FIRE EMBLEM 16: Three Houses Retrospective - ShaneBrained

0. Title 0:00:00
I. The Journey to Fodlan (Intro) 00:00:13
II. A Uniting of Houses (Development) 00:03:52
III. White Clouds - Part 1 (Story Synopsis) 00:10:07
IV. White Clouds - Part 2 (Story Synopsis) 00:20:55
V. Azure Moon (Story Synopsis) 00:29:17
VI. Verdant Wind (Story Synopsis) 00:35:01
VII. Crimson Flower (Story Synopsis) 00:42:31
VIII. Silver Snow (Story Synopsis) 00:48:49
IX. Diverging Perspectives (Story Analysis) 00:58:13
X. Life at Garreg Mach (Gameplay Analysis Part 1) 01:12:24
XI. A New Class (Gameplay Analysis Part 2) 01:18:34
XII. Odds and Ends (Gameplay Analysis Part 3) 01:26:58
XIII. A Place to Rest (Gameplay Analysis Part 3) 01:41:44

Game - Fire Emblem: Three Houses

[captainmidnight]

Congratulations on running the gauntlet and actually pulling it off! I really admire how much you put into this.

[VarsVerum]

It's beyond impressive to see how much effort, time, writing, recording and editing this entire journey must've took. I was shocked to see so much care put into this series. I understand very well the discouraging feeling of your first video in a new series not doing so hot, certainly not to your extent of course. But I think the beauty of YouTube is that what you plant and forget about may someday grow and bloom when you least expect it to. Trust me when I say the Fire Emblem Retrospective is a treasure that you've blessed the FE Community with, and I'm sure that from now until the end of time, countless will stumble upon any one of your episodes and smile upon discovering amazing series to binge watch. It's truly impressive; there are channels with 7-8 figures of subs who don't put even 10% of the effort that you do.

Regardless of what direction you take next, you're growing your brand as one of the best game historian/documentarian channels I've ever seen. So keep going!

[Parmandur]

Silver Snow was actually the first path written, that the designers focused on as the primary bwrsion of the story: Verdant Wind is the afterthought.

[DelanHaar]

You know what else is monumental? This review series. Seriously, way to stick to an idea.

"In totality, some frustrations here and there do not outweigh the incredible amount of great experiences that I had in playing this game."

This may be the best summary of Three Houses I've yet heard. Yes, it suffers from a scope beyond its means in all kinds of ways, but what the game does deliver just *begs* to be explored and expanded upon. And in a strange way, the incompleteness gives everyone a chance to fulfill that desire in their own way.

On a more personal note, I can retroactively say that this game was a *significant* coping mechanism for me during my self-isolation in the US during the height of the pandemic. In a time where human interaction was largely secluded to faces on screens, Three Houses provided a fleshed-out world with vivid characters, a deep labyrinth of gameplay mechanics (obscured as it may sometimes be), and an online community of people who wanted to talk about it in some form or another. It helped re-ignite my desire to tell stories and share my creations with the world. It spurred me to join communities. To be less of an island.

I doubt I was alone in that.

[MrPOP]

It’s amazing to think that you’ve finally reached this game after starting this series retrospective 3 years ago. Even just listening to the opening notes of “The Edge of Dawn” at the start of this video was a bit surreal considering the number of games you had to cover along the way.

On another note, Ferdinand von Aegir was my favorite character in the entire game. Rest in peace, Billy Kametz.

[foolishlyfoolishfolly]

This review series has actually inspired me to marathon through every Fire Emblem game as well (skipping FE1 because I hate lack of weapon info too much). I love this franchise so much, and your work was one of the things that first got me into it. I think it was your video on Sacred Stones that convinced me to give Fire Emblem Fates a shot. It's been a wild ride, thanks for everything!

[shadowmetroid]

I definitely agree that Azure Moon feels like the most complete story of the three. Sadly I think it's the one that suffers the most in hindsight because it doesn't do anything to deal with TWSITD

[belgianstar]

Engage made me curious about the origins of FE and soon I found myself watching this whole series over the course of 2 weeks. I hope I’m not the only one who will be brought to this playlist this way, because you truly made a masterpiece.

[lotnegative]

Three Houses was my first Fire Emblem game and I finished my third and final run yesterday. I absolutely loved it. I came from the Persona series, so running around in the monastery and spending time with the students and other characters was right up my alley.I didn't get tired of it even once throughout the 200 hours I invested into this game.

My favorite route was Verdant Wind. I believe the reason my impression of this route was so different from yours is that it was my first play-through. I chose the house whose lord I was most interested in. So my impression wasn't "clone", it was "Claude". I didn't even know there was a church route at first. My sister told me and quickly finished that remark with: "It's basically a copy of the Golden Deer route with slightly more information on Byleth you can just watch on YouTube to find out."
I have no intention of playing Silver Snow, because the little bit of information I am missing from that route, can be pieced together from Rhea's C support and one of Alois's supports with either Byleth or Leonie (I can't remember who). Rhea mentions she saved Jeralt's life and Alois states he had received a blood transfusion that lengthened his life-span, making him over 100 years old before he passed away. It doesn't take a detective to piece this together. I also played the DLC on top of that.
Claude remained my favorite lord until the very end and so did the route VW.
I played in the order VW —> CF —> AM and that's also the order of which routes I liked the best, though the difference of how much I like each of them is absolutely minimal, I loved them all. Crimson Flower was certainly the most interesting route, simply because it's the most different, but with VW's knowledge, the misinformation Edelgard acted on did have me frustrated at times (not in an annoyed, but in a painful, sad way). I felt bad about being the "bad guy" in the first half of the second part, but it did get much better over time. I came to really enjoy this game's moral ambiguity. No side is completely good or bad.
I personally think playing two routes is the absolute minimum for this game and one of them should be Crimson Flower. For the sake of lore, I would probably recommend Verdant Wind over Azure Moon, simply because you don't get any information from Rhea in the latter, but really I believe it's best to play all three. I don't deem Silver Snow necessary.


Side notes:
Funnily enough, I never noticed the crooked background images in the support conversations, which might partially be because I often listened to them whilst doing other things, like brushing my teeth, as opposed to actually looking at the screen. When I did look at the screen, my focus was on the characters, so I wasn't attentive enough to notice.


One thing I find crazy about this game is how EVERYTHING is voiced. Each and every line is being spoken, even if it's just a random NPC in the monastery. The budget for this game must have been huge.

[THENikNak]

So fun fact about crimson flower since you didn’t mention it in the story section. Seteth and Flayn can be spared by taking out Seteth first and letting Flayn do her thing. They end up going back into hiding afterward. Doesn’t change the story at all similar to Claude’s sparing but it’s a thing.

Edit: I was wrong here. You can spare them but you just need to have blurry engage one of them and they will both flee.

[snarkygoblin]

Three houses got me into Fire Emblem, I'm now a massive fan of the series and can't wait for the next one. I really hope they learn from the mistakes they made with three houses.

[BryonAutry]

Well worth the wait! I am so glad you decided to keep going after the early disappointment in growth and return. I cannot express enough how much I appreciate all of the work, blood, sweat and tears that obviously went into this entire series. I am super excited to hear you are planning to create separate uploads for the stories of the games, too. I feel like I will definitely get alot of use out of those. :)

Thank you for all you have done over these last 3 years, and I hope you continue to enjoy future releases in the series for years to come!

[ixlness]

3 Houses was my first Fire Emblem game, and after putting hundreds of hours into the game, I went on my own journey to play every mainline FE game. I went the opposite way and went backwards, but I was able to complete my journey earlier this year.

I found this series last year, and every time I finished a mainline game, I would hop onto your video of the game I played to get your opinions on the game. The retrospectives added to my Fire Emblem journey and I am forever grateful for that.

Feels so satisfying coming to the “end” of your retrospective series, but when the next mainline game comes, I’m hoping we’ll get a retrospective video from you.

[RiverdudeCovers]

Damn that ending got me, it felt so great to find this channel and series about a year or two ago that covered all these amazing games. Thank you for all the great content and I can't wait to see what you'll do next!!!!

[bearerofbadnews]

From the initial trailers I didn’t like Dimitri very much. Then seeing his time skip design and playing Azure Moon he became my favorite of the three lords.

[the_detective_prince]

this retrospective series is how i discovered this channel and binged all of them up to Fates (Echoes and this video weren't out yet) when i got covid last year and absolutely love the work you've done, very excited to see what comes next

[THENikNak]

Honestly feels like an end of an era. Thanks for making these massive videos. I’m excited to see what direction the channel takes over time especially as you reach the end of the spin offs.

[niallrowe]

Amazing series that had me a bit emotional there at the end. The little story about the history of the retrospective itself at the end was also lovely and shoutout to the FE community was lovely. I'll be keeping my eyes peeled for everything you have coming next and best of luck 😊

[dangalfthedruid]

I'm so glad this is here! I've marathoned this series in anticipation of this, and I've really appreciated how well you carried your previous experiences into each review while also allowing each game to show its own merits. The amount of effort that's gone into this series is amazing, bravo!

[kipame]

One thing i like to add while watching it, Silver Snow was the first developed path of Three Houses by Intelligent Systems while Verdant Wind and the others were made after by Koei Tecmo