RPG Talk: Fire Emblem: Three Houses - Blue Lions

In which I talk (write) about RPGs from a storytelling perspective...

Platform: Switch
Release: 2019

Fire Emblem: Three Houses is an ambitious game with three different routes through the first half of the game and four different endings. Honestly, though I'd like to see all of them, a single playthrough is already a very long game, so I don't know that I'll get to all the rest, though at minimum I hope to eventually finish a second route. (Thankfully there is a New Game+ option so a second go-around might not be as time consuming.)

I'm also glad that I finished this before my surgery (and wrote most of this before my surgery) as I'm not sure I would be able to play this in my current state as anything more than a visual novel involves a painful amount of button pressing.

This particular RPG Talk entry will cover both my overall impressions and the Blue Lions route of the game. If I get around to the other routes, they'll have their own entries.

The start of the game introduces the protagonist, Byleth (who can be renamed), and the military academy at the monastery of Garreg Mach. The academy is situated in the middle of the continent of Fódlan, between three nations, who send their best and brightest to be educated there. As it happens, the heirs of the three nations are all in attendance this year and thanks to saving them from some bandits, Byleth and her father are pressed into working for the monastery. Her father, Jeralt, resumes an old position of his as captain of the knights there, and Byleth becomes a teacher.

I'm using female pronouns for Byleth because that's what I used in my playthrough, but the player can choose their gender appearance at the start of the game, and there's a decent case for Byleth being non-binary.

As an instructor, Byleth becomes the head of one of the monastery's three houses, corresponding to each of the three nations. She gets a brief introduction to the students in each of them, and after she makes her selection, the game properly begins.

Though the first half of the game features the same basic storyline for all three houses, many of the scenes will vary owing to having a different cast of characters. It's only after a major event and the five year timeskip that each house spirals out into its own storyline, with the Black Eagles route splitting in two for a total of four possible endings.

When I first heard about the game I was initially going to play the Black Eagles route, but after watching the post-timeskip trailer I ended up falling in love with Dimitri, who I barely recognized from pre-timeskip media. I actually thought he was a major villain at first glance. What could turn such a clean cut teenager into this vengeful man with shaggy hair and an eyepatch yelling to kill them all? There was a story there, and I wanted to see it. So I selected the Blue Lions.

The first half of the game is mostly setup while establishing the weekly routine of life at the monastery, and there is a cadence where each month ends with a battle. Sometimes the battle is narratively something our characters expect well in advance. Other times it's more of a surprise (though to the player it is not since the event is marked on the calendar even though they don't know exactly how it's going to come about).

Things can happen in the middle of the month, but the bulk of the main plot is rendered in the first and last weeks of each month (either setting up or dealing with the result of the month's battle) with the middle likely to be peppered with side quests and optional character development conversations as the students bond with the monastery faculty and each other.

The Blue Lions route focuses mostly on Dimitri, though occasionally other Blue Lion characters will have critical parts to play. As prince of the Holy Kingdom of Faerghus, it's unsurprising that Dimitri's story would take center stage in a game about conflict between the three nations. Whichever house the player chooses to teach is the one Byleth will side with after the timeskip, so playing Blue Lions is really the only way to get Dimitri's story. In contrast, most other students can be recruited into other houses on other playthroughs, allowing their personal side quests to be fulfilled no matter who Byleth sides with.

Dimitri himself starts off as a rather bland character in the fashion of an honorable knight. He's well spoken, kind, and interested in emulating his noble father. But he's had a bad lot for a prince, having both his parents and a good number of his friends violently slain in an event later known as the Tragedy of Duscar. Dimitri himself was the sole survivor.

As the first half of the game passes, it becomes increasingly obvious that despite the appearance of being well adjusted, Dimitri is refusing to let the scars of the tragedy leave him. It's not just a matter of being haunted by the ghosts of his family. He is looking for revenge, and that was his true purpose in joining the academy in the first place. (Though we never learn why he suspected his parents' killer would be in the monastery.)

Dimitri becomes increasingly violent and bloodthirsty when he sees connections between the Tragedy of Duscar and the monastery's enemies until he finally snaps upon confirming that Edelgard of the Black Eagles is in fact the Flame Emperor, one of the main villains of the first half of the game. Despite their history together (they're actually stepsiblings) and Edelgard's insistence she had nothing to do with his parents' death, Dimitri goes off the deep end, and for a good while afterward, can think of nothing but killing her.

And then things get bad.

Edelgard's forces from the Adrestian Empire attack the monastery. During the fighting, Byleth gets knocked out and spends five years in suspended animation, and when she wakes up, she finds out that the entire continent is at war. Edelgard has taken half of the Holy Kingdom of Faerghus, including the capital, thanks to a turncoat noble who framed Dimitri as killing his uncle, the regent. The Leicester Alliance is also troubled by infighting between those who would cave to the Empire and those who wish to fight. And on top of that, Dimitri escaped his execution and has been running around like a madman killing imperial soldiers left and right for the past five years. He is not particularly sane when Byleth runs into him again. In fact he initially mistakes her for another ghost come to torment him for failing them. And this is not a sign of him cracking. He already cracked. He talks to the dead people he's trying to avenge.

It's interesting being put in a position where the leader of the nation is supposed to be a sympathetic character, but the rest of the cast can't trust him to do the right thing. When everyone else reunites after the five year skip, Dimitri is advised to go back to Faerghus, reclaim the capital, and then go to Enbarr, the imperial capital, to take down Edelgard. His advisors want him to be the leader the rest of his country can rally behind, but Dimitri isn't interested in anything except revenge.

This conversation comes up not once, but twice in different circumstances with different characters raising the question. And despite disagreeing with him, the advisors reluctantly stand down and follow his wishes in solidarity with the prince they are honorbound to serve.

I expected a train wreck of a campaign when I picked Dimitri based off his "Kill every last one of them!" line in the trailer, and seeing his obsessive decision making is very much the ride I signed up for. Dimitri himself implies that he no longer cares about the well being of his companions and sees them as tools to be used in pursuit of his agenda.

It almost makes me wonder why some of the characters are still following him, but the thing is, Faerghus has been invaded, half its land stolen, and Edelgard has made it clear that she intends to conquer the entire continent. The rest of the cast might not be happy with Dimitri (Felix in particular makes this known), but they share a common enemy, and it's true that stopping Edelgard should stop the invasion, so he has just enough going for him that people have reason to put up with him.

Following a madman to the bitter end of his quest for revenge is probably a bit too dark for a Fire Emblem game though, so Dimitri does come to his senses, but I'm not entirely sure I like how it happens. He's shown a flagrant disregard for everyone else's safety, so the fact that his father's friend, Lord Rodrigue, dies saving him from an assassin seems an odd choice to snap him out of it.

I suspect the writers wanted Dimitri to reckon with losing another person dear to him, but while that person could still impart some last words that would let him see reason again. The problem is they didn't set it up well enough where we could see why Dimitri would care now when he didn't earlier, and I didn't like that what was written to be mental illness (the voices Dimitri hears are clearly only in his head) is fixed by Dimitri suddenly realizing what an awful person he's been to the living people still around him. He says later that the voices are still there, it's just he's able to avoid listening to them, but his recovery is so clean that if not for that one line of dialogue I would have considered it an inexplicably complete recovery.

Post-timeskip, post-mentally ill Dimitri fits the end to this particular storyline though. He sounds worn and beaten, but determined to do the right thing. He's like his teenage self, but very heavy into atonement and questioning whether he really ought to be king after everything he's done. I suspect that most of his people probably are fine with it, because Dimitri's murder spree over the years has been exclusively at the expense of the Empire. He might have been a mentally ill disaster, but he was their mentally ill disaster, and sticking it to their invaders.

And it's probably best for Fódlan to have a reluctant leader at the end of the day, considering that the Blue Lions storyline eventually results in all of Fódlan coming under Dimitri's rule. The Alliance falls apart from Edelgard's invasion, and the individual lords agree to pledge allegiance to Dimitri, bringing the Alliance back into Faerghus territory (which it originally split off from). Then the Empire falls when Dimitri's army lays siege to it and faces off with Edelgard.

But while I enjoyed the game, the Blue Lions route did not feel fully fleshed out as a story. I understand why we don't get much of Edelgard's motivations, since that will likely be covered in the two Black Eagles routes, but Dimitri's story should have felt complete.

We learn a lot about him, how he cared for his father and stepmother (his own mother dying before he could remember her), and how the Tragedy of Duscar scarred him, but for a backstory defining event, details of the Tragedy are surprisingly light. We know the Duscar people were blamed and had their lands stolen because of it, but we never learn the details about why the Tragedy happened, either the official reason, or the real one.

It's alluded to that Dimitri's stepmother wanted to go back home to the Empire, which was difficult given that she had been chased out of it, and it comes to light that she probably had a hand in the tragedy, which is why her body was never found. That was a great start in building towards a larger conspiracy, but then we never learn anything more. His stepmother is a name without a face, who has no dialogue, and is tied to the traitorous noble who tried handing Faerghus over to the Empire. Characters bring up the fact that it would be extreme for her to murder her current family to go back to her old one, but we never hear her side of the story nor do we know if she ever made it back to the Empire.

This felt like a severe lack of closure since none of this would have happened if not for the Tragedy, and we never learn why Dimitri ties the tragedy to the identity of the Flame Emperor. Though he and Edelgard arguably end the story with no hard feelings towards each other, it doesn't feel earned, especially when we have no idea what happened to the stepmother who wanted to return to her home country and see her biological daughter again. Dimitri doesn't even ask when he has his one chance to see Edelgard on peaceful terms.

I still enjoyed the game, but it was more while the story was playing out than when it finally came to the end and I realized I wasn't going to get the answers I wanted.