You can be Gay in Fire Emblem: Three Houses

Fire Emblem Fates: Three Houses is coming out in two weeks, and I’m counting the days until I get my hands on this sweet new game. I’m not saying it’s going to fill the increasingly wide and deep hole that’s currently in my waste of a life, but it’s gonna be a damn good Band-Aid solution. But as the days tick down and we get more and more information from lucky journalists who were able to get their hands on a review copy, one question that keeps coming up is the issue of romance: after all, if you can’t hand-pick your favorite student and make them your bride/husband, then what’s even the point of playing a Fire Emblem game?

On this issue, we’ve had little in the way of answers, until a livestream of the game last Friday: yes, the game will have romance (which isn’t always a guarantee: there wasn’t anything like that in the Gamecube-era games), but no, you won’t have time-traveling/bubble reality babies coming in as new units. Good to know. But after getting that baseline down, there’s one other question up in the air: will you be able to romance your own sex?

The answer: yes. And not only that, it seems Nintendo is actually going to do a less crappy job of it than they did in earlier games.

See, in the earlier games, there was exactly one male and one female who could be seduced by their own sex. Not only were they… controversial (you kinda had to drug up the girl to get her to like you if you were a dude), they were also very on the nose. They may as well have been wearing pride flags when you first met them.

This game, however, is being subtler. Not only will some of these characters be straight-up gay, Nintendo isn’t going to tell you who’s what: you’ll have to figure that out on your own.

Promising, but this is Nintendo we’re talking about. I’m sure they can still find some way to mess this up if they really try.