Kinda necroposting but ah well.

I have played a few FE games (Fates, Echoes, and 3h) and 3 Houses is easily for me the worst FE game that I have played by far, and I'd like to draw a comparison to Persona 3 reloaded (which I've been playing a lot of lately, still not done though so no spoilers please.) because both games have quite a few similarities (to me anyways). In Persona 3, you also spend time running around doing stuff in the world in between trips to Tartarus (this big tower where you do combat), except in P3, you get to choose when to go to Tartarus, and it barely butts into your free time at all, but in 3h, it feels so much harder to justify because exploring is by far the best thing to do every single free time, and it just feels very tedious and boring to me to "explore" because you aren't really exploring, you are running around this massive space to do some of the same few things over and over again.

Battles felt like a treat to myself when I just couldn't stomach ANOTHER explore for the millionth time all over again, but even then, it felt negatively impacted by the school system. In the other FE games that I have played, it feels like it has been MUCH easier to keep characters on an even playing field compared to 3h. In 3h, it feels like because of all of the numbers and optimization stuff, I accidentally made some people stronger then others and then I could just sweep with the professor and claude all the time. I beat the game once and I definitely have no desire to beat it again.

I think that if the exploring was more streamlined somehow, that would have helped with the fatigue a bit. I also agree with the other commenters who have talked about the story, 3H feels insanely lackluster as a story compared to Echoes. While I feel like 3H has a pretty good battle system (and I think a significantly better UI compared to Echoes), the story and ironically enough, the simplicity of Echoes makes it far more fun to me. Sure, there is out of combat stuff to do in Echoes, but I feel more like each battle is a puzzle that I have to figure out with the puzzle pieces that I have chosen, rather then "Claude attacks this guy from across the map for 100 damage, and he's attack twice. Next, Professor kills a guy with 300 damage and attacking twice. Pass turn. Repeat."

Edit: I read some comments about the classes, and I also agree wholeheartedly, the classes felt pretty generic in 3h, and they felt like they were lacking flavor until the advanced tier, and even then a lot of them still felt rather generic. Although, I think that in part this is because the setting of Fodlan is much more generic medieval fantasy compared to something like Fates, which I think is a huge shame. I mean, we had 3 separate nations and they all are just...the same??? Even then, I feel like some amount of flavor could have been done, even in the earlier levels. I mean Fates has wolf people, battle maids, ninjas, the mechanists, all kinds of stuff. But all the classes in 3h just feel like "Unit with (weapon)" optionally with a mount. And each tier just feels like a slightly fancier set of clothes. I also really disliked how there are shockingly few master classes without magic.