stunt_muppet

It is pretty delightful! Though it does also mean I have EVEN MORE choices to make, because I only have a few couples that I know I want to get together. With everyone else, there are a lot of good options! And sometimes I'll think I have a pairing that's synergizing well in battle and would be cute together but it turna out their support level only goes up to B and they aren't an available endgame pairing! These are TOO MANY DECISIONS.

Three Houses also has a timeskip around the middle of the story, and the whole deal is you pick one of the titular Houses and get a certain set of characters that go with that house. However, you can recruit almost any of the other students until the timeskip happens (there are a couple who are only available in one house and can't be recruited).

Then once the timeskip happens, all of you wind up on different sides of a war, and depending on which House's story you're playing, if you didn't recruit someone from one of the other houses, you may have to kill them instead. Now obviously that's unacceptable, so I have to spend my non-combat time focusing on wooing everyone possible to my house, but that then leaves me with only combat time to strengthen bonds between the people I already have!

It's all a bit much but this does mean the game lends itself to multiple playthroughs easily. Even if you go through all four versions of the story, you can still go back again to pair up different characters, see supports you didn't before, or experiment with different characters in different combat classes. I'm looking forward to getting further into it!

(And psst, if you want to try a Fire Emblem game, Fire Emblem Awakening is considerably easier to find as a ROM than this newest one is, and I *think* it might have a no-permadeath option as well, though I'm not certain. You know, if you were interested.)