Review: A look at the Fire Emblem: Three Houses Ashen Wolves DLC

This past week, a substantial set of new content was added to Fire Emblem: Three Houses as part of its Expansion Pass. Three Houses has been gradually rolling out DLC over the past few months, but until recently that new content has been fairly low impact — some of the more notable updates included a range of new costumes, some new repeatable quests, and, most importantly, the ability to feed the cats and dogs in the monastery. Now, however, a full side-story pack has been released, adding around 8-10 hours of new story content. You don’t need to worry about where you are at in your main playthrough of Three Houses, as the Ashen Wolves DLC is a separate mode and uses a different set of save files. It does work in the other direction, however — once you’ve experienced the side story, its new features and characters will unlock in your main campaign save files.

The Ashen Wolves side story (alternatively known as Cindered Shadows) fits into the storyline of Three Houses by offering a basic premise: Until now, you’ve been participating in the fancy high-society life of some of the most important people in the world, working at a monastery so that you can teach the heirs apparent to kingdoms and empires how to ride a horse. However, it turns out that the monastery has a big secret — namely, it is built on top of a huge underground network of ancient buildings known as the Abyss, and these buildings are inhabited by the kind of people who certainly wouldn’t be seen in high society, mostly because that might get them arrested or discovered by their debt collectors. Previously, the concept of a labyrinthine area underground that the church couldn’t fully monitor did come up as a minor plot point in the game, but the Ashen Wolves DLC works to flesh that idea out into a new traversable zone full of people to interact with.

The side story takes place relatively early in the timeline of the main campaign, with you and the three house leaders (Edelgard, Dimitri, and Claude) discovering the entrance to the Abyss while chasing down a shadowy figure. There, they meet a ragtag group of new characters calling themselves the Ashen Wolves, who claim that they are the monastery’s forgotten fourth house. I won’t spoil the story beyond that, but I will say that it was fun to see the three house leaders team up — after all, this feat was impossible after the first 15 minutes into the main campaign of Three Houses when you are (as the title of the game implies) asked to choose one of the three houses.

Presumably, the reason this guy is hiding from the police is that he insists on wearing those horns while inside.

The first thing that stood out to me when playing Ashen Wolves was the difficulty. One common complaint about Three Houses was that it quickly became too easy. While there was a hard mode, a lot of people weren’t satisfied with the difficulty of that either. The larger problem was that if you chose Normal difficulty at first, you were stuck in that mode for the duration of the 40-60 hour campaign, with the option to switch difficulty modes permanently unavailable (despite it showing up in the options menu). While Nintendo still hasn’t given people the option to switch their difficulty settings for some reason, the difficulty level of Ashen Wolves is fairly challenging even in Normal mode.

Part of the difficulty is due to the battles themselves throwing more waves of enemies at you than the base game does, but it is also due to your restricted ability to grind for levels and resources. The main campaign of Three Houses gives the player the ability to participate in optional battles several times between each story mission, so if you find yourself struggling you can simply dedicate more time to combat between major missions. Here, every battle is a story mission, so your levels are going to stay roughly on par with the enemy NPCs throughout the story. Ashen Wolves also limits resources by providing you with just enough gold to get by, if you spend responsibly, and it also doles out only limited amounts of ores (which are what you use to repair/upgrade your weapons). Thus, you’ll need to consider when to use lower ranks of weapons (i.e. Iron instead of Steel) so that your good weapons aren’t broken when you really need to use them against a tough opponent. Coming into this review, I didn’t expect that I was going to make any comparisons between the gameplay of Ashen Wolves and Breath of the Wild, and yet here we are.

The side story really gets across the feeling of an underground society scavenging for limited resources.

The DLC story pack took me slightly under 6 hours to complete, according to the in-game timer, but that’s probably on the faster end of completion times, as I’m a fast reader who also has a lot of Three Houses experience due to being 115 hours into a playthrough of every single route. Other estimates that I’ve heard have placed the length of the DLC at around 8-10 hours, which seems reasonable to me. The real bulk of the time you can spend on the new content is a lot higher than that though, as the new characters and locations tie back into the base game. If you open a main campaign save file after finishing Ashen Wolves, you’ll notice a range of changes.

You don’t need to start a new game after doing the DLC — I did tests in various old save files in different parts of the campaign, and the Abyss stays accessible from Chapter 2 (which is very early on) until the end of the game. That said, after a certain notable event that happens at around the halfway point of any Three Houses route (anyone who’s played through will know what I mean), you’ll lose your chance to recruit the new DLC characters to your team. However, the Abyss will still be available to you, along with a variety of services and minor quests that are added alongside it. The new playable characters will be hanging around the Abyss each month, with unique dialogue for any given month (sometimes but rarely venturing out into the aboveground monastery), and you can offer them gifts and lost items just like any other character. Most of their support conversations are with other DLC characters, but each of them has a few support conversations with regular students too.

Some of the Abyss area’s fun new features that were added into the main campaign have some practical uses, such as the Renown Altar, which lets you convert items into Renown (a type of currency in Three Houses). It also allows you to convert Renown into rare items and weapons, including a new item that lets you switch to the new specialist sub-classes that were added during the side story. The altar is a useful addition, as I suspect it will come as good news to some of the more dedicated fans who are several rounds into New Game+ and are quickly running out of meaningful things to spend their Renown on. There are also some other new features offered by the Abyss that are mostly for fun, like the ability to interfere with your students’ love lives by “intertwining” their destinies, or the Abyss Library, which features a range of forbidden texts that were thrown out of the official above ground monastery library by everybody’s favorite strict library curator, Seteth. Some of these writings are more serious and offer lore insights into a version of ancient events that the church doesn’t want others to hear, while others were thrown out of the library for more mundane reasons, such as the love manual which teaches the art of seduction.

For those asking the important questions: yes, this DLC side story includes cats. Unfortunately, I don’t think they included the new cat-feeding technology that was added to the main campaign.

Overall, this Expansion Pass DLC is good value if you enjoyed Three Houses when it came out and have been itching for some more variety to help you to jump back in. The side story is excellent on its own, and the way it crosses over into the main campaign creates an incentive for people to start a new run. If you haven’t been paying attention to the gradual drip of new content over the last few months, you may run into some other surprises too, like the new third difficulty setting for those who wanted more of a challenge. If you’re one of those people who finished the game months ago and haven’t played in a while, my first suggestion would be, of course, to experience the new Ashen Wolves side story. My second suggestion would be to try playing the New Game+ mode to experience the story of another house. That way, you can incorporate the new characters from the side story at the start. My third (and most important) suggestion would be to experience the most important update that Three Houses has ever added — the ability to go to that monastery and feed those cats.