Fire Emblem: Three Houses review – fantasy combat meets college soap opera

Nintendo Switch; Intelligent Systems/Nintendo
This boarding-school daydream is grandiose and silly, but a gorgeous look and revised combat help it sing

At a time when the egotism and idiocy of a generation of private schoolboys threatens to plunge Britain beneath the waves, there is something strangely comforting about Fire Emblem: Three Houses, a fantasy role-playing game in which you essentially train up a bunch of budding Etonians on behalf of the Spanish Inquisition. Set in the "olde worlde" of Fodlan, the game casts you as a young professor at Garreg Mach Monastery, a warlike religious school for the offspring of princes from three rival nations.

Over the course of an 80-hour plot (with the option to play through twice more for different outcomes), you'll side with the ruler-to-be of one country, hone a class of privileged whelps into fearsome warriors, and unravel a conspiracy involving diabolical relics and ancient gods. Oh, and there's a peculiar girl trapped in your subconscious mind who gives you the power to rewind time when battles run awry. It's quite the epic, and takes a while to get into its stride, but once you've acclimatised to its baroque mixture of boarding school daydream and turn-based strategy, Fire Emblem: Three Houses absolutely sings.