The Garreg Mach Monastery was one of the most notable additions to Fire Emblem: Three Houses, asides from Claude being upside down on the box art. Jesting aside, I do remember many people being very excited about this addition, likening it to a more in-depth version of the My Castle from Fates. Personally, I feel it is more akin to an explorable version of the base castles from Genealogy of the Holy War, where you could shop, enter the arena, and do various things before your characters could leave for battle. Of course, there are many differences between the two, but the gist of the inspirations seems there.
In theory, exploring a base camp, talking to your units, forging bonds with them, and engaging in a multitude of activities is appealing, but over time, you end up realizing that you spend a lot of time in the monastery, and very little time is actually doing what was otherwise the focus of the game: tactical RPG combat. It is like being served a meal where the sides would be more prevalent than the main dish. As the game progresses, you gain more and more resources to use at the monastery, and the time you spend there increases, exponentially. It’s like they keep adding more and more salad on your steak platter. You try to eat all of the sides, but it quickly gets you full, and it spoils the main dish for you. Salad in end of itself isn’t the issue; it’s that there is just too darn much of it. If you watch let’s plays of Three Houses, entire episodes are spent just preparing for the next chapter, and not actually making any progress, story-wise. And as the let’s play progresses, their episodes can go over the hour mark just to get past that specific point of the game. You get to fish, eat with your allies, go to a sauna, feed dogs and cats, cook, forge, watch longwinded supports, play where’s Waldo with blue shiny spots, get tutelage, change learning focuses for weapon ranks, do some gardening, sing at a choir, give gifts to allies, give them terrible life advice at an advice box, etc…
Having options is great, and I generally advocate for them. However, when one option yields overwhelmingly better results than the alternative, it really becomes an illusion of choice. Yes, you could choose to skip most of the monastery phases, but you would lose out on valuable weapons, items, support points, weapon experience, student motivation, passive buffs, stat boosters, divine pulse charges, quests, side missions, forging, the actual ability to forge, battalions, various shops, gold, and more. The entire game was made with the assumption that you would use this feature extensively. While one could potentially get by a very challenging hard mode without it. Maddening makes it almost a requirement. It “is” possible to beat it with minimal monastery use, but it requires very creative shenanigans. In a sense, the point of a tactical game is “tactics”. You should generally be expected to try to make the best of the situations presented to you. Few will play optimally, but most will make a conscious effort to try to win, even when using meme builds. With the monastery system, however, it is a tedious affair, and foregoing it is tantamount to kneecapping yourself.
The tedium leaves players with a conundrum. On one hand, it is optimal to explore at Garreg Mach and get as much as you can from it. In the other hand, one might just want to move on to the next map much quicker. Now, how do we fix this?
In essence, most of what is possible at the monastery can actually easily be conducted through a mere menu interaction. Moving the cursor in a split-second to select a character / shops, is essentially replaced by running around for minutes. Collecting random objects is now a Where is Waldo minigame, and fishing could literally just be removed and just give you’re the items instead. I do believe that that is some value in exploring an area, but there could definitely be an option to simply auto-collect all of the lost items at Garreg Mach, and manage the various monastery-specific activities through a few menu presses. The Tellius games had a base camp system that exemplifies how this could work.
The thing is, I actually enjoy parts of Three Houses. It is a game that feels good to play. The menu is snappy, the quality of life changes give you more information than ever before, and while the objectives are not very varied in the main game, there are very solid side missions that do. Despite all of these positives, every fiber of my being recoils at the idea of going back to this game. The monastery prevents me from going back to a game that I legitimately enjoy. I would in fact be more likely to play the DLC, as it dials down on the exploration aspect. And while some may point out to games like Persona as being very much the same in that regard, there is one distinct difference; for Persona, the relationship building and immersing yourself in the world is its entire point. Its style of game is better suited for it. A tactical RPG fan is less likely to be looking for this kind of element in their games.
This may have seemed like a scathing view on Three Houses, but I did enjoy this game far more than I did Awakening and Fates for instances. It is less a criticism of the whole game itself, but rather of a specific aspect of the game that prevents the player from delving into some of what are arguably some of its better aspects. It is a pacing issue. I wish that the game allowed me to experience it on my own terms.
