#challenge run

Shattering! Shattering! Dangerous is finally wrangled, Notability I got on the side, and our Infernal Sharpshooter's Rifle is forged....

Y’know something I actually like about Three Hopes is that they have like characters who are locked to routes. One issue I had with Three Houses is pretty much every character is recruitable. Even though when you get into some characters back stories it really doesn’t make sense for them to not be ride or die a certain lord. The game even kinda knows this because you will just have some characters who are questioned why they’re standing against their lord they fall back on saying they trust the Professor/The Player.

But Three Hopes really did commit to the idea, nah these guys wouldn’t leave their lord character and would fight with them in this war. But would also be your opposition depending on who you chose.

And they make sense to me-Dimitri’s friends from childhood are of course gonna stick by him and Dedue. And because the Kingdom is a sanctuary for the Church it makes sense many of the church characters are aligned with them. Hubert and Ferdinand are loyal to their Emperor. Manuela has all her backstory tied to Adrestia and her opera company. The Alliance is made up of various lords and ladies who’s loyalty is more flippant for what will serve them better in the long run, so it makes sense that the largest act of loyalty is of House of Goneril will not leave Claude.

Heck there’s even characters who could maybe go two ways, but not a third. Lysithea really has no reason to side with the Kingdom at all outside of sharing her crest with Catherine, but given she has a shared condition with Edelgard it makes sense that she is caught between two lords. Mercedes loves her brother and of course wants to be with him and the feeling goes both ways. Neither have a tie to the Alliance.

(There’s also characters locked to certain loyalties, but they’re non playable like Haneman and Gilbert, but I still think it makes sense why they are only for the Empire and Kingdom respectively.)

But what they also did is show us characters who could go all three ways. The truest of neutral characters in this conflict.

And again, I think it makes sense to me with what we know about the characters: obviously the Ashen Wolves will look out for their own interests and The Abyss, Shamir is a mercenary and isn’t as die hard loyal to Rhea as Catherine, like I said previously given the Alliance’s structure of various lords and land holders a lot of Golden Deer being ones who will go any way fit, Ashe doesn’t have a background with Dimitri but he was a thief who wants to protect his younger siblings before anything else, Petra is of course concerned with Brigid and her people’s well being, Dorothea of course has her aspirations for elevating her status which could go anyway, but she is someone who cares about the commoners and their place, Linhardt doesn’t like violence at all, and of course Byleth and Shez are Byleth and Shez.

And this inclusion of these sort of true neutral characters actually inspired me both gameplay wise, but also narrative wise.

Me and my friends ended up creating something we called the “Hopes Neutral Run,” basically the idea is that when you play Three Houses, you can only use and recruit characters who are available in all routes of the story in Hopes (you can’t use your lord character, but understandably they have to be deployed). However, you cannot recruit any characters after the time skip either. So if you miss them you miss them. Now if you want to make it easy on yourself (or trying Blue Lions and only have Ashe) you can go through NG+ to recruit some characters early. But I’ve personally found the routes with the most satisfying amount of difficulty is Silver Snow and Golden Deer. It is definitely easier if you also have Ashen Wolves DLC, but I’ve found you can still make the 10 base game characters work with Byleth.

There is some flexibility. Alois becomes a mercenary in Hopes like Byleth and Jeralt so that means he’s on their side in all three routes just not playable. So I think it’s fair to use him. While Cyril is only loyal to the church, I think I wouldn’t use him in this challenge. One my friends went harder even only using the classes they were in Hopes and not using any other for the characters.

Please try it, me and my friends have had some wild results after our Engage challenge runs.

Now that was gameplay, but let me tell what this made me think about narratively. I’ve been in the FE community for a long time and I’ve seen A LOT of people make their own Three Houses Golden Path, hypothetical perfect route that pleases everyone proposal fic. And I have to admit, when I found out about all these characters who don’t have a set loyalty it made me want to see a hypothetical new Three Houses route where these specific characters break away from the Fodlan war and look for some alternative to not only stop this war, but also the Agarthans.

I am a huge sucker for the trope in storytelling when for the final confrontation, the last line of defense for the world is this collection of scarps of various characters that you wouldn’t expect. Making them sorta this Magnificent Seven sort of group. It’s one of the reasons I really like the last team in Attack on Titan so much. It really feels like the world is ending and this is all that could be mustered. From main characters to side characters to a few former antagonists

And if you want a Fire Emblem example. Fire Emblem Radiant Dawn’s endgame ends up splitting the recruited units into three armies. With fixed characters for each army.

While of course you had all the units who lived and could be assigned to each army, I sometimes like to play through RD’s last part with only these characters as the only force against the goddess.

Of course that’s just me. I complete understand the appeal of Three Houses is there is no magical route where every side is placated and this is just a fantasy. But maybe there could’ve been something with Byleth and with no lords only has the tatters of some of their students while the others are dying on the hill of their respective lord. They bring all these people of various backgrounds and standings to oppose the flames of war that have engulfed their continent and they could make something more fair and equal than what the Empire, Kingdom, Alliance or Church could give them.

But again that’s all fantasy. Fanfic writers that’s in our hands if we wanna see that.

New card? It's not recorded on the wiki! (At least at the time of writing, should be up once I post this)

New video time. Really time to get back on track, and Payday 2's always a decent way to solve that.

This challenge run is simple: take the recently-added Welrod, and run through Career Mode with it as my only real source of damage. Simple? Sounds that way, but in practice? Not so much.