Mechanics

Three Hopes is a Musou game wearing Three Houses systems, and the systems are the part that catches people out. Most of what looks like a decision is really a resource you can spend again later. A small number of choices are permanent, and two of them are made before you have any idea what they mean. This guide walks the whole thing in the order the game puts it in front of you, and flags what cannot be undone.

The decisions you cannot take back

One thing is not on that list and never will be, so it is worth clearing up now: there is no romance system here. No S-rank supports, and nothing carries over from Three Houses. What you get instead is A-rank supports for most of the cast, the Merc Whistle key item you can gift to an A-rank partner to unlock unique battle accessories, and Partner Specials, which pair two characters on one attack. Our romance page covers what that substitute actually does.

Before you press start

Three difficulties are offered up front, described by the game as Easy for people who are here for the story, Normal for beginners and intermediates, and Hard for experienced players who want a fight. Maddening is the fourth and it is hidden until you beat the game once, on any difficulty, in any mode, with any ending, after which it appears on the Select Difficulty screen for a new run.

Casual and Classic decide what a death costs. Casual revives units and playable characters once the battle ends; Classic does not, and a character lost in combat stays lost for the rest of that playthrough. Our difficulty guide pairs Normal with Casual for a relaxed run and Hard with Classic for a real challenge, and it has the menu path for changing difficulty later, which lives under System, then Settings, then Game Settings, where Difficulty is the first option.

Chapter 2: the house choice writes your ending

Our routes guide recommends Golden Deer for a first playthrough, on the grounds that a balanced roster is prepared for whatever resistances the game throws at you, and that Claude is the only character who fires a bow while flying. It also carries the full eight unit roster for each house with each character's signature ability, from Edelgard's Solar Prominence to Ingrid's Icy Plunge and Marianne raining ice down once you pass 300 hits.

While you are there, it settles the fourth route rumour: there is no fourth route. What people saw was a small story change on any house if you recruit Byleth, in which Solon possesses you and your army and turns them on each other.

In battle: the numbers that decide your damage

Nine stats, and you do not control which ones grow on level up, so the useful thing is knowing what each one is quietly doing.

Weapons carry four numbers of their own: Might is damage, Durability is effectively the skill points that Combat Arts and Magic spend, and the two Increase values cap how far each can be raised. You also cannot pick up a weapon at all unless your proficiency or class level is at least its level. Our stats guide has the detail.

Two triangles, five tiers

Melee runs Sword over Axe over Lance over Sword. Ranged runs Bow over Gauntlet over Tome over Bow. Blue arrows on the minimap mean you have the advantage and red means you do not, and the whole thing stacks up to five tiers in either direction, which is a big enough range that matchup beats raw stats more often than people expect.

Three tiers from a single Effective Attack out of a five tier scale is the number to remember. Our weapon triangle guide covers reclassing to reach a different Buster and the optimize feature that will build a unit for you. What each class actually does with that advantage is in our classes guide.

Back at camp: what an Activity Point buys

Camp is one economy, not a set of unrelated menus, and Activity Points are the scarce thing. They refresh between main story chapters, so the number of chores and expeditions you get is fixed per chapter whether you use them or not.

Expeditions are the efficient one

They unlock in Chapter 5 and need C support with an ally before you can invite them, which you get from the cheaper activities above. Then talk to them at camp and take Invite on an Expedition. Four things our expeditions guide establishes are worth carrying into every one you run.

1. The location does not matter. It changes the ally's opening line and nothing else, with one exception: a yellow icon on the selection screen means an encounter, which is bonus dialogue where every response lands well.
2. Take Talk rather than asking questions, because it makes a perfect conversation much easier to reach.
3. Go straight away when a character asks after a battle. The bonus Support Points are lost if you fight anything else first.
4. Each ally has seven possible topics and only three come up per expedition, so a perfect conversation is three right answers, not seven. It pays extra Support Points, extra Morale and a bigger Charm bump for both characters, and giving a gift afterwards adds more on top.

You start with the Plains and unlock two more locations through Recreation Quarter upgrades. The guide carries perfect responses for 31 characters, which turns the whole activity into a formality.

Support and Morale are different currencies

It is easy to treat these as one thing because the same activities feed both, but they buy different things. Support levels let allies learn new abilities, and hitting the cap on a level can trigger a Support Conversation, though not always. The tell is in the Support Info menu: three dots over a character's Support Level means a conversation is waiting at the top of that level. Our support guide lists the five best Support Point sources and the correct response for 29 characters across the early chapters.

Morale is simpler and more immediate: it scales the damage an ally deals, and you read it from the Convoy page, where the symbol next to a character's class abilities runs grey for Neutral, orange for Happy, yellow for Excited and green for Joyous. Gifts, cooking, volunteering and taking battle MVP all raise it, and MVP is worth a whole tier on its own, which you can engineer by playing as the character you want to promote. One warning from our morale guide: in Casual mode an ally dropping to zero HP costs them a full tier.

Building the army

Four ways in, and they arrive in this order. Your house hands you eight units automatically in Chapter 2. Persuade Strategies take the rest during main story battles, and the sequence matters: capture territories on the War Map for Strategy Resources, spend them to enable the Persuade Strategy before you start the battle, then hold the direction input until the gauge fills and the objective changes, and finally beat the character to recruit them. If you are short of Resources mid mission, you can go back to the War Map and collect more.

Byleth is the third way and the one with a wrong answer. On every route Arval tells you to finish Byleth off and on every route you ignore that. On Scarlet Blaze, use the lightning strategy, secure the strongholds and especially the northwest one, then push on to Rodrigue and Alois and take Alois down quickly. On Azure Gleam, handle Fleche, clear the opening objectives, then kill Randolph to close the mission. On Golden Wildfire, escort Claude across the map and back, pre-place your best units in the top left, and when the objective changes get there and beat the new enemy before Byleth does. Jeralt comes with him on all three. Our recruitment guide has each version step by step, and our companions guide covers what everyone else costs.

The fourth way is the post game, where Renown buys the characters you never got, at 60 Renown each. Rhea and Sothis are available whatever ending you finished on, while some, Arval among them, want specific decisions made during the run.

Renown, and the trade nobody mentions

Renown comes from two places: every chapter has a main story battle that pays it, and the Chore Master will sell you more in exchange for Activity Points. You spend it in Shez's personal quarters, where the eighteen permanent stat boosters sit at either three or six times Renown, and after the credits the same journal sells weapons, the post game characters and the Sword of the Creator.

Here is the tension worth planning around. Strategy Resources come from capturing territories on the War Map, and Renown goes up the fewer territories you capture. So the currency that recruits people during the run and the currency that unlocks people after it are pulling in opposite directions, and you cannot maximise both. Our Renown guide has the full purchase list.

How it ends

Three endings come straight from the Chapter 2 house choice, and all three topple the major antagonist while leaving Fodlan's peace an open question. Black Eagles ends with Edelgard and Shez going after Thales and Rhea intervening, in a magical fight that appears to kill them both. Blue Lions ends with Dimitri beating Thales, Edelgard defeated and watching, and Claude reluctantly treating Rhea as a future ally. Golden Deer skips Thales entirely for the Central Church, where Rhea turns into a dragon and Claude and Shez kill her, after which Claude proposes ending the war.

The fourth ending is not an ending so much as two more chapters, Chapter 15 The Hour of Vengeance and Chapter 16 Into the Chasm, and they only exist if you recruited Byleth rather than killing them. The content is the same on all three routes with the cast swapped. Arval possesses Shez, Solon turns up as a boss and is then killed by the possessed Shez, which opens a portal to Zahras that swallows all three house leaders, and Chapter 16 reveals Arval was being controlled by Epimenides all along. Beating Epimenides costs you Arval too. Our endings guide has the full sequence.