The latest Fire Emblem game has been stripped back to basics but also designed to please long-term fans, which leaves it in a weird place.
The tactical roleplaying game is the second main Fire Emblem on Switch, but the seventeenth in the series, and it makes you well aware of it.
In many ways Fire Emblem: Engage is a return to form, a classic Fire Emblem adventure where you travel the world with the goal of slaying an evil dragon.
More importantly, it drops a lot of the gunk that made the previous entry Fire Emblem: Three Houses a slog at times.
Three Houses had endless chores to complete between levels, a frustrating number of mechanics and an often painful amount of dialogue.
Engage solves most of these problems. The social elements are tightened up and the gameplay has had most the kinks polished out.
Three Houses gave you equippable battalions and combat arts, which allowed different special moves. You also had weapon durability, which just sucked.
All of that is gone, replaced by emblems.
Stylistically, emblems are bizarre. They are equippable items which summon protagonists from previous Fire Emblem titles to power up your characters.
There’s no subtext here. No allusions to previous games. Almost every protagonist going back to 1990 is here, fully voice- acted, to help out your party. And as mentioned before, this is the 17th installment. There are So. Many. Characters.
But mechanically? Emblems are amazing. They power up one of your party members for three turns, giving them new passive skills, special abilities and weapons.
They are designed to feel overpowered, but are surprisingly well-balanced.
Each has a different ability, but they’re given to you slowly, so it rarely feels confusing. One moves really fast. Another heals all your units. It’s simple, but fun.
Its so much tidier and dramatic than Three Houses, which gave you new abilities with little explanation through level-ups and equips.
The emblems do pose a difficult question, though. Is this the right place for new players to start?
They won’t know who any of these mighty ghostly warriors are, but I don’t think it’s a huge issue. The story uses emblems to drive the plot, but they’re not too dependent on them.
I’ve only played a handful of the series’ games (and Super Smash Bros, which roped in a few franchise faves), and I never felt bogged down when unknown faces showed up.
The writing is less nuanced and more cliched than Three Houses, but is paced a lot better.
Now the player character is voiced and has a real personality, and subsequently a way to drive the story forward. It feels a lot faster and more engaging.
It’s great. The game is great. But then also ... it can get kind of tedious.
If you play on classic mode then your team mates actually die when they fall in battle. That’s it, gone.
This is how the game is designed and what makes its strategy so compelling.
This isn’t chess, where you can sacrifice a pawn to take a bishop and start again with a full board next game. In Fire Emblem that pawn never, ever comes back. They’re dead.
It’s what the franchise is famous for, and what makes it great.
I spent an hour and a-half on one level trying to keep everyone alive. It was frustrating me to no end. I had slowly burned away all ten of my time-rewind charges, which let you undo your mistakes. I was about to restart the battle from scratch, but realised I could use an emblem skill to protect my party, pull back and create a defensive wall.
Everybody made it out alive. It felt amazing and was the kind of rewarding, skill-based gameplay I’ve found many Switch games lack.
It also makes the game exhausting at times, which players should be aware of going in. Sometimes you don’t want to spend over an hour trying to unscrew the terrible situation you put yourself in. For that reason I think it’s a game best taken slowly.
To offset the frustration of character deaths, Engage has an absurdly large roster.
There are way too many. I can’t remember even half of them and the game just keeps giving them to you.
Three Houses had a huge roster too, but they were all introduced at the start. You had time to get to know them and pick your favourites. The process is less overwhelming to begin with in Engage, but far slower and more annoying.
So the tight and engaging (hah!) gameplay makes it an addicting blast to play, but it can get a bit much. This is one of those games you burn out on if you’re not careful.
If you are looking to get into the franchise, it’s not a bad place to start — but you might want to take it slow.
