Fire Emblem: Three Houses' Graphics Have Aged Absolutely Terribly

Before you decide to come at me, I want to make it abundantly clear that I love Fire Emblem: Three Houses. Like many modern fans, I got into the series on the 3DS with Awakening and subsequently enjoyed Fates and Echoes, too. They’re all excellent games that made creative use of the handheld’s processing power to depict lovably rendered character sprites and fantastical conflicts which felt massive in spite of their limitations.

So, when Three Houses was announced as the first console exclusive Fire Emblem in over a decade, expectations were understandably high. A series that had finally gone mainstream in recent years was now coming to a capable platform like the Switch that had already given us beautiful experiences like Breath of the Wild and Super Mario Odyssey. Unfortunately, the finished product left a lot to be desired.

Why Doesn’t Fire Emblem: Three Houses Have A Switch 2 Upgrade?

I’ve been asking myself this question ever since the new console came along last year, since Three Houses would be perfect for a free or paid upgrade that addresses texture quality and the general state of assets across Garreg Mach monastery. Acting as a central location, most players will spend several dozen hours exploring throughout Three Houses. You sort of learn to stomach the lacking visuals throughout each playthrough, and some might argue they give off their own unique charm.

Pavements are laughably low resolution, buildings are covered in the same gross textures, while the food and drink found in the cafeteria is laughably bad for a series of this size and influence. Character models look lovely in battle, and the anime portraits shown during the majority of conversations are equally impressive, but finding them in the monastery means you’ll be exposed to notable aliasing that just doesn’t make it very fun to look at.

Even the open fields or dank dungeons you do battle within start to blend into one another after a while, and the temperamental frame rate when playing on the original Switch doesn’t help matters. Thankfully, this performance shortcoming is eliminated on the Switch 2 due to more powerful hardware, allowing the cap to rise without any manual tinkering.

But it was a distraction for years and remains so today if you haven’t upgraded. There is a lot of walking around the hub area to be done in Three Houses as you engage in conversations and take part in activities essentially to gather resources and deepen relationships, and seldom does any of it look good. You can get over this to enjoy the story and combat, but you shouldn’t have to. The expansion looked no better, nor did the Warriors spin-off that followed afterward.

Even With Bad Graphics, Three Houses Remains An RPG Classic

It wasn’t until Fire Emblem Engage launched several years later that the gameplay engine would get a serious visual upgrade, but it just unfortunately came from a game whose narrative and cast were not nearly as memorable. Despite my complaining, Three Houses remaining relevant amidst the wider landscape of JRPGs is proof that it didn’t need cutting-edge visuals to matter. Now it feels like an awkward quirk of a fantastic game, but I will admit it makes going back to it all before the release of Fortune’s Weave more difficult than I’d like.

Me and many others would happily drop a few dollars on a Nintendo Switch 2 edition, which ups the resolution to 4K, improves overall texture quality, and doesn’t look like total garbage. Is that too much to ask for? I’m going to jump back in regardless and cringe my way through the uglier parts, but otherwise excellent parts of the art direction, like characters, enemies, or locations, are undermined by an overriding visual presentation that doesn’t hit the mark.

Who knows, maybe the upgrade I so desperately want is right around the corner. It happened with Xenoblade...

Fire Emblem: Three Houses