This was an absolute anime fever dream from start to finish, somehow managing to be unfathomably terrible in ways I would never have expected. I’ve played every Fire Emblem game except for the spin-offs; so when I found out that Intelligent Systems was planning on releasing an ‘anniversary’ game that celebrates the entire franchise, to say I was confused was an understatement as I’d thought they’d already achieved that in Awakening, which was far from a perfect game, but it was one that had a lot more integrity and care for long-term fans compared to Engage. Whilst I do have more criticisms than praise, I’m going to be fair to this game, even when I don’t think it deserves it at times.
I’m very happy the weapons triangle is back - it’s one of my favourite ‘core’ mechanics of the franchise because of how easy it is to remember. It’s also nice that permadeath feels ‘good’ again as one of my biggest gripes with Engage’s predecessor, Three Houses, was how the game gives you a limited amount of units that you had to invest a lot of time in and no replacements to replenish your ranks if you lose anyone. Engage on the other hand feels a lot more in line with designing around permadeath even though casual mode is an option, as it gives you more than enough units throughout the game that even if you lose one or two per each map, you'll gain enough replacements of the appropriate level to finish the game. The UI definitely feels like a good step foward as well; very readable font type and size and I much prefer the simple menu rather than an aesthetically pleasing wheel that is nothing but confusing as hell to navigate. Animations are clean and feel ‘punchy’ again, which seem very inspired by classic FE animations. The game runs extremely well, only experiencing some framerate drops when using heavier tomes or on the bigger Jugdral paralogue maps. I also liked that they brought back a wide variety of utility staves - Silence, Warp, Rewarp, Freeze, Obstruct…which you could then pair with Micaiah’s emblem ring to warp 4 units across the map and delete a boss in one turn, if you really wanted.
Personality wise the emblem rings are a fever dream in how they speak to you and that’s all I’m going to say. The engage mechanic tied to them is quite fun though. Each of the emblem rings feel varied enough in their utility that they allow the player to customise their gameplay in a way that suits them the most. You can even inherit some of their skills, or forge bond rings for additional stat boosts and abilities. It is a shame that the bond rings are easily overshadowed by the existence of the Emblem Rings themselves as well. Some of the maps have a low unit deployment so most players would feel inclined to simply ignore the gacha of rolling bond rings entirely (which can be exploited through save scumming to guarantee an S rank ring anyways) because why would you bother with a measly stat boost when you can just warp Celica across the map? The S rank bond rings give you some powerful tools (Shove, Swap, Brave Thunder), without asking you to sacrifice your hard earned SP to spend on skill inheritance - something I appreciated a lot on Maddening mode. However, all of this preparation and investment ended up rather useless as I steamrolled the last four or so chapters of the game after lowering the difficulty to Normal. At that point I had grown so exhausted with the map design in the game that I just wanted to get things over with.
I will say the first half of Engage is decent in terms of map design. You’re given completion objectives that aren’t just ‘route the enemy' and bringing back Radiant Dawn style party splits is a huge positive for gameplay going forward. There's even a well executed escape map no less than 10 or so chapters in! That’s great! However, maps really started to go downhill in the second half, with uninspired gimmicks on rectangular boxes where you fight your way through seemingly endless waves of enemy reinforcements. The paralogues are definitely some of the better maps in this game, which is sad to say, since they’re just rehashed maps from previous games. This lacklustre map design resulted in the worst final map in the entire franchise, complete with an utterly boring map theme as the icing on top. Not only was the map insultingly easy, it also presented you with one of the most unintuitive, potentially stupid, 2nd boss phases I’ve ever seen. Fighting the iconic villains from previous games, in the form of corrupt Emblem rings? Sounds cool, right? The promise of obtaining some fanservice flavor text if you manage to pair the Emblem ring with their respective villain is obviously very tempting for long-term fans! It would have been cool, if the game didn’t ask you to walk around in a circle for an hour to achieve this. I would have preferred literally any other style of final map compared to this. Not only that, the villain’s descriptions were so ridiculously vague that that I wonder what a new player would gain from this, other than being hit with waves of annoying reinforcements that just make you want to burst the boss down in a single turn. It’s a very short map when you ignore those bosses, so it does feel like some very intentional padding.
I’m not against simplicity in Fire Emblem at all - in fact, I’d argue the franchise has excelled at that in the past e.g the GBA games, which manage to capture a good balance between simplicity and fun, whilst still managing to create short but interesting character supports which ultimately still respect the playerbase. Bringing back the weapons triangle in Engage is an example of where simplicity felt like it wasn’t bordering on insulting - which is what the game manages to excel at everywhere else. Whilst Three Houses saw the franchise take several steps forward in terms of making nuanced character supports and world building, we’re back to the days of having little to no world development with one-dimensional, cliche characters founded upon singular tropes. Engage manages to feel almost insultingly dumbed down to a point where certain character supports felt utterly mind numbing, and no amount of good gameplay can make up for that. I reached a point where I gave up interacting with characters around Somniel, because the characters would not say anything interesting, they would just give you a line of generic avatar bootlicking that makes Alear feel like they were designed to be Corrin on steroids - was there even a single character in this game that was rude or indifferent to Alear? Even Alear’s greatest enemies ended up kissing the ground they walked on. After all that developer discussion on whether or not to remove a player avatar (even having success without one in Three Hopes), we somehow went back to the WORST kind: chosen one power fantasy. I understand why video games want the player avatar to feel powerful and special, but we've seen previously in Fire Emblem (Corrin, Byleth) that this comes at a significant cost as the quality of character writing begins to take a nosedive when every line of dialogue boils down to praising the Divine Dragon. Whilst there are some characters I ended up enjoying - Ivy, Goldmary, Alcryst, Panette and her brother Pandreo - for the most part, each character’s interests, motivations, personalities and relationships with each other felt extremely empty or straight up nonexistent in their support dialogue. Having a reference book with personality profiles of the units is a cool idea, but it would have been nice to see that information reflected in their supports! Three Houses excelled at this, which is why it makes me feel like we somehow went several steps backwards in Engage, and it is disappointing to see this decision going forward. The cutscenes will have someone mention just “how bad the war is” but…what war? The story and world setting just didn't feel developed enough to make you really feel like there were high stakes. The story COULD have portrayed a conflict between between multiple nations, each lead by people with different social and political aspirations, learning to forge peaceful relations between each other (Ivy and Alcryst’s support even leans into this idea, albeit briefly) - it just chose not to. Though I'm not sure if 'terrible story, but great gameplay' can really make up for it in this game.
I'm also not a fan of the main hub/Somniel at all. In fact I think it is worse than the monastery in Three Houses, because everything is locked behind minigames that I simply did not want to dedicate the time to completing just for some stat boosts! As cool as it is to traverse across a world map, I genuinely just want linear game progression back. There’s a reason why FE9/10 have some of the best worldbuilding the franchise has ever seen and they achieved it without a hub area that pads out game time. Base conversations in FE9/10 provide useful insight into how characters are responding to various events outside of their support conversations...but that would also require IntSys returning to putting effort into creating a decent plot and characters that don’t feel like you’re reading a section on tvtropes to begin with. I do think this problem extends from having a player avatar as the protaganist, rather than allowing the main lord/s drive the story forward.
Fire Emblem is a franchise that was built upon the idea that it’s completely okay to make mistakes - in fact, it used to embrace that! Your first blind playthrough of any game can never be replicated, so it’s one you should enjoy. For a strategy game, that’s a huge boon because it provides a huge amount of replay value: everything you learn on your first playthrough, you can utilise to your advantage on the next one. That’s another reason why I miss the classic, map only recruitments where you felt like you ‘earned’ each member of your roster, as opposed to being spoonfed units. It only adds an extra layer of strategy when you see the speech bubbles appear and know that if you navigate towards this character, whether they’re an enemy or a potential new ally that you need to reach before they die. That only enhanced how rewarding it felt when you unlocked a new support conversation between units! It felt like a missed opportunity to not do classic recruitment in Engage, complete with a homage to an iconic recruitment theme like Together We Ride. Optimising your strategies, knowing where all the useful items are hidden, knowing when surprise reinforcements will spawn, experimenting with units you didn’t use (or lost on previous runs) adds to gameplay value. I think that’s why, when you talk to longterm fans, they’ve often replayed the older games. I don’t see much replay value here for me personally, because so much of the game turned me off the idea of going through it again. It even feels like a NG+ mode was somehow missing at the end.
I can’t really say I am surprised or disappointed when I knew this would be some sort of fanservice, monster of the week, anime cheesefest. Personally, I would have much preferred that IntSys focus on making the previous titles accessible to play for those who are hesitant or cannot emulate the older games. Or, perhaps just a fanfestival with some artbook re-releases, merchandise, a new premium arrange album, a new Cipher (rest in peace) series art drop, literally anything other than this would have been preferable.
I only hope that if you’re new to the franchise, if you enjoyed this game and it made you want to try the older ones; go ahead! I'd personally recommend Path of Radiance or The Blazing Blade to anyone looking for a place to start after this.
I’m very happy the weapons triangle is back - it’s one of my favourite ‘core’ mechanics of the franchise because of how easy it is to remember. It’s also nice that permadeath feels ‘good’ again as one of my biggest gripes with Engage’s predecessor, Three Houses, was how the game gives you a limited amount of units that you had to invest a lot of time in and no replacements to replenish your ranks if you lose anyone. Engage on the other hand feels a lot more in line with designing around permadeath even though casual mode is an option, as it gives you more than enough units throughout the game that even if you lose one or two per each map, you'll gain enough replacements of the appropriate level to finish the game. The UI definitely feels like a good step foward as well; very readable font type and size and I much prefer the simple menu rather than an aesthetically pleasing wheel that is nothing but confusing as hell to navigate. Animations are clean and feel ‘punchy’ again, which seem very inspired by classic FE animations. The game runs extremely well, only experiencing some framerate drops when using heavier tomes or on the bigger Jugdral paralogue maps. I also liked that they brought back a wide variety of utility staves - Silence, Warp, Rewarp, Freeze, Obstruct…which you could then pair with Micaiah’s emblem ring to warp 4 units across the map and delete a boss in one turn, if you really wanted.
Personality wise the emblem rings are a fever dream in how they speak to you and that’s all I’m going to say. The engage mechanic tied to them is quite fun though. Each of the emblem rings feel varied enough in their utility that they allow the player to customise their gameplay in a way that suits them the most. You can even inherit some of their skills, or forge bond rings for additional stat boosts and abilities. It is a shame that the bond rings are easily overshadowed by the existence of the Emblem Rings themselves as well. Some of the maps have a low unit deployment so most players would feel inclined to simply ignore the gacha of rolling bond rings entirely (which can be exploited through save scumming to guarantee an S rank ring anyways) because why would you bother with a measly stat boost when you can just warp Celica across the map? The S rank bond rings give you some powerful tools (Shove, Swap, Brave Thunder), without asking you to sacrifice your hard earned SP to spend on skill inheritance - something I appreciated a lot on Maddening mode. However, all of this preparation and investment ended up rather useless as I steamrolled the last four or so chapters of the game after lowering the difficulty to Normal. At that point I had grown so exhausted with the map design in the game that I just wanted to get things over with.
I will say the first half of Engage is decent in terms of map design. You’re given completion objectives that aren’t just ‘route the enemy' and bringing back Radiant Dawn style party splits is a huge positive for gameplay going forward. There's even a well executed escape map no less than 10 or so chapters in! That’s great! However, maps really started to go downhill in the second half, with uninspired gimmicks on rectangular boxes where you fight your way through seemingly endless waves of enemy reinforcements. The paralogues are definitely some of the better maps in this game, which is sad to say, since they’re just rehashed maps from previous games. This lacklustre map design resulted in the worst final map in the entire franchise, complete with an utterly boring map theme as the icing on top. Not only was the map insultingly easy, it also presented you with one of the most unintuitive, potentially stupid, 2nd boss phases I’ve ever seen. Fighting the iconic villains from previous games, in the form of corrupt Emblem rings? Sounds cool, right? The promise of obtaining some fanservice flavor text if you manage to pair the Emblem ring with their respective villain is obviously very tempting for long-term fans! It would have been cool, if the game didn’t ask you to walk around in a circle for an hour to achieve this. I would have preferred literally any other style of final map compared to this. Not only that, the villain’s descriptions were so ridiculously vague that that I wonder what a new player would gain from this, other than being hit with waves of annoying reinforcements that just make you want to burst the boss down in a single turn. It’s a very short map when you ignore those bosses, so it does feel like some very intentional padding.
I’m not against simplicity in Fire Emblem at all - in fact, I’d argue the franchise has excelled at that in the past e.g the GBA games, which manage to capture a good balance between simplicity and fun, whilst still managing to create short but interesting character supports which ultimately still respect the playerbase. Bringing back the weapons triangle in Engage is an example of where simplicity felt like it wasn’t bordering on insulting - which is what the game manages to excel at everywhere else. Whilst Three Houses saw the franchise take several steps forward in terms of making nuanced character supports and world building, we’re back to the days of having little to no world development with one-dimensional, cliche characters founded upon singular tropes. Engage manages to feel almost insultingly dumbed down to a point where certain character supports felt utterly mind numbing, and no amount of good gameplay can make up for that. I reached a point where I gave up interacting with characters around Somniel, because the characters would not say anything interesting, they would just give you a line of generic avatar bootlicking that makes Alear feel like they were designed to be Corrin on steroids - was there even a single character in this game that was rude or indifferent to Alear? Even Alear’s greatest enemies ended up kissing the ground they walked on. After all that developer discussion on whether or not to remove a player avatar (even having success without one in Three Hopes), we somehow went back to the WORST kind: chosen one power fantasy. I understand why video games want the player avatar to feel powerful and special, but we've seen previously in Fire Emblem (Corrin, Byleth) that this comes at a significant cost as the quality of character writing begins to take a nosedive when every line of dialogue boils down to praising the Divine Dragon. Whilst there are some characters I ended up enjoying - Ivy, Goldmary, Alcryst, Panette and her brother Pandreo - for the most part, each character’s interests, motivations, personalities and relationships with each other felt extremely empty or straight up nonexistent in their support dialogue. Having a reference book with personality profiles of the units is a cool idea, but it would have been nice to see that information reflected in their supports! Three Houses excelled at this, which is why it makes me feel like we somehow went several steps backwards in Engage, and it is disappointing to see this decision going forward. The cutscenes will have someone mention just “how bad the war is” but…what war? The story and world setting just didn't feel developed enough to make you really feel like there were high stakes. The story COULD have portrayed a conflict between between multiple nations, each lead by people with different social and political aspirations, learning to forge peaceful relations between each other (Ivy and Alcryst’s support even leans into this idea, albeit briefly) - it just chose not to. Though I'm not sure if 'terrible story, but great gameplay' can really make up for it in this game.
I'm also not a fan of the main hub/Somniel at all. In fact I think it is worse than the monastery in Three Houses, because everything is locked behind minigames that I simply did not want to dedicate the time to completing just for some stat boosts! As cool as it is to traverse across a world map, I genuinely just want linear game progression back. There’s a reason why FE9/10 have some of the best worldbuilding the franchise has ever seen and they achieved it without a hub area that pads out game time. Base conversations in FE9/10 provide useful insight into how characters are responding to various events outside of their support conversations...but that would also require IntSys returning to putting effort into creating a decent plot and characters that don’t feel like you’re reading a section on tvtropes to begin with. I do think this problem extends from having a player avatar as the protaganist, rather than allowing the main lord/s drive the story forward.
Fire Emblem is a franchise that was built upon the idea that it’s completely okay to make mistakes - in fact, it used to embrace that! Your first blind playthrough of any game can never be replicated, so it’s one you should enjoy. For a strategy game, that’s a huge boon because it provides a huge amount of replay value: everything you learn on your first playthrough, you can utilise to your advantage on the next one. That’s another reason why I miss the classic, map only recruitments where you felt like you ‘earned’ each member of your roster, as opposed to being spoonfed units. It only adds an extra layer of strategy when you see the speech bubbles appear and know that if you navigate towards this character, whether they’re an enemy or a potential new ally that you need to reach before they die. That only enhanced how rewarding it felt when you unlocked a new support conversation between units! It felt like a missed opportunity to not do classic recruitment in Engage, complete with a homage to an iconic recruitment theme like Together We Ride. Optimising your strategies, knowing where all the useful items are hidden, knowing when surprise reinforcements will spawn, experimenting with units you didn’t use (or lost on previous runs) adds to gameplay value. I think that’s why, when you talk to longterm fans, they’ve often replayed the older games. I don’t see much replay value here for me personally, because so much of the game turned me off the idea of going through it again. It even feels like a NG+ mode was somehow missing at the end.
I can’t really say I am surprised or disappointed when I knew this would be some sort of fanservice, monster of the week, anime cheesefest. Personally, I would have much preferred that IntSys focus on making the previous titles accessible to play for those who are hesitant or cannot emulate the older games. Or, perhaps just a fanfestival with some artbook re-releases, merchandise, a new premium arrange album, a new Cipher (rest in peace) series art drop, literally anything other than this would have been preferable.
I only hope that if you’re new to the franchise, if you enjoyed this game and it made you want to try the older ones; go ahead! I'd personally recommend Path of Radiance or The Blazing Blade to anyone looking for a place to start after this.