The final part of the Fire Emblem: Three Houses expansion pass, Cindered Shadows, was announced last week. It introduced us to the mysterious fourth house called the Ashen Wolves, with its students who live under Garreg Mach Monastery for… reasons. The reveal also raised some questions about how it all fits in with the main game.
We’re now getting a better idea of how Cindered Shadows will play out thanks to some new details from Nintendo Japan, along with the Fire Emblem Twitter account. Translations courtesy of RPGSite and Nintendo Everything, respectively.
The DLC is genuinely side content. It will be accessed from the main menu and isn’t integrated into the main story. Once players have completed the scenario, though, they can recruit all four main Ashen Wolves into their army — er, class. However, we still don’t know if they will have support options with other characters or if they’ll be silent helpers like Anna.
The maps are designed to be much more difficult than those in the main game, with new gimmicks and challenges, and players will be using a set group of students for combat. The Fire Emblem Twitter account revealed they will be Dimitri, Claude, Edelgard, Linhardt, Ashe, and Hilda. That’s in addition to the four Ashen Wolves students and, of course, the just-announced-for-Smash Byleth.
Non-combat exploration reportedly doesn’t use the calendar system either, so we’re still in the dark on how the rest of the Cindered Shadows content will play out. Hopefully, we can at least invite these poor wretches denied the light of day to a lovely little tea party. That would make everything better, right?
Anyhow, Cindered Shadows isn’t quite a new fourth path that lets you get by without killing everyone, but letting all the House Leaders fight together again is some pretty darn good fanservice nonetheless.
We loved Fire Emblem: Three Houses when it launched last summer and are anxiously awaiting Cindered Shadows‘ February 13 release date. Stay tuned to GameSkinny for more Fire Emblem: Three Houses news as it crawls out of the shadows.
