My Super Mario Maker 2 review was basically all about how playing the game with my girlfriend turned me into a wife guy. But now a new pair of Nintendo Switch games has me feeling emotions so mature they make me go “yeah, I guess I am in my late twenties now.” Wolfenstein: Youngblood and Fire Emblem: Three Houses, despite their very different genres, both give you the proud parental joys of protecting and guiding the next generation.
Wolfenstein: Youngblood dropped on Switch the same day as a ports of classic Doom games (with weird DRM) and it’s a trip how much of that core action-packed Id shooting style remains despite decades of technical advancement. The lower resolution on Switch also makes the game look more retro but that’s another thing. Slaughtering Nazis remains as satisfying as ever in shotgun street scuffles, dark duels with a flashlight in one hand and a pistol in the other, and bodyslamming brawls against robot dogs with your power armor.
The game’s new structure also pushes the shooting to the forefront. Youngblood is a pared-down budget game. The level design is perhaps more intricate than the main series thanks to input from Dishonored’s Arkane Studios. But the overall world of Nazi-controlled 1980s Paris is much smaller. Instead of seeing new sights, you take on new shootout-heavy missions in the same areas like a light RPG. Earn money to upgrade weapons and level up to gain new skills as well as raw power to take on tougher enemies. The recycling grates after a while in a Destiny kind of way.
Where the parenting aspects comes in though is that Wolfenstein: Youngblood spices up these raids by inviting you to bring a friend for co-op the entire time. And the two of you play as Jess and Soph, the twin daughters of B.J. Blazkowicz searching for their missing father. I’m not huge into the co-op from a gameplay perspective. The extra gun is nice in firefights but the team heal mechanic just leads to this vicious cycle of dying while reviving your partner forcing them to revive you and then just die.
But from a story perspective, the twins are aces. They carry on B.J.’s most incredible trait which is having soulful inner thoughts and human connections while also just being the dumbest hicks, this time with some appropriate childishness. The biggest disappointment of the game’s budget nature is the limited story content involving these two proudly, gleefully killing Nazis in their path.
Fortunately, if you’re looking for a game with lots of story content featuring kids in your care that you would die for, there’s Fire Emblem: Three Houses. I have kind of a weird relationship with Fire Emblem. Maining Marth in Super Smash Bros. Melee got me interested in the series. But between the JRPG fantasy theme and dumb permadeth, Advance Wars was my Nintendo strategy game of choice. I loved Awakening on 3DS because it was more forgiving and introduced brilliant romance pairing mechanics to invest me in the characters. But Fates doubled down (literally) in ways that just felt like a cash grab.
Fire Emblem: Three Houses though uses the jump to a home console to push these ideas forward in meaningful ways that have engrossed me even more than Awakening. It all comes down to the new premise in which you’re a professor at a school for young leaders. Many have compared it to Harry Potter (or maybe Valkyria Chronicles). You even choose between different groups of students with different vibes. I went with Golden Deer because Claude isn’t white and also the best, their political system is more fair since there are no kings, and the kids weren’t as deadly serious.
I’m sure plenty of people who play this game will care about the characters because they enjoy the story. But I’m telling you that despite not giving a shit about this anime church nonsense (hello Xenoblade Chronicles 2), on a pure gameplay level these academic mechanics have me so invested in my students I would kill all of you and then myself if anything happened to them. While it’s initially overwhelming getting them all dumped on you at once in this strange building to explore, over the course of each month you really get to know them and the monastery itself.
As a professor you keep students motivated with gifts or praise or constructive criticism to get them to study certain skills like swordsmanship or healing magic. None of this takes that long and can even be fully automated. But if you pour in the time you could get a student to realize an affinity for a skill they never realized they had, eventually completing an exam to upgrade to a new character class.
Achieving these goals is an immensely rewarding long-time experience. You truly feel like your team is yours as you mold young minds and even poach from rival houses. But the minute-to-minute management minutiae is also pretty addictive. It’s the first time I’ve really cared about the RPG aspect of Fire Emblem as opposed to just the strategy.
It’s in the strategy though where all that hard work pays off. Because they are separated by weeks of schooling, the lengthy battle missions feel even more consequential. The dynamic HD battle sequences, with camera control and full battalions of soldiers charging at each other, add to the spectacle without being as dumb as a Warriors game.
Spending so much time learning about your students and pushing them gives you instinctive knowledge of how to use them on the battlefield. Units still support each other in bonds that grow over time, but it feels more organic than the matchmaking of romance mechanics. Again, the long-term work you put in makes it feel like a strategy is coming together, not just ad-hoc tactics. And that’s not even getting into the real payoff in the… post-grad half of the game
Fire Emblem’s strategy gameplay is so sound it would pretty tough to mess up. And Three Houses builds on it with more flexible combat options like risky cooperative gambits, combat art attacks that hasten weapon breakage in exchange for extra power, and ditching the rigid rock-paper-scissors weapon triangle. But it’s most clever innovation is just flipping your whole perspective on what it even means to lead an army when it’s also your classroom. And the vocal theme song is still a banger.
For more on Nintendo Switch check out these other cool games out now and look forward to the Nintendo Switch Lite coming later this September.
Buy Wolfenstein: Youngblood
Buy Fire Emblem: Three Houses
