As a tactical strategy game, Fire Emblem has always given players at least a little leeway in determining their combat styles. The units you deploy, the classes you choose, and the weapons you equip are all examples of the most basic ways to tailor a strategy to your own playstyle. Some people prefer high risk, high reward crit-machines like myrmidons, while others are more than happy to tank their way through maps with heavy armor units and a few healers.
Because of the variety of playstyles, a good mechanic in Fire Emblem is one that gives players a wider variety of strategies to work with while remaining balanced. That’s why battalions are so fun in Three Houses. These potentially life-saving, low-use armies don’t just add scale to the battle, they give an insane degree of flexibility. As an example, nearly any map in the game can be traversed on the first turn using a battalion with Stride, a dancer, and clever use of the warp spell. Whether it’s wise to do so is a question for a later date.
What really makes battalions work is the way they’re implemented in-game. An entire new stat (Charm) has been added in order to use them properly, and they’re trained up as if they were their own weapon type in the academy sessions. They provide stat boosts when equipped, but retreat and take those buffs with them when their endurance runs out. For all intents and purposes, battalions are like show-stopping, low-use tomes. They’re also presented as a check to another new mechanic in Three Houses: the demonic beasts.
These massive foes have shields, extra health bars, and usually counterattack at any range. Battalions make the fight a little more fair by denying counterattacks and taking out potentially large chunks of shield at once. While the game’s Combat Arts are certainly another tool at players’ disposal for dealing with beasts, they sometimes aren’t quite enough. A map with monsters forces players to make the decision: do they want to use their limited battalion charges on the monsters, or a clump of enemy soldiers?
The final and most important factor that allowed battalions to slide right into place as a mechanic is the fact that players aren’t the only ones who can attack in groups. Enemies sometimes have battalions, and they will use them. Often. In higher difficulties, an enemy with a high Charm stat and a battalion can completely ruin player formations if they try to turtle their way through the map, punishing one of the most common strategies for Hard mode players. Making note of which enemies have these powerful tools and when to use your own adds a lot of depth to the gameplay.
Battalions help Fire Emblem players think tactically - and that’s a good thing.
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