6 Things to Know Before Playing Fire Emblem: Three Houses

Use Your Time Wisely

Using your activity points for the right activities is very important if you want to improve the camaraderie in your chosen house. There are a couple of things you can do in the Monastery that can take your activity points away, and you need to make sure that you’re spending your free time wisely.

Before you jump into Fire Emblem: Three Houses, don’t do random activities before knowing what’s best for you and your class.

First off, don’t worry about sending your students to choir practice in the cathedral. You don’t get too much experience and there are better things that you can do with your time.

Once you get access to the Training Grounds north of the dormitories, placing your students in a tournament is a fantastic way to get tons of prize money and a good chunk of professor experience.

We also recommend having at least one meal a day at the dining hall, because it increases bonds and motivation of the students that you choose to eat with.

Inviting someone to tea by speaking to them is also a great way to get closer to them, just make sure to say the right things to make for some interesting conversations.

These are just a few things to know before you end up making the wrong choices.

Really Get to Know Your Students, Even the Ones Outside of Your Class

Throughout the duration of Fire Emblem: Three Houses, you will come across moments where you have to answer questions and give advice to your students and to other folks around the Monastery.

Correctly answering these questions and coming up with compelling discussions will only you increase your bond with them and raise motivation levels.

If you don’t know anything about these characters, it can hard to guess the right dialogue options to make, which means that you really need to be aware of everyone’s likes, dislikes, hobbies, interests, and everything else.

If you go to the roster section of the menu and go to the tab on the far right, there are notes that Byleth has on all of the students in your house, even showing when they were born, their closest allies, their age, their height, and a couple of other things.

Knowing stuff about your fellow comrades will help you get closer to them and in turn, increase their potential on the battlefield. Try not to skip dialogue or any cutscenes as this info is pertinent if you plan on being successful as their teacher and comrade.

Battle Lines in Combat

If you’re new to strategy RPGs or have just never played a Fire Emblem game before, there are little things that Intelligent Systems does with the combat in Three Houses to make it newcomer-friendly, things that you might not know if you’re just jumping in.

You probably already know that every unit has a certain amount of spaces that they can travel on their turn, but there’s a way to see how far they can attack, who they’re attacking next, and where they can move.

If you hover over one of your own units, there will red lines connecting them with one of the enemy units if the enemy is about to attack them next. If the unit in question is weak or prone to taking high damage, you should move them out of the way or find a way to kill that enemy before they take action.

You can also press the back right trigger and you will be able to see colored grids showing how far an enemy can move. If you’re standing somewhere that’s not purple-colored, then you will be safe from attack as long as they aren’t using any long-range weapons.

These are great things to know before your troops fall thanks to your terrible commands.

Watch Support Conversations

If you go into the main menu, you will see an option called Support. Here, you will see a list of all of the members of your house as well as members of other houses.

If you see a little blue thought bubble over the character’s icon, that means that you can start up a mini cutscene with that character and someone else.

This lets you increase the support levels of two characters and also learn more about your student’s likes/dislikes, hobbies, and interests.

You can choose to skip it if you want, but we recommend popping into this menu every so often to see if there are new support conversations to watch –some of them are actually really interesting and fun to check out.

Watch Your Weapon Durability

Before you jump into Fire Emblem: Three Houses and start attacking all willy-nilly, you need to be aware that weapons can and will break if you use them too much.

Each weapon has a certain number of uses before it dies on you and becomes useless, so you need to make sure that you have backups ready to go for each and every party member.

Before you go into combat, look at the durability levels of every weapon in the inventory section and buy any necessary equipment and equip it to whoever needs it.

If you see that Claude’s Iron Bow has 3/25 hits left, you should have at least one other bow in his inventory. The shop can be accessed in the battle menu before you begin a fight or you can go to the armory at the Monastery.

Gardening and Fishing Is a Must

When you first get free time to do as you wish around the Monastery, you will be given activity points that limit the number of activities that you can participate in.

Some activities will give you more experience points than others and some can even be done without the use of any points at all, making them a priority.

There will tutorial quests at the beginning of the game that will show you where to go fishing and garden, but after that, you won’t really be told to go back towards the southern sections of the Monastery.

But, if you want to get your Professor level up easily, doing these two activities are very easy and take up almost no time at all.

Make sure to plant, cultivate, and harvest each day that you’re free and also make sure to get out that fishing rod and reel in some fishes.

Doing this stuff will also get you special items that you can give to your students as gifts and fish can be used with meals that you share with your students, boosting their motivation and bonds with one another.

For more on Fire Emblem: Three Houses, you can check out our scored review right here as well as our wiki guide that’s full of helpful tips and tricks.