#36
Change YoY: NEW! My Rating: 9.2 / 10
The second of four new games on my list this year. Fire Emblem: Three Houses is the first game in the whole series I've played to any significant extent, largely due to the fact that most of them are available only on platforms I've never owned. As such, it was well past time to give the series a proper chance, and it more than lived up to my expectations. In fact, it is now the highest ranking Switch and Nintendo game in my top 50, unseating Breath of the Wild, something I genuinely wasn't expecting to happen beforehand. I thought I would like it, but not quite to this extent.
Going in, I thought the gameplay would be what carries the game for me, as I've always enjoyed tactical RPGs, but I was very pleasantly surprised by the quality of the writing, especially when it came to the characters. The politically charged story revolving around the tensions between three competing nations and the dominant church is very well told, and using a military school as the framing device is very clever as the relationships between the students from various different backgrounds does a great job at raising the stakes for the second half of the game.
What really pushes the game to the next level is the way its gameplay interacts with the character development and relationship, and how the things that you do between the battles has an impact on how well the different characters do in battle. This way the story, characters, and gameplay all feel intrinsically linked to one another, rather than separate aspects that exist in their own little boxes. This is the best Switch game I've played thus far, and I'm very much looking forward to playing other games in the series as well once I have the time to do so.
