i succumbed: i didn't expect to love the characters of fire emblem: 3 houses so much. after the 3ds fire emblems i wasn't sure the series had anything left to offer me, but the students in black eagle house have won me over, and despite my grievances with the game in general, i'm still looking forward to playing the other routes just to get to know their characters better. their success is that they're fun and charming and well-acted and robust enough this time to justify the amount of time they spend in the spotlight. but most of their characterization happens in support conversations, which have a troubled structural relationship to the rest of the game. i don't feel this relationship has been very well considered. rather i feel like three houses has only heaped more weight on a structure that already undermined the potency of the stories the series uses it to tell
i'm still playing my first route but i wanted to record my feelings while they're loud in my mind. expect general spoilers up through the first couple post-timeskip chapters of the black eagles route
1. the sequestering of most character development in optional support conversations means that no character's growth or relationships are reflected in the main mission cutscenes. instead, when plot-inessential characters (ie everyone besides edelgard and hubert) appears in the main story, it's in the context of everyone in the house taking turns saying how they feel about the situation based on their one stable character trait - linhardt's sleepy, petra's not from here, and so on. i appreciate that some effort has been made to make characters respond directly to each other in these scenes, but such replies are the exception to the rule, and are still agnostic of whatever shared experience the interlocutors have been shown to have in their support conversations. the result for me is that, immediately, these 8-person conversations feel forced and formulaic, and more widely, so does the whole premise of the black eagle strike force. i'm not sold on anyone's reason for being here. whatever selfhood they're shown to have, it feels like their main reason for sticking around, for being generals in this war that didn't go anywhere until i showed up, is so that i (that's me!) can use them for video game stuff
the restriction harms in both directions. non-major characters are discouraged from growing in direct response to plot events as these developments can't be reflected in support conversations that were accessible before those events. the black eagles' lukewarm reaction circles are about the most they can affect each other without creating feelings that have to be addressed or reflected in the support side.
2. the flexible timing of support conversations means that they aren't guaranteed to occur at a time that makes any sense narratively or emotionally. in an effort to mitigate this many are locked until (or after) certain story events have happened, but not necessarily because the supports refer textually or emotionally to those events. the weirdest example of this is that my b-rank with leonie was locked until jeralt died, after which i was prompted to view it almost immediatey. but the conversation made no reference to her mentor's death whatsoever. in fact, it almost read as a bitter taste of dramatic irony, except that the tension never resolved. it was just a weird angry exchange about my not appreciating jeralt enough. oh, my god.. has no one told her yet? in the following explore phase, i found leonie gloomy with grief but seemingly completely oblivious of our recent conversation. it's possible to read this as an intentional writing choice, if a clunky one, but mostly it feels like an unresolved problem proceeding from a desire to make both these conversations available to you in any order
other common disconnects include: supports locked until after the timeskip that would have made at least as much sense beforehand, or that refer to the events of previous supports as if they had happened last week and not 5 years ago (caspar and ashe a-rank comes to mind here); and c-rank conversations potentially available before the timeskip but not accessed until after. in addition to discordantly preserving the goofy high school energy of the first half, these scenes' continued availability limits the degree of change characters (much less their relationships) can undergo during the five year gap, lest these late-viewed c-ranks paint an inconsistent character picture. the effect in all these cases is a kind of chronological incoherence - compounded with contrivance of basing the second half of the game in garreg mach again (who's grading these certifications now, by the way), it feels like there's no distinction between the past and present, between the black eagles as starry-eyed students and as hardened war generals. it turns out the (honestly moving!) sadness edelgard expresses in edge of dawn was unfounded - high school never has to end after all!
3. the nonlinear and nonexhaustive consumption of support conversations means that basic character information may be repeated frequently because you might miss it if it's only available once. how many times has shamir explained that she's from dagda, and she's a mercenary, and she joined the knights because she owed rhea a debt, but that's all settled now so actually it's totally whatever that she's here with you? this is a particularly egregious case; in others, the game is willing to hide unique lore and character background (i'm thinking of alois and leonie's supports) and i'm more allured by the prospect of seeing a differently incomplete picture of each character in each run
4. when you come back from the timeskip, all your old teammates stand in a circle again and tell you how much they missed you, while showing a glimpse of how they've changed since you last saw them 5 years ago. sort of. the best reintroduction you get is actually in the explore phase, when you can talk to each character one on one. but the explore phase is optional, and even if you take it at the earliest possibility, a week of time passes first, during which time prompts may come up for any of byleth's supports that had their requirements met before the timeskip but were plot-locked until after. after that, you're given a chance to view any other unlocked support conversations through the menu (and if you were serious about raising support levels, you'll have a lot of them unlocked). but these supports are, crucially, not intended as reintroductions to these characters. they're written as though reintroductions have happened, or rather as though they aren't necessary as all (see item 2). the existing framework of plot-focused main story cutscenes and character-focused optional support conversations and explore phases doesn't make room for character reestablishment that isn't optional to view or prone to being mistimed.
fire emblem's vision is of many complex, well-rounded characters having lots of characterization and lots of unique relationships with each other. the way they've chosen of making character content bountiful but not overwhelming in having sequences of one-on-one conversations between characters and making them optional. the amount of dialogue written for three houses is staggering. it's inevitable compromises have to be made in order to reconcile all these different pieces with each other and with the main story. and clearly the narrative team is to some degree aware of the challenges of this approach as new efforts have been made in 3 houses to restrict these conversations in time and tie them to events in the main story. i can understand and respect the task before them - it's an achievement what they've made work.
but in choosing what compromises to make, what values have been prioritized? even more than past titles three houses is designed to indulge player control of their experience. support conversations by their nature are about providing narrative rewards that are responsive to the player's choices about which characters to use and which to pair up, and their expansion directs energy and emphasis away from the main story's fixed cutscenes (which feel really slim in 3h). meanwhile additions like the explore phase only add more pieces for the player to opt into or out of or to reorder - to say nothing of grander choices like which house to teach or whether to join or oppose edelgard. all the unsynchronized story avenues are a pleasure individually but when added up they muddy the trajectory of character development, bloat it and disrupt its pacing
three houses best resists these issues when it anchors scenes to points in narrative time and says, you can't view this anymore, it doesn't make any sense. the aforementioned leonie b support could so easily have been a home run if it had committed to being a direct reaction to jeralt's death. instead three houses buckles to a fear of denying content to the player and affords them as much control of what events are viewed and when and in what order, neglecting to consider how the structures that afford this control affect storytelling in favor of the brute force addition of even more content to address combinatorial possibilities
