When you think "soap opera," visions of hokey classics like Days of Our Lives probably come to mind. Or maybe some memories of Downton Abbey. Nintendo likely isn't high on the list of associations with the term, for good reason. Outside of the Xenoblade series, Nintendo’s storytelling style rarely approaches such levels of drama. But that didn't stop it and Intelligent Systems from making one of the best (and best-selling) video game soap operas ever on July 26, 2019: Fire Emblem: Three Houses.

Three Houses has four storylines — five, if you include the DLC expansion — but they're all facets of the same, big problem. Fodlan, the fictional nation in which Three Houses takes place, came into being generations in the past, the end result of unjust wars and a religion that sanctions severe social stratification. The Vatican City of that religion is Garreg Mach Monastery, which is also where all the up-and-coming nobles and ambitious peasants come to study and network. Byleth (that's you), fresh off a near-death experience and the realization that a tiny god lives inside them, is now an instructor here and picks which house and house leader for whom they effectively want to be patron.

You've got the Black Eagles, a team primarily stacked with aristocratic brats who don't mind throwing their station around, helmed by their leader Edelgard, a determined warrior whose life mission is overthrowing the church and making a better world, no matter the cost. Then there's Dimitri and the Blue Lions, also a house with noble backgrounds, but whose members are typically the victims of their upbringings, rather than the passive enjoyers of privilege's bounty. Most of them want a return to the........

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