Avendo amato tantissimo Three Houses, questo Engage è stato un mezzo colpo al cuore per me.
Amavo le sezioni "social" che ora sono solo abbozzate, la storia, i personaggi, le musiche, lo stile e ovviamente anche il gameplay.
Qua l'unica cosa che mi piace è il gameplay, perché la storia è una favola per neonati, i personaggi sono fra i più stereotipati che io abbia mai visto e le musiche sono dimenticabilissime (a parte quando ci sono i vecchi brani dei vecchi fire emblem riarrangiati).
Se non avete mai giocato un FE, giocate prima three houses.

I just...can't with this game. Aside from being the first 3D FE game to actually consistently look good graphically, and reassuring me that games in the franchise going forward wouldn't use this weird dubstep-orchestral mix for its music, it's just...ugh. The only thing that invokes any hope that I could possibly have for the franchise is that the FE4 remake is coming, but this just isn't it, chief. Tldr: gamesux lmao. If you didn't like anything FE related from the last decade excluding Echoes, you won't like this either. A lot of this is just me being overly cynical and critical because of the immediately apparent things about the game that annoy me.

Basically beating several dead horses here, but why do all the characters have to look like Vtubers? Why are these characters arguably the most one-note and tropey post-awakening yet? Why is the story a comically derivative flanderization of recurring plot points and themes throughout the franchise's history? It's like, if I told a toddler about the Archanea games, and asked them to tell me what happens in them. Ooh, there's a fell dragon that was slain by heroes of old that eventually came back, but instead of the story being about reclaiming one's homeland, the fear of losing comrades or war not being black and white, it's about the power of friendship, I guess. I dunno - I've been sitting on my chapter 18 file for like, a month now, and ever since starting Engage I've played through 5, going on 6 other FE games. The game just does nothing for me. I feel nothing for any of the characters except Yunaka (but I mean, everyone loves Yunaka), I hate the character designs, I hate how everyone throatgoats Alear, and I hate how totally uninteresting the story is. Get this; you're the divine dragon, and you have amnesia, everyone immediately loves you, you lose your parental figure, and you gotta find the magical emblem macguffins to save the world from a great evil that's just evil because...well, they're evil! It's trope-fucking-stew. There's no nuance, no deep character writing - nothing. Sure, a game doesn't need these things to be good, but this a series built on commentary of war, the horrors of war and what war entails. We aren't even fighting human beings for most of this one; just faceless generic zombies. Even Awakening and to some extent Fates, with their respective risen and invaders, and despite Corrin's insistence on non-lethally dispatching whole army squadrons, had some actually poignant moments where you fought and killed actual people (the end of the Plegia arc in the former game especially comes to mind). The big bad instigators of the conflict are fought for three or so chapters before it's revealed that "uh oh! the main antagonist was just manipulating the king all along!". God, I took 3H for granted. Blue Lions and Dmitri are actually cool and all of 3H's routes had commentary and themes much in line with previous games in the franchise, irrespective of the quality of the writing.

The gameplay definitely sucked though - you'd know something is wrong with me if you ever caught me saying 3H played well - and Engage took some notes; some good, some bad. There's no kind of mandatory dating sim hub world like the monastery anymore, thank the Lord. It's instead replaced with the Somniel, which still acts as a hub where you interact with other characters, but is entirely optional. Characters actually all start out in a class designed to fill a niche, but the meta still seems to just be "make everyone wyvern riders" anyway, which is an unfortunate consequence of granting complete and total control over building characters in an FE game. To reiterate from my 3H review, one of the most important things for an FE game's cast is for the majority of its playable characters to have a predefined niche. Whether it be a healer, flier, dancer, front-liner, growth unit, etc, every character has a role, and they're going to be in that role for most of the game. This isn't to say FE should be like chess, either. Ever since as early as FE1, healers and their promotions functioned as both healers, warpers, and spell casters. In FE2, they could summon illusions and various other NPC allies, and by the time FE5 rolled out, you had rescue chaining, capturing and stealing, providing support bonuses, greater control over the weapon triangle, skills, status staves, all sorts of things to make sure a unit would be doing more than just attacking. The point I'm trying to make is, once everyone is able to reclass into anything, and have any set of skills, every character becomes homogenized and not much more than a set of stats and growths. It means sacrificing unit identity and part of the franchise's identity for the sake of granting player customizability. And this also isn't to say that giving the player freedom to build their team in an SRPG is bad either! Tactics Ogre and Final Fantasy Tactics pride themselves on their unit customizability. But...this isn't either of those games. This is Fire Emblem, and outside of losing too many units in the DS games, none of the units in your army are blank slate generics. These are actual characters, and that's also irrespective of how well or badly written said character is. On the topic of the DS games and reclassing, given I'm fresh off of them, I'll also say that reclassing 6 characters to wyverns isn't actually optimal at endgame thanks to their low speed caps. It's almost as if the devs took caps and classes into consideration since there are plenty of enemies with ridersbanes, armourslayers, and bows if you're playing on H1 or higher, which you should be. I remember there being very few enemies with effective weapons in Engage aside from bow users.


Oh yeah, and emblems are a thing, I guess. They're a win button, basically. Just use their ability to one round the enemy, or always survive enemy phase, or attack multiple enemies at once, or warp to any enemy from anywhere on the map, or basically a free level up. Considering half of them don't even start with weapon types they were actually known for in their respective games, it feels like it was just used as an excuse to put old characters in as fanservice. Also, isn't it just great when the game gives you emblem rings, makes a big deal about them, makes them the defining part of how you play the game, then just takes them away from you? Considering you need to raise bond levels to reclass, why take them away? Why pride your game on freedom to build units, but then severely gimp that just because the story says so? Total freedom to reclass is bad, as I've already stated, but given that the game gives the option, I'm going to want to use it. And this wouldn't be much of an issue if you got those rings back quickly, but of course you don't. You get two new ones, go three chapters without any more, and by chapter 18 you finally get two of your old emblems back, leaving you with more emblems than you had before they were taken away. It's also at this point where map design and my enjoyment of the game took a nosedive. The maps being designed around low mov works for about 10 chapters before becoming boring.

Man, just typing all this up is tiring. I don't have the energy to hone in on the story and writing and talk about how shit it is anymore. It's campy, it's corny, and it's tropey. I audibly groaned on a few occasions, and watching some of the later cutscenes early totally killed any desire I had to finish Engage. No, the story does not get better; it just makes me more embarrassed for being a fan of this series, and gives its detractors more ammunition.

Quitando el drama de los ofendiditos de twitter que se pusieron a chillar por el mod de la traducción sin censura, daré mi opinión honesta sobre esta nueva entrega de la saga.

Engage es una celebración de la saga y esto se nota con todo el fanservice que tiene para las personas que están desde los inicios de la saga, pero realmente está a la altura? O es, como muchos dicen, una entrega decepcionante? Pues... me encuentro en un punto medio...

Antes de tocar lo importante, mencionaré lo que me gusto de Engage. El combate me parece muy bueno y lo dice alguien que detesta los JRPGs que usan como sistema de combate el de casillas, pero el de Engage me gusto bastante. Por la parte del Gimmic de esta entrega, que son los anillos, es una buena mecánica que le da más juego a los combates, pero está muy bien balanceado y no se llega a sentir roto en ningún momento.

Sinceramente, solo he jugado 3 houses y no sé cómo sea en anteriores entregas, pero algo que e gusto bastante fue que el personaje en esta entrega si tuviera voz y una personalidad a diferencia de Byleth (a pesar de que el MC de engage me pareciese meh). Soy de los que prefieren mil veces más un MC con personalidad que uno callado y esto lo agradezco y espero que en futuras entregas se mantenga.

Y esto es lo único bueno que puedo decir de esta entrega, ahora comentaré porque le estoy dando un 2.5/5... Si bien un juego no es solo historia, sino que jugabilidad, estamos hablando de un JRPG donde la historia se le da un rol protagónico, pero es que la historia no solo es mediocre, sino que decepcionante... A diferencia de la mayoría, mi queja no viene por parte de que la historia es sacada de un shonen genérico post 2014 ya que a pesar de que es cierto, no me molesto tanto eso, lo que le dio a la torre fue como se desarrollo su historia.

Sin entrar en spoilers, dire que la historia no tiene una razón o motivo real, te despiertas y solo te dicen "Consigue todos estos anillos porque si". Ni hablar de como todos los personajes son ilusos y le dan algo tan valioso y poderoso como anillos a un personaje que en muchos de los casos ni siquiera conocen. La historia peca mucho de ser predecible y con solo jugar los primeros 3 episodios ya sabrás que sucederá, cuál será el "Plot twist" y como terminara todo, no te sorprende en ningún momento

Lo peor sin duda son los villanos... Pude tolerar todo lo anterior, pero hay algo que odio en toda historia y son los villanos que son malos porque si, sin dar ningún argumento o intento de justificación... Eso fue lo que realmente hizo que perdiese el interés en la historia y disfrutase solo del combate fueron los villanos ya que son los típicos villanos que son malos porque si, no se exploran sus razones ni el porqué de sus acciones, solo sabemos que uno es un masoquista, otro una loli, otra una milf dragona y por último un personaje con la personalidad más simple y el aspecto más genérico posible el cual a pesar de hacer cosas horribles, la historia lo considera como alguien "Bueno" que nunca pago por sus crímenes o tan siquiera se explicó porque lo hacía.

Es una lástima ya que si bien muchos de los personajes tienen aspectos genéricos, hay algunos cuantos como la Nalgotica de Ivy, el eboy de Alcrys, el papucho de Diamant y el saquito de cemento de Hortensia que son excelentes y quería saber más de ellos, pero lastimosamente el sistema de "Social link" es tan pobre que la mayoría de conversaciones no aportan nada a la historia de los personajes.

Otra cosa a mencionar es que pesar del tono de anime shonen, tiene escenas muy serias y violentas, cosa que siempre agradezco, pero en este caso desentonan bastante con el tono y la historia planteada. Es como si hubieran querido hacer una historia mucho más madura, pero alguien en el equipo prefería hacer algo más family friendly para los jugadores.

Por último, agregaría el mismo problema que sigue manteniendo los juegos de Nintendo al ser localizados al inglés, que sus traducciones dan asco y en este caso con mucha censura... Al menos lo jugué en PC y pude instalarle el mod restaurar los diálogos de la versión japonesa. Tengo que elegir la opción menos peor ya que o es jugar con el horrible texto en español que se la pasan usando modismos gallegos o jugar con texto en inglés donde los localizadores hacen fanfics con la traducción...

No lo consideraría un mal juego, disfrute mucho de su combate, pero venir de 3 Houses que era una entrega excelente, con más profundidad y contenido, esto se siente como una experiencia mucho más inferior en casi todos los sentidos. Sé qué salió un dlc y su sinopsis suena interesante, pero dudo que lo juegue en un futuro, no siento motivación por volver a jugar algo de engage.

The closest main-line Fire Emblem gets to the gameplay of FEH battles. The break system is much better than traditional weapon triangle because it results in you getting hit by low 20s on player phase less. The stats grow and it feels good to use units, on hard you can get away with nearly anything, but maddening takes a little more planning to not be really rough (even in my first playthrough where I had maybe two units that one-rounded enemies, it was still entirely possible). The inheritable skill system, now that you can actually get some SP is extremely good, it hits the same sweet spot as FEH's best where it lets you customize units without making everyone feel the same (with the added bonus of not being a gacha game). 30 Avoid terrain can be aggravating but really only when you're not thinking about it, and by late-game where it may be harder to play around it, you have options to deal with it (Divine Pulse, Engage attacks, -avoid dragon vein).
In terms of writing the story isn't a ground-breaking masterpiece but it works and, alongside the cast, is more than enough to carry the excellent gameplay.
My main complaint with this game is that the jump from maddening to hard is really steep. Once you know how the game works hard can feel a little unfulfilling, but it's still a decent sandbox experience nonetheless.
A game I have yet to stop loving even after half a dozen playthroughs, it was so good I stopped playing Fire Emblem Heroes.

While enjoyable for its new battle mechanic and variety of maps, this game overloads itself with content, and its story is nothing to brag about either.

It is interesting and fun to see characters from past Fire Emblem games in a new game. The mechanic of Rings and Bracelets sharing power with your team is thoughtful and provides a fresh angle to build strategies and enjoy story-based support conversations.

While the new mechanic may be fun, the rest of the game suffers from overloading the player very early on. Once you get past the tutorial battles, you are introduced to a separate area called the Somniel, which feels burdened by extra activities and featuees alongside a turn-by-turn strategy game. Additionally, too many characters join your group in the first 10 chapters, sometimes three or four per chapter, leading most of them to feel irrelevant as you continue through the story.

Speaking of the story, it lacks the serious tone that came out in the Three Houses/Three Hopes game stories. My personal preferences don't mesh with that.
Overall, I consider this game to be a Genshin Impact-styled Fire Emblem game: disappointing for the franchise but still playable and enjoyable once you ignore the carnival/circus you get presented with.