Fire Emblem: Three Houses Devs Share More Details About The Game’s Features, Mechanics And More

Earlier this week, French website Jeux-Vidéos.com posted an interview with Fire Emblem: Three Houses directors Genki Yokota and Toshiyuki Kasukihara, who shared more details about the game’s features, mechanics and development for the Switch.

While we already shared one interesting tidbit from the video earlier today, some new translations of the interview have since surfaced online. These new details shed more light onto Fire Emblem: Three Houses‘ various features, as well as its development process.

Check out some highlights below:

Fire Emblem: Three Houses’ Development

• There’s a focus on management this time around as the developers felt the need to come up with new features
• This is how they came up with the squad system, as well as the student teaching system
• The game was developed by 3 companies; Nintendo, Intelligent Systems, and Koei-Tecmo
  • Koei-Tecmo have a lot of experience when it comes to simulation games, and the devs took advantage of that
  • Nintendo was in charge of production
  • Intelligent Systems was in charge of art and game design
  • Koei-Tecmo did the grunt work and tackled programming, as well as the actual development of the game
  • Koei-Tecmo only picked developers that were fans of the Fire Emblem series to work on this installment

Garreg Mach Monastery

• There are about 30 characters in the game (students, not just story characters)
• The My Castle feature is replaced by the Garreg Mach Monastery
  • The devs didn’t go with something the players could build, because they had much grander ambitions this time around
  • What they wanted to do would have been hard to achieve with a system like My Castle
  • The team wanted to convey the impression that the Monastery is a place where all the students have been living for years

Online

• Online rankings let’s you see which choices the other players made during the game, seeing which choices were most popular
• ‘Exchange students’ let’s you send one of your students to other players as an exchange student
  • You can give them a gift to deliver to the other player
  • You can add exchange students as support units, though it seems there’s restrictions about their use in battle
• Lost Souls are places where many other players struggled
• If you managed to survive in these places, you will get some bonuses

Misc Gameplay Tidbits

• The weapon triangle system is not as prevalent as in previous games, but it’s still part of the game
• The team starts development by coming up with themes and systems before they decide what to bring from past titles
• The team wanted to offer players a lot of freedom when it comes to teaching students
  • Players can freely give whichever weapons and skills they want to students
• The developers were able to add lots of elements to the game thanks to Switch’s power
  • This includes visual elements such as squads who take part in battles, which was not possible on previous hardware
  • The move to Switch allowed the developers to display more text on screen, such as the name of fighters
  • With more space for text, they also added pages that provide historical background for the various characters
• You get to choose which house to teach after about 1 hour.

Fire Emblem: Three Houses will be launching for Nintendo Switch 26 July 2019.