Gaming Reference & Reviews

Fire Emblem Engage: Great gameplay sans narrative

Intelligent Systems & Nintendo have provided us with the seventeenth mainline entry in the Fire Emblem franchise, & it brings with it plenty of good as well as a bit of bad. The game has found great success by going back to its gameplay & mechanical roots but continues an unsettling writing trend seen in previous recent entries such as Fire Emblem: Fates in 2015 & Fire Emblem: Awakening in 2012. Despite its shortcomings, Engage excels in the areas where it counts most leading to a generally positive reception from the fanbase.

Engage’s story is in all honesty a complete & utter disappointment. It feels poorly thought out, shallow, pandering & unoriginal all at once, making for a widely miserable experience outside of gameplay. The general plot appears to be a copy paste of Awakening nearly beat for beat but without all the things Awakening managed to do right combined with the annoying, gimmicky character writing players had to put up with in Fates. The central emblems are at worst blatant nostalgia-baiting fanservice & at best generally inoffensive plot devices that make for really enjoyable gameplay mechanics, though I will give credit to the events that take place during chapters 10 & 11 for effectively combining gameplay & story. For most players who have been with the Fire Emblem franchise for a significant amount of time, a second playthrough focused entirely on gameplay & skipping cutscenes will be much more enjoyable than the first playthrough taking in the entire experience. Engage’s writing displays an unfortunate precedent of shoddy craftsmanship Fire Emblem fans have been all too familiar with since the jump to the 3DS, which stings even more considering Fire Emblem: Three Houses showed clearly that modern Fire Emblem is capable of telling interesting stories with multilayered characters. While Three Houses certainly isn’t perfect, the story & character writing it provides is far preferable in comparison to almost every other recent Fire Emblem instalment.

On a more positive note, Fire Emblem: Engage’s gameplay is an absolute delight to experience. The newly introduced break mechanic grants much more depth & fun to the long running weapon triangle system as well as providing increased relevance to player phase, with my only criticism being that it becomes much less important as you progress into the late game & your units are more capable of killing enemies in a single round of combat. Emblems, while perhaps being a bit fanservice heavy & robbing Engage of it’s own unique identity, at least make for one of the most unique & customizable gameplay elements the franchise has ever seen. One bizarre decision Engage has made is to provide the player with new units later in the game that objectively outclass your starting ones. While the series has always been made up of optimal & lesser units, never before has the player been so incentivized to drop their older units the moment a new alternative arises. You can spend each unit’s individual skill points or SP to learn skills from Emblems, allowing that unit to benefit from said skills without needing to have the specific emblem equipped. This would be a great mechanic for optimization if not for SP being the stingiest resource in the entire game. Units gain SP from combat only if the have an emblem or bond ring equipped, but the gain rate is slow & there is no method to effectively farm for it whatsoever. Combined with the fact that emblem skills can be ludicrously expensive & the later joining units come with much more SP than you’re likely to have grinded up on your older units, it’s very unlikely that you will get deep into the prospect of kitting your team up with skills until far later into the game, which I find to be quite the missed opportunity.

Engage features a handful of standout tracks such as Preparations but overall the OST is neither Fire Emblem’s best nor its worst. The solm battle theme is catchy but begins to grate on you since it’s used for every single map that takes place there. The core game is exceptionally fun & engaging but all of the content outside of the pure game is either unimportant fluff or outright poor in quality, such as the plot in general. The game has a surprisingly hefty runtime even without going for full completion. A casual playthrough of the full story plus at least a few of the optional paralogue battles can be expected to take a player somewhere around 40 hours to finish, though this could be shortened by skipping cutscenes & solely focusing on gameplay. For those who wish to see everything Engage has to offer, they will be dedicating at least twice the amount of time as a casual player to consider their file complete. Along with the whopping 15 paralogues to play, those who purchase the DLC expansion pass will be faced with an additional 6 paralogues as well as an entirely new story to experience in the final wave of DLC that has yet to release at the time of this review. Speaking of the DLC, the debate on its worth compared to its price is not something I can answer outright, as Nintendo’s DLC practices are viewed differently by many of their fans. The season pass will provide the player with plenty of additional stat boosting items & weapons, 6 additional paralogue maps as well as 7 additional emblems for expanded fanservice & gameplay possibilities, & finally an additional self contained story with new characters & classes, but again I cannot currently speak to the quality of this 4th wave as it has yet to release. The game goes for the traditional $80 CAD, & will likely stay that way considering Nintendo’s typical lack of sales for their games. Those looking for the entire experience will be handing over an additional $40 CAD for the season’s pass, though it’s worth is debatable. If the formula for gameplay has reached this level of excellence already, as long as the Fire Emblem development team hires some new writers the next instalment in the franchise could be a monumental hit, though only time will tell.

Since assigning a numerical value to art seems somewhat pointless to me, instead included below is a handy list of pros & cons to help you come to your own conclusion

Pros	Cons
Fantastic core gameplay, potentially the best in the series	Terribly generic plot, poorly written & gimmicky characters
Plenty of customization for your units & their classes	Unit builds are more rigid than necessary thanks to how stingy the SP economy is
Satisfying challenge & strategically gratifying	Too much fluff in the somniel that adds very little to the package
High replayability for those who want more Fire Emblem	A significant amount of content is locked behind a $40 CAD paywall