EDELGARD DID NOTHING WRONG

*ahem*

As I said at the beginning, this was actually my entry point into the series, as I saw tons of chatter about it on social media and wanted to see what the hype was all about. Now that I’ve played through the rest of the series, however, I’ve gained a greater appreciation for the ways in which it’s in conversation with its predecessors. But, yes, it’s still the best Fire Emblem (though Radiant Dawn has a better plot overall).

After the massively overambitious mess that was Fates, the Fire Emblem team decided to do that again, because they are categorically incapable of learning form their mistakes. Fortunately, they started by making their first good decision in a long time: They outsourced the plot to another company, Koei Tecmo (the Monster Rancher guys). Because they are competent writers who don’t have lolicon and incest fetishes, the game ended up with a really good story. In particular, it is an astoundingly insightful look at classism (though its takes on racism are… awkward at best).

Unfortunately, even with outsourcing, it’s clear the devs bit off more than they could chew; major parts of the game are blatantly unfinished, and the list of cut content is a mile long. Fortunately, the game was so successful the devs were allowed a second shot with an AU remake, Fire Emblem Warriors: Three Hopes, which implements many of the cut ideas and is overall a much better story. Unfortunately, they changed the gameplay to hack-and-slash, so I only watched it instead of playing it. But I’ll discuss both, because Three Hopes sheds more light on aspects of Three Houses.

The designers once again took inspiration from Genealogy of the Holy War, but this time they were more interested in the concept of a war academy than the waifus and incest. So they made a game set entirely at an officers’ academy for up-and-coming nobles. Unlike in, say, Pokemon Scarlet & Violet, this is actually interesting because the students get to do things. There is also a point where everything hits the fan and we timeskip to a full-blown war, another inspiration from Geneaology.

Let’s back up a bit. This is another reboot, set on the continent of Fodlan. It is divided into three countries: The Adrestian Empire, the Holy Kingdom of Faerghus, and the Leicester Alliance, which is ruled by a council of dukes rather than a monarch. At the center of the continent lies the holy monastery of Garreg Mach, a neutral ground where students from all countries come to attend the officers’ academy. The academy is divided into the titular three houses, each representing one of the three countries and headed by their crown heir. Adrestia has the Black Eagle house, headed by crown princess Edelgard; Faerghus has the Blue Lion house, headed by Dimitri, the sole remaining member of the royal family after a tragic massacre; and Leicester has the Golden Deer house, headed by Claude von Riegan, grandson of the Alliance’s current head honcho. Additionally, noble blood is literally magic: Different family lines have “crests” that activate magic powers in combat and can be inherited genetically.

Already you can tell there’s a lot of names and information to keep track of. However, I never had much trouble doing so. Part of this is thanks to the character info screens displaying everyone’s affiliations in case you forget, and part of this is thanks to the early story’s slow pace that helps you to learn all the politics before the immediate plot starts demanding your attention.

But let’s get the gameplay discussion out of the way first, because there’s actually a lot to talk about. Three Houses retains several mechanics from previous entries (non-weapon equipment is back from the Tellius games, there’s a “home base” area like in Fates, weapons are breakable again) while radically changing several others.

Most obviously, the academy setting is implemented into the gameplay: The player character is a professor at the academy, and every in-game week you can tutor your students in weapon and magic ranks. You still gain weapon experience through in-game actions, but much less, and the number of ranks has been doubled to include “Grade+” ranks in between the letter grades; this necessitates tutoring to properly build your units. Every character has different aptitudes for each skill, encouraging you to develop them along certain lines; however, you can grind up their weak skills to create unconventional builds if you really want to.

Furthermore, the class system has been completely redone: Anyone can now be any class (except for gender-locked classes, those are still a thing), but you have to meet certain skill requirements to unlock them. For example, to become a myrmidon a unit must have swords at D rank or higher, while fighters require axes, bows, or fists at D. Everyone starts as a generic “Commoner” or “Noble” class with very limited abilities (similar to the Villager class in Gaiden), and gains access to four tiers of classes throughout the game; this greatly expands the total number of classes and provides more granular opportunities for advancement, rather than the one-and-done promotion system of most games. Cavalry, flying, and armored classes also require additional training in dedicated skills, which I think is good balance since those classes tend to be the best.

The weapon system has been tweaked. The weapon triangle has been removed, which I’m ambivalent about because I think it encouraged diverse unit composition; instead, weapon choice is primarily relevant to class advancement, as most classes require specialization in a specific weapon. Additionally, due to the new way that weapon ranks work, classes no longer restrict what weapons you can use — you can use any weapon in any class as long as you have the ranks for it. This I unequivocally love, because I am so sick of promotions giving you new weapons at E rank and forcing you to do a ton of grinding to get any use out of it.

Weapon ranks additionally teach characters combat arts, which have been expanded compared to Echoes — there are a lot more of them, and they now work by consuming additional weapon durability rather than HP. I think this is an interesting change, because weapon durability has always been a bit of a wonky mechanic — weapons have so many uses that it often takes multiple maps to wear them down, so as long as you regularly restock there’s never much concern over them breaking at inopportune times mid-battle. With the option to burn through your weapons faster for additional power, breakage becomes more of a concern and an interesting strategic tradeoff. Plus, I like combat arts just because they give characters more uniqueness and more options, adding more RPG-ness to the game. The game also now softballs the consequences of weapon breakage, probably to encourage use of combat arts; you can now attack with a broken weapon (just without any might bonus), so you’re not rendered completely helpless, and broken weapons can be repaired at the home base.

Oh, and there’s a new weapon type too: fists. “Brawler” classes can fight unarmed, but can also equip gauntlets that function as brave weapons. They’re a cool addition that genuinely feels like a fast, scrappy fighter, even moreso than myrmidons did in previous games.

Magic has also been redone. Spells are now intrinsic to characters as in Gaiden, and have fewer uses than weapons but are refreshed after every battle. This fits better with how we expect spells to work in RPGs, and also gives mages a legitimately different fighting style than warriors: Mages have a greater risk of running dry mid-battle but don’t incur long-term resource costs, while fighters can easily last the whole battle but require resource investment and inventory management.

Lastly, there’s a new mechanic in “battalions”, which are squads of soldiers that can be assigned to characters for various bonuses and access to a special AoE attack. I didn’t use these much because they’re not very necessary on normal mode, and I honestly felt like they added a bit too much complexity, but I know other players have had a lot of fun with them.

Overall, this is just a really good, fun system with a lot of depth. You’re given an immense amount of freedom to customize your characters, yet they all remain unique thanks to aptitude strengths and weaknesses encouraging them in particular directions. Everyone also has custom lists of skills, combat arts, and spells gained through tutoring, in addition to personal skills returning from Fates. It’s a delightful middle ground between customizability and character identity, and I loved seeing my characters grow throughout the game.

And in battles themselves, we have another cool addition: Monsters have unique mechanics now! They are large, taking up 2×2 or even 3×3 tiles, and have multiple health bars as well as special area attacks. I said in my Shadows of Valentia review that Fire Emblem bosses are usually very boring, so I was really pleased by how this shook things up. Monsters are now truly more dangerous and imposing than ordinary soldiers, and it feels like a true accomplishment every time you manage to bring one down. I love the epic scale of their massive bodies and terrifying attacks; the artists truly outdid themselves here.

Speaking of art, it’s… hornier than I would like (especially Hot Teacher in the upper-right), but still refreshingly restrained after the horrorshows of Awakening and Fates. The women’s designs now run a spectrum between sexy and practical, which works a lot better to sell the excuse that the sexy women are choosing to dress that way than if they all dress like strippers. (There is even one sexy shirtless man, but only one and he’s DLC exclusive.) With the exception of boob plates, all of the sexy outfits also look like real outfits instead of porn costumes, so like in the Tellius games, the outfits aren’t totally jarring.

We also get male dancers, in a series first! They’re less sexy than the female version, but the female outfit is also significantly more covered than usual.

Unfortunately, the avatar designs are extremely sexist and really annoy me. It’s not as bad as f!Corrin, but it’s pretty close. I recommend playing with this mod that gives f!Byleth the same outfit as m!Byleth.

On the other hand, we get a black guy who isn’t a comic relief caricature! Instead he’s, uh, a dark-skinned blond caricature. My thoughts on him are mixed, but he’s still leagues better than the likes of Devdan.

No lolis this time, at least. Well, there’s Flayn, kinda, but her design isn’t sexualized at all, her physical age is stated to be 17, and this is actually the one time I can believe she’s an adult playacting at being a child. (My thoughts on Flayn are complicated, we’ll get to that in the plot section.) I did appreciate that the timeskip avoids the potential creepiness of all your relationships being student/teacher, also — all the characters are at minimum early 20s after the timeskip, and they’re even allowed to fill in your role as instructor, firmly establishing that you are now equals. (The lack of a child mechanic also avoids the implication you immediately go at it like rabbits, which is a plus.)

I think the characters are probably the best feature of the game. This was the first time in the series that I genuinely cared about (and remembered) every single member of the playable cast, which is quite a feat given how many there are. I think the key is the setup of splitting the playable cast over the three houses: instead of playable characters only showing up at various points throughout the game, everyone is there from the start. Even though they’re not playable, you can still interact with characters from other houses and they’re still present in the plot. A few of the church-aligned characters don’t show up until several chapters in, but otherwise there’s no variance in screentime, and no eleventh-hour characters competing with characters who have always been by your side. I think something that also helps is that characters can’t die until after the timeskip, which avoids necessitating character-agnostic plots.

The characters are all genuinely compelling, with deep and nuanced personalities, distinct character arcs, and commentary on real social issues. I particularly loved the recurring theme of characters who fear turning into their parents but manage to defy expectations and become their own people. Support conversations are often initially adversarial, but transition into genuine friendship in ways that feel real and earned. I also cared about paired endings for the first time! Paired endings are no longer just “And then they got married,” they directly build on the support chain to feel like true conclusions to everyone’s character development. I particularly liked Petra/Caspar and Ferdinand/Dorothea, as well as Manuela’s solo ending validating that she doesn’t need a husband to have a fulfilling life. And though supports are grindable as in previous games, they also require story thresholds to progress beyond certain points, allowing them to reference the main plot as in Path of Radiance. I found this a nice compromise.

I particularly liked the player character, Byleth. The writers made the radical decision of giving us dialogue options this time, making Byleth truly feel like our avatar instead of just another character we happened to get to customize. This naturally requires their dialogue to be simpler and more taciturn, but they actually integrated that into the character, with other characters commenting that Byleth is unnaturally stoic and emotionless. This is even plot-relevant! There is still quite a lot of avatar-worship, but guess what, that’s also plot-relevant, in addition to feeling much more earned since your relationship with the characters is built organically. They like you because you’re their teacher, not just because they sensed you’re the protagonist.

Jeralt is also the best Fire Emblem dad. He’s an interesting and complex character in his own right while also being a genuinely great parent. I think a big part of this is that his inevitable death comes at the midgame instead of in the prologue, so he has time to develop as a character and we have time to actually get attached to him. (This also makes his death hit a lot harder than FE’s dead dads usually do.) “Characters get to have enough screentime for people to care about them” is a recurring theme here. My only quibble is that he should have been playable and I genuinely don’t know why he isn’t. There’s data in the game files showing he was definitely intended to be playable, even getting as far as voice recordings for lines exclusive to playable characters, but in the final product he just isn’t for some unfathomable reason. Three Hopes would correct this oversight, at least.

We also get gay characters who aren’t jokes! Multiple characters are explicitly queer, and even the ones who aren’t often have very romantically-charged A supports with same-sex partners (including blushing while conversing). The player is even given multiple same-sex romantic options this time, none of whom are yanderes! It’s clear the writers genuinely cared about queer representation this time instead of just throwing it in.

…But now we do have to talk about the plot. It is, I have to say, the weakest part of the game. Much of this is because so much was clearly rushed or cut, making many areas unsatisfying or confusing, but some of it is definitely the writers’ own fault. I don’t know why they did such a massively overambitious plot again when that has been a disaster every time they’ve tried it previously, and there’s some stuff they really clearly ought to have pared down because it adds nothing but bloat. The plot is still miles ahead of every other game bar Radiant Dawn, so I encourage you to play or YouTube the game yourself. Watching all four routes will only take you about… (checks) …46 hours. You weren’t doing anything this week, were you?

The plot is split into two acts bridged by a five-year timeskip, with the first act remaining mostly the same for all houses while the second act has unique plotlines for each. The first act revolves around the academy setting, with the PC, Byleth, getting recruited as a professor due to their mercenary background. (Yes, we finally get a non-noble protagonist again! For about five minutes before it’s revealed actually they’re literally the second coming of Christ.) After a tutorial fight, the pope running the academy wastes no time sending kids into life-or-death situations to do her dirty work and can’t stop gloating about how evil she is:

This includes executing dissidents and forcing two students to kill their own family. Despite this, the fandom and 2/3 of the cast believe Rhea is an innocent woobie. ???

This section honestly drags out for far longer than necessary and is the weakest part of the plot. It’s 12 chapters in total; for comparison, act 2 has between 6 and 10 chapters. Stuff does happen, but at a glacial pace… right up until the end, where everything happens way too quickly and the villains are abruptly killed off without explaining anything they were doing. To add insult to injury, the plot threads of this section only get followup in two of the four routes; in all others, they’re just dropped. It’s also really, really stupid that Rhea the invincible god-dragon is sending level 1 babies out to deal with serious threats, and I will never forgive her for that stupid paralogue where she pretends to be a poor little noncombatant who needs you to risk your life protecting her. (Yes I know she did all this to test Byleth, but the point at which Agarthans show up is the point at which she should start taking this seriously and stop sending her precious mommy/daughter/girlfriend into the jaws of death with only greenhorns for backup.) I was ready to move on from lighthearted school times to the real plot about halfway through, and just grew increasingly tired as things continued to drag out. This section definitely could and should have been chopped down by a few chapters, and the Agarthan stuff in particular should have been moved to act 2 instead of given a hamfisted non-resolution here.

The one important thing occurs at the very end: Edelgard is revealed as the mastermind behind the attacks you’ve been facing the whole arc, and declares war on the church. If you chose the Black Eagles at the start of the game, you can choose to side with either them or the church; otherwise, you’re railroaded into siding with the church regardless of house.

Yes, despite the game ostensibly having four routes, there are effectively only two. In all routes except one, you are fighting against Edelgard to rescue Rhea (who somehow gets captured despite, again, being an immortal god-dragon) and restore the glorious status quo. Developer interviews explain why this is: They developed the church route first, and used that as the default template for the other routes. It’s painfully clear that they ran out of time long before finishing all the routes: The Black Eagles route is half the length of the others and has a nonsensical hackjob of a plot, while the Golden Deer route is literally just the church route but Claude is there. The Blue Lions do get a more unique route, but it’s a worse one that leaves crucial mysteries and plot threads unresolved.

You can see clear similarities to Fates, as well as aspects of Radiant Dawn: We have multiple factions of friends who find themselves on opposite sides of a war and are forced to fight. Three Houses does this better than either of them by virtue of the conflict being real instead of contrived, and in some ways the story feels like a second draft of Fates. Unfortunately, for some baffling reason the developers forgot about the genius selective pacifism mechanic from Radiant Dawn, so there’s nothing stopping best friends from gleefully hacking each other into giblets. They still made unique skirmish dialogues for every sadistic pair-up you can think of, many of them quite heartwrenching, but this has no effect on gameplay. This is a terrible missed opportunity for gameplay/story integration, and it would have added even more value to poached students. I don’t know why it never occurred to the devs to do this. (My theory that they mindwiped everyone after Radiant Dawn gains credence.)

A bunch of other stuff happens, but the important part needed to appropriately contextualize and understand everything else that happens (which is only revealed in the church route because Quality Plotting) is this: 1000 years ago there was a dragon genocide. Yes, yes, I know, but this time there’s interesting additional context because Intelligent Systems wasn’t writing it. Because history is written by the winners, the dragonslayers were hailed as heroes and their descendants went on to form the major noble houses of the present day; however, their magic noble powers do not have happy, shiny origins as in other FE games. Their bloodline crests were obtained by drinking the blood of the slain dragons, and their legendary weapons were forged from their bones. The reason the legendary weapons can only be wielded by their descendants isn’t because nobility is inherently better, it’s because they need a blood type match.

I thought this was a really clever and interesting twist on what has become a rote cliche in Fire Emblem, and a genuinely meaningful commentary on the history of imperialism. The ruling families of Fodlan are not divinely appointed gods; they are cruel warlords who built their empire very literally on the blood and bones of their victims.

Unfortunately, for some reason the writers decided to muddy this by making the chief representative for the dragon side the pope, who the game spends over half its span establishing as incredibly evil. Yes, she’s a genocide victim motivated by trauma to preserve the last vestiges of her people, but she could do that without being a literally draconian tyrant who has ruled the entire continent as an immortal god-queen for the last 1000 years while erasing history, murdering dissidents, and stifling scientific progress (autopsies are banned, among other things). Cool motive, still tyranny, Rhea. I do think she’s compelling as a tragic figure and might have worked if she was toned down just a smidge, but as-is she really only works as a villain, and the attempts to portray her as a good guy are just baffling.

The other dragons seem less evil on the surface, but the fact they’re willing to go along with Rhea’s schemes makes them look awful too. In particular, I have zero sympathy for Flayn — you lose the right to hide behind the facade of “I’m just a (1000-year-old) little baby girl!” after you voluntarily take to the battlefield and start murdering people.

But even the immortal dragon pope is too realistic to be the real villain, because this is Fire Emblem and we ultimately have to pin everything on a spooky demon man. See, it’s also revealed the dragon genocide was actually a counter-genocide after the dragons invaded the continent from another realm and took over. The original inhabitants were driven underground and evolved into weird mole people, adding yet another faction to this tangled political web, and it turns out they’re secretly responsible for everything bad that’s ever happened. The mole people, despite also being genocide victims, are all objectively evil and it’s okay to slaughter them to the last man, because that’s not at all creepy and tone-deaf after all the moralizing about the dragon genocide.

To make this worse, the mole people are extremely Jewish-coded. To wit, they:

1. are a secret underground society
2. of shapeshifters
3. who secretly control the world government
4. and use blood magic
5. to perform evil experiments on good Christian Seirosian children

Yes, LITERAL BLOOD LIBEL. And this is all on top of them being genocide victims but they’re evil for being mad about that and it’s okay to finish the genocide because they’re the real oppressors, which… yikes. To make this even more uncomfortable, Three Hopes portrays the dragons with Aryan features — yes, really:

People who look like this are just better than you and you’re evil for thinking they shouldn’t rule the world.

The most generous interpretation I can give is that the writers unthinkingly copied common secret-society tropes from other media without knowing they were antisemitic. However, given overt antisemitism has cropped up in other parts of the Japanese media landscape, I think that’s too charitable. This is just such a comprehensive list of antisemitic tropes that I find it hard to believe they didn’t know what they were doing.

The Blue Lions route does not get into any of this even though it’s extremely relevant to Dimitri’s backstory (because of course the mole people were responsible for that too). Instead of learning the truth about the trauma that has defined his life and getting vengeance and closure with the true perpetrators, he anticlimactically kills the mastermind by accident without even realizing who he is, because that makes sense.

Dimitri and his story as a whole are just… ugh. So, okay, the writers were clearly trying to do clever subversions with each of the house leaders defying your first impressions: Edelgard is heir to the most hegemonic country but is actually a radical, Claude seems super shady but is actually the nicest of the three, and Dimitri looks like the generic good-guy lord but is actually an unhinged, bloodthirsty murderer. On the surface, I think this is a neat idea. It makes you reconsider judging a book by its cover (a major problem with Fire Emblem as a whole) and demonstrates that trauma victims will not always behave the way you want them to — they shouldn’t have to perform to your script for their pain to be valid.

In theory.

Unfortunately, they go way too far with Dimitri and instead make him a genuinely awful person who should never ever be put in charge of anything, oh my god. He is horrifically violent and cruel, killing enemy soldiers brutally when he’s not regaling you with fantasies of how he wants to torture them, and he shows appalling disregard for his allies even when they’re risking their lives for his selfish, petty goals.

The nicest character in the game fights to her literal last breath protecting him, and this is his reaction. (For reference, compare with Claude’s and Edelgard’s reactions.) Don’t worry, though, after his surrogate dad dies taking a completely justified blow from a 12-year-old trying to avenge her brother (you kill her, of course), he magically becomes a good person again. Everyone else dying isn’t good enough, but seeing the one person he actually cares about die as a result of his cruelty and stupidity suddenly makes him realize he was wrong, and also magically gets his schizophrenia under control.

Oh yeah, did I mention? Dimitri sees dead people. This mental illness is handled… perhaps better than you’re expecting, but only if your expectations are at the Earth’s core. No one ever acknowledges Dimitri’s hallucinations are dangerous and harmful, or that someone who can’t tell the living from the dead should not be leading an army let alone a kingdom. Don’t worry though, you just have to traumatize him a little more and then it’s not a problem. The story at least doesn’t go with the narrative that he’s “cured” — in his ending he says he still sees the ghosts, they just don’t overwhelm him anymore — but it’s still very awkward and unnecessary. Give this boy real therapy, please.

Dimitri’s plotline is, completely unintentionally, a fantastic argument against dynasticism and Dimitri in particular being king. In addition to being unqualified for leadership in basically every way, Dimitri very clearly does not want to be king. It reads to me like he’s only doing it out of obligation, to Dedue but also to the system of primogeniture that states the leader of Faerghus can’t be anyone else. The first half of the plot has all the actual leadership done by Gilbert and Rodrigue while Dimitri broods in a corner muttering about torture fantasies, and his friends just do everything he wants without question no matter how bad of an idea it is, because the prince said it so we must obey!

Rodrigue: Your Highness… Fhirdiad is in a terrible state right now. The tyranny is unbearable, and so the rebellions are endless. Refugees starve to death in the streets. If I may speak freely, Your Highness… We should change course for Fhirdiad and take down those traitors before we embark to Enbarr.
Dimitri: There’s no time for that. We must annihilate Enbarr before all else.
Rodrigue: Think this through. I understand wanting to destroy the Empire and the emperor. I want that so much it hurts. But which is more important, the dead or the living?
Dimitri: (angrily) SILENCE.
Rodrigue: No, Dimitri, you will hear me out.
Dimitri: Are you asking me…asking the dead…to forgive that woman?
Rodrigue: No, I would not ask that of you. What I am asking is that you allow us to prioritize the Kingdom capital over the Imperial capital for now. As Lambert’s close and trusted friend, I am confident that he would have advised the same.
Dimitri: Do not dare to put words in the mouth of the dead. They are your words alone, even if you borrowed their lips. Until I offer up that woman’s head, Father will remain a slave to his lingering regret and hatred… Even now, he suffers. It is ceaseless. As we waste time with idle chatter, his suffering continues!
Rodrigue: (sighs) You are my king. Our king. Wherever you lead, we will follow.

Seriously.

Even after his magic personality fix, he only accepts the role because everyone so aggressively pushes him into it. I really think he’d be happier if he could just elope with Dedue to a cottage in the countryside and leave the politicking to someone else.

Oh right, I still haven’t talked about Dedue. He’s the one black guy, so you can already tell this is going to be fraught. See, after the mole people killed the royal family (but somehow missed a 12-year-old), they pinned it on Duscur, a neighboring territory of black people, who were promptly genocided in retaliation. Dimitri managed to save a Duscur boy during the attack, and they grew up like brothers. Dimitri knows Duscur wasn’t responsible for the attack, and vows to restore their territory to them once he takes the throne. (Which he does, but only offscreen in the epilogue.) This is, supposedly, Dedue’s sole reason for supporting Dimitri’s claim to the throne. However, in terms of his actual actions, Dedue is obsessively devoted to Dimitri personally, and will kill himself or even fight against his own people for the promise that the Aryan boy will totally be anti-racist once he gets absolute power.

Duscur General: Why save us?
Dedue: I will not abide the needless death of my own people.
Duscur General: You must know that as long as there is breath in me, I will fight.
Dedue: Then fight, and be defeated. But so long as you pose no threat to His Highness, I will not end your life.
Duscur General: Idealistic fool. We will not relent. Not until we’ve taken back the homeland you monsters stole from us!
Dedue: I share the same sentiment.
Duscur General: You? Who sold his soul for Faerghus?
Dedue: His Highness has promised the people of Duscur a home. His will be a kingdom that is proud to harbor the blood of both Faerghus and Duscur.
Duscur General: That’s impossible. Don’t be naive.
Dedue: Believe what you will. But Faerghus will change under his reign. That is my firm belief.
Duscur General: …

So, by implication he would murder his own people if they threaten Dimitri. Despite ostensibly fighting to restore his homeland, in practice Dimitri is always his highest priority and his character completely revolves around him. I think this is best demonstrated by the fact that if you don’t do Dedue’s sidequest, he just straight-up dies during the timeskip in order to save Dimitri’s life. The black guy and his whole subplot about reparations for racist violence are, ultimately, completely disposable to the plot. As much as I like Dedue and Dimitri’s relationship in a vacuum, in the broader context of race politics it’s very awkward, especially when Path of Radiance did far better in… just every way, really. Not only did the apology and reparations occur on-screen as part of the main plot, but the ethnic minority fought and advocated for themselves instead of meekly relying on race traitors to fix everything for them. It’s a far cry from this.

Speaking of race issues, there is also this brown boy Rhea adopted as a pet/manservant, and who can join your army as a child soldier. He is also explicitly willing to kill his own people because he’s obsessively loyal to Rhea, the doting mother who, uh, never taught him to read:

Cyril: I’d appreciate it if you wouldn’t tell anybody, ’cause I’ve been trying to keep it a secret, but… I don’t know how to read, so I wasn’t sure what to do with the list.
Lysithea: Is that so? But why do you keep it a secret?
Cyril: I’d hate it if people figured I wasn’t up to a job just ’cause I couldn’t read.

This doesn’t have any uncomfortable real-world parallels at all!

Dark-skinned Claude was also meant to have some kind of anti-racism plot, but they ran out of time so only implications remain. We will have to wait for Three Hopes to talk about him.

Fortunately, we did get one good thing out of this mess, and that’s Edelgard, who is the best character. Edelgard turns out to have been tortured and manipulated by the mole people into becoming a human superweapon for them. This puts her in a difficult position where, despite ostensibly having a ton of power as the Emperor, in practice she is a figurehead and must act under layers of subterfuge and plausible deniability every time she wishes to undermine her captors. This is a really interesting conflict for a character, and I think it’s a variant of Conquest‘s plot that actually works. Conquest Corrin had the chance to escape their captors’ clutches and instead chose to walk back into the cage, but Edelgard has no easy outs, and her captors are far more competent. She makes it clear she despises the Agarthans and, unlike Corrin, has no illusions of reforming them (despite them taking the forms of her friends and family, which must be really torturous). She knows the Agarthans’ plans are abhorrent, but she’s forced to aid them because they give her no other choice. Despite this, she successfully out-schemes and defeats them in the end… offscreen because the writers ran out of time. So we get no proper closure to this, and also she never explains what the Agarthans even are on her own route, so you better have played the church route first if you want to have any idea what’s going on. Swing and a miss.

But what I find most interesting about Edelgard is that she is anti-dynasty to an extreme, far more than even Ike. Her first act as emperor is to jail and dissolve the corrupt Adrestian aristocracy, and she pushes for a meritocratic system in its place, with many of her supports delving into the nitty-gritty of how she is dedicated to making this truly, actually work. She rightly decries the crest system as dehumanizing, elitist, and discriminatory, and promotes soldiers who would otherwise be passed over for their crestless or common status. Moreover, she demonstrates a willingness to genuinely listen to others and incorporate new ideas — her supports with Manuela are particularly notable for making her accept the virtues of religious tolerance, even though she despises the church. Most interestingly, unlike every other Fire Emblem protagonist bar Ike, she renounces her throne in the ending, unlike in all other routes where the house leader becomes the new king and Byleth becomes the new god-pope. When she said she didn’t want her country ruled by right of birth, she included herself in that. She actually walks the walk.

I think that everyone else’s supports throughout the game back up her arguments, also. The story as a whole is remarkably anti-aristocracy, with just about every character’s subplot deconstructing the system of bloodline magic by showing how awful it would really be. Nobles are pushed into arranged marriages with sleazy spouses for the sake of good crest matchups, and kids who fail to inherit crests (because inheritance is realistically semi-random like real genetic traits) are discarded and ostracized by their families, breeding resentment. Despite the Fire Emblem universe being mostly egalitarian, this leads to exactly the kinds of sexism and misogyny you would expect, which is discussed and criticized instead of just being there because women must always suffer. There is even one subplot about a noble who planned to marry his own daughter to produce an heir with a better crest. When I first played I didn’t think much of this, but after the incest-and-eugenics-fest that was Awakening and Fates I can’t help but read this as pointed criticism of the series’ child mechanics. Eugenics is bad, people!

And then you kill her in 3/4 of the routes and her own route is an unfinished mess.

This game could have been so good, you guys. Many aspects of the plot are never fully explained, and several plot threads are just dropped without further explanation. What exactly was the Flame Emperor trying to accomplish by setting up the initial bandit attack? How much of Edelgard’s actions are her own vs. the Agarthans’? What is Claude’s deal? Why does Rhea want to get into Byleth’s pants?

Fortunately, Three Hopes would answer all of these questions and more — well, except for why Rhea wants to get into Byleth’s pants, that remains a mystery for the ages. However, this post is long enough as it is, so I’ll cover that next time.