![]() ![]() Another simply prefers to nap all the time. ![]() One character tells you he knows he’s destined to be a knight but wishes he could be a painter instead another wants to spend every day alone in her room, which you gradually realize is because of horrific abuse by her father before she finally left home. You are responsible for choosing their paths, for deciding whether to train them in healing magic or battle-ax-wielding (or both!), and have a fairly strong hand in whom they wind up spending their lives with as well.Īs a result, you become intensely acquainted with their quirks and proclivities. That’s the other, subtler set of choices I’ve found myself making over the course of my hundred-odd hours: how best to care for these characters. I like to hoard these supports until I’ve collected half a dozen or so and then watch them all at once, usually right before bed or on the elliptical. Sometimes they fight, sometimes they flirt, sometimes they confess to the other that their dads were mortal enemies. The real currency of the game, to my mind, comes in the form of “supports,” or little cutscenes that take place between characters as they spend more time together. You deepen your own relationships through training and teatime, and they get to know each other as well. Each house contains eight students, and every one of them has a complicated, compelling backstory that gradually unfolds over the course of the game. This is made acutely painful because of how richly drawn the characters are. You might even have killed them yourself. The students in the houses you don’t choose become, over time, your enemies although at first you might have enjoyed meals with them in the dining hall or fought beside them on missions, by the end of the game you’ll likely have stood opposite one another on a battlefield. ![]() While the mechanics and story beats are similar (which I know firsthand because as soon as I finished my first run, I immediately went back and played all of the others), it’s an entirely different game from route to route. It became obvious almost right away that this was not the case. At first, I’d thought that was largely a cosmetic choice, that the story would unfold similarly no matter who you picked. The first choice you make is in the game’s title: which of the three academic houses you will lead. It’s a little cheesy, a little predictable, a little repetitive. The story, which ultimately becomes about your attempts to win a multipronged transcontinental land war, feels in moments like Harry Potter fucked Game of Thrones and gave birth to Pokémon. You play as a young mercenary who becomes a professor at a monastery-slash-officers’-academy (“horny magic war school,” is how I describe it when prompted), training a group of students in their late teens and early 20s to become paladins and mages and swordmasters.Įven if you do not play JRPGs, the rhythms are likely familiar: You and your students battle monsters and enemies, gain levels and gold, and upgrade weapons. Still, the big questions - kids, marriage, money, parents, profession, place - loom just outside the frame, because with each year it becomes clearer that this life of mine is not practice, not groundwork for something bigger and later, but real, for keeps, permanent. I do not expect it will feel this good forever, so I am trying to be in it, to tread the water of it, while I can. The rhythm of things suits me, finally, after a lot of stops and starts and uncertainties. I count my steps and I take a light antidepressant. I sing in a choir I knit sweaters and socks I make dinner for myself most nights. I’m largely happy: I like my job and my city, love my friends and boyfriend, and have not had to contend yet with any major family tragedy. ![]() Thirty is, if anything, a waypoint, a firm-ish line I can use to demarcate a portion of my life and take some semblance of stock. I feel lucky to be getting to this age at all - several people I loved did not - and 30 is not old, and old is not bad. I’ve identified as 30 for the past few years, so really this is just making it legal. everything else going on in the world at the moment. I’m not scared about it, or anxious I reserve those feelings for …. I had not thought of it that way, although the fact that I was telling my chiropractor about the game at all should have been a sign I was in deep. “Wow,” my chiropractor said when I told him I’d hit the 40-hour mark, seven days in. I got the game for Christmas, started it on the second day of the new decade, and by early April have logged, according to the in-game counter, over 240 hours of play time. It’s embarrassing how much I’ve played Fire Emblem: Three Houses. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |