How long is Fire Emblem: Three Houses? Here's how long it took us to beat the main story

It seems like everyone is talking about Nintendo's latest hit lately with all this chatter about romance and war. You might be wondering just how long is Fire Emblem: Three Houses? How long will you have to invest in the Persona of tactical strategy games in order for you to enjoy the fruits of your labor? It's a pretty straightforward question in terms of the main story, but Three Houses has so much content that you may be coming back for a second helping.

Fire Emblem: Three Houses takes around 40 hours to beat if you're playing it in a straightforward manner. That means you're mixing battles, exploring the monastery, seminars, and rest up in an even way. Some of these activities, like exploring the monastery, take up far more time than the others. 

Three Houses is broken up into two parts, the first are the primary grid-based battles the series is known for that happen at the end of each month and progress the main story. The second includes a choice of exploring Garag Mach Monastery and completing activities, hosting seminars from other units that give your soldiers special stat boosts, and optional side quest battles that can help you gain experience and additional resources. Each month is broken down into a few weeks and you're only able to select one of the above activities per week.

You have the option to skip everything besides the main story battles if you choose to. Doing so will cut your play time down significantly. You can also opt to do as much as possible and pad your game time significantly. Other players and reviewers have sunk 80 hours into a single playthrough, which is impressive.

The story is also broken up into multiple chapters that differ between different houses. Blue Lions has 22 chapters whereas one of the Black Eagle runs only had 21 for example. Chapters feel rather arbitrary though as most of your playthrough time length will be based on how you decide to spend your time. 

I've played through the main story three times now, completing a run with the Black Eagle, Blue Lion, and Golden Deer Houses and I've racked up a little more than 100 hours in the game. If you're looking to complete every little thing the game has to offer than you're probably going to need to drop close to 140 or so hours. There are four stories in the game including one for each house and an additional path along the Black Eagle route.

If you've been keeping up with the Three Houses discourse you know that a time jump takes place within the game at the 20 hour mark, or sooner/later depending on how much time you spend exploring the monastery. All the systems stay in place after the jump, meaning that you can still explore, host seminars, and go on optional side quests after the big change takes place. Don't expect the tempo or the amount of time you need to invest to change at any point in Fire Emblem: Three Houses. 

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