from what i had initially played of engage, i did not at all enjoy it. i went into it with very few expectations based on the direction the series took outside of remakes after path of radiance, but still found myself largely disappointed. i found the cast and dialog mostly insufferable, the actual story itself some of the worst the series has to offer, and the flanderization of legacy characters almost insulting. however, i have a lot of friends with varying levels of experience with fire emblem saying it got good, whether that be solely the gameplay for some or the story for others. i decided to give the game another shot and finish it, hoping that at least one of thoses two camps would be right and i came out kind of disappointed in both repects, though i do have a much higher opinion of the game than i did before

in terms of story, it just gets worse. as the game goes on the already frustratingingly shallow plot continues to spiral downward, taking a break around the solm arc to catch its breath before going even faster down the shitter with everything afterwards. it's not awakening level where it's bad out of being largely boring with nothing of note ever happening and it doesn't get to being fates levels of balls to the wall bad until close to chapter 20, it's just a badly written story in a way that feels frustrating and ultimately like it was written for children. this doesn't feel like a game from the same series that had the battle of belhalla, the battle with emperor rudolf, or (even as sloppy as the writing in three houses is) the final confrontations between dimitri and edelgard. instead we get a 7 minute death scene ending in a pinky promise, or moments that have potential but just aren't able to work for me because they involve characters that everything else has lead me to be unable to stand. it especially doesn't help that i found most of the impotant characters and especially the villains to be some of my least favorite characters. usually in a fire emblem game with a boring cast, there's a really cool cast of villains to at least make things interesting half of the time or at the very least one main character who i like seeing on screen. binding blade absolutely comes to mind for me here with elffin, bern's generals, and (with the context of the manga) zephiel being some of the standout characters for me in that game and some of my favorites in the series despite the other characters around them, but in engage the lords and villains are all either really annoying, really boring, or a frustrating mixture of both and it makes the main conflict and narrative even weaker as a result.

speaking of characters i can't stand, boy there sure are a lot of them. the style of writing here is largely taking a few character traits or quirks and just running with those constantly which is already a style i don't like, but my dislike of them mostly comes down to me not liking those specific character traits, which is pretty apparent when i can't get myself to enjoy fan favorites like yunaka at all. there's also the emblems, which are all just flanderized versions of their original counterparts, with sigurd and ike being some of the more frustrating ones. there are exceptions, such as roy and eirika being just completely mischaracterized and micaiah, lucina, corrin, and byleth not having much to actually flanderize, but i wouldn't say those are positive exceptions. regardless of this lower standard of character writing, the only characters i'd say are actually flat out bad are veyle and alear. veyle is just radiant dawn blood pact levels of bad writing without any of the minor things about the blood pact that made you think "oh neat" and wrapped into an unappealing design who shows up constantly. likewise, alear also invokes a lot of fire emblem's history with sloppy writing, most specifically the my units. like most my units, they are the absolutely most important character on screen at any given time and everybody on your side has to revere them like they're some kind of god, and intelligent systems decided that instead of maybe writing my units a little differently that they would double down on the isssues these characters had and they were going to double down hard. now your my unit is literally a god who almost everyone worships or at least reveres in some capacity, not to mention that their entire personality boils down to "good-doer mary sue with a dark side" like you'd find in self insert works on fanfiction.net in the early 2000s. it honestly got super frustrating seeing a rare scene i thought was actually good just for alear to show their ugly mug and for me to lose interest completely. on a more positive note, i found myself liking a lot more characters to the level i usually do for fire emblem in this game than i ever did in awakening or fates. i wouldn't say they're the best characters ever but lapis, zelkov, goldmary, and fogado are a few standouts to me, with rosado, alcryst, and kagetsu also having a lot of things i enjoyed about them. the game definitely gets a bit more consistent with better characters as it goes, backloading most of the worse ones to firene and just sprinkling one or two stinkers into the later regions, but it can lead to long stretches with no one you actually like having anything to say depending on what you like character wise. while i think engage hits much lower lows with its characters than awakening and fates ever did, it also hits much higher highs than they did too which i guess means i surprisingly like engage's cast more than those two.

if the story just ended up getting worse for me, how about the gameplay?

it's pretty good i guess!

i definitely wouldn't put it up with new mystery or thracia gameplay wise, but it's definitely much better than awakening or three houses in that department. i'd probably place it somewhere below blazing blade and path of radiance, making it one of the better entries in the series gameplay wise in my opinion. the actually gameplay systems definitely work for what engage is. i find myself not really caring about break and no weapon durability is a little boring to me but with everything else about engage being the way it is, i much prefer being able to just jump in with minimal inventory management. the weapon triangle actually returning is very welcome, and the emblems are very fun in the same way that new mystery letting you move insane distances on its maps was fun. because of this, in sections of the game where you have no emblems or very few emblems it can be a bit boring and the game seems very intent on removing the main aspect of what makes actually playing it compelling in that regard, but the map design kinda makes it okay? i've never been too huge on the "conquest is good because it has really good map design" bandwagon that most people seem to be able to agree on, and i find myself feeling the same way about the idea that engage also has really good map design. neither game has bad map design at all, i'd say in a lot of areas they have really solid map design, i just don't think they're the peak of the series like some would allege. engage also had a lot of moments where i needed to put the game down before i was at all willing to start another map if only because i wasn't finding the gameplay enough to push me through to another cutscene i wasn't going to enjoy, but that mostly started cropping up towards the latter end of the game.
on a more minor note gameplay wise, the somniel sure is a thing i guess. i don't like the hub worlds fe has started to do but at least now it's rather unintrusive, at least compared to the complete and utter slog and narrative disaster that the monastery was. if i had my way the hubs just wouldn't be a feature, but i'm willing to take what wins i can when it comes to the social sim aspects fire emblem has leaned into.

i also thought i'd quickly touch on the music, as well as the graphics. music wise, there's very few games in this series with soundtracks i go out of my way to listen to. i only really listen to music from the jugdral titles, the three remakes, and some of three houses and even then they're far from my favorite game soundtracks. likewise, engage is just pretty okay. there's some neat parts of the ost but largely it's not one i found myself super invested in but i didn't find myself bored by it either. in terms of the graphics, while i still think the GBA games are the best looking in the series, engage definitely gets close with the battle animations and there's a lot that are really cool. the models themselves are just okay though, but they would probably be better with a different art style. on the other hand everything about the non-battle animations can only be described as laughably bad. they have this uncanny way of moving that invokes amateur SFM porn and overdramatic mocap acting and it just sucks to look at. it's genuinely baffling to me that on one hand we have the best battle animations the series has seen in almost 20 years but at the same time we're given the most low quality animations for cutscenes and dialog, but i guess it's better than nothing.

overall i think the largest thing keeping me from overall enjoying fire emblem engage is the simple fact that i am not the type of person to value gameplay over story in any type of rpg. to me, gameplay in an rpg serves to lead into and provide context for story moments to elevate it in a way that non-interactive media simply couldn't accomplish. there's plenty of rpgs i loved that i couldn't get into gameplay wise, whether it be xenogears or vagrant story or smt2. engage, however, doesn't have a good or, for lack of a better term, engaging story which leaves the gameplay very little to work with and elevate. you could argue that i'm able to just skip the cutscenes and story elements and just play the game, but at that point why i am playing engage over any other fe game? in any other genre this would be something i could look past completely, but due to the way i approach and enjoy the rpg genre as a whole i find engage an experience that i could've done without. i can understand a decent amount of the hype around this game but it isn't for me and even after giving it a second chance i find it indicative that echoes, three houses, and any future remakes are just detours on the direction that seems to be maeda's vision for this series post-awakening, and i can't say that excites me.
in terms of the series at large, unless there's any reason to believe this direction is changing i'm probably not going to be keeping an eye on it much longer outside of news in regards to remakes. i still love most of the older titles and it's a dear series for me but i can see that fire emblem has shifted to a much different audience than it used to appeal to and for now, i think engage is going to be where i get off of the wild ride that shouzo kaga started.

so long and thanks for all of the memories, you weird bastards at intsys