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Fire Emblem: Engage -- A Brief Review

So, I finished Fire Emblem: Engage last week and with the game leaving such an impression on me I feel like sharing my thoughts and opinions on this tactical, turn based, "animesque" beast. It's not every day I play a Fire Emblem game (and it's even the first time I finished one!)

With my limited experience with the franchise, I can't draw comparisons on how the game stacks against the predecessors. As someone with almost no previous experiences with FE, this is a review for other people in a similar position.

so...

Is it worth it?

Yes, with a few caveats.

In terms of gameplay, the game is phenomenal, with long engaging battles that often felt like puzzles to unravel. Very often I'd find myself sinking over 30 minutes in a chapter without ever noticing the time pass me by. Combat is complex enough to offer many different challenges and a good variety of solutions for said challenges, with a richness of classes, characters, weapons, and abilities that always kept the game fresh from start to finish.

It's when the game leaves the Chapters and "Paralogues" (the name given to sidequests with unique rewards such as units) that enjoyment starts to suffer...

Fire Emblem: Engage suffers from a plethora of side activities that range from useful, but boring, to entirely pointless and extremely boring. The small minigames and interactions you can have with other characters in the main hub are repetitive, but reward you in ways that always made me feel like I'd be putting myself at a disadvantage. I would often dread the moment of going back to my home base knowing I'd have to do the exercise minigame, the fishing minigame, have a meal with two other characters, pet the local domestic spirit... It got tired extremely fast.

However, the biggest culprits were definitely the random battles always cropping up in already completed maps and, especially, the Tower of Trials. Very quickly I realized they were but a waste of my time, giving me pitiful rewards for prolonged battles that lacked the creativity and charm of the actual Chapters and Paralogues. In both cases, I gave them a try then just forgot they existed and felt no loss.

And then there is the story.

I've seen much criticism leveraged towards the plot and characters, and I would agree that much of it is justified, although I myself I had no personal problem with the game's story. It is simplistic, tropey, and campy, but if you come in knowing what to expect you might still find yourself having a good time and the camp (I would even argue the camp is the best part).

But truly, what harms the story the most is marked low quality of most of the game's "cutscenes". While the few pre-rendered cutscenes are a joy to watch and very well animated, those are far in between. The vast majority is simple dialogue boxes over barely moving characters in front of backgrounds that are very often just static PNGs, and the contrast is quite jarring.

In Conclusion

Fire Emblem: Engage is a very fun game when it does what it does best: engaging uniquely crafted turn based battles that make the most of its character driven tactical RPG gameplay. Whenever it drifts from that, the fun factor starts to degenerate at a disturbingly rapid pace.

I can recommend it, but I ask that you know what you're getting yourself into before buying. If you can get past the camp, the atrociously low quality cutscenes, and the excessive amount of boring and sometimes pointless side activities, you might just find a beautiful gem of a game hiding underneath.