We got about five minutes worth of news for Fire Emblem: Three Houses in the most recent Nintendo Direct.  In this direct we got to learn a lot more about the lore behind this new game as well as what your character’s role is in this world.  With that being said I will go straight into my thoughts on the news.

First I want to bring up the above image.  We find out that the continent of Fodlan is divided up into three houses and all of these houses are living peacefully with one another.  This immediately is a red flag for me.  Never have I seen a Fire Emblem game start off by saying everyone likes each other, and usually someone becomes an aggressor very quickly.  In this case it sounds like not only do the houses live in harmony but the fact that you see the houses working together throughout multiple cut scenes shows they stay that way for quite some time in the game. Makes me kind of suspicious of the Almiyra over on the right but that’s just speculation.

We then get a little more information on what appears to be a create your own character.  You find out your character has a mysterious power then gets offered to teach at a military academy.  Then you find out the character is the only one that sees a mysterious girl named Sothis who offers to guide your character.  Now that’s a lot of vague in such a short period of time.  What is this power, who is Sothis, why are you the only one able to see her.  I feel like the reason all this was brushed over so quickly is due to major plot elements that will appear far later in the story.  Personally I probably wouldn’t give a person with an unknown power a teaching position at the biggest military academy but that’s just me.

The game goes into details explaining each of the houses, their names and their leaders.  This is all pretty self explanatory but then we get to the Church of Seiros.  It lies at the military academy and is the main religion of Fodlan.  Furthermore, the knights of Seiros are charged with protecting the kingdom.  This is red flag number two for me, especially when you remember that the first trailer talked about the crests and how they are tokens of the Goddess’s power.  According to the first trailer these crests are used to maintain order; however, they are then quickly labeled as the cause of the problem.  This makes me really question the motives of the leaders of the Church of Seiros.

This is where I think the game will get most of its replay value.  It looks like you get to pick one of the Three Houses to each which will give you access to the students of that house.  I have a feeling that you will still get access to the heads of the other two houses, but when and how you recruit them depends on which house you pick initially.

After that we get to see a bit of your role as an instructor.  It looks like in this image you have three actions to chose from so you can perhaps use tutoring three times and auto-tutor once.  I think tutoring is going to amount to bonus exp and helping to master weapon usage and auto tutor just picks who you tutor at random.  I’m not yet sure what the group task is, but I think set goals is to allow you to pick what weapons and classes your students try to master.  Going back to what I said earlier about how I feel you will still be able to recruit people from the other two houses.  I think the members of your house will be the ones you can customize but when you get deeper into the story it will be past all the lessons and you recruit students from the other houses after they have master their respective classes.  Kind of how echos has the villager class that you can mold to any class while characters you recruit later already have an initial class picked.

The rest of the trailer gives us vague details on things such as unit bonding and further emphasis on the three houses.  Then a few story cut scenes that reveal some sort of antagonist.  It appears that we get a glance of your character’s mysterious power and it strikes me as some sort of foresight into the future; however, that’s not very clear at this time.  Not a lot of revealed here to come to any sort of sound conclusion; however, it does make me want to know more and I can’t wait to get this game on July 26th.