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.
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.