16 hours in Engage and just finished chapter 13, and I'm enjoying it a bit more than I thought I would. Following Rol's approach I will give what are my positive, neutral and negative impressions so far
+ Positives
+ Engaging mechanics are a clever and original way to give a secondary class to a character and allow you lots of experimentation. If you deepen your bond enough you can inherit skills from any of the rings, which helps a lot of flexibility and offsets the fact the weapons are now back to being class-locked. Their special abilities are something closer to overdrives
+ Hard so far offers a fair and balanced challenge for anyone who is used to FE mechanics, without consuming so much of your brain cells like in Conquest and definitely not "Hard, but easy" like Three Houses. Chapter 11 comes to mind as the hardest yet and of course my favorite as well.
+ Animations and graphics are a very welcomed improvement from Three Houses in every way. Still not on top of Switch capabilities, but now the technical side of the game is perfectly serviceable
+ I feel the game to be balanced. Dodge builds are reliable, and critical hits don't look overpowered like in 3H. Knives doing poison damage is a nice addition. Archers are not OP either (in Awakening and Fates even the faintest archer could 1OH all flying units)
+ Celebration of the over 25 years of Fire Emblem. As someone who only started playing in Awakening (having played Path of Radiance and Radiant Dawn later thanks to emulation), more than half of the emblems are unknown to me and this game does a very nice introduction to the main characters of old. I've spent some time collecting the bond rings just to read the description of the older cast. I've also read some of the maps are inspired by older games so I imagine for older fans this game must be a joy
= Neutrals
= History is actually alright, not good by any means but serviceable. It doesn't annoy me enough to skip any cutscene yet as Fates did and the introduction of the 12 Emblem Rings feels very organic and well-placed. I'm surprised because I was expecting something horrendous.
= Maps. 3H haters on Reddit says 3H maps are shit and keep praising Engaging for putting "Core strategic gameplay first", but I honestly fail to see how the maps here are any better. Conquest and Radiant Dawn still have better maps and so far I argue that even 3H has more varied maps than Engage. The maps are certainly better than Awakening though
= Breaking mechanic. This mechanic was probably not really well thought and I guess they introduced it after realizing that in Three Houses you can make Dimitri or Felix go to a map and then all the enemies will just suicide trying to kill them (unless you're playing on maddening). The concept is okay, but the problem is this is basically an infinite charging Battalions (and I miss Battalions, RIP). As long as you're not facing armored units you can spam attacks without being punished by your enemies attacking you back. This is making characters that in the past would be frail during Player Phase (i.e. physical units with low Def) to be absolute beasts, Chloe comes to mind although she's the only physical flying unit in the game so far. You can basically make it through all the player phases without even getting damaged, broken IMO
= Somniel is a nice hub actually, better than in both Fates and Three Houses. I thought it would feel disjointed but I'm sold on the concept and it actually feels alright to have a base where you can come back, buy items, do some support's dialogues, train, and sharp or skills before committing to another fight. I found it to be overly cutesy, but you get used to it after some time
- Negatives
- UI is bad and confusing, I'm surprised because UI was always very good on Fire Emblem games. I have the impression the team responsible for the UI here is the same responsible for Awakening and Fates, but they forgot we don't have a second screen on Switch
- Although the game has tons of experimenting options for inheriting skills and testing emblem rings, most of them seem to be enough to explore in a single playthrough. Unlike Fates/3 Houses with its multiple routes or Awakening with the marriage and second-generation mechanics, I see nothing on Engage compelling the player to a second playthrough. I can be wrong as I didn't finish and didn't see what NG+ has to offer, but well... unless you are REALLY a fan of grinding the game story over and over I don't see much value here other than the ~40 hours on maps and combats of the first playthrough
- Social interaction mechanics are HORSE SHIT. This is not Persona by any means and I'm seeing very few rewards to "engaging" with them. Three Houses did a much better job here, as social activities would often give you weapon proficiency points, professor experience to give you more time for other activities, deep the bounds between the units, and make the morale of your students higher so you can spend more time training them. So while Three Houses actually encourages you to PLAY the game, here your only reward is to pretend you are a friend of 10 different waifus and talking about waifus...
- ... the characters in this game are unbearable. They come from the most generic anime you can think of, they are not only unidimensional they are straight-up annoying and the voice acting is not doing them any favors. Their design is so bad that it makes me sad to play with them, thinking about Celine fighting with her big Dress and it just seems off and immersion-breaking. The fact I can't stand 90% of them and most of them actually are pretty useless gameplay-wise (and you get over 30 of them in a single playthrough, mind you) are making me think 2/3 of the cast were designed to die as baits on maddening
- Art direction. Starting from the soundtrack, bland and uninspired, when I compare it with Path of Radiance of Three Houses which has pretty iconic music I can't stop scratching my head in disbelief seeing how much less artistic this game actually feels. It's a very much forgettable entry in all the sense of the word and the lack of actual effort to make it memorable in any way instead of resorting to past main characters. Nothing here makes sense, the setting, places, and even the color pallets don't match together. Worldbuilding is ass as well and the lack of visual identity makes the graphics (which are good) to look much less beautiful than they actually are.
Overall, the negative points are making Engaging a game that I don't want to revisit, I will finish and call it a day. It's a soulless game that is not something common for Nintendo games, if you showed it to me I would say it was made for some random Japanese third party who make waifu JRPGs
Last edited by IcaroRibeiro - on 21 January 2023
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