Fire Emblem Engage — Accolades Trailer — Nintendo Switch
Fire Emblem Engage — Accolades Trailer — Nintendo Switch
by ONE-OF-THREE
32 Comments
ONE-OF-THREE
>The critics are engaging with Fire Emblem Engage! See what they have to say!
>Have you started your adventure in the latest entry of the Fire Emblem series yet?
Kaelocan
Why do the comments look like they are fake review bots you would find on an online store lol
BlusterKongForSmash
Ew
crono333
Loving this game! It’s my first real Fire Emblem game (played Warriors previously) and I’m addicted lol
DudeWheresMcCaw
Bad character design.
Cutcutman
I’ve been really enjoying Engage.
The gameplay is peak Fire Emblem imo. Great and unique maps, actual difficulty and smart enemy AI. Balance and map wise, it’s a huge step up from Three Houses, where a majority of maps lacked strategy and were reused numerous times and making everyone a Wyvern Lord meant you could basically Steam roll the game.
The story is pretty straightforward and cliche, but it has funny moments and isn’t something I would call “terrible” like other people have been saying. It accomplishes what it sets out to be and doesn’t have the jarring plot holes and loose ends that Fates and Three Houses had. The characters aren’t as deep as Three Houses characters, but are still imo very enjoyable. They have good voice direction in English and remind me a lot of Awakening/Fates type characters, which is a plus for me personally.
On top of that, the call backs to previous Fire Emblem games are awesome, especially as a fan. The call back maps and the Emblems are truly treats for long time fans.
JohnsterHunter
I’ve been really frustrated with this one. The battles are top notch but the story Ave cutscenes are so cringey that I can’t enjoy them. Overall a big step down from 3H
purefish152
Sure would be nice to boost Engage popularity even more with a little more info on that Genealogy leak… Please, Nintendo?
Darkchick3n
Its a huge mixed bag. Dialogue between character is now extra cringe and 90% of the cast are dressed like jesters. Someone thought Kefka look in ff6 was top and decided to make many variation of it. I lile though the triangle is back and summoning heroes ia nice. Also having healer that cna defend themselves is cool.
Long live our Avatar named Colgate
Calhalen
I like it, but the characters and supports are a massive step back from 3h imo, story too. Like 3 characters of my 9 so far have ‘loves working out’ as their sole personality trait. I’m on chapter 6 or 7 and couldn’t tell you their names yet, they just haven’t made an impression at all. There’s no real interesting standout like Rhea or Dimitri (yet anyway). Graphics are a big step up though at least
GamerKingFaiz
Would this be a good place for a newcomer to the series to start?
Last SRPG I played was back in the day (prob FF Tactics or Advance Wars).
Atzar87
I’ve loved Fire Emblem ever since Blazing Sword but this one isn’t clicking for me. Struggling to find the motivation to finish it. I don’t dislike it exactly, just… eh.
The story is best when it stays out of the way, the characters are poorly-presented, and the Somniel IMHO is a large step back from Garreg Mach – which already had a mountain of problems of its own. The map design and tactical gameplay is very strong, but that’s a lot to make up for.
pHearn
As a fan from the GBA days, I really appreciate the map design and inclusion of the weapon triangle. This is the type of gameplay that had had me hooked back in the day. You can ignore the home base stuff and stay on the map progressing and leveling up. People here get hung up on the story or cheesy supports, but to me that’s always been something extra to make the combat gameplay more accessible.
3 houses had big open maps that made infantry pretty useless. I spent most of the game in menus doing school and supports, then rushing mounted units across the map. The characters and story were great, but the gameplay suffered pretty badly. Part of the fun is replaying the game, but most of it was mashing through menus. On top of that, the game chugged overlooking your units on the map. The graphics took precedence over performance, and it looked awful. Glad it got more people into the series though.
alluvicqueen
i’m enjoying the gameplay a lot but the story and characters definitely turn me off from the game a lot. also the lack of new game + is sad. but had a good time and have already spent 50+ hours so well worth the money
i have a feeling new game plus will be added in an update but it sucks we have to wait. and would extra suck if it’s paid dlc
p3ek
Fire emblem engage – “its not as good as the last game” Trailer
thewwwyzzerdd
I feel a little validated reading the comments. I am digging the battles in Engage, but I think that 3 Houses as an overall package is the stronger game so far. I havent beat engage yet though.
fuckredditmods3
Such a delight to have a good FE game again, 3 houses was the bottom of the franchise and i was afraid they give us more of the same crap.
Fluessigsubstanz
A really great game. To make a comparison to three houses, its like they cut away a part of the story to improve the gameplay by a ton.
Art direction and design though is a mixed bag. Personally I like it and its not like you have enough choices to choose units that aint looking “too funny”.
FunketheBlue
Gameplay was great. However story and dialogue was pretty bad.
theFoffo
Wish the mc design wasn’t so uninspired
GamblingGhost
While it’s not my favorite Fire Emblem game (it’s Path of Radiance and Radiant Dawn), it’s the most fun I had with the serie and I did all of them.
Cold_Government3924
I’m 20 hours in and losing steam. I think Normal mode is too easy, and it’s insane that I can only downgrade difficulty modes, not up them. Also, the character interactions are getting a bit much—cringeworthy and often really low effort.
SaikaTheCasual
Honestly it’s an awesome game with amazing characters. Very positive vibes despite the dark story. The interactions between the MC and their mates are all very wholesome.
Pebbicle
I’m honestly quite mixed on this game. There are a couple of good things that I really like about it such as more defined unit roles which is a very real problem with Gaiden/SoV and 3H. For all the talk of being more about gameplay than 3H is though it’s still telling where the focus of design lies when you log almost 60h on Hard while not grinding whatsoever. The previous longest game in the series before 3H was around 40h while the rest hover between 20-30h. This is because the gameplay of Fire Emblem doesn’t lend itself well to really long playthroughs since it stretches itself too thin. Up until Awakening there was next to no useless content in the games. Even petting in Fates has a power increase attached to it as it gains support points which are extremely important and a scarce resource in Conquest where there’s no grinding maps. Engage is actually worse because where My Castle was effectively a glorified base menu, Somniel has poor menu structure and require you to pick up bond materials while constantly traveling between the arena and ring chamber. This kind of extra content ruins the flow of the game. It’s very easy for someone like Sakurai to talk about how his games having extra content is fine when all his games aren’t tied inextricably to resource management like Fire Emblem is. It would be like having to do to a run of Smash Run between tournaments to get an impact modifier in competition fights.
And before anyone asks, yes the resource management is most of what Fire Emblem is. For the same reason grinding ruins Sacred Stones, Awakening, and Birthright/Revelation, the minigames came very close to ruining Conquest and the hub areas came close to ruining 3H and Engage. But unlike 3H where the monastery is at least justifiable for the narrative the game is attempting to tell, Engage feels like it has it just because 3H had it. It’s a bit like Fates having children for no apparent reason because new fans liked that part about Awakening.
Still, if I would rate all the modern-era FE games I would say 3H>CQ>Engage>BR>SoV>Awakening>Rev. Engage has enough going for it while not being as EP-centric as Birthright is for me to consider it the better experience.
Keyen3
Engage turned out great. The gameplay is the best out of all the FE games I’ve played. Really well designed maps and the unit abilities are super fun, quite challenging too. And I’ve ended up loving a lot of the characters after being a little hesitant on how the cast would turn out before release (Ivy, Yunaka and Alcryst are favs of mine). Also, its a beautiful looking game, which hasn’t traditionally been the case for the series hahaha.
320gblink
My fave FE since Awakening!
Also, man, I love that Nintendo does Accolade trailers for their games, but the thirty second trailers aren’t the best. I get they’re quick, thirty seconds, but I feel they could drag out more scores and quotes. The Three Houses accolades trailer was great, and it was a minute and a half.
playtech1
I am impressed with how much better Engage looks and feels compared to Three Houses. The move to the Unity engine seems to have made it all feel smoother and higher resolution.
On the social side the constant influx of new (and better) characters is making it harder to bond with the ones you have at the beginning of the game. The characters generally seem uninteresting.
Overall Three Houses was carried by its cast whereas Engage is being carried by its battles.
Edit: although Somniel and post-battles annoy me with the time sink of collecting stuff from the ground – I’m meant to be the Divine Dragon, maybe someone else could pick up that stuff?
Defiled_hottub
Wish there was just a battle-focus mode that drops the goofball dialogue and cringe story.
Will have to settle for spamming X and getting to each battle as quickly as possible.
RamsaySw
Honestly, as someone who’s played every game from Genealogy onwards, I really dislike Engage.
The maps are an improvement over Three Houses or most of the other modern Fire Emblem games – and even then, it’s not especially exceptional when compared to the pre-Awakening games. Whilst the map design early on is very good, Engage’s maps really deteriorate towards the end. Chapter 21, 22 and 23 are pretty much open fields with little terrain to speak of which really feel like the map designers of Three Houses worked on them, and it also feels like bosses and reinforcements are spammed like crazy to make up for the interesting map design that characterized the early and midgame maps and which feel absent in the late game. In this stead, I think Engage’s overall map design is still nowhere near as good as that of Conquest’s.
Engage also has a bunch of minor issues in its gameplay that really add up and drag down the experience. Why the UI so bad? Why does it feel like the game expects you to make far more gold with stuff like the donations than you are actually given? Why do skirmishes scale to the the unit of yours with the highest level in the army, making grinding unbelievably tedious if you want to do so (and no, this probably wasn’t intended to be an anti-grinding mechanic given that Maddening barely even has skirmishes to begin with)? The Somniel is still incredibly tedious and still doesn’t feel optional despite the lack of a calendar system (the Arena is especially bad in this regard given how broken skirmishes are).
IMO Engage’s plot is inexcusable. I’m getting tired of arguing about Engage’s writing, so I’ll just say that it’s one thing to have an unoriginal story that is executed well – and some of the best Fire Emblem stories are so not because of their originality, but because of good execution. It is another thing entirely to have an unoriginal story that is executed poorly. Engage’s plot is very much the latter.
The characters don’t fare much better – which especially sucks for me given that the characters are probably the most important aspect of a Fire Emblem game for me. Having read all of Engage’s supports, almost all of Engage’s characters have a really bad habit of having just one or two supports that delve into the character’s backstory. Almost none of Engage’s characters don’t have a cohesive worldview that they can use in interactions with other characters, and the interpersonal conflicts which defined the best Fire Emblem casts are pretty much nonexistent. As such, almost all of the supports just feel like character gimmicks are being thrown together because there’s only so many ways you can deliver a character’s backstory.
I think the worst part of Engage, though, is how *soulless* its writing feels. It genuinely feels like the reason why the old characters were included was because Intelligent Systems knew the story was woeful and needed something flashy to lure players in. If I didn’t know who developed Fire Emblem and you told me that Gamefreak wrote this game, I would have believed you – and even Scarlet and Violet’s writing looks outright inspired compared to that of Engage’s.
I think Intelligent Systems really needs to get rid of their in-house writing staff (keep in mind that Echoes is a remake of a game that was originally written by someone who has long since left the company, and Three Houses was largely written by a third party) – because this is the second Fire Emblem game in a row that Intelligent Systems has written that could have been great if it wasn’t for how glaringly bad its writing is.
TimmiT401K
I’m enjoying the game so far, but it really makes no sense to me how this game is essentially a playable advertisement for old Fire Emblem games and yet Nintendo has not made it possible to buy 3/4ths of these games in North America, at least not on modern consoles. I would love to play Path of Radiance again.
erikluminary
I’ve been playing Engage and having a great time with it. The opening song has been stuck in my head lol
Roliq
Really hope that this game falls off in sales (which appears to have happened in Japan selling less than 3H despite having a slightly bigger opening), is pretty horrible outside the gameplay so it should not be rewarded for that
32 Comments
>The critics are engaging with Fire Emblem Engage! See what they have to say!
>Have you started your adventure in the latest entry of the Fire Emblem series yet?
Why do the comments look like they are fake review bots you would find on an online store lol
Ew
Loving this game! It’s my first real Fire Emblem game (played Warriors previously) and I’m addicted lol
Bad character design.
I’ve been really enjoying Engage.
The gameplay is peak Fire Emblem imo. Great and unique maps, actual difficulty and smart enemy AI. Balance and map wise, it’s a huge step up from Three Houses, where a majority of maps lacked strategy and were reused numerous times and making everyone a Wyvern Lord meant you could basically Steam roll the game.
The story is pretty straightforward and cliche, but it has funny moments and isn’t something I would call “terrible” like other people have been saying. It accomplishes what it sets out to be and doesn’t have the jarring plot holes and loose ends that Fates and Three Houses had. The characters aren’t as deep as Three Houses characters, but are still imo very enjoyable. They have good voice direction in English and remind me a lot of Awakening/Fates type characters, which is a plus for me personally.
On top of that, the call backs to previous Fire Emblem games are awesome, especially as a fan. The call back maps and the Emblems are truly treats for long time fans.
I’ve been really frustrated with this one. The battles are top notch but the story Ave cutscenes are so cringey that I can’t enjoy them. Overall a big step down from 3H
Sure would be nice to boost Engage popularity even more with a little more info on that Genealogy leak… Please, Nintendo?
Its a huge mixed bag. Dialogue between character is now extra cringe and 90% of the cast are dressed like jesters. Someone thought Kefka look in ff6 was top and decided to make many variation of it. I lile though the triangle is back and summoning heroes ia nice. Also having healer that cna defend themselves is cool.
Long live our Avatar named Colgate
I like it, but the characters and supports are a massive step back from 3h imo, story too. Like 3 characters of my 9 so far have ‘loves working out’ as their sole personality trait. I’m on chapter 6 or 7 and couldn’t tell you their names yet, they just haven’t made an impression at all. There’s no real interesting standout like Rhea or Dimitri (yet anyway). Graphics are a big step up though at least
Would this be a good place for a newcomer to the series to start?
Last SRPG I played was back in the day (prob FF Tactics or Advance Wars).
I’ve loved Fire Emblem ever since Blazing Sword but this one isn’t clicking for me. Struggling to find the motivation to finish it. I don’t dislike it exactly, just… eh.
The story is best when it stays out of the way, the characters are poorly-presented, and the Somniel IMHO is a large step back from Garreg Mach – which already had a mountain of problems of its own. The map design and tactical gameplay is very strong, but that’s a lot to make up for.
As a fan from the GBA days, I really appreciate the map design and inclusion of the weapon triangle. This is the type of gameplay that had had me hooked back in the day. You can ignore the home base stuff and stay on the map progressing and leveling up. People here get hung up on the story or cheesy supports, but to me that’s always been something extra to make the combat gameplay more accessible.
3 houses had big open maps that made infantry pretty useless. I spent most of the game in menus doing school and supports, then rushing mounted units across the map. The characters and story were great, but the gameplay suffered pretty badly. Part of the fun is replaying the game, but most of it was mashing through menus. On top of that, the game chugged overlooking your units on the map. The graphics took precedence over performance, and it looked awful. Glad it got more people into the series though.
i’m enjoying the gameplay a lot but the story and characters definitely turn me off from the game a lot. also the lack of new game + is sad. but had a good time and have already spent 50+ hours so well worth the money
i have a feeling new game plus will be added in an update but it sucks we have to wait. and would extra suck if it’s paid dlc
Fire emblem engage – “its not as good as the last game” Trailer
I feel a little validated reading the comments. I am digging the battles in Engage, but I think that 3 Houses as an overall package is the stronger game so far. I havent beat engage yet though.
Such a delight to have a good FE game again, 3 houses was the bottom of the franchise and i was afraid they give us more of the same crap.
A really great game. To make a comparison to three houses, its like they cut away a part of the story to improve the gameplay by a ton.
Art direction and design though is a mixed bag. Personally I like it and its not like you have enough choices to choose units that aint looking “too funny”.
Gameplay was great. However story and dialogue was pretty bad.
Wish the mc design wasn’t so uninspired
While it’s not my favorite Fire Emblem game (it’s Path of Radiance and Radiant Dawn), it’s the most fun I had with the serie and I did all of them.
I’m 20 hours in and losing steam. I think Normal mode is too easy, and it’s insane that I can only downgrade difficulty modes, not up them. Also, the character interactions are getting a bit much—cringeworthy and often really low effort.
Honestly it’s an awesome game with amazing characters. Very positive vibes despite the dark story. The interactions between the MC and their mates are all very wholesome.
I’m honestly quite mixed on this game. There are a couple of good things that I really like about it such as more defined unit roles which is a very real problem with Gaiden/SoV and 3H. For all the talk of being more about gameplay than 3H is though it’s still telling where the focus of design lies when you log almost 60h on Hard while not grinding whatsoever. The previous longest game in the series before 3H was around 40h while the rest hover between 20-30h. This is because the gameplay of Fire Emblem doesn’t lend itself well to really long playthroughs since it stretches itself too thin. Up until Awakening there was next to no useless content in the games. Even petting in Fates has a power increase attached to it as it gains support points which are extremely important and a scarce resource in Conquest where there’s no grinding maps. Engage is actually worse because where My Castle was effectively a glorified base menu, Somniel has poor menu structure and require you to pick up bond materials while constantly traveling between the arena and ring chamber. This kind of extra content ruins the flow of the game. It’s very easy for someone like Sakurai to talk about how his games having extra content is fine when all his games aren’t tied inextricably to resource management like Fire Emblem is. It would be like having to do to a run of Smash Run between tournaments to get an impact modifier in competition fights.
And before anyone asks, yes the resource management is most of what Fire Emblem is. For the same reason grinding ruins Sacred Stones, Awakening, and Birthright/Revelation, the minigames came very close to ruining Conquest and the hub areas came close to ruining 3H and Engage. But unlike 3H where the monastery is at least justifiable for the narrative the game is attempting to tell, Engage feels like it has it just because 3H had it. It’s a bit like Fates having children for no apparent reason because new fans liked that part about Awakening.
Still, if I would rate all the modern-era FE games I would say 3H>CQ>Engage>BR>SoV>Awakening>Rev. Engage has enough going for it while not being as EP-centric as Birthright is for me to consider it the better experience.
Engage turned out great. The gameplay is the best out of all the FE games I’ve played. Really well designed maps and the unit abilities are super fun, quite challenging too. And I’ve ended up loving a lot of the characters after being a little hesitant on how the cast would turn out before release (Ivy, Yunaka and Alcryst are favs of mine). Also, its a beautiful looking game, which hasn’t traditionally been the case for the series hahaha.
My fave FE since Awakening!
Also, man, I love that Nintendo does Accolade trailers for their games, but the thirty second trailers aren’t the best. I get they’re quick, thirty seconds, but I feel they could drag out more scores and quotes. The Three Houses accolades trailer was great, and it was a minute and a half.
I am impressed with how much better Engage looks and feels compared to Three Houses. The move to the Unity engine seems to have made it all feel smoother and higher resolution.
On the social side the constant influx of new (and better) characters is making it harder to bond with the ones you have at the beginning of the game. The characters generally seem uninteresting.
Overall Three Houses was carried by its cast whereas Engage is being carried by its battles.
Edit: although Somniel and post-battles annoy me with the time sink of collecting stuff from the ground – I’m meant to be the Divine Dragon, maybe someone else could pick up that stuff?
Wish there was just a battle-focus mode that drops the goofball dialogue and cringe story.
Will have to settle for spamming X and getting to each battle as quickly as possible.
Honestly, as someone who’s played every game from Genealogy onwards, I really dislike Engage.
The maps are an improvement over Three Houses or most of the other modern Fire Emblem games – and even then, it’s not especially exceptional when compared to the pre-Awakening games. Whilst the map design early on is very good, Engage’s maps really deteriorate towards the end. Chapter 21, 22 and 23 are pretty much open fields with little terrain to speak of which really feel like the map designers of Three Houses worked on them, and it also feels like bosses and reinforcements are spammed like crazy to make up for the interesting map design that characterized the early and midgame maps and which feel absent in the late game. In this stead, I think Engage’s overall map design is still nowhere near as good as that of Conquest’s.
Engage also has a bunch of minor issues in its gameplay that really add up and drag down the experience. Why the UI so bad? Why does it feel like the game expects you to make far more gold with stuff like the donations than you are actually given? Why do skirmishes scale to the the unit of yours with the highest level in the army, making grinding unbelievably tedious if you want to do so (and no, this probably wasn’t intended to be an anti-grinding mechanic given that Maddening barely even has skirmishes to begin with)? The Somniel is still incredibly tedious and still doesn’t feel optional despite the lack of a calendar system (the Arena is especially bad in this regard given how broken skirmishes are).
IMO Engage’s plot is inexcusable. I’m getting tired of arguing about Engage’s writing, so I’ll just say that it’s one thing to have an unoriginal story that is executed well – and some of the best Fire Emblem stories are so not because of their originality, but because of good execution. It is another thing entirely to have an unoriginal story that is executed poorly. Engage’s plot is very much the latter.
The characters don’t fare much better – which especially sucks for me given that the characters are probably the most important aspect of a Fire Emblem game for me. Having read all of Engage’s supports, almost all of Engage’s characters have a really bad habit of having just one or two supports that delve into the character’s backstory. Almost none of Engage’s characters don’t have a cohesive worldview that they can use in interactions with other characters, and the interpersonal conflicts which defined the best Fire Emblem casts are pretty much nonexistent. As such, almost all of the supports just feel like character gimmicks are being thrown together because there’s only so many ways you can deliver a character’s backstory.
I think the worst part of Engage, though, is how *soulless* its writing feels. It genuinely feels like the reason why the old characters were included was because Intelligent Systems knew the story was woeful and needed something flashy to lure players in. If I didn’t know who developed Fire Emblem and you told me that Gamefreak wrote this game, I would have believed you – and even Scarlet and Violet’s writing looks outright inspired compared to that of Engage’s.
I think Intelligent Systems really needs to get rid of their in-house writing staff (keep in mind that Echoes is a remake of a game that was originally written by someone who has long since left the company, and Three Houses was largely written by a third party) – because this is the second Fire Emblem game in a row that Intelligent Systems has written that could have been great if it wasn’t for how glaringly bad its writing is.
I’m enjoying the game so far, but it really makes no sense to me how this game is essentially a playable advertisement for old Fire Emblem games and yet Nintendo has not made it possible to buy 3/4ths of these games in North America, at least not on modern consoles. I would love to play Path of Radiance again.
I’ve been playing Engage and having a great time with it. The opening song has been stuck in my head lol
Really hope that this game falls off in sales (which appears to have happened in Japan selling less than 3H despite having a slightly bigger opening), is pretty horrible outside the gameplay so it should not be rewarded for that