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naraburns nihil supernum
1yr ago
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I've been playing and thoroughly enjoying Fire Emblem Engage over the past week. The story is bland, with some of the worst hero worship I've ever seen in an RPG, but the gameplay is probably the best it's ever been in the series. Here are my thoughts on it as someone who's played about half the entries in the series. I'm maybe 3/4 through right now, so I suppose my impressions could still change.
The presentation is solid, with better environmental design and seemingly less asset reuse than Three Houses. Many lines are unvoiced though which feels like a step back from Echoes and 3H. The character designs range from trashy gacha game tier to quite good, depending on who you're looking at. The environments are gorgeous and the music is incredible.
The story is pretty generic with fairly obvious plot twists. It's serviceable though, and not actively terrible like Fates. The characters take the unfortunate Awakening route where most of them are one-note gimmicks who just repeat their gimmick(s) in every support conversation. The cast is large enough that despite this, you should find yourself with a full roster of people you like and want to keep alive. I like Alfred, Diamant, and Ivy quite a lot, as well as many of the meme characters that the gameplay makes you grow attached to. I prefer how 3H and Genealogy handled their characters better, with a tightly connected cast of characters whose interactions developed both the characters and the world, but I like the new cast nonetheless.
The big new mechanic of the game is the Engage Rings, which are 12 rings that each contain the soul of a protagonist of the previous entries. Characters can "Engage" them to receive guidance and significant power from the hero stored inside them. The game glosses over the sheer existential horror of being a disembodied spirit bound to a ring for seemingly forever, aware of the world around you but unable to interact or communicate with it until the main character awakens your ring, so... I will too, I suppose. You steadily acquire more of the rings as the story progresses and assign them to your units, who can use them to call on extremely powerful abilities.
Storywise, the rings are pure fanservice, and often feel like a missed opportunity. Many of these characters are already very similar to eachother coming into it — at least half are infantry lords with similar personalities who use swords in their own stories — and Engage flattens their personalities even further into basically a single, happy, supportive blob with one personality between the 12 of them. It might be more interesting to have the rings be the spirits of characters and heroes or villains from the game's own worldbuilding, with distinct personalities and histories that vary between the spirits, but I get why they went the way they did. I've played the games about 2/3 of the included characters and it is fun to see them here, even if it does feel like the I clapped when I saw it meme.
Going by gameplay the rings are awesome. They give varied, interesting abilities that can play to a unit's strengths or shore up their weaknesses, and each one has a flashy, single-use move you can use each time you Engage it. Many characters have unique mechanics that echo the mechanics from their own games (Lucina's abilities are based on pair-up attacks, Corrin has terrain-altering moves, Leif cheats and uses whatever weapon is most advantageous when attacked, just like the enemies in his game.) that make the unit you attach them to play radically differently. The rings are definitely overpowered, but the game throws so much of its own nonsense at you that they actually feel somewhat balanced, though your experience may vary based on difficulty and how much you grind.
The game itself is a blast, minus some tedious minigames like the fishing. The map design is strong, units have varied niches, fights are challenging and feel cinematic, skill inheritance and ring placement give you lots of unit building options, and I can go on. Engage is easily shaping up to be one of my favorite entries in the series. Strong recommend if you enjoy RPGs, strategy games, or Fire Emblem.
I feel embarrassed to say this but honestly the character design hair has been holding back my purchase. It's just so fucking dumb looking.
Which ones? They look like standard modern FE husband/waifu bait to me. Except maybe the black Dippin Dots girls, I'll admit that's weird.
Also I wasn't going to buy this but I see Lyn is in it... now I might have to.
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