Chapter 17 of Fire Emblem: Three Houses is kind of awful from a strategy perspective. There’s really only one approach that works, and even then, there are numerous unexpected enemy reinforcements and unexpected occurrences that can see a character getting killed for nothing more than being in the wrong place at the wrong time. I’d be fine with all of this stuff if you could predict it. It’s being totally unable to tell what triggers reinforcements (there appear to be multiple non-obvious triggers) and enemies turning into monster units that drives me crazy.

The Empire’s plan is to split the army into two halves and catch Faerghus in a pincer attack. Both sides recognize that Fhirdiad lacks the resources to survive such an attack for long and that King Dimitri is likely to intercept Edelgard’s group at the Tailtean Plains, the site where Seiros defeated Nemesis and Faerghus originally defeated the Empire to win its independence, instead. The fight reflects both of those past battles: once more, believers will fight the owner of the Sword of the Creator, just as Faerghus will fight the Empire for the sake of its own existence.

I gamble a Master Seal on Leonie’s 51% chance to become a Bow Knight and get lucky, so she should be even more useful from now on. I also use up a bunch of other seals in an attempt to unlock additional stat gains, but none are triggered. It’s hard to tell how this stuff works at a glance, but my suspicion is that each class has stat minimums that units benefit from if their stats don’t yet meet that threshold. That would explain why it seems to only happen when class changing to a more advanced class. That’s just a theory, though. I might end up checking the glossary.

Other than that, it’s more normal “wandering around the monastery” activities. Petra wins a sword competition to unlock a new Master Seal, which is helpful considering how expensive they are at Anna’s shop. Byleth and Jeritza finally reach an A-level support, and I didn’t have much time when recording and ended up skipping through support conversations rather than letting them play out in full. There’s also a sidequest that involves finding a glowing blue point. Honestly, I don’t know why Fire Emblem: Three Houses even bothers including these pointless side activities.

I made an effort to figure out the Dark Seal I’ve had sitting around in my inventory for some time, and it turns out it’s a mid-level class change for certain mage characters. As in, the ones I don’t use. That doesn’t matter much, though, because Lysithea is already a dark magic user who hits like a tank. It’s just too bad that she can’t survive counterattacks at this point in the game. My goal is to class change her to a Gremory (which Dorothea currently is—it doubles the amount of magic a character can use) and Marianne to a Holy Knight. There are no seminars that teach the riding skill Marianne needs, so I spend three weeks having Linhardt teach seminars to increase Lysithea’s Faith stat, but by the end of all of that, Marianne still has the better chance of succeeding at her exam. She ends up becoming a Holy Knight, and since I’m currently out of Master Seals, Lysithea has to remain in her current class. That’ll become a problem unless she’s 100% protected from surprise reinforcements.

Toward the end of the video (14:47), Byleth stops at Jeralt’s grave on a random day and thinks about who he’s going to give the ring to. Everyone romance-able who Byleth has reached an A-rank support level with shows up on the list, but there are two surprises: first, you can choose “no one,” and second, you can choose “???” (despite the picture clearly displaying Sothis). That latter option appeared to be grayed out, but it can be chosen nevertheless. My curiosity almost got the better of me. I followed through with my original intention of choosing Leonie, though.

One of the smaller but nevertheless significant things that happens over these few weeks of Linhardt seminars and classes is that Lysithea unlocks the Warp spell. It only has one use per map, but her magic stat is high enough to allow her to warp someone a decent distance away.

Full disclosure time: I attempted this map three times, and the video above is of the third attempt. My first two runs involved splitting up units and that always became an utter disaster; thanks to the gimmicky random reinforcements that Fire Emblem: Three Houses insists on spawning, keeping everyone bunched together is the only strategy that doesn’t come back to bite you. It’s map-related annoyance that inspires me to use up all of the stat-boosting items I’ve hoarded, boosting Byleth, Petra, Ingrid, and Marianne. All of the high-level weapons enemies have been dropping are also equipped onto everyone, with the most notable being a Brave Axe that allows Edelgard to attack 2-4 times and the powerful bow from Leonie’s paralogue that will make Bernadetta even more dangerous by allowing her to do Relic-tier damage and attack 2-4 times.

The goal of this map is to defeat the “leader” characters. Only some of them are present at first: Dimitri, Dedue, and Sylvain. A magic-using generic leader (probably a replacement for someone I recruited) shows up as a reinforcement at the top-left of the screen before long, too, and Rhea—who confirms when you face her that she’s Seiros and was the one who killed Nemesis in the game’s opening cutscene—shows up with a ton of powerful church reinforcements all over the map. The mistake I originally made was viewing the two starting points as distinct groups who can operate independently. That just gives you fewer options when a million reinforcements show up around everyone. Instead, it’s best to put flying/mounted units in the middle group and have them move toward the main group while it advances up, circling around and eventually cleaning everyone up together. Lysithea warps Petra into the thick of the fighting to distract and/or damage anyone foolish enough to target her.

It’s easy to believe that your two groups are supposed to operate independently because of this map’s other gimmick: there are a bunch of stationary enemies placed around the map, and they randomly use Crest stones to become monsters. That hasn’t been a big plot point, but it happened back in chapter 5. Dimitri didn’t sign off on this plan (Dedue went behind his back), but he’s apparently become single-mindedly focused on killing Edelgard for reasons that aren’t immediately clear, so he doesn’t push back. Here’s the thing, though: the monsters on the bottom-right don’t pursue you until you’re in their range, so they can be safely ignored. Another thing that’s not obvious is that Rhea’s non-monster forces will flee once she does. Basically, the map boils down to moving everyone clockwise, killing the reinforcement leader, Dedue, Dimitri, Rhea, and then Sylvain. Everything goes relatively smoothly, though I fail to notice a safe spot I could move Marianne into at one point.

I debate using the Divine Pulse immediately after moving her since that’s when I notice the safe spot, but don’t in the hope that she’ll survive. She gets doubled and her Nosferatu spell doesn’t heal enough damage to keep her afloat, so I’m stuck rewinding anyway. Super annoying.

This screenshot is from one of my earlier attempts. In the video, I manage to kill Dedue as a person, but he can also use a Crest stone and turn into a monster. Like so much else that happens in this level, I have no idea what triggers this. Moving everyone clockwise is all I did differently.

After the battle, Dimitri and Dedue die—apparently, they hadn’t been properly murdered yet—and Rhea swears revenge against Byleth, who she claims “stole” her “mother’s heart” and wields the Sword of the Creator like Nemesis. That’s dumb. She knew about Sothis and was clearly at least partially responsible for putting her inside of us, and she gave us the sword. She has no one but herself to blame for all of this.

Edelgard later explains that Dimitri was driven crazy after her uncle (presumably Lord Arundel) used a strategy against him. Dimitri attributed the result to Edelgard, and the rest is history. Even without specifics, we know Arundel enough to know that whatever he did was probably pretty heinous. It’s my hope that we get the opportunity to murder him later. Not to avenge Dimitri, because he was only moderately less annoying than Claude was, but because it would be a fun thing to do and also remove a future obstacle. I’m really getting into this conquering thing.

Fire Emblem: Three Houses Let’s Play – Chapter 17: Field of Revenge first appeared on Killa Penguin