As promised, here’s the translation for the second half of the interview with the Three Houses development team, found in the May 2020 edition of Nintendo Dream (which came out last month).
Like the first half, you can read the translated interview at Nintendo Everything. A big thanks to them for choosing to cover the interview–and Oni Dino for translating the contents. In case you missed it, you can find the first half here.
Here are a few highlights that we cherry-picked. Please be aware that the full interview includes spoilers for the various routes and DLC.
Connections to other games?
Does the world-building of Three Houses have any connection to other games in the Fire Emblem series?
Kusakihara: I don’t think so. At least, not as far as I can tell. I mean, there could still be some mysteries in the land of Archanea that we don’t know about yet. There are some items in the exploration quests that are evocative of past titles, and that was all thanks to the developers at Koei Tecmo. I think it was all really clever. There’s a location by the name of Oghma Mountains that comes up, but this is due to us having Celtic mythology as an underlying, central theme rather than it being related to past Fire Emblem games. […]
The “items” being mentioned are from Catherine and Shamir’s fetch quest. It’s less obvious in the English version, but in the Japanese version, all the items are themed on various games in the series. Eg. Crestological Mysteries is a nod to Mystery of the Emblem.
Correction: I almost forgot about the fetch quest, if I wasn’t reminded by one of Kirokan’s tweets.
The comment before that, about Archanea’s lingering mysteries, could be a reference to the rusted weapons that can be forged into Archanea’s legendary weapons (such as Mercurius). Perhaps it’s also a reference to Sothis sharing a very similar appearance to the Archanean divine dragons?
Poor Holst
So you’re saying Hilda’s brother won’t be added to the game?
Yokota: Nope! (Laughs) I think the only one who really knows what kind of person he is is Kusakihara.
Kusakihara: Holst and Glenn are kind of similar to Columbo’s wife: you don’t know whether they exist or not, but they come up in conversation from time to time. It’s the same concept as with crests; I wanted that to signify that the world is more expansive than what the player sees in the game. I think that gives the player the sense that the world of Fódlan really exists as a result.
Unless they make another game set in the Three Houses universe or spin-off content (like a manga or anime or even an art book), it looks like Holst’s appearance (and Glenn’s) will be left to our imagination.
Dimitri’s time-skip design
Tell us about Dimitri’s appearance after the time-skip with his eyepatch.
Kusakihara: It actually wasn’t planned in the beginning for him to have an eyepatch. It came about when I asked Chinatsu Kurahana to add one after I saw her character designs illustrations. […] I told her that I wanted each character’s [time-skip] appearance to absolutely ooze how they’ve been living their lives over the past five years, and the idea for Dimitri’s eyepatch came from this school of thought. That’s why Dimitri doesn’t have his eyepatch solely in the “Crimson Flower” route. […] There are some routes where such danger doesn’t befall him, so his eyepatch is a symbol of a deadly encounter.
That’s about the only Dimitri-related nugget in the interview, while there was a lot more for Edelgard and Claude. Although they do bring up his popularity with Nintendo Dream readers. But like we said earlier, having no loose ends isn’t necessarily a bad thing.
