Fire Emblem games love to throw Characters at you, this much is for certain. For such meagre battle slots – ten to twelve if you’re lucky – the sheer amount of options can often leave the prospective player feeling spoiled for choice. If you’re the kind of player that favors personality and role playing elements then your choices are likely to naturally fall into place, but what if you’re the kind that likes to min-max, preferring battle statistics to support dialogue? Worse still, what if you’re stuck somewhere between the two? Nothing we write is likely to completely remove you from this problem, but we can tell you that we’re firmly in the ‘min-max’ camp that likes to optimise everything for optimal battle, and the following is how we rank absolutely every character available in Three Houses – may it offer you some guidance on your way!
Tier List
Anyone reading our recent Three Houses articles is unlikely to be surprised by the content of our top tier, since it essentially features members of the top 10 we recently wrote, though the cut off point for the ‘Great’ tier may be slightly controversial. We came into this article expecting it to be one of our toughest to write yet, but if we’re honest things actually started to fall into place fairly easily. Long time Fire Emblem players out there might understand when we say that we’re kind of… Done with the game. Having played it to completion more times than we care to mention, our opinions are set in stone and we’re ready to set our sights on another title in the series, one that’s slightly more Sacred shall we say.
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Amazing Tier
- Dimitri
- Edelgard
- Claude
- Felix
- Hapi
- Leonie
- Lysithea
As noted above, there really shouldn’t be many surprises here, though our personal touch of Hapi might be something that others don’t necessarily agree with. Additionally, were it not for the inclusion of an excellent personal class in Barbarossa, we’re almost certain that Felix would have overtaken Claude. Even now we’re considering just how many times we’ve seen him frequently outperform the lords. Either way these are the seven that we absolutely adore; they’re super powerful, never failing, absolute monsters of the battlefield that continuously prove themselves no matter the difficulty level chosen.
Special mention has to go to Dimitri of course. Way back when, in our first ever playthrough, we chose the Blue Lions and in many ways the lord of this particular house spoiled us in all the best ways. He’s a statistical monster, this much is obvious, but as the game progresses and his personality turns, so too does his performance – it just gets better and better. By the time you unlock the Wrath and Vantage Battalion combo he’s already destroying everything in a single round, and now he’s capable of taking on entire maps alone. It’s slightly unfair if we’re honest; he has the best story, the best stats and the best skills. Not that we’re complaining really, because the overriding memory of Three Houses will forever be his story turns and his ridiculous, unhinged power.
We should probably make mention of everybody else. Edelgard is probably the most malleable of the lords, likely to excel no matter the role you choose for her, even magical. Claude is the absolute king of archery, a role that he grows into as the game progresses, and the remaining non lord lot are examples of tremendous power in their chosen roles. It’s hard to go wrong when picking any of these as an addition to your house, but we should probably end with a word of caution: On anything other than the maximum difficulty level, picking one or more of these characters will make things far too easy.
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Great Tier
- Petra
- Ferdinand
- Balthus
- Sylvain
- Lindhart
- Shamir
- Ingrid
- Hilda
- Marianne
- Seteth
- Ignatz
- Catherine
- Dorothea
- Mercedes
- Bernadetta
- Yuri
- Constance
- Lorenz
- Manuela
- Hanneman
- Anna
- Jeritza
The middle tier is always so difficult, isn’t it? We tend to find that those encased within the mid section of any tier list tend to go one of two ways; you either found them to be incredible allies in battle, perfectly capable of reaching the top tier, or they belong to the absolute lowest of the low, struggling to keep up with your best performers. Either way, this is our ‘mid’ tier, which in Three Houses we consider to be Great. We’ve named them this way because in our opinion they can perform very well in almost any team, and in many cases they can approach the top tier albeit with a little attention.
Still, without making a million tiers it can be difficult to accept that some of these characters fit together. Sylvain for example, is very likely to be considered better than Lorenz or Anna, but in our opinion they can fit into the same category. If you give the latter a bow and a little TLC, she’ll perform very well in any given team. Technically Sylvain requires less help, and his statistics mean he’ll likely perform no matter what role you give him, but the end result remains… Great.
No doubt this is the tier that will get the most scrutiny, and rightfully so, but we’d urge any readers to actually give those in this list a chance. Yes people say that Lorenz is useless because his stats have no standout, that Anna really cannot contribute and suffers from a lack of supports and that Ignatz is only useful on higher difficulty levels, but take your time to give these lot a chance and you’ll be pleasantly surprised. Unlike our next candidates…
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Poor Tier
- Annette
- Ashe
- Dedue
- Hubert
- Caspar
- Raphael
- Cyril
- Flayn
- Alois
- Gilbert
Finally we end with our last tier, the absolute bottom of the barrel. It’s not that any of these units are completely unusable, really it isn’t, it’s just such a pain in order to do so. Any one of the members here tends to come with a fairly severe failing; Raphael for example has fantastic defensive capabilities but little else besides, Ashe too can be a relatively useful Archer but his personal skills are lacking and statistically he’ll fall off all too soon. They just feel so… Unspectacular in comparison to their cohorts in higher tiers.
This being a Fire Emblem title, no unit is completely useless. Hubert makes for a good if limited mage type, and Caspar will make a pretty good knight or brawler type, it’s just that they fall well behind any of the other choices, to the point where anybody looking maximise their performance will be forced to look elsewhere. They have their uses of course, Annette in particular is an excellent Rally unit and Flayn can make for a passable healer, but with this group in particular we always feel the need to bookend any opinion about them with, ‘but X unit is actually much better at the role’. Still, if you’re looking for a challenge then a team full of these will make for an entertaining run at least.
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Categories: Fire Emblem: Three Houses