Fire Emblem: Three Houses devs talk gameplay systems, new mechanics, what Switch let them expand upon, and more

French website Jeux-Vidéos.com had the chance to interview Genki Yokota and Toshiyuki Kasukihara about Fire Emblem: Three Houses, and the pair had yet another big round of info to share. Check out a summary of the details below.

- 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
- 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 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
- 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.