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fire emblem: three houses (M/F, M/M, F/M, F/F)

• overall: B. enjoyment: C+.
• is fire emblem a dating sim? three houses seems to be making the case that it should be. some significant gameplay changes putting supports heavily into the focus, story highlighting romance (your dad literally leaves you a wedding ring when he dies), and all the lords openly flirting with you pushes this one heavily into "man, i guess this counts, huh!" now, i will not be reviewing this as a fire emblem game, but as a dating sim. the art, voice acting, and gameplay are impeccable, though there are some gameplay features that don't mix as well. the romantic storylines are... hit or miss. some have very nice romantic buildup with byleth, and some definitely do not. the length of the game can be frustrating, since you must endure the common route again for each story you play. as a game, i had fun. but it doesn't make a very stand-out dating sim.
• plot: D. the main plot of three houses hinges around a war that one of the lords starts, your choices determining what side you're on. but years before that you're taken on as the new professor at a monastery/military academy, given a choice which students to care for. unknown to you, the head of the church knows a lot more about your backstory than she lets on. now, as the plot for a fire emblem game? great. i love it. but this is a dating sim review, so let's address the elephant in the room. byleth should not be dating any of these people. "you are the new teacher at a school full of cute young adults" is not a good dating sim premise.
• characters: A. fire emblem as a franchise has a habit of reusing character designs and personalities, and many end up being fairly one-note. three houses is not immune to that. despite many characters being fairly static, however, they are explored and fleshed out well (mostly) and are pretty likable people (mostly). the designs are very nice as well, on average. there are some absolutely flawless characters thrown into the mix, as well as some that fall flat.
• writing: B. i could talk a lot about the quality of the writing in fire emblem three houses - but this is once more not a review of the game as a whole, just the dating sim aspects, so let's ignore the routes themselves and talk about the supports, which is where the relationships happen. as a whole, i find them very well written. they're fun, they flesh out each character, and they depict realistic and well developed relationships. ... platonic relationships, that is. the problem that comes up here, again, is that you are playing as a teacher, and many of these characters are your students. the supports naturally treat them as such. there is rarely any romance in the supports themselves, saving it all for a big proposal at the end of the game. but with so many of the relationships coming from an explicitly non-romantic starting point, not all of those scenes work very well. the ones that do are very lovely, but there are a lot of characters in the game and so the average gets a bit dragged down.
• routes: verdant wind > crimson flower > azure moon > silver snow
• gameplay: C. traditional fire emblem games are SRPGs, with big battles taking place on grid-like maps containing all your characters at once. support points (the stat that monitors how relationships progress) rise based on which characters are near each-other while they fight -- more or less. in three houses, however, that's only a third of the game. the rest is split up between personally tutoring your characters to improve their skills (which can also raise their support, with a little luck) and exploring your base of operations, the school you teach at. while exploring, you can directly interact with the characters, asking them out to tea or lunch and giving them gifts. essentially -- typical dating sim elements. personally, i found these portions of the game very fun. but you do hit a certain wall once you've done anything enough, where there just won't be any point in continuing and you have to skip through to the next month or do something else. three houses has a lot going on gameplay-wise, and while i like every element independently, i'm not entirely sure it's always well balanced.
• art: A. not entirely as professional as you might expect from such a huge studio, but it's still extremely good. i think the character portraits are kind of stiff and some look silly, and the 3D environments arent always as consistently high quality. but the game still looks great, and the animated cutscenes are gorgeous.
• sound: S. it's fully voice acted, and there's a lot of it. you can choose to hear the voices in either english or japanese (or, presumably, whatever language you play in) and the quality is genuinely fantastic. it is a mainstream game from a huge company. no surprises here.