Last time, I mentioned wanting to get through the game without needing to use the Divine Pulse rewind feature. Chapter 15 and its many paralogues caused that to go right out of the window; everything that’s driven me crazy about Fire Emblem: Three Houses and held the gameplay back is suddenly thrust front-and-center. Infinitely spawning enemies? Check. Half of the time, you’re not even told that there are infinite enemies and have to work out how the map works based on the fact that enemy forces are continually replenished. That’s not all, though—we also have foggy maps combined with infinite enemies and mandatory characters who can be killed in a single blow. Then there’s what amounts to an escort quest with suicidal mages. There’s also a paralogue that changes its goal of reaching an area once you’re almost there, spawning in 10-20 absurdly powerful enemies who can cause you to lose instantly if you don’t start wiping them out within one turn of when they appear at the corners of the map. I’ve enjoyed Fire Emblem: Three Houses overall, but right now I’m pissed off beyond words at its gimmickry. This is inexcusable garbage.

Now that the Alliance has been swallowed up by the Empire, our kind-of ally Lord Arundel (the guy responsible for Kronya and Solon) has been seen grabbing up Relics left behind. For some reason that escapes me, we killed Claude and left his super-powerful bow behind for someone else to find. That’s dumb. Anyway, our next advance—which doesn’t happen in chapter 15 for reasons that will become clearer later—will be made easier if we target certain noble houses, some of which are the family of recruited characters. Off the top of my head, Ingrid and Felix both have family supporting the Holy Kingdom of Faerghus, and by extension, Rhea and the church. Hubert muses about whether they’d be willing to act as hostages to bring their families in line. I like Hubert. Before, I assumed he’d betray everyone and refused to level him up, but he’s fun.

There’s also an incredibly strange cutscene with Edelgard where she rambles about not liking rats, and the conversation stalls when Byleth notices something on her desk. It’s not obvious what it is because the papers lack detail and take up a tiny portion of the Switch’s 1920x1080 (at best) resolution. From her reaction and the general flow of the lines, though, it looks like a drawing of Byleth. Edelgard: queen, ax-user, fan artist.

I waste a ton of activity points continually losing to enemies in the bow tournament before finally winning. Is all of that effort worth a Silver Bow+? Probably not, but discovering that losing in this tournament doesn’t kill the participating character or cause the prize to disappear is good information to have. Recurring series character Anna shows up near the merchants and can open up a secret shop once you find a specific glowing blue point in the monastery and return the item to her. Her wares are expensive, but I bite the bullet and purchase an equippable item that increases a character’s avoid rate by 10. That’s going to be huge for Petra and allow her to become an incredible dodge tank.

Lysithea and Edelgard’s B-rank support is actually pretty interesting. Both of them were experimented on by the same mages, and while Edelgard can’t come out and say that for obvious political reasons, Lysithea is intuitive enough to recognize the possibility. For the most part, though, I just fish in the video above. Doing so caused Byleth’s professor level to hit A, which is the point at which you can assign three adjutant characters.

The video above wasn’t originally titled “BS,” so I should probably warn everyone right about now that the rest of this is going to take a turn into the profane. You can only malign something as being “garbage” or “incomprehensibly boneheaded” for so long before that brand of family-friendly outrage becomes woefully insufficient. Let’s call the map above (and several below) what it is: bullshit. These paralogues are complete and utter bullshit. The gimmick-obsessed idiots at Intelligent Systems who conceptualized and greenlit all of the bad decisions in Fire Emblem Fates and Fire Emblem Echoes: Shadows of Valentia strike with a vengeance in Fire Emblem: Three Houses‘ paralogues, and this makes the gameplay terrible.

This first paralogue is called Insurmountable, and it tasks you with defending an area from an enemy advance. At no point does the game tell you that enemy reinforcements are infinite, or that they’ll spawn so long as the opponents at the top-right and bottom-right of the screen remain undefeated. If, like me, you expect that information, it becomes easy to think you’ll outlast these reinforcements and exhaust your time and equipment accomplishing nothing. And while endless reinforcements are bad, endless *flying* reinforcements who are all armed with silver weapons are even worse. You’re stuck slowly moving through terrain that limits your movement range while enemies fly over all of that crap to reach you. They’re just a nuisance. They exist to pester you. Bringing squishy mages along for this one was a bad idea, and I had to use the Divine Pulse a ton to keep some of them from getting killed because everything about this map is insufferable shit. Fuck whoever designed this.

Darkness Beneath the Earth is a Hubert-centric paralogue. You’d think that bringing him along as a mandatory character would be the problem, but no: we’re tasked with protecting a bunch of dark mages on behalf of Lord Arundel (who’s recognizable from early cutscenes with the Flame Emperor, but hasn’t played much of a role since). We’re protecting them from beasts with multiple health bars, and these monsters are fast enough to double attack. Keeping most mages alive would be doable if they had anything resembling survival instincts, but instead of healing or moving out of range, they run headlong at the monsters every turn. Between monsters prioritizing them and their own stupidity, most of these mages are dead in 2-3 turns, long before my units can even reach them. Then Lord Arundel criticizes the group for not keeping his fucking suicidal mages alive. I seriously need the ability to direct CPU units to move away like in Radiant Dawn. Keeping third parties alive is a pain in the ass.

Legend of the Lake is a paralogue centered around Leonie and Linhardt. She’s in debt and can’t buy a new weapon, and he knows the location of a powerful weapon that can be obtained for free. All we have to do is beat a giant monster. Thing is, the entire map is covered in fog, enemies spawn into the map infinitely, and the giant monster has a ridiculous critical chance that can wipe out a character based on nothing but bad luck.

Outside of knowing exactly how strong your opponent is and exactly where various enemy units are stationed before more spawn, there’s no strategy that can help you get through this. If you haven’t leveled up Linhardt or Leonie, they’ll be insanely vulnerable and keeping them alive will be entirely luck-based. This isn’t strategy. It’s not even strategy-adjacent. I don’t know why Fire Emblem has refused to learn this lesson in the 11 years since Shadow Dragon (the last game that didn’t have giant “what the fuck” maps like this), but luck-based gameplay is the opposite of fun.

Being unable to strategize adequately is also the opposite of strategy. You know, the genre this is supposed to be. This isn’t fucking rocket science.

Foreign Land and Sky is a paralogue centered around Petra and Bernadetta. It begins perfectly fair: it’s just you against a bunch of enemies who themselves make use of terrain advantages to make things difficult. Jeritza’s special class recently unlocked a skill that allows him to counterattack from any distance (even with a non-ranged weapon), the map claims to end when you either rout the enemy or allow Petra to reach a point on the opposite side of the map, and you can land Petra on certain squares to spawn CPU helpers, so you have options. At least, that’s how it looks.

In reality, you waste a bunch of your Gambits thinking that the enemies you see are all there are, only for Petra to get close to reaching the end and watch as a ton of enemies spawn from the top-left, bottom-left, and top-right. Among those enemies is Catherine—every bit as dangerous as before—and you’ll no doubt have weak characters lagging behind in one of the three corners where enemies spawn. Meanwhile, the paralogue’s goal shifts. You can no longer win by moving Petra to the end space. Instead, “leader” enemies can win by landing there (including a flying unit who can get there in two turns), while your only method of winning is to beat everyone. The video above is my second attempt at this map because my character placement the first time around caused me to be so utterly fucked that my only option was to rewind to the very first turn, at which point deleting the video and starting over was the only thing that made sense. I hate this shit. Whoever decided that lying to the player about what the goal is constitutes good strategy needs to be banned from the industry forever because they don’t understand strategy games.

And that brings us to chapter 15’s story combat encounter, where all of this miscellaneous bullshit culminates in a needlessly subpar experience. Rhea and the Knights of Seiros are marching on Garreg Mach and we’re placed on the defensive, but it’s mentioned several times that our group doesn’t know the ins and outs of the monastery like they do. As a result, it’s possible that enemies could surprise us in unexpected places. With all of the previous bullshit fresh in my mind, I rush Byleth and a bunch of other characters ahead (getting him killed and having to rewind as a result) while several others hang back in the expectation that a giant group of reinforcements will spawn right next to the point you’re tasked with defending. They never do. All of that talking about surprises is just a couple of reinforcements appearing from the bushes, and one guy with a super-powerful ax. That’s all. This is the underlying problem with unexpected/endless reinforcements and changing map requirements: you become so unable to tell what you’re dealing with that you’re always either overprepared or underprepared. It makes the gameplay miserable.

Both Seteth and Flayn show up to lead the attack personally and die in the process. This would normally be sad, but I’m too pissed off to care. My current mindset is that every character in this game can eat a bag of dicks. Rhea and Catherine wipe out a large part of our army (including Ladislava and Rudolph, both of which had somehow survived up to this point), but losing Seteth and Flayn forces them to retreat for some reason. Rhea is angry—I feel you, crazy pope bitch—and swears revenge in the name of the Nabateans, whatever the fuck those are.

Do you know the worst thing? I still have one paralogue remaining that I’ll have to finish in the next chapter. I’ll be blown away if it isn’t miserable. But at least I’ll have cooled down by then and can continue using phrases like “unparalleled mechanical ineptitude” instead of a torrent of profanity. Sorry about that, by the way; I’m so close to loving this game, and it’s infuriating that it refuses to stay good long enough to let me.

Fire Emblem: Three Houses Let’s Play – Chapter 15: Tempest of Swords and Shields first appeared on Killa Penguin