Published 6/04/2022

Fire Emblem Engage

Of any of Nintendo’s many, many franchises, Fire Emblem easily ranks amongst the most important to me. Fire Emblem on the GBA was an extremely formative game for me, shaping my tastes in games and characters alike, and in the years since I’ve been a pretty damn dedicated fan. But the last few years have been… off, at least personally. I loved Fire Emblem Awakening, but Fates didn’t quite scratch that itch, and Echoes has some real problems in regards to its map design, albeit with the best visual design of the franchise. And then there’s Three Houses. I appreciate what Three Houses did for the franchise, and I’d be the first to say it has the most well-written and strongly rounded characters perhaps in the entire series… but it’s insistence on repeating the same maps on multiple routes, generally weak map design, and bloated Monastery sections didn’t do the game many favors in my eyes. Hell, when I prefer the Musou follow-up Three Hopes to an *actual* Fire Emblem, somethings up, right? And thus, I dived into Fire Emblem Engage with a heavy heart, fearing that the franchise that was once so close to my heart had simply become something I couldn’t connect with.

Engage might not totally soothe those fears, but it goes a hell of a long way in rectifying them.

The highlight of Engage, by far, is its focus on extremely tight, engaging map design and build ‘em how you want units. Three Houses did well in the latter regard, but with Engage, you’ve got the whole shebang. Engage features pretty much every mainstay map objective of Fire Emblem past - rout ‘em all, capture the base, defend the base, and so on. Beyond that, you’ve also got a wide variety of mid-battle mechanics to cope with, many of which rapidly snowball into some of the most terrifyingly engaging (hah) battles I’ve seen in a Fire Emblem in ages. One, for an example, has a number of reinforcements spawning in on set turns, which can be easily dispatched. But once you step over the magic line, these reinforcements will keep spawning, more and more each turn, until you finish off the boss. This forced me to leave units behind to try and stem the tide for just one more turn, in the hope I could make it to the boss in time This is just one of the varying mechanics Engage throws at you, and I think it’s this variety that puts Engage amongst the best Fire Emblem games to actually sit down and enjoy, having the most engaging (hah) gameplay since Fire Emblem Conquest - with a few bells and whistles to make the whole experience a touch less frustrating. It also helps that battles look the best they’ve had ever since the beautiful GBA sprites of yesteryear; animations are fast and fluid, making those 1% crits feeling all the most hype-inducing when they roll at that exact needed moment.

This is heightened by the varying difficulty options, which help suit pretty much any player to their desired experience. Hard Mode genuinely felt like a challenge at times - not insurmountable by any means, but I really had to sit down and work out what ways I needed to tackle a map. The return of a turn rewind feature, allowing you to rewind time up to ten times per map, is perhaps a little too generous at times, but I found it great when I was nearly an hour deep into a map and I made a reeeeal stupid mistake. Maddening, the hardest difficulty, has also received some interesting tweaks to make it a more actively enjoyable challenge. On your first run through the game, all characters will have set level ups, free of any RNG blessings or curse alike. Whilst this does take away from the smaller level of randomness inherent to Fire Emblem, I think it’s a really nice way of easing people into the much, much tougher challenge of Maddening, allowing them to focus on building up characters rather than getting screwed by a particuarly bad bout of RNG - and once you’ve cleared Maddening, then you can have the true Fire Emblem experience regardless.

One of Three Houses biggest positives was the fact you could build characters to be pretty much anything you want them to be, to an almost ridiculous degree. Engage somehow furthers this system, primarily through the addition of the Engage Emblem. In moment-to-moment battles, Emblems can be equipped by characters, giving them general stat boosts and the ability to perform special one-use abilities unique to each Emblem. Characters equipped with Emblems will accrue SP, and by raising characters bonds between themselves and specific Emblems, via battle or the facilities in your home base, can allows them to learn and equip abilities from each Emblem, which can be fantastic in filling in weaknesses in a character stat-set, or further steamrolling with strengths. Some are a little less interesting - like basic stat boosts - whilst others are total gamechangers; I made great use of Lyn’s unique ability, granting +2 speed after every kill for that battle, turning otherwise slow-starters into double-hitting nightmares. I only scratched the surface of some of these combinations - I was, as with many other people, particularly fond of the Sigurd-Louis combination, and I can’t wait to tease out new interaction and mechanics by throwing together some truly ridiculous pairings.

Though, whilst the map design and actual engagements are fantastic, an issue I have, and one I’ve found echoed across various Fire Emblem focussed communities, is that there is very little reason to use earlier recruited characters. For an example, you’ll be getting great characters like Lapis or Boucheran pretty early in the game… but a scant few chapters later, you’ll be unlocking a characters like Kagetsu and Panette, characters who fill very much the same role as these two, but outstrip them in pretty much every conceivable way. Now, I used Lapis anyway, because she’s one of my favorite characters in the game, but the fact the balance is this out of whack prevents ostensibly weaker characters from getting a chance to thrive in harder difficulties, unless you don't mind gimping yourself, that is. I don’t care if Alcryst is a weaker option, I love him too much.

The big sour patch on Engage is its story and general storytelling situation. Engage’s story is *stupid*. I don’t say that with malice, or derision, but as a fact. Engage’s story is stupid, ridiculous, but genuinely fun and occasionally heartfelt at times. It follows Alear, awakening a thousand years after a war between the Light and Dark dragons. Upon awakening, they learn of the Emblem rings, magical rings that contain the spirits of heroes from other worlds. Twelve of these rings exist across the land, and once gathered will allow their wielder to be granted their greatest desire. With the remnants of the Dark Dragons returning, Alear suffers a mortal loss, and sets out to regain the Emblem rings.

The baseline plot of Engage is… fine, being enough to get the ball rolling, but once that ball does get rolling, it goes some… uh, weird places. Alear and their merry crew are the heroes, but some of the contrivances of their journey… Well… Characters die, almost in an instant, for the dumbest reasons. They’ll be mortally wounded, but be alive enough to dump exposition for a straight ten minutes before finally kicking the bucket. Seriously, it’s almost comical how long these scenes go on for. Alear and company will be outwitted by the most obvious ploys - falling for obvious ambushes and having key items stolen right under their nose. The villains - the Four Hounds and their master - are almost laughably poorly written, somehow remaining threats despite being defeated and routed at almost every turn. The characters themselves are quite fun to see, but overall their role in the narrative is ridiculous. There are a smattering of good ideas here and there, and it is for the most part a successful tribute to Fire Emblems past, but I don’t at all fault those saying this ranks amongst the weakest stories in the franchise. It’s very ‘Saturday morning cartoon’ with it’s vibe, and whilst that scratches a certain kind of itch, it’s not quite the storytelling I’ve come to expect from some of my favorite Fire Emblem games. The hype moments are hype, but these scenes that put a true grin on my face were few and far between.

And despite my issues with the storytelling of this game, I must heap acclaim on a lot of the unique, in-battle dialogue triggered between particular allies and enemies. These are near totally missable, especially if you’re focussing on only a few key units. Whilst up until Chapter 10 I’d been fairly dismissive of the storytelling across the board in Engage, I used both Alcryst and Diamant to engage the boss, leading to some of the most heartfelt and simply soul-shattering dialogue I’ve ever heard in a Fire Emblem game. Trust me, if you think a foe has history with a particular character, send ‘em in - you won’t regret it. These in-battle conversations are perhaps the cream of the crop in Engage’s storytelling - contextual, low-key character building conversations that somehow blew past anything else the game was offering at that point.

And whilst the writing of the story may err on the side of silliness and nonsensical, I genuinely came to love the vast majority of Engage’s cast - some of which, perhaps, I’d mark as amongst my favorite in the entire series.Now, these aren’t the well-rounded young adults coming into their own of Three Houses, or the prim-and-proper nobles of games like Echoes or Sacred Stones. No, these are a bunch of crazy people - non-pejorative. They are wacky, unhinged, sometimes kind of insane… at least at first. This does lead the game to fall into the trap of many C-Supports being gag takes on a character’s ‘main trait’, but a lot of the later ones are actually pretty moving and relatable, and I think a lot of criticism regarding playable character writing is getting stuck on these poor first impressions. Alcryst, Lapis, and Citrinne’s joint struggle regarding self-esteem and worth really struck a chord with me, and Rosado’s genuine love for his art, and himself, won him over as amongst my very favorites in the game. Honestly, this game does a great job on subverting expectations based on character looks - I thought Yunaka would just be the funky ‘waifu’ type character… and whilst she still is very much that, many of her supports imply a twisted and dark past that brought her to this current look. Honestly, I could go on for a while about my favorite characters, but I'll hold myself back for the purposes of this review. There are downsides - Alear’s steward twins are kind of insufferable, and there’s a few characters that are a little more boring than outright bad. But overall, like I said, these aren’t the most written characters in the franchise, but for the most part they are easily some of the most and genuinely likable - honestly, I can’t remember the last time I liked such a large majority of a Fire Emblem cast as this one. Says something, considering how much I love the Elibe game casts.

Alear on their own is a massive improvement over previous mainline ‘Avatar-esque’ main characters. I didn’t mind Robin, but Corrin and Byleth are genuinely terrible player stand-ins, for a variety of different reasons. Alear, whilst a bit silly at times, is a great player surrogate and they have a refreshing sense of genuine warmth and down-to-earthness many of the previous Avatars didn’t have, which is a little ironic considering they are literally a divine god. Being the main character, they’re very much tied up in the silly, oft-stupid main story, but they shine as a main character in spite of the utter silliness they’re put through. Their design - especially the female version - remains ridiculously busy and over the top, but after only a few missions I’d grown used to it overall. Honestly, most character outfits are pretty ridiculous in battle, but between their default class outfits, and the casual ensembles they don in Somniel, it would’ve been really nice for a feature to pick a particular outfit for character’s in battle. It’s not a huge quibble, but it’d simply be a good little feature.

Finally, between battles, Alear’s party will recuperate at the Somniel, their home base. For those who played Three Houses, the Somniel serves a similar, albeit stripped down, equivalent of the Monastery. Here you can purchase weaponry, raise the bond levels between characters and Emblems, raise and listen to supports, or engage in a variety of simple minigames that will raise Alear’s party’s stats in the coming battles. I wasn’t a huge fan of the Monastery in Three Houses after a time, feeling like a second metagame you had to partake in if you didn’t want to gimp yourself, but the scaled-down nature of Somniel helped allay those feelings in Engage. There’s less to do, feeling far less like a requirement, but will satisfy those looking for a bit of what made Three Houses so unique. For me, I was just happy to have a tiny bit of downtime to buy some supplies, read some supports, and check out the cute outfits of my newest recruits, and then I’d be back into the fantastic battles. Somniel is, in my opinion, the perfect balance between the nothing-but-battle nature of older Fire Emblem’s, and the ‘home-base’ developmental nature of the more modern titles.

When Fire Emblem Engage was announced, I had a terrible feeling that this could be the step too far - too fanservicey, too much double-downing on the more controversial elements that have divided the old and new guard. It’s not perfect, especially in it’s storytelling and general writing, but I think most would agree that Fire Emblem hasn’t *played* this well in a decade - perhaps ever. It’s a game that invites critical thinking in not only its combat, but in the way you develop characters and pair them with the fantastic - yet silly - Emblem mechanic. It won’t be a slam dunk to everyone - particularly those who jumped on the bandwagon with Three House’s release, but at its core as a Fire Emblem title, Fire Emblem Engage blew past my expectations, becoming what I would argue is probably the best Fire Emblem game in over a decade.