Trivia / Fire Emblem: Three Houses

• Acting in the Dark: Chris Hackney didn't know who the Flame Emperor was until he voiced Dimitri's lines for The Reveal.
• Actor-Shared Background:
  • Patrick Seitz, who was previously a high school teacher, voices Jeritza, a teacher at the Officer's Academy.
  • Joe Zieja, like his character Claude, attended a military academy in the Air Force Academy before going on to serve in the Air Force and then into military intelligence.
• Beam Me Up, Scotty!:
  • Rhea is often quoted as saying "I'll rip your heart out!" when referring to her role in Crimson Flower as an antagonist. She never actually says that; she instead actually says "I shall rip your chest open, and TAKE BACK YOUR HEART MYSELF!"
  • On the Crimson Flower route, Edelgard is often misquoted as saying Rhea merely took the name of Seiros to inspire her troops. In actuality, not only is the line said by Hubert rather than Edelgard, the message was more about Rhea using the goddess' name (IE Sothis) as a way to inspire her troops to keep fighting. Seiros's battle dialogue with Edelgard heavily implies that the latter is fully aware that Seiros and Rhea are the same person due to her lack of surprise when Seiros mentions Wilhelm. Likewise and contrary to what some believe, the route also reveals both in the Saint class' description and in Byleth's battle dialogue with her that Saint Seiros and Archbishop Rhea are indeed one and the same.
  • Edelgard in the Verdant Wind route is quoted as saying Claude, as an outsider, has no right to change Fódlan. In reality, she never says that; her boss dialogue states since Claude has insufficient knowledge of Fódlan's suffering, she cannot work with him despite knowing they share similar ideals.
• Blooper:
  • The end of the FMV that plays during the aftermath of the Fort Merceus battle (Chapter 18 of Verdant Wind; Chapter 17 of Silver Snow), shows Byleth and a small battalion of soldiers looking on warily at the mass destruction that Those Who Slithers' ballistic missiles wrought on the fort. If you're playing as a female Byleth, her eyes are erroneously colored blue for one shot.
  • In the aftermath of Chapter 17 of the Crimson Flower route, which features a still of Edelgard raising Aymr with the intent to behead Dimitri, the Adrestian Empire twin eagle logo is missing from the back of her cape.
  • Several animated cutscenes of the Verdant Wind route give off the impression that Claude is seemingly not wearing anything beneath his gambeson, despite concept art and his model showing otherwise.
  • At launch, multiple S-Rank illustrations featured characters Off-Model, being one of the most well known examples Hanneman lacking his goatee. This was rectified with the version 1.0.2 update.
  • Prior to the 1.2.0 update, Lysithea would erroneously mention during Part 2 the Insurrection of the Seven had taken place 13 years in the past rather than 18.
• B-Team Sequel: Most of the development was done directly by the Kou Shibusawa team at Koei Tecmo, with primary developer Intelligent Systems mainly taking on a supervisory role in this game’s development.
• Content Leak:
  • Mid-May 2019, a Reddit poster by the name of thanibomb leaked several details about the game, including the Time Skip and several character details.
  • The different DLC content has been leaked quite a bit before their releases as well, including it being revealed before her release that Anna would be a playable unit.
  • The involvement of Chris Niosi as the English voice of Byleth was leaked by him shortly before the game's release, therefor breaking his non-disclosure agreement, which necessitated a casting change.
• Directed by Cast Member: Patrick Seitz is the English voice director of the game, and voices Jeritza and Lambert personally.
• Dummied Out: See here.
• Enforced Method Acting:
  • Christian La Monte stated that Ignatz's scream in response to Raphael suddenly appearing in their B-support was genuine, as the recording team intentionally played Raphael's line suddenly and loudly in the recording booth to frighten Christian into screaming.
  • Chris Hackney was kept out of the loop on who the Flame Emperor's true identity was until during his recording for the reveal. That way, his reaction was more genuine.
• God Never Said That:
  • In spite of the speculation surrounding the game's development, no interview mentions nor hints the Crimson Flower route was a late addition to the game (which is a common theory trying to explain its short length and few animated cutscenes). What the devs have said on the matter is that only Black Eagles was planned to have a route split, which was decided early into development to boot. It's also mentioned playtesters complained about being railroaded into the Silver Snow route (the path where you oppose Edelgard), which led to the requirements for accessing Crimson Flower being lowered substantially.
  • From the same interviews, you'll find many who claim they confirm Edelgard was designed as the game's Big Bad. The interview never says that; instead, it talks about the reasoning behind making said character (and by extension, their allegiance) have an antagonistic/driving role in the story in most routes while also playing with the player's expectations about what such a role usually entails.
• Inspiration for the Work: Fire Emblem: Genealogy of the Holy War directly inspired the use of the military academy setting and eventual war between the former classmates. Other aspects of the worldbuilding, like Crest bloodlines being a major part of politics and the Time Skip, were also likely inspired by similar elements of Genealogy.
• Keep Circulating the Tapes: With the release of version 1.0.2 in September 2019, Chris Niosi's original voiceovers for Byleth have been patched out with Zach Aguilar's re-recordings, meaning the only places you can find Niosi's voiceovers are versions 1.0.0 to 1.0.1 as well as some YouTube channels.
• Limited Special Collector's Ultimate Edition: The game came in a Seasons of Warfare Edition for North America, complete with Steelbook case, a sample soundtrack CD, an artbook, and a year 2020 calendar. The Limited Edition in Europe swaps out the CD for a USB stick and the calendar with a pin badge set. The limited edition in Japan only has the CD, steelbook case, and artbook.
• Market-Based Title: In Japanese, the game's subtitle is "Wind, Flower, Snow, Moon". Per Word of God, they didn't go with the international name because they didn't feel it wouldn't translate well back in Japan.
• Meme Acknowledgment:
  • Joe Zieja announced his role as Claude while hanging upside down, a reference to the Upside-Down Claude meme.
  • Ben Diskin's announcement that he was voicing Lorenz alluded to Lorenz' Memetic Loser reputation.
  • Alejandro Saab's announcement that he was voicing Yuri began with him finding a suspicious package next to a sewer drain, alluding to the "sewer kids" meme.
  • Mark Whitten has gotten in on the Seteth's Quests meme and even voiced two examples. Cherami Leigh read a skit as well.
  • Allegra Clark references the "Hoes Mad" meme by singing it. Faye Mata followed suit (albeit without any singing).
  • Billy Kametz changed his Twitter bio to Ferdinand's memetic "I AM FERDINAND VON AEGIR". He even got a t-shirt with the phrase.
  • Joe Brogie has said that he has watched the dancing Sylvain videos.
  • The official Nintendo of America Twitter account wished Claude a happy birthday with upside-down text.
• Missing Trailer Scene: Footage of what appears to be a slightly different version of the cutscene used for the Gronder 2 Rematch was briefly shown in a promotional video in early February 2021. Most notably, it shows Edelgard and Claude in their ultimate lord classes —Emperor and Barbarossa respectively— during the fight rather than in the Armored Lord and Wyvern Master classes correspondingly like in the final release.
• Newbie Boom: Needless to say, the best-selling FE game of all time has, by every metric and reckoning, brought in tons and tons of new users to the franchise again, after Awakening and Fates did the same.
• The Other Marty:
  • Cristina Valenzuela voiced Edelgard in the E3 2018 reveal trailer and was under the impression she would be playing her in game, but was replaced by Tara Platt sometime between then and the February 2019 direct after it was decided to take the character in a different direction voice-wise.
  • A first for the Fire Emblem franchise in that Nintendo replaced an actor post-release. Originally, Chris Niosi was cast in the role of Male Byleth for this game as well as Heroes. However, only six days before the game's July 23rd release date, Niosi admitted to violating his non-disclosure agreement on Discord. Nintendo decided to clean house and replace Niosi with Zach Aguilar for Version 1.0.2 onwards.
• The Pete Best: Quite a few people tend to acknowledge Zach Aguilar as the voice of Male Byleth, especially in the wake of his original voice actor Chris Niosi violating his non-disclosure agreement only one month before the game's release.
• Playing Against Type:
  • Cherami Leigh, known for voicing either Badass Adorables or Plucky Girls such as Mae, voices Rhea, a motherly type figure of the Church of Seiros (with her Japanese voice actress being Kikuko Inoue, who's known to voice these kinds of characters). Then it goes even further with Rhea's Ax-Crazy and psychopathic nature during the Crimson Flower route. She uses a mix of this same voice and Minerva from The Walking Dead: Season Four for V's angry side in Cyberpunk 2077, as well as Rhea's calm demeanor for her role as Sonia in The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom, which, coincidentally, Chris Hackney stars in alongside her as Rauru.
  • Erica Mendez, whose go-to roles are young boys (Gon, Aladdin) or tomboys (Ryuko, Kai), voices Shrinking Violet Bernadetta.
  • Christine Marie Cabanos typically plays cutesy young girls (Delthea, Himiko, Madoka) or upbeat optimists (Chiaki, Shiemi, Mako). Here she plays the sullen and cynical Hapi.
  • Several voice actors also do this in the Japanese dub:
    • Kaito Ishikawa provides a subversion of Typecasting as the voice of Dimitri. Dimitri is the kind of handsome Nice Guy that Ishikawa tends to play...but he also has an Ax-Crazy dark side and spends a good few chapters after the timeskip being a revenge-obssessed Jerkass focused on Revenge Before Reason.
    • Claude is much deeper-voiced, proactive, and free-spirited than the types of male Shrinking Violets that Toshiyuki Toyonaga is typecast as.
    • Yumiri Hanamori is known for playing Genki Girls and childish characters. Mercedes is a Wise Beyond Her Years sisterly character.
    • Unlike the Deadpan Snarkers and comically serious characters that Makoto Furukawa tends to play, Sylvain is a smooth talker and Casanova Wannabe.
• Promoted Fanboy: Claude's voice actor Joe Zieja played Skull Kid in a Nintendo fan film called A Terrible Fate back in 2016, and has been producing Nintendo-related tracks on OverClocked ReMix since 2012. Now he's a voice actor in an official Nintendo first-party game.
• Queer Character, Queer Actor:
  • Coincidentally, Dorothea's English voice actor, Allegra Clark, is bisexual like her.
  • Linhardt is bisexual and in the English version, is played by the homosexual Chris Patton.
• Real-Life Relative: Katelyn Gault (Ladislava's English VA) is married to Kyle McCarley, who voiced a guard at the Officer's Academy.
• Reclusive Artist: The English singer for "The Edge of Dawn" is known only as "Buttercup". Nothing else is known about her, and Greg Chun, who localized the song, has stated that she would like to keep her privacy.
• Recycled Set:
  • The temporary base the Black Eagles occupy at the end of Part 1 is a reskinned version of Miklan's boss arena from Chapter 5.
  • The paralogues "Foreign Land and Sky" and "Forgotten Hero" share the same map in spite of both paralogues being meant to happen in different geographic locations^note The former is in an archipelago, while the latter is in a forest within Edmund's territory, with the only actual difference between both locations being the presence of Fog of War in the latter. A similar case happens for nearly half of the Blue Lions' paralogues, as Felix, Sylvain, and Annette & Gilbert's side missions share the same map in spite of them taking place in different areas of Faerghus.
• Referenced by...:
  • Infinite Craft offers this game's title as a possible crafting recipe.
  • WarioWare: Move-It! has a character named Summer, whose design greatly resembles Hilda during the academy phase.
• Role-Ending Misdemeanor: After male Byleth's original voice actor Chris Niosi admitted to a decades-long history of abuse towards partners and friends, including an incident where he disclosed his role on Discord in violation of Nintendo's non-disclosure agreement; these combined factors led to the role being recast with Zach Aguilar for Version 1.0.2 onwards.
• Same Voice Their Entire Life: Edelgard and English Dimitri retain their voice actors (Ai Kakuma, Tara Platt, and Chris Hackney) for flashbacks to their childhood on the Azure Moon route.
• Schedule Slip: Three Houses was originally stated for a 2018 release back when it was revealed during the Fire Emblem Direct from February 2017, yet no footage nor proper subtitle for it was shown. Then, during E3 2018, the game got a proper trailer showing it was set to release in Spring of 2019. Finally, during February's 2019 Nintendo Direct presentation, it was revealed the game's release date would get moved one final time to July 26th of that year.
• Shipper on Set:
  • Chris Hackney is a notorious Dimileth shipper, playing female Byleth on his stream of the game solely to marry her to Dimitri, and has liked fanart of the ship on Twitter.
  • Joe Brogie is among those who think They Wasted a Perfectly Good Plot with Sylvain and Bernadetta's lack of an A-support, stating that he thought they had romantic potential.
• Spoiled by the Cast List: The credits doesn't hide the connections between aliases, like Rhea and Seiros, Edelgard and the Flame Emperor, or Arundel and Thales sharing the same voice actors.
• Star-Making Role:
  • Joe Zieja being the voice of Claude scored him mainstream spotlight after several minor roles over the years (his biggest role prior to Three Houses was being the voice of Achilles in Fate/Apocrypha, though Ace Combat fans would recognize him as Full Band from Skies Unknown.) and primarily being an author. It helped that his frequent interaction with fans on Twitter and uploading videos on YouTube which has made Claude (and the Golden Deer as a whole) into a Fountain of Memes within the fandom.
  • The same applies to Chris Hackney. He'd played several supporting characters before such as Boey in Fire Emblem Echoes: Shadows of Valentia, but Dimitri was the first time he played a main character. Both that and his phenomenal voice acting saw him massively rising in acclaim; he even mentions in an interview that his Twitter blew up with followers in the pre-release and post-release period.
  • Even a few of the supporting players got career boosts from this game, notably Abby Trott (Annette), Brittany Cox (Ingrid), and Mark Whitten (Seteth).
• Throw It In!: In a Reddit AMA, Joe Zieja revealed that the chuckle Claude had during his and Lysithea's B support was him Corpsing due to finding the line funny. The directors liked it and threw it into the game.
• Urban Legend of Zelda: Due to some lines and dummied out content surrounding the Azure Moon route, it is commonly believed that Dimitri's route was meant to have a route split happen early in Part II. This is in spite an interview confirming that not only was each route conceptualized fairly early in development, only the Empire's route was planned to have a route split. Likewise and from a datamining angle, nothing in the game's final code suggest diverging paths had existed at one point for the Blue Lions.
• What Could Have Been: Enough exists for its own page.
• Word of God: The Nintendo Dream interview revealed that Claude is a fake name, and his real name is Khalid. While they originally wanted to reveal this in-game, they never really found a good time to do so.
• You Look Familiar:
  • Several members of the English voice cast did work for Fire Emblem Heroes, with many of them doing voice work for the characters of Fire Emblem: Genealogy of the Holy War and its midquel Fire Emblem: Thracia 776. More specifically:
    • Robbie Daymond who voiced Ares is Hubert.
    • Chris Hackney who voiced Quan is Dimitri.
    • Joe Zieja who voiced Jamke is Claude.
    • Laura Post who voiced Silvia is Catherine.
    • Faye Mata who voiced Lene is Petra.
    • Allegra Clark who voiced Ethlyn is both Dorothea and Shamir.
    • Erica Mendez who plays Deirdre is Bernadetta.
    • Abby Trott who voiced Nanna is Annette.
    • Christian La Monte who voiced Seliph is Ignatz.
    • Griffin Burns who voiced Julius is Cyril.
    • Cassandra Lee Morris who voices Julia is Sothis.
    • Ben Lepley who voices Saias is Dedue.
    • Ratana Therakulsathit who voiced Ishtar is Leonie.
    • Christopher Corey Smith who voiced Reinhardt is Lord Arundel.
  • And even there are two cases from the Japanese cast who started on the Genealogy crew and then got into here:
    • Kikuko Inoue who plays Deirdre is Rhea.
    • Takehito Koyasu who voices Lewyn is Seteth.
  • The English cast also worked on several previous Fire Emblem games as well.
    • Tara Platt, who voiced Miriel and Flavia in Fire Emblem: Awakening, is Edelgard.
    • Robbie Daymond, who voiced Tobin in Echoes: Shadows of Valentia, is Hubert.
    • Chris Hackney, who voiced Boey in Echoes, is Dimitri.
    • Chris Patton, who voiced Kliff in Echoes, is Linhardt.
    • Ben Diskin, who voiced Jakob, Hayato and Saizo in Fire Emblem Fates, is Caspar and Lorenz.
    • Erica Mendez, who plays Lianna in the Warriors spinoff, is Bernadetta.
    • Lucien Dodge, who played Leon in Echoes, voices Felix.
    • Dorothy Elias-Fahn, who voiced Rinea in Echoes, voices Mercedes.
    • Doug Stone, who played Mycen in Echoes, voices Gilbert and Duke Ludwig Aegir.
    • Patrick Seitz, who voiced Basilio in Awakening and Zeke in Echoes, plays Jeritza (aka The Death Knight) and Lambert.
    • Christine Marie Cabanos, who plays Delthea in Echoes, is DLC-exclusive character Hapi.
    • Cherami Leigh, who plays Mae in Echoes and Caeda in Warriors, voices Rhea (aka Saint Seiros).
    • Paul St. Peter, who also voiced Gregor from Awakening, is Ionius the Ninth (Edelgard's father).
    • Christopher Corey Smith, the voice of Yarne and one of the Male Avatar options in Awakening, as well as Slayde in Echoes, voices Lord Arundel and Thales.
    • Eden Riegel, who also was Sumia and Nah from Awakening, as well as Genny from Echoes, voiced Fleche.
    • Todd Haberkorn, who also voiced Male Morgan in Awakening, voiced Metodey.
    • Michael Sorich, who voiced Vaike in Awakening, voiced Gwendal.
    • Jessica Gee-George, who played Panne from Awakening, voiced Cornelia.
    • Jamieson Price, who voiced Virion and Priam in Awakening and Rudolf in Echoes, voices Nemesis.