3/5 ★ – beemancer's review of Fire Emblem: Engage.

Fire Emblem: Engage is my first foray into the franchise, and while I think I'm unlikely to return to older games I feel like it's left me open to future titles. I was told from the get-go that the story was not terribly interesting, but I was actually pretty surprised that it mostly did what it set out to do. More importantly, the gameplay was... well, Engage-ing, at least for most of the experience. The story was not something that's going to win any awards, but I think it was actually quite serviceable and fun. What you need to remember is that the goal is not to tell some deep, meaningful story that's going to make you think a lot. The goal of this story is to force-feed you batchest Smash Bros characters and cram in as many overly dramatic moments as possible. I mean, just look at the main character. Sure, Fire Emblem characters tend to have some anime-ass designs, but Alear is so over the top they'll get confused with fan-made OCs. If you leave your self open to just accept that the story is ridiculous and trope-filled, it's actually pretty enjoyable. More important than the content of the story is its presentation. Engage's cutscenes are really good, the voice acting is excellent, there's a few songs that absolutely drop bars, and there are some moments in the story that are really excellent. That being said, there's also a lot of standing around in a big empty field talking at each other while t-posing. The story also has a tendency to spin its wheels at times. I would say that the content of this story doesn't quite fit it's length, leading to some repeat moments and defeated bosses leaving to fight again another day. There's lots of characters to choose from so you're gonna have a few you really like. They're all extremely one dimensional and don't really develop at all, but they are also really fun, so whatever who cares. Gameplay-wise, Engage had a lot going for it. I also have a few complaints to which I'd bet veterans of the franchise would just say "yeah, that's Fire Emblem for ya." The game is tactically interesting, and there's a lot of very small decisions that can make a big difference. Positioning is super important, that's a common trait in TRPGs, and it's quite common that you need to decide to retreat because your units don't line up well into the units that are in range to attack. The emblem rings give you a great degree of flexibility and customization when combined with the different unit types, weapons, and tools. The main story missions have a surprising amount of variance given that there aren't that many enemy types. Yea, the enemies can be most of the classes you can use and have most of the weapons you can get, but they all more or less fall into "bow guy", "melee guy", or "wizard" - just find the correct vulnerability and attack them. The only unique enemy type is "big lizard", so it would've been nice to see some more. However, Engage makes up for this by having extremely unique level design. Terrain is used masterfully, and there's tons of interesting gimmicks. Just about every chapter gave me something unique to think about, which is pretty impressive for a game this long. The game is extremely fair, and gives you a lot of tools to track enemy attack options and ranges. This is pretty necessary, because a single mistake can very easily kill a character. The game gives you three dials to adjust the difficulty; an option to rewind turns, a permadeath option, and the actual AI level of your enemies. Of them, only the last is adjustable after the start of the game (and can only be made easier), which is an archaic design decision. There's no reason for a game released in 2023 to not let you freely change the difficulty options without restarting the 40-hour campaign, because someone like me who has not played a FE game before doesn't really know what options she's gonna like best. The game might also have too many customization options - bond levels, support levels, class levels, weapon levels, skill inheritance, etc., etc., and they all add up to a lot of time to invest in each of the 30-something characters. The people who do all this with permadeath enabled are true masochists, to be honest. One aspect during battle that I was not a fan of was reinforcements. Enemies sometimes come from predictable zones like forts, but also sometimes just out of the walls. Reinforcements were never infinite, at least in the main story, and were rarely something that made the game more difficult. Instead, I just had to adjust and kill the wave before moving on. At least on the base difficulty, enemies almost never retreated from a losing battle and rarely advanced before one of your units comes into range, instead giving you time to get set up (and sometimes even cheese things out if you like). Because of the lack of enemy variety, some battles just felt too long, and it was usually because the battle got extended by these reinforcements. In some ways, I'm glad enemies don't tactically retreat, because even though that would make the battle very interesting and I like using my noggin a little bit, Engage is a game where you can have up to 14 units under your control in some chapters. When the battle ebbs and flows, that ends up being a LOT of units you have to move back and forth, which is already tedious enough. I think I would've preferred a slightly lower unit count, or maybe they need to modernize a little bit and give me the ability to group units in some way so I can control them together when it's convenient. The game also likes to nickel and dime your time with the admittedly cool attack animations and also giving you XP after every action you take rather than at the end of the battle. Now, there is one elephant in the room that I'd like to discuss, but there's no way to do so without at least a minor spoiler. I'd suggest skipping this paragraph if you don't want even the slightest spoiler, but frankly I mostly write reviews so I can rant about stuff so this ain't for you anyway. The game gives you a lot of fun toys to play with, and a few of these are very exciting. The feeling of progression is an important aspect of any RPG, and taking that progression away from the player is something that should be done very carefully. We're talking about a game where many players prefer perma-death here, but in my opinion this is different from a character dying. Characters die in RPGs all the time, and that can do a lot for your story. But if you've every played Dungeons and Dragons, you know there's some stuff in the game that can fuck up your character. Sure, you could die, but then you just get to make a new character. You could also become permanently disfigured or feeble-minded, have your spellbook incinerated, or have your DM decide that your Paladin has fallen and loses all their divine powers. Yea, you're alive, and maybe it's an important moment in the story, but in the meantime that player might not be having a lot of fun. You need to ask very carefully if this is worth it, and if that dramatic moment can be achieved in a way that does not hold a player hostage. Engage did something similar for me - there's a point in the story where you lose all of your emblem rings. This is pretty annoying, because the rings are really fun to have and there's a bunch of systems in the game where you need to build up bonds with the rings and such that make them integral to your overall build decisions, so they're not just items that you lose. You get them back gradually, but you don't get them all back for about 10 main story chapters, which is about a third of the game where you're just getting back the toys you acquired during the first half of the game. During this time, I genuinely feel like I had less fun, and the plot twist really wasn't worth it. It wasn't even particularly well explained how the enemy managed to take these rings from you (they are physical objects that are distributed to a dozen different people, and the whole plot of the game revolves around the fact that neither side can acquire all 12 that easily). Again, the story isn't that great; the point of the story is to get excited about lots of old Fire Emblem characters showing up, and this played counter to that goal. So why setback the player enjoyment do it? This was a big miss for me. Anyway, I had a lot to say about Fire Emblem: Engage. It wasn't a super memorable RPG, but it's fun despite it's drawbacks and unlike most RPGs its the sort I would actually consider replaying. Doing challenge runs of a game like this is pretty tempting, since now that I'm through the story I don't need to care so much about whether the characters actually live or not. I can't see myself wanting to play older FE games because the rings are so transformative and the units are kinda boring otherwise, with very few AOE and movement options to speak of. But I kind of hope Nintendo intends to powercreep this series even more in the future. Give me even more ridiculous options, and make the challenges just as ridiculous to match. This is a game I'd recommend to most people that like tactical RPGs, even if you haven't played Fire Emblem like I hadn't, but if you aren't at least a fan of Smash Bros some of the joy of the story might be lost on you cause you can't recognize any of the old characters.