Media in Review: Fire Emblem Engage
Fire Emblem is a weird series that never seems to be happy with its balance of "Strategy" and "RPG". On the one end of the scale, you have something like Three Houses, with its four separate story branches, a big school where you can mold any character into anything with enough time and effort, enough capital-L Lore to fill an entire book, and a passable if uninteresting game attached to all this RPG stuff. At the other end of the scale, you have Shadow Dragon (both the actual FE1/3 remakes and the pseudo-ones like Binding Blade) - games that technically have a plot, but are more concerned with moment-to-moment play than they are telling you a compelling story. The series is at its best when it lands somewhere in the middle of this scale, and while the exact sweet spot varies from person to person, I think the majority of folks would agree that Path of Radiance and Radiant Dawn are the best the series has to offer.
Engage is firmly on the Shadow Dragon side of the scale, seemingly a rejection of almost everything Three Houses brought to the table. Most of the RPG stuff is either streamlined or tossed entirely, and the writing in general is vastly simplified. Supports are all short and tend to be about basic character gimmicks, and the plot is a Saturday morning cartoon in which you are the Divine Dragon and you are setting out to stop the Fell Dragon from destroying the world by banding together with all the local nobles and their retainers. This isn't to say the writing is necessarily bad, mind you; when it works, it works really well. There's a scene in the last third or so of the game where it drops a "No, I am your father" twist that is clearly intended to demoralize a character, but they immediately turn to their friends and the response is more or less "Yeah, we don't care, you're still our friend" and the plot just continues as if nothing had happened.
To be clear, this is by design - it's not trying to be an epic tale with TWISTS and BETRAYALS or anything like that, but that doesn't make it any less disappointing when it takes until Chapter 20 to get around to a reveal that pretty much everyone figured out by Chapter 5. It also doesn't change that the game does put its worst foot forward in many ways. As Alear is literally divinity, the majority of the cast actively worships them, and nowhere is that more evident than the initial batch of characters whose supports start with "Divine One, you're so cool, let me do your laundry for you" or "This is the first meeting of the Divine Dragon Fan Club, how can we get more people to worship him?"
As for the gameplay proper, it is an absolutely fantastic strategy game, easily the best the series has seen since FE9. Emblems give stat boosts, skills, and a superpower that can accessed once every handful of turns, as well as weapon proficiency that can be used to unlock new classes. It sounds broken (and frankly, it is), but Engage has enough teeth that by the end, it's throwing just as bullshit enemies against you, and the whole thing turns into rocket tag. Cues have clearly been taken from Heroes as maps are smaller, but with more interesting enemy formations and unit movement is less across the board. There are side objectives like chests and villages that require you to put to a surprising amount of effort in to get, and knowing when to use your engages vs. saving them for a boss is the difference between victory and defeat sometimes. And sometimes, you just want to absolutely humiliate a boss, like when I tried to puzzle out how many of the final boss's 100 HP bars I could break in a single turn (it was 3 of 4). I'm broadly not a big fan of what you would call "Modern" Fire Emblem (ie, anything from about Awakening on), but once I got on board with what Engage was doing, I had a ton of fun with it.
I'm still hoping for a real back to basics game that sheds the modern skill system and reclassing and all that nonsense, and just delivers a really good core game; A Blazing Blade, or better yet, a Path of Radiance for the modern day. But if this is the closest we're going to get to that sort of "reset" game, then honestly? It's a pretty good one. I understand why the people who loved Three Houses didn't like it, and why it didn't sell as well in general. But it's a damn sight better than any of the 3DS games and it deserves better, even if the overly anime art and simple story are valid turn-offs.