Claude would agree to that just to annoy Edelgard. This is a mish-mash of characters who didn’t quite belong in the other houses, in line with the theme of “ragtag band of misfits.” Much Better Strike Force (Verdant Wind):
Some trivia:
I calculated a stat score for everyone, where the stat score is the stat divided by character level. The stat doesn’t include item, skill, or food bonuses, but does include class bonuses. And here come a bunch of graphs that I still can’t believe I spent time compiling and making. Finally, I took the average of each stat for the three teams.
I have entirely no idea why I did all this, but whatever. It's been fun. Now, after ~500 hours, it's time to put this game away for good. |
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