(The following post contains spoilers for Fire Emblem: Three Houses.)
Tonight’s new chapter of The Ghost of Ochs, Warming Glow, concerns Byleth investigating that weird artifact in the garden that was mentioned back in Chapters 5 and 18. In the game, it’s where you’d scan amiibos to gain rewards (and bonus music from past Fire Emblem titles if you used an amiibo like Marth, Lucina, or Robin while looking at it). It also grants access to a backdoor in the Holy Tomb, where you can go once per chapter to collect rare items. The weird thing is that you appear behind the throne, but there’s no reachable exit or backdoor, so one has to wonder how Byleth escapes from the tomb without getting noticed or stuck. In this story, at least, I included another, smaller teleportation orb like the one in the garden that reacts to Byleth’s Crest. There’s more to the tomb than first appearances might indicate, but we’ll leave those mysteries open for later chapters.
Anyway, a funny thing happened a week before I posted this chapter: Nintendo led off its Nintendo Direct presentation with a new Three Houses spinoff called Fire Emblem Warriors: Three Hopes, due out this summer. Having logged over 100 hours in the original Fire Emblem Warriors since its release almost five years ago, and 200+ more in Three Houses proper, this game looks like another one to add to my sparse wish list for summer gaming. While I won’t pass up the opportunity to play with Byleth, Edelgard, Dimitri, and Claude again (I have all four characters maxed out in Fire Emblem Heroes), there was a particular character who appeared near the end of the announcement trailer that got me and my friends buzzing:
Although I can’t be fully certain with the lighting is in the scene where she appears, they (and a lot of other fans) think she looks like a possible post-timeskip version of our story’s heroine, Monica von Ochs:
I’m currently in the “cautiously optimistic” camp on this since the game is just over four months away and all we have to go on is that announcement trailer, but looking at the two characters side by side, I can kinda see the resemblance. Apparently, this was not lost on some of my readers, for I noticed a slight but definite boost to the story’s readership on FanFiction.net in the five days after the Direct ended:
After the Nintendo Direct: an average of 39 hits (a 77% increase)
We’ll see what happens when more information trickles in, but until then, keep spreading the news about this story, and leave your comments at the mirrors below:
Scrawl Before You Write 