There are around 34 playable characters in Fire Emblem: Three Houses. However, not all of them can join your team. The characters you can recruit to join your quest get determined by the house you pick at the start of the game.
At the beginning of the game, you become a professor in a prestigious school, and you need to decide which house you want to teach. The three houses are The Black Eagles, The Blue Lions, and The Golden Deer. Each house has its own set of students and a student leader. The student leaders in all three houses are the heirs to the three nations of Fódlan.
Each house starts with eight students, though, you can recruit others to join your cause. You can request other students from the other two houses to join yours, and you can also recruit several members of the faculty.
Max Number of Students you can recruit?
There are 24 playable students in Fire Emblem: Three Houses. They are split up between the three houses, with each house having eight students. After you pick a house for your professor, you can recruit the students from the other houses to join yours. Theoretically, you should be able to recruit almost all the other students, though we haven’t accomplished it ourselves. With that said, attempting to recruit everyone is a challenging task on a first-time playthrough. Also, certain characters cannot get recruited outside their houses.
Characters you cannot recruit are the house leaders; besides the leader of the house you’ve chosen, the other leaders cannot get recruited. That means Edelgard, Dimitri, and Claude will remain exclusive to their respective houses. The leaders’ personal retainers should also be private to their first houses. Hubert is unique to the Black Eagles, Dedue is exclusive to the Blue Lions, and Hilda is exclusive to the Golden Deer.
However, there is some conflicting information on Hilda not being able to get recruited. Twitter user EdragonXX showed an image of Hilda’s recruiting requirements. RPG Site also claims the character can get recruited on the third month in the Blue Lions route. We have yet to test this method.
Looks like, after a certain point of the game, and depending on your decisions, Hilda becomes recruitable like everyone else. If you want to recruit her you need Cha and Axe. pic.twitter.com/VaD0JtIMkh
— EdragonXX (@edragonxx) July 19, 2019
So beyond the house leaders and two retainers, the other students are fair game. However, recruiting student characters takes a lot of time and effort. To recruit a student, you need to have the avatar character Byleth a high enough grade in two specific skills and stats. Every student has their own set of skills or stats that Byleth needs to raise their grade to for recruitment.
For example, Leonie needs Byleth to have a high grade in spear and strength. From our experience, the C-grade in skills and a 15 on the stat is high enough to recruit the student. Additionally, Byleth needs to have a close enough relationship with them before you can recruit them. Raising a skill grade takes a while, and trying to do that for all the students will take forever.
Theoretically, it is possible. On most Sundays, you have the day-off. On Sundays, you can go on battles to level yourself up. While specific battles deplete the amount of time you have in the day, there is usually one-battle that never takes up any of your time. You can grind on that one free battle until you raise all your skills to grade C and have enough high stats in everything.
The only issue is that you get minimal experience for your skill grades in battles. You need to be in a particular job class to raise specific skill grades, and you will always need to switch weapons out to build some of the skill grades.
We say it is theoretically possible to recruit most of the students, but we haven’t tested this ourselves. It could be possible that the game does have a limit for how many students you can recruit, though nothing like that is getting reported. Most first-time players recruit around two to four students in their initial playthroughs. Maybe if you are more experienced with the game, you may be able to get more if you grind a lot.
