Fire Emblem Engage is a great strategy game, but can’t quite match Three Houses
The long-awaited Switch follow-up largely strips back its social life for a fast-paced, action-heavy adventure
- Director
- Kenta Nakanishi
- Key Credits
- Genki Yokota (Producer), Nami Komuro (Writer)
It’s hard to tell if Fire Emblem Engage will please the most passionate fans, or annoy them.
The game, which serves as an anniversary special for the franchise, brings back protagonists from across the series and delivers nostalgia with both barrels, but by gutting large parts of what made Fire Emblem: Three Houses such a hit, it might feel like a bit of a missed opportunity for fans who wanted to spend some more time with old friends.
While Fire Emblem Engage’s combat kept us happily playing almost every side mission and skirmish throughout the game’s lengthy campaign, the heart of the franchise, the characters, often feel like one-dimensional approximations of great RPG heroes. Add this to the sheer number of characters the game tries to deal with and Fire Emblem Engage begins to feel very crowded.
More Fire Emblem Engage Guides:
Dining Guide | Spirit of Somniel |How to rewatch cutscenes | amiibo unlocks | Somniel guide | Steel location | Iron location | Gift guide
Playing as the Divine Dragon, a red & blue haired protagonist that can be either male or female, you awake decades after a battle that saw you fight alongside Marth, Ike, and other Fire Emblem favorites thanks to the Emblem Rings. These rings contain the spirit of those heroes and serve as a power-up during combat.
Once awake, you meet a group of characters that have been watching over you while in your eternal sleep, and it’s not long before they’re forced to join you on the quest to reunite the Emblem Rings after they’re stolen. Thus begins a gap year across the regions in order to get them all back, before their power falls into the wrong hands.
From a narrative perspective, the opening hours are frantic and jam-packed with exposition. The pacing is inconsistent as Fire Emblem Engage goes from introducing a new character with every new line of dialogue to simple tutorial fights that last way beyond the point where the intended lesson has firmly sunk into the player.
This unevenness is a problem throughout the first half of the game, where simple fights take longer than they need to and character development is sidelined in order to introduce even more new characters. The game’s second half is much better about allowing characters room to breathe, but the narrative overall feels weaker than Three Houses, even if the combat itself is stronger.
Combat missions in Fire Emblem Engage are essentially big games of chess. It’s all about anticipating what the enemy will do, and making sure that you can either destroy that enemy or organize your units in a way that means your weaker party members won’t be destroyed.
Should you choose to, you can play the game with perma-death meaning if a unit is lost in a battle, it can’t be reselected. The character itself will remain in the game’s hub area, but your opportunity to raise their bond level and unlock certain cutscenes will be lost.
While the missions themselves start off very simple, the final five or so chapters ramp up the difficulty significantly. This was a welcome change, but we’d have much preferred a steady rise, as in its current form, it feels like we went from a mission we could essentially auto-battle our whole way through, to one we had to micro-manage.
“It’s all about anticipating what the enemy will do, and making sure that you can either destroy that enemy or organize your units in a way that means your weaker party members won’t be destroyed.”
While the latter is preferable, especially if you enjoy the armchair-general fantasy, we fear that this sudden shift in difficulty will take players by surprise, and lead to armies being decimated.
Away from the battlefield, Fire Emblem Engage’s social threads are a letdown. When compared to the stellar, and widely adored relationship systems from Three Houses, Engage’s off-the-pitch antics feel rushed and thin. While you can bond with characters, this amounts to a very short cutscene in most cases, and little else.
It makes the inclusion of the legacy characters feel like a bit of a waste. While some of the classic characters get some development, plenty of them feel like the voice actors were only available for half a day, leaving their appearances feeling like minor cameos. This also highlights the issue with how thin the new characters are.
We would understand if the new characters felt like afterthoughts if the developers decided to go all in on the fan favorites, but in Fire Emblem Engage, neither faction gets the screen time or dialogue that they deserve. The coterie of pantomime villains gets some more time to shine, but not nearly enough.
The narrative is serviceable but entirely predictable with twists and turns in the second half that is highly melodramatic but fit with the tone. It’s not a story you’ll commit to memory, and from the outset the goal of collecting all the Emblem Rings doesn’t vary significantly, leading to a very methodical structure of mission – new character – mission – new emblem ring – mission. While it makes the story incoherent at times, the sheer volume of characters means you have a lot of chess pieces at your disposal, which we appreciated.
The game runs well on Switch with the only slowdown coming during certain combat animations but these were fairly infrequent. The character themselves are all brilliantly designed and have a host of extra costumes you can put them in, making your army as fashion-forward as they are deadly.
It feels like if the game had the social links of Fire Emblem Three Houses, with the same great gameplay of Engage, we could be talking about one of the very best games on the Nintendo Switch, but when the action is over in Engage we found ourselves with less and less reason to return to home base.
Engage’s gameplay won’t make up for the disappointing social elements for every player, but for strategy fans, it’s a fast-paced, inventive and enjoyable journey, even if it feels hollow when you’re not on the field.
The real let-down for us was the use of the classic characters, most of which feel like hastily added cameos, rather than the central focus that the plot seems to suggest they should be. The new cast, outside of the outlandish villains who entertain any time they’re on screen feels underdeveloped, and the excellent costuming and inventive locations aren’t quite used to their fullest potential.
Fire Emblem Engage is a great strategy game, but we don’t think it’s a great modern Fire Emblem game. Whether the reverence for the social elements of Three Houses came as a surprise to the team or not, the dearth of those moments in Engage makes it feel like it’s missing half of its core at times. While the anniversary cameos will please the hardcore fans at first, we worry that, much like the weak social aspects, their largely minor impact on the game itself will disappoint.
- Excellent turn-based combat
- Plenty of variety
- Well designed characters and locations
- Thin social elements
- Weak dialogue
- Uneven difficulty curve
