4/5 ★ – Artagah's review of Fire Emblem: Three Houses.

While I enjoyed my time with the game, I didn't absolutely love it. The long monastery sections and all the other activities outside of battling, all interspersed with lengthy loading times, really dragged down the pacing and dragged out the amount of time I spent playing. The game could have told the same story, same support convos and had the same vibe it was going for in way shorter of a time span with less frustrating teleporting, running around, waiting for calendar and eating cutscenes, intense relationship grind between all the characters you want to see support convos between, and so forth. It's all this for only a third of the story too. If you wanna see the story from every perspective available, and the various endings are VASTLY different, you have to do this FOUR times over, with the initial "White Clouds" segment being identical between the playthrough, with the only difference being the characters on your team. Outside of the absolute tedium of warning the support convos in the monastery and growing your teams stats in the classroom, the game is a delight! I enjoyed the actual fights and the strategies I had to employ, I mostly enjoyed building out the team and making sure everyone was well equipped and their strongest self (weapon durability that carries over between fights wasn't really a mechanic that should have been here though, hope it goes away like magic durability did). I immensely enjoyed the stories the game told and the narrative presentation. The shining star of the whole narrative were of course the characters. I loved learning about them all, seeing all their supports, delving into their backgrounds and motivations and quirks, and they were overall my biggest motivator to keep playing. If the characters were any less compelling, I would have dropped my playthrough a long time ago. They were worth the monastery slog, and all the loading screens! Overall an awesome game that would have greatly benefited from better hardware and a bit more respect for the player's time.