The on-going Japan Expo in Paris has been the source of some recent Three Houses information.

(Image via Jeuxvideo)

Toshiyuki Kusakihara and Genki Yokota, who came for the Three Houses live demonstration, were interviewed by Jeuxvideo. I am unfamiliar with French, but fortunately, machine translations are pretty good (unlike how they are for Japanese).

To begin with, they mentioned how this is the first home console Fire Emblem since 2008’s Radiant Dawn, which was released on the Nintendo Wii.

They discussed Koei-Tecmo’s familiarity with tactical simulation like games, such as Romance of the Three Kingdoms or Nobunaga’s Ambition to name a few. Saying that their passion for the genre, along with them handpicking developers who liked Fire Emblem to begin with, was part of why the project has gone so smoothly.

Intelligent Systems managed the artistic direction and game design while Koei-Tecmo did the programming.

The folks at Jeuxvideo compared the calendar system to Koei-Tecmo’s Atelier franchise–how you progress through the game while following the calendar, trying to prepare yourself for what the game will throw at you next.

Next they go into the differences between the Monastery and My Castle (from Fire Emblem Fates).

Yokota: The My Castle system was interesting because you could build it up yourself. But the ambitions we had with the Monastery were much larger and harder to achieve using a similar system. We wanted to give this feeling of shared life; while you created your own My Castle from scratch, in Three Houses, it is already established. The characters have lived there for years and, for them, it’s a place of life that they can call home. So it was designed this way to create that kind of mood. Read more