Nintendo has revealed the long-awaited Fire Emblem game for Nintendo Switch. Here’s the debut trailer for Fire Emblem: Three Houses.
For the most part, Three Houses features about what you’d expect from a mainline Fire Emblem game. There are grid-based tactical battles, a variety of characters with their own stories and designs, a kind of rock-paper-scissors battle system that dictates which units have an inherent advantage over others, and other such familiarities. That’s good news for those who feared that Nintendo was going to get cute with a franchise formula that has worked incredibly well thus far.
However, there is one thing about Fire Emblem: Three Houses that is quite different from what has come before. It seems that the Switch version will use a fairly simple visual style for battles when you are in the overhead planning view of the fight and then switch over to an incredibly details battlefield perspective when an attack has been ordered. Those visuals lend Fire Emblem fights the epicness that we always assumed was there but hasn’t been specifically showcased in the past.
In fact, the battlefields themselves appear to be fully-rendered environments that look to take advantage of the Switch’s surprising levels of processing power. We even see some of our heroes wandering around what appear to be non-battlefield environments. This suggests that players might have direct control of some of the story segments that occur between fights.
As for the story, it appears to involve a goddess who watches over the kingdom who is under attack. The three houses tagline suggests that there will be multiple parties involved in the conflict, but we’re not entirely sure how everyone involved will factor into the grand scheme of things.
This looks like a nice evolution of the Fire Emblem franchise that still maintains all of the things we’ve come to expect from the series at its best. Look for Fire Emblem: Three Houses to hit Nintendo Switch sometime in the spring of 2019.