Nintendo’s Fire Emblem franchise is still riding high
after the immense success and popularity of 2019’s Three Houses.
The next entry, Fire Emblem Engage, eschews the heavy-handed social simulation
introduced in Three Houses
in favor of a setup that’s more akin to previous entries,
relying more heavily on combat, strategy, and personnel management.
The result is that the level of depth and strategy are among the most impressive in the series,
but it’s definitely a step backwards when it comes to narrative and character development.
Unlike Three Houses, where you take charge of a class of students
and try to manage your daily life,
Engage is about preparing for each new battle
and following a linear story path across the world
as you try to save it from the threat of the fell dragon Sombron
and his generals known as the Four Hounds.
As you complete each battle, you unlock a new path forward on the world map,
though there are occasional deviations.
It’s a very straightforward approach, one that veterans will be all too familiar with.
The highlight is a return to form for battlefields,
specifically the heavier focus on environmental hazards and obstacles
that you have to account for
in addition to the regular factors like enemy positions and weapon ranges.
While it doesn’t bring back all the goods,
notably lacking height advantages or slope mechanics,
Engage delivers the most satisfying battles in a long time,
and each map continuously adds new wrinkles to keep you on your toes.
What also stands out are the battles presented in many of the paralogue chapters.
These chapters are tied to one of 12 heroes from Fire Emblem’s past,
and the maps resemble iconic battlefields from those entries.
They’re definitely going to resonate with those who have played previous entries,
but the payoff of revisiting these famous encounters
perfectly fits the celebratory nature of Engage
and tastefully pays tribute to its heritage.
The combat system sees some new changes, too.
While the weapon triangle returns, it introduces a new layer
that really encourages you to pay attention to matchups more than ever.
When you attack with a weapon advantage, you inflict a break status on that unit,
which temporarily disarms them and prevents them from counterattacking.
Similarly, enemy units can inflict break status on you or your teammates.
This opens up new options for offensive and defensive strategies
that were previously unavailable, like being able to use units
who would otherwise be demolished by an enemy counterattack.
Though it’s not the first to do so, another important change is that Fire Emblem Engage
is one of the rare installments that ditches weapon durability.
While there are still consumables
and a few support weapons that have limited uses,
removing durability makes the game more approachable for newcomers
since you have to spend less time worrying about inventory management.
Instead, you’re afforded more time to delve into some of the newer mechanics,
like the Engage system which allows any combatant to equip an emblem ring
that pairs them with one of 12 heroes from previous Fire Emblem games.
While they don’t directly fight with you, when invoked, these characters can enhance your units
with passive buffs and powerful new attacks.
They’re game changers that can quickly turn the tide in your favor.
Your bond increases with each hero the more you use them,
allowing you to eventually inherit up to two skills from each character
to equip at any time.
Mixing and matching abilities can really power up your units to even the odds,
though it’s not so integral that you need to worry about it constantly.
The one shortcoming is the narrative aspect of your relationship
with each hero, as you get maybe a line or two at most with each new conversation,
resulting in very shallow exchanges
that tie into a larger issue with Engage.
Engage’s story is very straightforward and basic, though it improves slightly by the end.
Its biggest issue is that it doesn’t spend enough time with world building,
and the background development for each of the different kingdoms and factions
is rudimentary at best.
This is mostly attributed to the underwhelming writing, which not only sabotages the plot development,
but the character arcs as well.
Engage’s other huge shortcoming is its characters.
Fire Emblem games are no stranger to large head counts,
but Engage’s roster suffers from perhaps feeling too large,
making it really difficult to spend meaningful time with everyone.
This leaves a large chunk of the group to feel like they’re merely faces in the background.
When you do finally spend time with the characters,
most lack any real sense of depth,
and many of their support conversations are bogged down by poor writing.
Lack of social simulation elements aside,
Engage is definitely a big step backwards from Three Houses
in terms of feeling connected to your characters.
It doesn’t take the proper time to develop their backgrounds,
so you don’t feel strongly tied to most of them.
Three Houses’ classroom approach of giving you a smaller scale roster in the first portion
definitely worked wonders,
and Engage would really benefit from that level of focus when it comes to character development.
When you can’t get invested in the characters, it’s hard to care too much about the narrative,
especially when it’s already struggling to hold your interest on its own merits.
One way Engage could have allowed you to get to know more characters
would be through the inclusion of new game plus.
However, no such option is available.
This really hinders the replay value, as Engage truly feels like a one-and-done affair.
That isn’t necessarily a bad thing for a game that’s 35-40 hours long,
but it feels like a huge missed opportunity, considering
how well Three Houses dealt with its large rosters
by allowing you to replay from different perspectives that presented completely new story threads.
Now to be fair, there is a home base where you can gather after every battle
and participate in a variety of activities.
A recent patch even added more opportunities to build up support levels.
Some of these include full fledged mini-games
like strength training and a fishing pond.
They’re nice novelties when taken at face value,
but they don’t play into a comprehensive social system.
They also frequently come off as tedious,
like having to remember to travel to the arena after every single battle
to try to get some measly experience for underleveled and neglected party members.
Returning to your home base completely kills the pacing and feels unnecessarily arduous.
Hampered by annoying load times,
you arrive to perform a checklist of actions
before departing for another battle.
Visually, there’s some charm to inhabiting a floating island in the sky,
but there’s a lack of substance and meaning to your interactions as a result of the shallow characters.
Thankfully, the most crucial activities,
such as shopping for gear and viewing support conversations,
can be done from a menu on the world map,
so you can completely bypass returning to home base if you choose.
Engage doesn’t need to be Three Houses, that’s not the issue here.
The issue is
that it fails at what it’s attempting in place of the previous game’s social aspects.
There’s a lot of moving parts, and they don’t seem to achieve the desired synergy.
You can’t even fault the format,
because other entries, like Awakening and Path of Radiance,
feature much stronger characters and narrative
that really sell this more traditional approach.
The game does have some online functionality, but it really feels like an afterthought.
Turning on network features provides some additional items in battles
if you land on certain spaces,
and there are two asynchronous multiplayer options.
However, neither of them feels really satisfying.
There’s also an additional mode called Tempest Trials
which has you battle through sets of back-to-back battles
where you can customize the difficulty to impact the rewards, allowing you to grind out rare items
needed for upgrades if you plan on tackling harder difficulties.
Speaking of which, Fire Emblem Engage presents multiple difficulty options from the start,
as well as the ability to implement permadeath for characters who fall in battle,
or to allow them to recover and return later.
While the normal setting can provide an ample challenge,
unlimited access to the rewind function pretty much trivializes things,
making time and patience the only real requirements to winning a battle.
It does help you learn the ropes, though, and could have served as a nice stepping stone
to tackling harder difficulties where rewind is limited to 10 uses per battle.
The reason why we say “could have”
is because you’re only able to lower the difficulty after you’ve started.
Unlike its mobile counterpart, Fire Emblem Heroes, where each battle has difficulty options,
Engage opts for the more restrictive method.
Combined with the fact that there’s no new game plus,
it largely fails to encourage players to try out harder difficulties,
as most will start on an easier option and eventually want to bump it up.
The music in Fire Emblem Engage is another great effort
with excellent use of leitmotifs,
and the voice work features some surprisingly decent performances
that help carry the narrative, despite the poor writing.
The game also looks its best when you’re able to walk around home base or the battlefields
after you’ve emerged victorious, and the battle animations really sell the attacks.
However, the battlefield visuals don’t look as good with the zoomed out perspective.
Fire Emblem Engage is a return to the series' more established format,
and the renewed emphasis on combat and strategy is a boon.
Yet these improvements come at the cost of losing the charm and character depth
seen in Three Houses.
Ideally, there needs to be a path forward that combines the best of both approaches,
and in that regard, Engage feels like a missed opportunity.
Additionally, the developers really need to address some quality of life issues
that kill the pacing, especially when it comes to interacting with your home base.
It’s a good effort, but it definitely falls short of the total package
we’ve come to expect from Fire Emblem.
Final score: 7 out of 10.
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