The post Fire Emblem: Three Houses Let’s Play – Chapter 10: Where the Goddess Dwells first appeared on Killa Penguin.

Fire Emblem: Three Houses may not be the most clever game ever created as far as its writing is concerned, but spending time with everyone and naturally building up your relationships that way is a far more effective means of establishing emotion than the unearned bipolar shifts that plague Fire Emblem Fates and Fire Emblem Echoes: Shadows of Valentia. Characters like Jeralt who hang around the story’s periphery don’t elicit any kind of emotional response when they bite it, to be fair, but the kind-of-loss in chapter 10 of Fire Emblem: Three Houses is actually a real bummer. That’s a good thing, though, because it means that I’ve become invested in the story, and that hasn’t happened since 2007’s Radiant Dawn.

[Click here to start from the beginning]

Chapter 10 begins with a support conversation with Leonie, confirming that Jeralt’s death was the event that blocked her support with Byleth from reaching a higher level. His death doesn’t factor into the conversation as much as I expected, though. Talking about him in the past tense is apparently what the holdup was about. We also get to see a scene between Monica and the guy who teleported in to save her from Byleth after she killed Jeralt. His name is revealed to be Thales, and he saved her to keep something about their bodies from being revealed to us. Flame Emperor is hanging around, too, but he’s not a fan of Thales and Monica. Still, they tolerate his obvious contempt and threats for some reason.

Some of the random characters littered throughout Garreg Mach appear to be taking Jeralt’s death harder than Byleth is, including one guy who’s practically wailing with emotion. Chapter 10 of Fire Emblem: Three Houses has tons of glowing blue spots that have lost items, though, so the tone is all over the place as characters are on the verge of tears before cheerfully informing you that the random object you’re trying to hand them isn’t theirs. Other than that, not much happens. I enter Bernadetta into an archery tournament and she wins an Advanced Seal, Manuela mentions at 43:36 that the blade that killed Jeralt was unusual and not made of iron or steel like an ordinary weapon (which might be a hint that we’ll get a zombified enemy version of Jeralt later on). And of course, there’s the usual buttering up of characters who haven’t been recruited yet.

I finally recruit Leonie, but doing so is bittersweet. Not because she’s mourning or anything, but because I recruit her immediately after asking her to join as a guest for the month. You can only ask one person per month (and that one person isn’t refunded if you subsequently recruit them). The calendar has moved into the next year, too, so if paralogues being available until 2/22 denote the cutoff point for recruitment, I’ve wasted one of the last guest opportunities that could have been used to recruit the last few remaining characters. Luckily, there are only a couple more who I’d like to recruit. Mercedes seems important because of her connection to Jeritza, and Raphael is kind of adorable in a “dumb bear” sort of way, but missing out on either or both of them wouldn’t be a huge loss. The other three or so potential recruits are so generic that they can get lost.

Felix was recruited in the last chapter and that means that his paralogue is available in this chapter. It’s called True Chivalry, and it boils down to everyone helping his father protect some villagers from bandits. Felix isn’t as useful as I expected, but Leonie balances him out by being way better than anticipated. The map is pretty easy, honestly, but you can’t direct allied NPCs to specific squares like you could in Radiant Dawn. As a result, a villager runs toward one of the stronger enemies toward the end and gets himself killed. Everyone would have survived if the computer’s decision-making wasn’t so astoundingly poor. I wish that you had more options for controlling CPU units in Fire Emblem: Three Houses. Anyway, the reward for saving most of the villagers is a Wo Dao sword (which is like a Killing Edge sword but with less durability) and Large Bullion.

There’s also a rare enemy encounter, and while I’m trying not to do anything that could be construed as grinding, I can’t tell if these encounters are random or purposefully placed during chapters. Either way, the fight is against a group of bandits and a large bird monster, and it takes some effort to keep the two from engaging each other instead of my units. Side note: Petra’s speed stat is already at 32 (13:00). That’s insane.

I have a couple of days off, so I opt to have Seteth teach a lecture before wandering around and buttering up Mercedes and Raphael. First, though, I start to plan out what each character will need to learn to reach their highest-tier classes—which I probably should have done much earlier—and it becomes obvious that there’s not a whole lot of flexibility here. Case in point, Leonie: she’s a lance-using Cavalier right now, but the endgame mounted unit she’d naturally segue into is an axe-using Great Knight. I’d also have to teach her heavy armor skills. Basically, you can either teach your cavaliers to use axes or accept that they’re going to have to learn flying skills and become a Falcon Knight. This system sucks.

Another thing that sucks is chapters that lie about their goal. Everyone finally finds Jeralt’s killer Monica (who is actually a villain named Kronya who either assumed Monica’s identity or was experimented on to the point where they might as well be completely different characters), and while Rhea initially refuses to let Byleth pursue her, his class is the only army that can go without spreading the knights so thin that Garreg Mach’s security is put at risk. This map is called The Sealed Forest Snare, and the goal is supposedly to defeat Kronya, but it’s pretty obvious that this is a lie. The biggest tell is that the top half of the stage is unpopulated by enemies despite there being a healing space present. There are some monsters with multiple health bars here, but everyone has attack Gambits equipped, and Bernadetta/Petra/Flayn/Dorothea are all capable of doing truly frightening amounts of damage. Kronya is difficult to hit (most attacks have a ~50% chance to hit), but she goes down easily enough.

Once Kronya has been defeated, she flees and combat is suddenly interrupted by a ton of dialogue and cutscenes; Solon appears and sacrifices her to perform a special dark magic spell called the Forbidden Spell of Zahras, and this transports Byleth to a dark plane of existence with no escape. The only being who can survive/escape this void is the goddess. Since we have Sothis inside of us, she decides to fuse with Byleth and grant him the power to escape. Unfortunately, that means that she won’t be able to manifest in the world and talk to us anymore, which I find to be legitimately sad. Once the two are combined, Byleth’s hair color changes and the Sword of the Creator becomes more powerful.

He cuts his way out of the void with this new power and returns to his students so that they can square off with Solon, who immediately summons a bunch of new enemies. Everyone still has Gambits because it was obvious that Kronya wouldn’t be the real boss of the map, though, and many characters are already so outrageously powerful that they can split up into smaller groups without putting anyone in too much danger. Solon hits like a truck (though Ingrid’s magic defense is so high that she could tank his hits and slowly whittle away his HP) and almost kills Byleth in a single blow, but Leonie and Ingrid take him out with Gambits. Before dying, Solon claims to be afraid of Byleth, who he continually refers to as “Fell Star.” He also says that Thales will carry out their mission, suggesting that all of these villains are indeed connected in some way.

Edelgard has questions for Byleth, what with him having recently returned from an inescapable void with a new emo hair color. She’s surprisingly content with his straightforward, “the goddess gave me her power” explanation, though, and doesn’t follow that up for whatever reason. Byleth passes out during their conversation and wakes up being taken care of by Rhea much like how she once looked after Catherine and Jeralt.

She appears to know what happened between Byleth and Sothis. Not only that—before the two fused, Sothis implied that Rhea is responsible for them being combined. Right before chapter 10 ends, Rhea mentions Byleth being something to her, trailing off before finishing her sentence. She brings up losing her mother earlier in this chapter, but I’m not sure if that’s important or just her trying to relate to Jeralt’s death. My current theory is that the sleeping Sothis was contained in and passed down by the family of the archbishop, that Byleth’s mother is either Rhea’s sister or mother and previous Sothis host, and that the goddess was then moved into Byleth when his mother died during childbirth. That would make sense because part of Rhea’s family could be considered to be living on in Byleth, hence the preferential treatment she shows him, and smuggling/protecting a sleeping goddess throughout the ages would also explain all of the church secrecy surrounding his birth. Just a theory.

[Click here to go to Fire Emblem: Three Houses #9]