Making a new review because my original got deleted (made a joke about k)
I'm finished. The gameplay and maps are consistently stellar and satisfying, and the story is intentionally campy. Many will compare it to the mess that is fates, but the camp here is by full intent and not meant to be serious, so I tolerate it more. The hub's far more optional and thus less of a slog than the monastery was for me, but the supports drag hard. They're very small and I find it hard to be attached to the cast. I like them, mostly, but they are every trope the "FE has never had a plot" bozos reduce this series to. While the story's goof is funny to me, these supports make me feel very little. I overall do find the game a stellar loop, though the onslaught of paralogues by midgame has stalled my progression. Nothing is intrusive. I like this quite a bit. It is a mickey mouse ass game with phenomenal tactical gameplay, yet mickey mouse by intent. This is what disconnects it from the insuffrability of Fates (not Conquest) for me, but any real layer to the story or world isn't there either. I'd like more layers, but camp is enjoyable if intentional. The OST is particularly good too. I initially didn't click then I hit Bright Sandstorm and I creamed.
All of the creepy shit that the localization team cut is good, but also, why was that allowed in general?
EDIT 3/23/2023, I beat this game on Hard. Love it even more. Bumping it up a half star, it was also a sort of comfort to cope with the loss of my father. Just a distraction from the world.

Before Engage was revealed, my biggest hope for a new Fire Emblem game was for it to not just be a carbon copy of Three Houses and be a return to form. Be careful what you wish for.

Fire Emblem Engage is shaping up to be one of the most polarizing games in a series where every game is polarizing on some level. I fall into the camp that does not care for it and I’m putting my extended thoughts on it here just to have them somewhere. This is not meant to demean anyone who enjoys it but rather to explain why I feel the way I do.

I actually do see why a lot of people in the FE spaces I frequent really enjoy this one. Breaking is one of the best mechanics to get added to Fire Emblem in a while, as it gives a nice flow to player phases and makes you have to put more thought into playing around enemy phases. Rounds of combat look absolutely stunning with quite possibly the best 3D animations in the series (Kagetsu’s crit animation gives me life) and other neat touches like the cool subtle effect for hitting someone with bonus damage. Ring abilities can just be incredibly fun to utilize, whether it’s busted stuff like Celica’s warp and Sigurd’s massive movement boost or more situational but still fun to use stuff like Lyn’s copies and Ike’s risk vs reward attack. And there’s plenty of maps that stand as some of the best designed in the series, with chapter 11 being the obvious standout, 17 being a tough but fair gauntlet of six strong boss fights, and 19 having a ridiculous surprise that feels like something from a rom hack but in the best way possible.

Based purely on gameplay, I have more positive things than negative things to say about Engage. But that’s not to say that those negative things don’t exist. There are some parts of the game where the map design falters. The earlygame maps essentially being scripted tutorials is a drag, the Solm arc has a desert rout map, a fog of war map with a dumb gimmick of having to break crates with the Ike ring, and a map with the Corrin ring that feels Rev inspired (derogatory), and there’s plenty of otherwise good chapters that suffer from excessive reinforcements that end up slowing down an already fairly slow game.

I also dislike how units feel in this one. The earlygame units are actively unfun to use and are ridiculously outclassed by any mid to late game unit with the same class. Furthermore, I’m not a fan of the effect rings have on unit feel. Plenty of aspects behind units such as skills and weapon proficiency are locked behind bonds with certain rings so it makes units feel less like actually unique entities and more so just vessels for rings.

Lastly, this may just be my personal preference but I’ve never liked the rewind mechanics that have been in every game since FE15’s turnwheel and they’re arguably at their worst now that you can save mid-battle and effectively give yourself infinite rewind uses. I get why these mechanics are there but they feel redundant with the existence of casual mode and really just take me out of the experience as they remove a lot of the interesting dynamics that permadeath creates. And this is before the assholish design choices that they tend to inspire.

So overall, from a gameplay perspective, Engage is a flawed but fun experience. Base Fire Emblem gameplay activates my neurons on a level that I can’t explain so not fucking it up too much is enough to make me happy. I might even go as far to say that a good chunk of my gameplay issues won’t be as much of a problem when a fair bit of time passes and the meta gets easier to understand. But my main source of issues with Engage is not so much its gameplay as it is its story.

I’m seeing a lot of takes from Engage enjoyers along the lines of “people only hate the story because it’s not as serious.” However, I wouldn’t mind a less serious Fire Emblem story if done well. I genuinely love the cheesy 4kids/saturday morning style English opening and I would look forward to Fire Emblem’s G Gundam equivalent: a weird outlier in the series’ history with the primary appeal of being really stupid in a fun way. Sadly though, Engage fails to capture scenes of true peak fiction like having Holland use a windmill mech or having the protagonist get detained in post apocalyptic Italy and interrogated by having his head shoved into a pizza.
The story just overall feels dry and uninteresting. Alear has the personality of cardboard and the four “lords” that join him don’t get much screen time after their respective arcs so none of them have any chemistry amongst themselves or with Alear in the main story. I’m sure that they have interesting dynamics with each other in the supports but if I shouldn’t have to go out of my way to find character dynamics that should have been there in the first place.

Beyond that, the plot is your standard Fire Emblem fare and almost everything that happens in it is something that has happened several times in the series, whether it’s a possessed ruler who’s the pawn of the main villain, a wyvern riding character who starts out on the villain’s side but defects to your army, or the main villain being a generic purple dragon whose main “Fell Dragon” title is the same as another game in the series’ generic purple dragon. For fuck’s sake, the game’s central theme of “going against what you’re fated to be” and the plot twist associated with said theme were both already done before and better in Awakening. It’s hard for me to enjoy this as a less serious game in the series when it just ends up being the same shit as before but with the most superficial layer of “irony”.

The sad thing is that there’s a handful of times where the less serious tone pays off. Yunaka is a fun twist on the bubbly personalities you see in the series by having a character whose bubbly personality is actually just a way of hiding her criminal past and her introduction chapter where she tries to hide the fact that she stole the ring is a fun dynamic. Alcryst is an entertaining parody of angsty characters like Takumi and his introduction scene cracks me up. Fogado is incredibly charismatic and you can tell that his VA had the time of his life recording for him. But these redeeming qualities are the exception, not the norm.

There’s also several moments where the game tries and fails to do serious emotional beats and its villains are the worst example of this. The game arbitrarily makes villains sympathetic with little build up, presumably because of the perceived notion that sympathetic villains are inherently better. It tries and fails to make you feel bad for the side villain who beats up children multiple times and the other side villain who looks like a DeviantArt user’s edgy Fairy Tail OC and whose primary personality trait is being a sadomasochist. Even worse is that the game waits until the very final chapter to give the main antagonist a backstory and then proceeds to treat their death as a sad moment in a way that feels completely unwarranted.

Finally, I’m not a fan of the way the emblem rings were implemented into the narrative. They don’t feel like the actual characters they were in their home series (although calling Byleth a character is a stretch tbh) but rather feel more like generic collectibles that have the faces of past protagonists attached to them as a marketing gimmick. In the main story, they’ll get a little bit of screen time in their join chapter and then get reduced to doing nothing but giving off exposition for the rest of the game. In the game’s side content, their supports are only two to four lines of dialogue so there’s not much they can add beyond generic advice or “remember this thing from the past game” dialogue.

Now because Engage has spawned gameplay vs story discourse, I’ll just say this: I can enjoy games with bad stories and there’s plenty of FE games that fall into that camp. I’m even in the camp that enjoys Fates: Conquest for its gameplay even if I do understand why some might not be able to. But the way I see it, the more time a story takes up, the more of an impact that said story has on my opinion of a game. Cutscenes are lengthy, even more so than Conquest’s, and the game is becoming notorious for how dragged on death scenes in particular feel. These cutscenes take up a lot of the game’s time so I would prefer for the time spent on them to have good writing. And no, being able to skip cutscenes doesn’t make the issues go away. That excuse doesn’t hold up for games I like (like the aforementioned Fates: Conquest) and it doesn’t hold up here either.

Minor tangent but the victim complex a small but vocal portion of the FE fanbase has for any criticism of this game is pathetic. I totally get it if you enjoy games primarily for gameplay and there’s plenty of cases where I do just that but you have to understand why some people aren’t able to do so. If you get genuinely mad at someone for not liking/being interested in a game primarily because of its story, you are part of the reason why video games aren’t treated as seriously as other forms of art.

I guess to explain my apprehensiveness towards Engage overall in spite of liking the gameplay for the most part is that there’s a feeling of soullessness to it, at least to me. It doesn’t exist to do anything new or interesting and primarily exists to reference pre-existing games. There’s been a fairly common take that Engage has a worse story than Fates. Suffice it to say that I don’t agree with this take. Fates’ story is a level of poorly constructed that is the lowest of low bars to clear and that’s before the mountains of gross shit in it.

However, I can see where this take is coming from, even if I find it disagreeable, to say the least. Fates’ concept of a choice between your birth family or your adopted family was a novel idea, at least at the time. Conquest in particular had an interesting idea of focusing on the flaws of implementing change within the system. Both of these ideas were squandered though, in such a way that resulted in some of the worst writing I’ve ever seen. But while Fates had the issue of trying and failing unbelievably hard, Engage had the issue of not trying at all.

And one last thing that I couldn’t fit in here: Fuck Nintendo/Intelligent Systems for putting in pedophilic romance options and fuck Backloggd for deleting my friend’s review because he told pedophiles to do something to themselves that would make the world a better place.
FREE BATTLEHUNTZ