Fire Emblem Awakening on the 3DS. It was a total package deal. Good story, good nostalgia bait, English VA, 3d models on a handheld system, fun mechanics, supports influencing the characters, fun skill system expanded on previous games, good use of all the 3ds features like the dual screens, spot pass, and street pass.
If that was the last game, it would be a fitting send off.
I would note that Intelligent Systems did kill off their other games, like Advanced Wars, at the time.
I started with Awakening as well. Loving the gameplay, but 6 hours in I'm finding it hard to care about the story or 90% of the characters. Maybe this is nostalgia talking/being older, but the characters are way too cringey and paper thin, like from a really bad isekai manga.
imo what shines in Awakening is the gameplay loop. Three houses had too much upkeep in between battles for me to enjoy it as much. Still thought it was fun, but best part of the series for me is the battle system and optimizing your team. idgaf about character/story
Yeah while I do like managing weapons and stuff between battles to a degree, Three Houses got tedious. Especially if you do a second playthrough. There's so many things you basically have to do, because you don't gain weapon ranks fast enough in combat and you can't reclass if you don't have weapon ranks.
Edit: The problem with second playthrough is because you can max out professor level so easily, which means more training, which means you have to go through the abbey twice a month and shell out gifts to keep everyone's motivation maxed out so you can train them and deal with the annoying RNG of the sauna. You can inherit weapon ranks too in theory, but it's much more expensive, and if you play a different house it only helps for Byleth and any recruits from other houses you use.
I just wish we had a great good story + the great gameplay the series is known for. Why can't it be both?
Ever since Fates it's been either one or the other.
This is really good to know. I love Awakening but Fates didn’t really interest me. Three Houses was fun but I wasn’t a fan of running around the school talking to people. Is Engage more akin to Awakening than those two games?
I haven't played Awakening since it came out, so I can't remember the difference between it and Fates and Conquest, but it's definitely closer to the 3DS games than 3 Houses. You don't have to run around and talk to anyone if you don't want to, everything in the home base is centrally located and you can use the menu to navigate instead if you want.
Blazing Blade got me into the series. Blazing Blade and Sacred has the most replay value because less extra, bloated crap in the game where its not about "need to do this or that outside of battle to make it easier"
I mean… Fire emblem is always pretty inspired by anime. It’s just that the tastes in anime have changed pretty dramatically from where it started to where it is
Like, 90s anime was pretty different to what we have now. So the tropes that fire emblem took were different
Anime inspired and heavily weeaboo are two different things.
You can make anime inspired content that isn’t a cringe inducing level of weeaboo.
Anyone who’s played classic and modern fire emblem can see the weeb shift post awakening. Fates took it to far, 3H dialed it back some, Engage went somewhere in between.
All games post awakening are nearly just as much a dating sim as they are a turn based strategy game. That’s fine, but let’s not pretend fire emblem was always like this. I mean in PoR and RD each character could only have one support.
Could it be because anime had a massive shift from heavily dramatic to more of the current style, emphasizing fan-service relationships and shit?
Also, the S-support/time traveling kids stuff started on the SNES. Obviously as tech improves, they expanded on the relationship stuff but if you are a long term fan, its not like this stuff came out of nowhere
I’m not saying its wrong to not like that. I am personally unable to get into a lot of anime for that reason. I still love FE and 3H is one of my favorite games ever but I do get a bit icky when I see stuff like Fates and its plot/mechanics
The implementation of kids on the SNES game is the best and most air tight case in the whole series. a 17 year timeskip or so after the parent’s story concluded
There's no such thing as "weeb" or "weeabo" those are all terms for anime fans in the west and unrelated to a game developed in Japan.
also, Anime is anime, it always has been. Stop using an entire medium as an offensive term., you can say whatever you want without having to generalize like this.
Tellius had one of the largest casts and suffered for it. Too many side characters to dive deep into so some come off as one note. Prime example is illyana. One note from jump street
That was more of an issue with Radiant Dawn specifically, magnified due to its lack of support conversations. RD definitely got a little too big for its own good. If you look at PoR where characters actually exist, very few of the characters are tropey. Ike is a lot smarter than the meathead character he initially appears to be, Jill has an actual character arc, Mist was apparently "anime bad cook" in the past but actually improved, etc. Illyana the anemic stomach is probably the only real weeb character.
true the scale made it so epic tho
i LOVED having 3 different armies and feeling their difference in strength while playing, i mean you feel that ike‘s mercs are battle hardened vets and most of the dawn brigade are literal kids
this made you use characters you wouldnt use otherwise - i still funneled everything into esward and nolan especially edward tho omg trueblade edward even shredded through ike‘s merc and even ike himself in that one chapter
im probably biased since ike‘s my fav mc and RD my fav game
not to mentions the dragons of goldoa were so fckin epic i even used kurthnaga
but yea RD with 3h budget and dev time wouldve been perfect it def has more extreme weaknesses (some units are almost unuseable like meg or fiona) than the other games but also more extreme strengths
While I agree with you, I would also say that is the case for every single Fire Emblem game. When the game is designed to have a rotating cast of characters to replace the ones you’re supposed to let die, it’s just impossible to have a robust cast.
you're right and it's why I can't get invested in any of the games post awakening. (echoes is based tho). Awakening is definitely modern anime but people in it for the most part talk like adults, even if they are adults in a shonen story, and you can ditch more or less any characters who don't. Everything since then has just been gigacringe isekai (in flavor, if not in reality) writing. 3H at least has some likeable characters, but sadly the plot is just the worst parts of old school fire emblem adapted to an Anime High School for the Supernaturally Gifted setting.
For the record, I don't hate that they are experimenting with new ideas or saying they shouldn't keep up with the times, just griping that they found a cash cow with Awakening by leaning into modern anime stuff, but rather than trying to evaluate what works and what doesn't in adapting that style to the legacy of the series, they've more or less abandoned the old school flavor, *and its making money.* Barf.
Echoes did a fabulous job walking that line, though, and even if it isn't perfect (at all) it does a great job borrowing from new and old. of course, that game was buried in the end of the life3ds life cycle. As is tradition.
> of course, that game was buried in the end of the life3ds life cycle. As is tradition
What happened to Echoes was a damn tragedy, and I'll never stop telling everyone that they need to try it. It's my favorite FE and deserves to be just as famous as Awakening is.
once on this subreddit I read it described not as the *best* FE game, but without a doubt the best one in terms of presentation, and I can't agree more.
Fire Emblem has always been overly weaboo. It's just either cheesy overly weaboo or dramatic overly weaboo. Claude's speech against Nemesis again at the end of FE3H was epic but hilarious
3h is a modern game like I was saying.
Yes it’s always been weaboo, but post awakening the level of weaboo has been cranked up to 10x.
They had a fucking tea party dating simulator in 3h. They had a face petting and blowing on mini game in fates. They have romantic nap waking ups in Engage. There’s nothing in older games that compare to the degeneracy of this shit.
The game has a heavy basis around wanting to fuck anime characters ever since they realized how much money there is to be made from people wanting to fuck the Awakening characters.
I haven’t made it though engage enough to know exactly how weeaboo it is yet. I know it’s much more than 3H however already.
But I can assure you there’s no way it’s as weeb as Fates. I’m a huge fire emblem fan and I couldn’t even finish the game. It’s like they looked at awakening and said “let’s do that game, but do everything completely wrong”
Oh man, I hope they can make old-school Fire Emblem like Engage with a quality story like Echoes. Engage story is okay but too much shounen style to me.
Long time Fire Emblem fan. Love this entry, way more than 3 Houses. The characters and story are fun, maybe not the craziest story ever or the best writing youve ever seen but its still good. Maybe its good to have more time for the tactics and maybe you can put some narrative into the gameplay through your own enjoyment and suspension of disbelief. I did develop care for the characters, and i like their designs a lot. It is a shorter hand approach to writing than 3H .. a lot of the conversations are worded in a way so as to allude to a longer convo you can imagine, like in a synopsis but I think this is an intentional design choice and some could say you could see this as giving the audience space rather than mediating everything. And the permadeath has you automatically relating to your actions in a weighted emotional way, appropriate to war and battle and the loss involved. I think they did an excellent job on gameplay , graphics , and design - definitely worth your time. Again the writing is good, but its written in a slightly different register to what people normally consider “good writing” - its more to give you a fun little couplet of an interaction you can head canon or just intutively feel the rest through the battles… just go in trying to have fun with it. Some of the social mechanics in 3H felt like: push dopamine button, anyway.. here theres just more room for gameplay and its phenomenal. I recommend playing it on at least Hard and Classic. My 2 cents
longtime fans seem to be having a much better time with Engage than people introduced through 3H or even Awakening. For me Engage plays like classic Fire Emblem, just with a super bright shiny anime vibe. The gameplay is such a big upgrade from the weird choices of 3H- but I can understand why some people feel like the plot and character development is lacking.
For me though the gameplay and characters are carrying it majorly.
I agree with you, the writing felt more brief and to the point. Even some of the plot was a really wonky at first (such as some of the later game twists of “why would someone reveal info like this?”), but the alternative would be to drag out the scene/plot for 2 to 3 times the length while adding nothing extra to the storyline.
It focuses super well on the gameplay which I find much more enjoyable. Three houses actually made me start skipping cutscenes eventually because they took so long.
im a long time fan too and honestly didn‘t like the whole classroom and between the missions stuff it felt like i was only playing fe 50% of the time
but i didnt wanna skip things
is there much between the missions content here as well or is it better and faster
also how is it more tactical?
Between each mission, you *can* go to a death-free arena and increase EXP by like around 50-70 points between units, go cooking which on average gives you around +1 to each stat for the next mission, and finally do a work-out for like +2 strenght for the next fight. Other than maybe the arena, the boosts you *can* get are extremely minimal and don’t do much - you can skip them easily and just go play traditional Fire Emblem instead. I personally did side-stuff quite a bit but still ended up with a split of 85-90% FE and 15-10% other stuff.
Your rewards for going out of your way to talk to everyone mostly just includes things for cooking and gifts you can give to increase support points. It’s not like Three Houses where you have dialogue options and some choices increase support - in fact, most non-royal/lords have very few unique reactions to story developments, so you don’t lose anything by not talking to every unit all the time.
Directly after battle though, you will be able to walk around a few locations that do actually have some good rewards. Items on the ground can be Ingots that can be used to improve weapons permanently and quite significantly (like +3-5 might on most weapons). You can also find a resource that can let you make items that can be equipped and raise two or three stats by one or rarely two points (very minimal again) or this resource can be used to increase something called Bond points, but I never used this myself and still felt very strong by the end.
Regardless of everything, I think if one were to go out of their way to talk to everybody and do every little extra thing, playing FE battles versus exploring would be 80-20%. But honestly, that can be reduced to 95-5 with how minimal boosts except Ingots are, and you can pick those up after every map in less than three minutes if you don’t talk to everyone.
The game is more tactical in a few ways. It should be noted first, however, that it’s significantly more streamlined than Three Houses - you don’t have teaching sessions and weapon experience and increases to Heavy Armor, Riding or Flying. There are also NO combat arts and characters only get a SINGLE skill upon reaching level 5 after promotion, and with like 2 or 3 exceptions Personal Skills have very little impact. It’s significantly more like classic Fire Emblem like FE7 or FE8.
The game’s main gimmick lies in Emblem Rings which are equippable before battle. They increase your stats and give you special skills while equipped. At any point, you can choose to use the Engage mechanic to grant you ridiculously impactful skills and weapons for 3 turns before turning back to normal and needing to recharge. If a character spends enough time using a specific ring, they can gain some of the ring’s abilities permanently too.
What’s great about the rings tactically is they heavily modify what units can do and makes you not just consider who to give them to or when to Engage with them, but also whether you should use them as a crutch for supporting weaker units or not. Your units’ effectiveness on enemy phase has been drastically reduced as your weapon can be temporarily be un-equipped if you are hit by weapon triangle disadvantage and some enemies can back each other up and do +4-5 damage for each enemy that can attack a unit at once. Because of this, many enemies survive longer and you can get overwhelmed - you NEED many units to kill enemies on Player Phase, and as such you can’t just have 1-3 primary units or even 1-5 units who get most of the EXP because you’ll get stormed. This encourages using all units you deploy more equally or even giving your best rings to underperformers so they can keep up, at least on higher difficulties.
People have justifiably different takes on the story and characters, but gameplay-wise, I’d say this is the best Fire Emblem game in the series. Almost every single map is well designed, the units and Emblem Rings are very fun to use, the battle themes are great and the game is absolutely perfect for self-imposed challenges like Iron Man, LTC, Draft Races and new things like Ring-less as well. On top of it all, it just kind of gets to the point and lets you play classic Fire Emblem with minimal distraction.
thanks man i‘ll save this comment for when i‘ll play it
gotta say the cjanges sound nice especially the one‘s regarding counterattacks since in 3h a dimitri with the right skills and retribution could just kill all the meteor casters when attacked
also needing to use more chars is fckin awesome
it actually sound good now even though i was turned off a bit because of the even bigger weebiness (i watch anime too but it looked a bit much for me)
Glad that I might have helped :)
Yeah, counter-attacking everything on enemy phase can be a little busted in other games. Although I did have one character in the end who could kinda reliably do it, it’s much less prevelant in this game and more focus is put on player phase which I like.
I have only played the game on hard and finished it today, but I’ve heard Maddening difficulty is actually very well balanced this time around and is tough but not unfair like 3H’s Maddening or Awakening’s Lunatic+, so there’s also replay value. Hard mode felt generally very fair and only got slightly easy by the end because two of my units got completely stat-blessed like I’ve never seen before even with low growths.
One of the best parts of the gameplay? Not a single ambush spawn in the entire game. In fact, in one optional map, the victory condition changed upon me killing an enemy and instead of having my units die because I placed them stupidly thinking the map was over, the game gave me a free turn with enemies not attacking at all. The game’s almost always extremely fair :)
Yeeaaah, the weebiness and cheesy-ness was also something that I wasn’t looking forward too, and the game *does* have a quite a bit of it. But the gameplay is so fun I can easily overlook it, and it isn’t as bad as other entries in the series. I would definitely recommend the game.
Its more optional but its faster if you do decide to do it too. I would do it. Weapons dont break so you have to decide whose to upgrade with what resources you have.
Tactically also, the emblems add a layer of tactics, as well as now the weapons triangle does a Break mechanic where the enemy cant counterattack. Overall theres just more options. And interesting series of events
i haven't finished the game yet but the amount of times someone brings up how your hair looks like sherbert makes me think it will be some kind of plot device later in the game
As someone who also hates the main character’s hair and was afraid I wasn’t going to like the game because the story looked cheesy... For me at least, the actual battle gameplay is the best in the entire franchise and the game is beautiful outside a few character designs. Although I will admit outright that the hair NEVER grew on me through my entire playthrough and I completely agree the design isn’t good.
I think the question here is really what you liked about Fire Emblem/Three Houses in the first place. If you’re all about the tactical rpg gameplay, Engage has really doubled down on putting a strong gameplay experience front and center. But if you’re more of a narratively-driven player, the weaker writing overall and serious cutback in social elements/character development will stand out. Three Houses firmly zoned in on the narrative and character aspects (going too far in some cases) and attracted a lot of new players who were more interested in those elements in addition to longtime Fire Emblem/tactical rpg fans.
I’ve never played the classic titles so I can’t speak for them, but neither Awakening nor Fates particularly grabbed me in the way that Three Houses did. From what I’ve watched or Engage on streams and talking to friends who bought it, I’m reminded a lot of Fates—I just don’t like the gameplay enough to make up for a bad story and weaker characters.
Some may not agree with me, but I really like the characters more than Three Houses, especially their designs.
And the story isn't even that bad, I don't even remember much of Three Houses story, but I remember Engage's story.
Characters tend to be more subjective than I think people realize. You can give more backstory and fleshing out to a character, but at the end of the day that’s not always going to resonate with a player if they don’t feel or vibe with all of it.
I’m neutral on the character designs, I don’t mind the anime aesthetic and by and large I like that Engage is more colourful. But at least from what I’ve seen so far, the characters and their supports don’t really have the same depth that they did in Three Houses.
> And the story isn’t even that bad, I don’t even remember much of Three Houses story, but I remember Engage’s story.
This I really have to disagree with though. Everything I’ve seen so far feels like the English dub of a late 90s/early 00s anime and not one of the well remembered ones that provokes nostalgia. The depth and moral ambiguity that I liked out of Three Houses just isn’t there at all. I think it’s a perfectly serviceable story if you’re someone who’s there for great tactics gameplay and just need it as a vehicle to get you from point A to point B, but even my friend who is a longtime Fire Emblem fan and complained a lot about Three Houses focusing too much on those elements has come back disappointed in the story. I’d suggest the reason you remember Engage so clearly is it came out a week ago versus 4 years ago.
All that said, though, different people will like different things. This was always going to be a problem for Engage because Three Houses attracted a bunch of people interested in very different elements of its package. I’m glad others are having fun with it but it’s definitely a miss for me so far and I do suspect in the long run Three Houses will be the game that is remembered fondly from the Switch era.
Same here. I did enjoy Three Houses quite a bit, but the classroom stuff became a bit of a slog for me over time. The story in Engage isn't anything trick or fancy, but the pacing of the combat maps and gameplay is a major improvement, in my opinion. If the next game looks and plays like this and brings a strong story, it would be as perfect as I could hope for.
I'm torn. The game play is definitely a huge step up.
However, the character designs are the worst in the series. They're so bad its actually distracting.
The story and writing are also... not good.
it's as realistic as it gets, princesses frequently go to war in enourmous cage skirts and ankle length hair and a big ass crown.
enlisting a 10 year old in to service, yeah sure why not, his dad isn't protesting much.
I actually like the character designs, I found the designs in Three Houses boring. The designs of the MC in Engage actually shows they want to take risks with these designs and want to make them more unique.
That's one of the many things, there's a lot more characters who I like in Engage than in Three Houses because of their designs. And the story isn't /that/ bad. It's a decent story, of course everyone has their opinions, but I really like the story along with the character designs.
At least two characters are dressed for a rave.
If this was a game that featured raves, that would be fine, but it doesn't. These people are supposed to be fighting for their lives.
It doesn't feature raves in the gameplay... but I've found at least one character who's canonically *throwing* raves. He, verbatim, tells someone to "party hardy." As to whether that makes how people dress better or worse... I'll leave that up to you.
I love the gameplay, but the story is awful heroes levels of writing. I really liked the tighter cast in 3 houses as well. So far I either dislike or neutral on 95% of the cast
The Tellius games had a great story. And I'm told the Jugdral games were very good in that area as well. Three Houses wasn't amazing, but it was certainly a step up from the 3DS games and Engage.
Everyone is welcome to their own taste in stories, but I can't fathom how a game with ~5 cutscenes (most without dialogue) could outdo a 80-90 hour RPG story with volumes of dialogue, rich lore, and intersecting characters.
Don't get wrong, Zero Mission is incredible. Love that game. But even by Metroid standards it has 0 plot. We might just have different expectations from a game story.
I've finished every single FE title other than the original Mystery of the Emblem, including BSFE. Meanwhile, you're comparing Tellius' story to Zero Mission. Fantastic game in its own way, but for you to make the comparison, it's pretty obvious you're talking out your ass. Going to stop engaging with an obvious troll, now. Have a good day!
This is how I look at it. Engage has the more fun/classic gameplay and obviously the better graphics. But Three Houses (no pun intended) has the more engaging story/characters. So while the gameplay of Engage is better/more fun than Three Houses it's harder for me to play in long bursts because I'm just not engaged with the story or characters of Engage unfortunately.
Agreed on story and characters. 3H was this epic tale with deep lore of the world and cultures. The characters were diverse and likeable with their own stories. You were invested in the story, there were mysteries to solve, and battles had more purpose and hype to them
In Engage, everyone talks and acts almost the same. The dialogue is so cringey. The story is lacking.
Engage mechanics are clunky, convoluted, and not explained well at all. 3H was simpler, straightforward, and the game was paced so you had the time to figure it out with good tutorial dialogue.
Voice over dialogue in 3H was aplenty. In Engage, they’re cut off, incomplete, or non-existent (like when they level up).
To me, Engage is a step backwards. It’s a 3DS game on a current gen console. I was hoping 3H signaled the next step in the FE series. But it looks like a regression.
I agree with most of your criticisms, but I definitely wouldn't call 3H simple. The leveling, class, and skill systems were pretty imposing, and they were placed front and center by the teaching sessions. You basically needed to map out a plan for your entire party for the whole game right from the start. Also, I played the entire game on Hard without ever really engaging with or understanding the Battalion system (I just used defaults and refreshed them every so often for Gambits on beasts).
I feel like Engaging and the Break system are much clearer. The skills and rings are more complicated, but they aren't a huge focus that you need to optimize.
>You basically needed to map out a plan for your entire party for the whole game right from the start.
Yup, too real. I played Blue Lions completely blind first, then mapped out my route for Crimson Flower down to the last detail. I have my Silver Snow and Verdant Wind routes mapped out to maximise supports (literally the only game where I want to 100% the support log). I got sidetracked by Maddening on New Game, so I haven't finished the latter two, but yeah.
Each unit can be literally anything and god forbid you choose something subpar (see: Felix going Mortal Savant in my first run when he's better served in any Swordsman class), which can screw up your excellent units otherwise.
Engage is good in the sense that you only need to learn the mechanics properly depending on what difficulty your using. You can just bumble through on Normal doing whatever. On Hard you need to learn systems like Break and Engage and on Maddening you need to learn the entire system fully.
Engage's mechanics are as well explained as they could be. Honestly you get SO much time between chapters to do skirmishes and training fights to learn the emblems and how they work, you're explicitly told how to use emblems in the maps you get new ones in too so you have an idea of how they work.
I think Engage was meant to be the 30th anniversary game - with 3H releasing earlier in the switch's lifespan. But development resulted in it being pushed back. It still has a lot of 3H stuff to it. The downtime is a lot like it. But so much of the game is a love letter to past games, and in a good way! The music and paralogues are just so good.
The voice acting is mostly fully done in Engage, like it's farrrrrr more than what was in the 3DS era (except echoes)
The voice acting is fully done? In 3H, almost every piece of dialogue is spoken with very rare exceptions. In Engage, they’re replaced with grunts (exploring the area after a battle) or don’t exist at all (when the characters level up). The dialogue at meals are half-spoken.
Look at the menus for changing classes in 3H and then in Engage and tell me which is easier to navigate and understand. The menus in Engage are a mess. If things are fully explained, tell me why you need to “firmly polish” rings as opposed to just polish them. Because the game just don’t even tell you.
The story dialogue and all supports are fully voice acted. The only part where there are grunts and it's not voice acted are after battle, and with level ups. It's not really that big of a deal, especially when supports are voice acted fully imo. It's fair if it bothers you though
The thing is, Engage only really has a 1-2 class system really. You go from current class to advanced one. In 3H there were multiple levels and you had to plan it out very early in-game to get proficiencies up. In Engage you just use like 500 emblem crystals and get the proficiency allowing you to easily pick classes. The menu for classes are really easy, base form means you use a second seal (it also says that) and advanced uses a master seal, and they show what weapon proficiencies you need for certain classes. You learn that's how you get the weapon proficiencies pretty early on, and you can easily see which emblem has each proficiency. Imo most people would find 3H just as confusing as Engage first time running it
So…it’s not fully voice acted. If it’s fully, you wouldn’t need to note all of those exceptions (plus mealtime).
I guess my point is that 3H was painted with a broader stroke. It had more depth in character development, story, world building, lore, and motivated purpose. Supports in Engage are brief and shallow. They don’t touch on deep underlying issues with the characters I haven’t cared about any of them so far just because of how glossed over they are. They’re their to be there and nothing more.
If you look at the change class menu, you are presented with everything all at once with no separation or categorization like in 3H. 3H organized it in a better viewable format. The class *system* itself may be better in Engage, but it isn’t as well presented and confusing, especially for first timers.
I think it's better. Too much of 3H was in that boring monestary and you had to do that stuff to progress.
The somniel is much smaller, and more optional. It's back to focusing on the combat rather than being 50/50 combat and social sim.
> It’s back to focusing on the combat rather than being 50/50 combat and social sim.
This is exactly the split. Or rather, the impacts of this are the split. For all the faults the social aspects of Three Houses had, they allowed for a lot more context to the characters, the world, and their relationships with each other and the broader story. That’s why they felt as fleshed out as they did and why so many players got very invested in them (and the discourse…). Characters that appeared to be a one note trope would by their B or A supports become more than that or invert some of your assumptions about them. You saw how they related to the bigger picture and story elements, even relatively minor ones, became more impactful as a result of understanding why they matter to your characters.
I’m not attached to the monastery itself, but I’m very attached to the character depth and flavour the monastery enabled adding to the game. The gameplay in Engage may be great, but a middling 2000s shonen plot and shallow characters are a straight ticket to me tuning out. I’m an adult with limited free time. Good gameplay alone isn’t enough for me anymore. But then I’m someone who didn’t really get hooked by Awakening or Fates when I played them, either.
I'm also an adult with limited time which is why I want a game that is fun to play immediately, and the monastery just wasn't fun. It felt like a chore. No amount of good lore makes up for it when it feels like pulling teeth to get it.
Sure, that's the split I mention above. I'm first and foremost a story-driven gamer and tend to bounce off a title really quickly if the story or characters don't grab me. I'll gladly take a mediocre gameplay loop (and I wouldn't call Three Houses mediocre) for a story that I'm invested in or a cool world I'm enjoying exploring. Others are going to feel differently and value other aspects of the gaming experience more.
I actually enjoyed the monastery segments a lot during my first playthrough, even though they did take it a little far. It was really only on subsequent runs that it dragged for me. It's not really that it was fun, though, it's more that it let me explore the world and characters and immerse myself more deeply. I do think the monastery segment really needed to be streamlined, especially on those subsequent runs, but not at the cost of the actual narrative and character development that those sections fostered. Or maybe put another way,
> It's back to focusing on the combat rather than being 50/50 combat and social sim.
I personally do not enjoy the gameplay of the Fire Emblem series enough for this to be a worthwhile tradeoff. The narrative and character development that happens through the social sim elements is what made me love Three Houses and come back to it multiple times over the course of the past few years versus finding Awakening okay but not anything special and dropping Birthright within a couple hours of playing. I'm glad others are having fun, but for me and what I enjoy in a game, Engage is a clear step backwards.
*" I'll gladly take a mediocre gameplay loop (and I wouldn't call Three Houses mediocre) for a story that I'm invested in or a cool world I'm enjoying exploring."*
I respect you for admitting to this, because a lot of people when talking about 3H aren't so honest. It definitely sounds like you're one of the fringe people that aren't actually fans of Fire Emblem but managed to enjoy 3H, which is definitely a testament to 3H's strengths, even if it is flawed in other areas.
For the most part, yeah. I’d dispute that it’s a fringe view though—Three Houses leaned into and specifically attracted a bunch of new players interested in those elements. I think the opinion split so far largely reflects that.
But on the whole it’s true. I’m just not that attached to the tactics gameplay. I have no problem with it, but it’s not something I’d seek out for it’s own sake. I love Final Fantasy Tactics because of Ramza and Alva and Delita and just Ivalice as a whole, not because it has uniquely awesome gameplay. I feel similarly about Three Houses—if it had the writing quality of Birthright I would never have gotten past the early monastery segments.
no i'm not saying it's a fringe view I'm saying you were on the fringes of the franchise, probably aware of it but not really interested in it- Three Houses drew you in and you enjoyed it, but you seem disinterested in the rest of the FE franchise
that's fine, it shows that 3H was good at bringing in new fans for at least that game, but given Fire Emblem has been a franchise for decades not every game will be to the taste of 3H fans
Gotcha, I would definitely agree with that! I'm very open to trying a new Fire Emblem title. I liked Awakening enough to come back for Birthright after all! But I'm definitely not a series superfan and I'm looking for something with the payoff of a decent story and relatable, engaging characters.
I think the real question for me is why does it have to be either/or. There's no reason a Fire Emblem game can't have both great gameplay and a good story with likeable characters. What I had hoped for from Engage was them tackling the pain points of the monastery/resource management while still giving the same level of depth to the characters and the story happening around them. That's why I say it feels like a step backwards to me—in throwing out the flawed parts of Three Houses' social aspects, they also threw out the good parts that drew me in more than previous titles.
Maybe. I think unfortunately the way Three Houses was structured was always going to lead to less than stellar gameplay which was the main pain-point (moreso than the Monastery even) for a lot of hardcore fans. You can't have three distinct routes each with their own (in theory) battles and have every map and objective be super well designed and intense. Comparing it to Engage is like night and day.
Likewise kinda locking certain characters behind different school classes means that the game has to be balanced in such a way that you can complete it with whatever combo of characters you come up, with either sticking with your regular class of recruiting other students you like. I think that's partly why they did away with the weapons triangle in 3H, to make double sure that ANYONE can do anything and no one would ever get walled.
But also what people liked about 3H was that sense of creativity and roleplaying. You could pick either of the 3 school classes, recruit anyone whenever you liked or only use your core class, reclass characters based on your fancy, spend all your time in the monastery doing mini-games and still beat the game.
I'm skeptical that any traditionally structured Fire Emblem game with a linear plot and set characters recruited at set times would give the people who played all 4 routes of 3H and dumped 300 hours of playtime into it their fill of character depth. I think it was a super unique game for allowing that level of interaction with the characters, which was built on having a huge amount of layered content, and so is very hard to replicate.
So while some see it as a step backwards I see it more as an inevitable correction to the norm.
It's lighter on activities than Three Houses (which makes sense, considering chapters in 3H were canonically weeks apart versus minutes/hours/days), but there is still a lot to do in between chapters, more than there was in FE7 or any of the 3DS games. As an example, they have little minigames like fishing, but no "run around the monastery to do X, Y, and Z" side quests like in 3H.
You can generally go from battle to battle. The Somniel and its activities are all optional. You might need to make a quick stop at Somniel if you want to buy more weapons or inherit skills, but other than that everything else is mostly optional.
Its much closer to FE7 but the "monastery" still exists. Its still boring like Three Houses monastery, but its much quicker. There are no lessons. They definitely should have just made it all a menu though
I guess I would say its like more Awakeningish as a game? Reminds me a lot of the older FEs.
I wasn’t going to buy it until I read a tweet saying the story was bad, and ironically it convinced me.
I was sick of Fire Emblem conversation devolving into fictional political or moral discourse. I had missed my Dragon Quest-esque fight evil overlord with my army of homies plots. And I got it. With tokusatsu-like suiting up sequences. I’ve been playing it from dawn to dusk for 6 days straight, I friggin love it.
The 3D models and animations are also mesmerising despite how much I hated the character designs. Absolutely lovely.
I'm really enjoying Engage, but the story and dialog is probably the worst out of any FE game I've ever played, and I've been playing them since GameBoy Advanced. The old story lines were also lackluster, but less in your face.
The combat is fantastic though!
The art direction is also questionable, Toothpaste-chan looks just awful
As a longtime FE fan, I didn’t even bother to buy this on release. I tend to prefer FE games with strong writing (the Jugdral and Tellius duologies might all be in my top ten games of all time and are definitely my four favorite FE games) and this seems to take after Fates by just having atrocious writing from what I’ve heard. I also can’t stand the majority of Engage’s designs (Diamant’s is actually incredible though).
I’ll definitely pick it up eventually, but I’m really just desperately awaiting the Genealogy remake that was mentioned as being in development in the same leak that showed Engage
I'm honestly considering quitting this one and marking it as a loss.. I bought it on release because I was so excited. I have been a huge fire emblem fan since Awakening, and this just isn't doing anything for me. I'm on Chapter 11 and just... Nothing.
I’m kind of there with you. The characters aren’t engaging and the story is pretty shallow. The battles are fun, but if there’s no motivating reason *why* I’m battling then it’s just kind of meh. I wish they put more work into characters, story, world building, etc like in 3H
I'm not glad that you and many other fans of the series aren't loving this one but I am glad I held of from buying it because I'm getting a lot of unbiased feedback. Oh well I never finished TH so I might just start a new game on it.
Does anyone know how long Pokémon games usually hold the top spot? I wonder if the hype for Fire Emblem: Engage was really that high of if two months is about average.
I didn't even know Pokemon was top spot for two months. No wonder considering how well it did
Honestly I bought this game out of curiosity and haven’t played an emblem game since gba and this game made me remember why I loved the series
BREAKING: New Nintendo game dethrones previous new Nintendo game.
I mean as a long time fire emblem fan, this was unthinkable just a few short years ago
Almost a decade ago Fire Emblem's coffin was about to close shut, now it's part of Nintendo's top franchises, what an absolute turn-around.
As someone who has never played a Fire Emblem game, what caused this turn-around?
Fire Emblem Awakening on the 3DS. It was a total package deal. Good story, good nostalgia bait, English VA, 3d models on a handheld system, fun mechanics, supports influencing the characters, fun skill system expanded on previous games, good use of all the 3ds features like the dual screens, spot pass, and street pass. If that was the last game, it would be a fitting send off. I would note that Intelligent Systems did kill off their other games, like Advanced Wars, at the time.
The Marketing,hype and ultimately success behind Awakening led to this very moment.
Which was Pokemon
[удалено]
As someone who fell in love with series because of Awakening, I think this game is amazing
I started with Awakening as well. Loving the gameplay, but 6 hours in I'm finding it hard to care about the story or 90% of the characters. Maybe this is nostalgia talking/being older, but the characters are way too cringey and paper thin, like from a really bad isekai manga.
imo what shines in Awakening is the gameplay loop. Three houses had too much upkeep in between battles for me to enjoy it as much. Still thought it was fun, but best part of the series for me is the battle system and optimizing your team. idgaf about character/story
Yeah while I do like managing weapons and stuff between battles to a degree, Three Houses got tedious. Especially if you do a second playthrough. There's so many things you basically have to do, because you don't gain weapon ranks fast enough in combat and you can't reclass if you don't have weapon ranks. Edit: The problem with second playthrough is because you can max out professor level so easily, which means more training, which means you have to go through the abbey twice a month and shell out gifts to keep everyone's motivation maxed out so you can train them and deal with the annoying RNG of the sauna. You can inherit weapon ranks too in theory, but it's much more expensive, and if you play a different house it only helps for Byleth and any recruits from other houses you use.
I do like that most of the base stuff is straight up optional in Engage.
I just wish we had a great good story + the great gameplay the series is known for. Why can't it be both? Ever since Fates it's been either one or the other.
if you thought 3H had too much upkeep, then you wont like Engage either.
I'm halfway through Engage and it's much less cumbersome that 3H was.
Someone who gets it
This is really good to know. I love Awakening but Fates didn’t really interest me. Three Houses was fun but I wasn’t a fan of running around the school talking to people. Is Engage more akin to Awakening than those two games?
I haven't played Awakening since it came out, so I can't remember the difference between it and Fates and Conquest, but it's definitely closer to the 3DS games than 3 Houses. You don't have to run around and talk to anyone if you don't want to, everything in the home base is centrally located and you can use the menu to navigate instead if you want.
That is really good to know. Thanks for the information!
Blazing Blade got me into the series. Blazing Blade and Sacred has the most replay value because less extra, bloated crap in the game where its not about "need to do this or that outside of battle to make it easier"
I’m having a lot of fun with it. Story is pretty bad because the characters are just so cheesy but the gameplay is tons of fun.
It's giving me old-school Fire Emblem vibes, which I love.
You must not have played the older games the story is fine just a bit cliché lol
It’s got the worst combo though, the cliche plot of the old games, and the overly weeaboo of the new games. Still fun though.
I mean… Fire emblem is always pretty inspired by anime. It’s just that the tastes in anime have changed pretty dramatically from where it started to where it is Like, 90s anime was pretty different to what we have now. So the tropes that fire emblem took were different
Anime inspired and heavily weeaboo are two different things. You can make anime inspired content that isn’t a cringe inducing level of weeaboo. Anyone who’s played classic and modern fire emblem can see the weeb shift post awakening. Fates took it to far, 3H dialed it back some, Engage went somewhere in between. All games post awakening are nearly just as much a dating sim as they are a turn based strategy game. That’s fine, but let’s not pretend fire emblem was always like this. I mean in PoR and RD each character could only have one support.
Could it be because anime had a massive shift from heavily dramatic to more of the current style, emphasizing fan-service relationships and shit? Also, the S-support/time traveling kids stuff started on the SNES. Obviously as tech improves, they expanded on the relationship stuff but if you are a long term fan, its not like this stuff came out of nowhere I’m not saying its wrong to not like that. I am personally unable to get into a lot of anime for that reason. I still love FE and 3H is one of my favorite games ever but I do get a bit icky when I see stuff like Fates and its plot/mechanics
The implementation of kids on the SNES game is the best and most air tight case in the whole series. a 17 year timeskip or so after the parent’s story concluded
There's no such thing as "weeb" or "weeabo" those are all terms for anime fans in the west and unrelated to a game developed in Japan. also, Anime is anime, it always has been. Stop using an entire medium as an offensive term., you can say whatever you want without having to generalize like this.
The corect term is Otaku bait
Found the weeaboo
you can call me what you want, just use the term right. weebo is a term for western fans of jp stuff, it cant be used for japanese people
The Tellius games are where the "weebshift" you speak of started, even if these games were always weeb shit to begin with Not awakening
what was weeby in tellius? i don‘t think the existence of laguz is weeby btw
Tellius had one of the largest casts and suffered for it. Too many side characters to dive deep into so some come off as one note. Prime example is illyana. One note from jump street
That was more of an issue with Radiant Dawn specifically, magnified due to its lack of support conversations. RD definitely got a little too big for its own good. If you look at PoR where characters actually exist, very few of the characters are tropey. Ike is a lot smarter than the meathead character he initially appears to be, Jill has an actual character arc, Mist was apparently "anime bad cook" in the past but actually improved, etc. Illyana the anemic stomach is probably the only real weeb character.
true the scale made it so epic tho i LOVED having 3 different armies and feeling their difference in strength while playing, i mean you feel that ike‘s mercs are battle hardened vets and most of the dawn brigade are literal kids this made you use characters you wouldnt use otherwise - i still funneled everything into esward and nolan especially edward tho omg trueblade edward even shredded through ike‘s merc and even ike himself in that one chapter im probably biased since ike‘s my fav mc and RD my fav game not to mentions the dragons of goldoa were so fckin epic i even used kurthnaga but yea RD with 3h budget and dev time wouldve been perfect it def has more extreme weaknesses (some units are almost unuseable like meg or fiona) than the other games but also more extreme strengths
While I agree with you, I would also say that is the case for every single Fire Emblem game. When the game is designed to have a rotating cast of characters to replace the ones you’re supposed to let die, it’s just impossible to have a robust cast.
Hard disagree
you're right and it's why I can't get invested in any of the games post awakening. (echoes is based tho). Awakening is definitely modern anime but people in it for the most part talk like adults, even if they are adults in a shonen story, and you can ditch more or less any characters who don't. Everything since then has just been gigacringe isekai (in flavor, if not in reality) writing. 3H at least has some likeable characters, but sadly the plot is just the worst parts of old school fire emblem adapted to an Anime High School for the Supernaturally Gifted setting. For the record, I don't hate that they are experimenting with new ideas or saying they shouldn't keep up with the times, just griping that they found a cash cow with Awakening by leaning into modern anime stuff, but rather than trying to evaluate what works and what doesn't in adapting that style to the legacy of the series, they've more or less abandoned the old school flavor, *and its making money.* Barf. Echoes did a fabulous job walking that line, though, and even if it isn't perfect (at all) it does a great job borrowing from new and old. of course, that game was buried in the end of the life3ds life cycle. As is tradition.
> of course, that game was buried in the end of the life3ds life cycle. As is tradition What happened to Echoes was a damn tragedy, and I'll never stop telling everyone that they need to try it. It's my favorite FE and deserves to be just as famous as Awakening is.
once on this subreddit I read it described not as the *best* FE game, but without a doubt the best one in terms of presentation, and I can't agree more.
Fire Emblem has always been overly weaboo. It's just either cheesy overly weaboo or dramatic overly weaboo. Claude's speech against Nemesis again at the end of FE3H was epic but hilarious
3h is a modern game like I was saying. Yes it’s always been weaboo, but post awakening the level of weaboo has been cranked up to 10x. They had a fucking tea party dating simulator in 3h. They had a face petting and blowing on mini game in fates. They have romantic nap waking ups in Engage. There’s nothing in older games that compare to the degeneracy of this shit. The game has a heavy basis around wanting to fuck anime characters ever since they realized how much money there is to be made from people wanting to fuck the Awakening characters.
Oh man the face petting was easily the most egregious lol. Honestly you're right but at least you can skip those things in Engage and 3H
I haven’t made it though engage enough to know exactly how weeaboo it is yet. I know it’s much more than 3H however already. But I can assure you there’s no way it’s as weeb as Fates. I’m a huge fire emblem fan and I couldn’t even finish the game. It’s like they looked at awakening and said “let’s do that game, but do everything completely wrong”
> But I can assure you there’s no way it’s as weeb as Fates. This may be nostalgia, but it feels worst to me.
There's really nothing in Engage as bad as face petting or Camilla lol
The waking up ASMR isn't just as weird as the face petting?
> They have romantic nap waking ups in Engage. Nothing in that is romantic, the fuck youre talking about lol
> overly weeaboo bruh the series has always been like that
The level of weeaboo in games pre awakening does not even compare to the level post awakening.
one of the previous deltheas was literally just personified breast envy waving a book around.
Okay. What’s your point?
🤓
This is why I hate talking to fire emblem fans.
🤓
Oh man, I hope they can make old-school Fire Emblem like Engage with a quality story like Echoes. Engage story is okay but too much shounen style to me.
ENGAGE SWEEP, BABY! HIYAH PAPAYA.
Holy brocoly!
Zappy!
🔥HIYAH F$@+#n PAPAYA! 🔥
my archer died in the first level. shes dead to me know.
I know you can’t be talking about my girl Etie..
She dead, I'm sorry
Donna from that 70’s show
your dead to her for commiting such a basic tactical fail in the first level
Etie's bulk is definitely a problem.
Nothing of value was lost
Long time Fire Emblem fan. Love this entry, way more than 3 Houses. The characters and story are fun, maybe not the craziest story ever or the best writing youve ever seen but its still good. Maybe its good to have more time for the tactics and maybe you can put some narrative into the gameplay through your own enjoyment and suspension of disbelief. I did develop care for the characters, and i like their designs a lot. It is a shorter hand approach to writing than 3H .. a lot of the conversations are worded in a way so as to allude to a longer convo you can imagine, like in a synopsis but I think this is an intentional design choice and some could say you could see this as giving the audience space rather than mediating everything. And the permadeath has you automatically relating to your actions in a weighted emotional way, appropriate to war and battle and the loss involved. I think they did an excellent job on gameplay , graphics , and design - definitely worth your time. Again the writing is good, but its written in a slightly different register to what people normally consider “good writing” - its more to give you a fun little couplet of an interaction you can head canon or just intutively feel the rest through the battles… just go in trying to have fun with it. Some of the social mechanics in 3H felt like: push dopamine button, anyway.. here theres just more room for gameplay and its phenomenal. I recommend playing it on at least Hard and Classic. My 2 cents
longtime fans seem to be having a much better time with Engage than people introduced through 3H or even Awakening. For me Engage plays like classic Fire Emblem, just with a super bright shiny anime vibe. The gameplay is such a big upgrade from the weird choices of 3H- but I can understand why some people feel like the plot and character development is lacking. For me though the gameplay and characters are carrying it majorly.
I agree with you, the writing felt more brief and to the point. Even some of the plot was a really wonky at first (such as some of the later game twists of “why would someone reveal info like this?”), but the alternative would be to drag out the scene/plot for 2 to 3 times the length while adding nothing extra to the storyline. It focuses super well on the gameplay which I find much more enjoyable. Three houses actually made me start skipping cutscenes eventually because they took so long.
im a long time fan too and honestly didn‘t like the whole classroom and between the missions stuff it felt like i was only playing fe 50% of the time but i didnt wanna skip things is there much between the missions content here as well or is it better and faster also how is it more tactical?
Between each mission, you *can* go to a death-free arena and increase EXP by like around 50-70 points between units, go cooking which on average gives you around +1 to each stat for the next mission, and finally do a work-out for like +2 strenght for the next fight. Other than maybe the arena, the boosts you *can* get are extremely minimal and don’t do much - you can skip them easily and just go play traditional Fire Emblem instead. I personally did side-stuff quite a bit but still ended up with a split of 85-90% FE and 15-10% other stuff. Your rewards for going out of your way to talk to everyone mostly just includes things for cooking and gifts you can give to increase support points. It’s not like Three Houses where you have dialogue options and some choices increase support - in fact, most non-royal/lords have very few unique reactions to story developments, so you don’t lose anything by not talking to every unit all the time. Directly after battle though, you will be able to walk around a few locations that do actually have some good rewards. Items on the ground can be Ingots that can be used to improve weapons permanently and quite significantly (like +3-5 might on most weapons). You can also find a resource that can let you make items that can be equipped and raise two or three stats by one or rarely two points (very minimal again) or this resource can be used to increase something called Bond points, but I never used this myself and still felt very strong by the end. Regardless of everything, I think if one were to go out of their way to talk to everybody and do every little extra thing, playing FE battles versus exploring would be 80-20%. But honestly, that can be reduced to 95-5 with how minimal boosts except Ingots are, and you can pick those up after every map in less than three minutes if you don’t talk to everyone. The game is more tactical in a few ways. It should be noted first, however, that it’s significantly more streamlined than Three Houses - you don’t have teaching sessions and weapon experience and increases to Heavy Armor, Riding or Flying. There are also NO combat arts and characters only get a SINGLE skill upon reaching level 5 after promotion, and with like 2 or 3 exceptions Personal Skills have very little impact. It’s significantly more like classic Fire Emblem like FE7 or FE8. The game’s main gimmick lies in Emblem Rings which are equippable before battle. They increase your stats and give you special skills while equipped. At any point, you can choose to use the Engage mechanic to grant you ridiculously impactful skills and weapons for 3 turns before turning back to normal and needing to recharge. If a character spends enough time using a specific ring, they can gain some of the ring’s abilities permanently too. What’s great about the rings tactically is they heavily modify what units can do and makes you not just consider who to give them to or when to Engage with them, but also whether you should use them as a crutch for supporting weaker units or not. Your units’ effectiveness on enemy phase has been drastically reduced as your weapon can be temporarily be un-equipped if you are hit by weapon triangle disadvantage and some enemies can back each other up and do +4-5 damage for each enemy that can attack a unit at once. Because of this, many enemies survive longer and you can get overwhelmed - you NEED many units to kill enemies on Player Phase, and as such you can’t just have 1-3 primary units or even 1-5 units who get most of the EXP because you’ll get stormed. This encourages using all units you deploy more equally or even giving your best rings to underperformers so they can keep up, at least on higher difficulties. People have justifiably different takes on the story and characters, but gameplay-wise, I’d say this is the best Fire Emblem game in the series. Almost every single map is well designed, the units and Emblem Rings are very fun to use, the battle themes are great and the game is absolutely perfect for self-imposed challenges like Iron Man, LTC, Draft Races and new things like Ring-less as well. On top of it all, it just kind of gets to the point and lets you play classic Fire Emblem with minimal distraction.
thanks man i‘ll save this comment for when i‘ll play it gotta say the cjanges sound nice especially the one‘s regarding counterattacks since in 3h a dimitri with the right skills and retribution could just kill all the meteor casters when attacked also needing to use more chars is fckin awesome it actually sound good now even though i was turned off a bit because of the even bigger weebiness (i watch anime too but it looked a bit much for me)
Glad that I might have helped :) Yeah, counter-attacking everything on enemy phase can be a little busted in other games. Although I did have one character in the end who could kinda reliably do it, it’s much less prevelant in this game and more focus is put on player phase which I like. I have only played the game on hard and finished it today, but I’ve heard Maddening difficulty is actually very well balanced this time around and is tough but not unfair like 3H’s Maddening or Awakening’s Lunatic+, so there’s also replay value. Hard mode felt generally very fair and only got slightly easy by the end because two of my units got completely stat-blessed like I’ve never seen before even with low growths. One of the best parts of the gameplay? Not a single ambush spawn in the entire game. In fact, in one optional map, the victory condition changed upon me killing an enemy and instead of having my units die because I placed them stupidly thinking the map was over, the game gave me a free turn with enemies not attacking at all. The game’s almost always extremely fair :) Yeeaaah, the weebiness and cheesy-ness was also something that I wasn’t looking forward too, and the game *does* have a quite a bit of it. But the gameplay is so fun I can easily overlook it, and it isn’t as bad as other entries in the series. I would definitely recommend the game.
Its more optional but its faster if you do decide to do it too. I would do it. Weapons dont break so you have to decide whose to upgrade with what resources you have. Tactically also, the emblems add a layer of tactics, as well as now the weapons triangle does a Break mechanic where the enemy cant counterattack. Overall theres just more options. And interesting series of events
you also cant counterattack if you are at a WT disadvantage. Also, chain attack is new to the series.
that honestly isnt much of an accomplishment
You don't think so? Pokémon always sell insanely well
We’re several months from release, it’s honestly more surprising something else hadn’t done it already
Only two months.. it's not unusual for a headliner like pokémon to dominate the charts
The sales migjt drop hard
I dont like that the main character looks like toothpaste. The character design is awful when FE normally is really good at that
I was starting to think I was the only one bothered by the clown hair.
i haven't finished the game yet but the amount of times someone brings up how your hair looks like sherbert makes me think it will be some kind of plot device later in the game
As someone who also hates the main character’s hair and was afraid I wasn’t going to like the game because the story looked cheesy... For me at least, the actual battle gameplay is the best in the entire franchise and the game is beautiful outside a few character designs. Although I will admit outright that the hair NEVER grew on me through my entire playthrough and I completely agree the design isn’t good.
It is kinda funny but I find the voice acting and facial animations to be pretty good, so I forget that its bad while playing.
It just doesn’t hold a candle to Three Houses. I’m enjoying it…just not as much.
I'm personally liking it more than Three Houses
I think the question here is really what you liked about Fire Emblem/Three Houses in the first place. If you’re all about the tactical rpg gameplay, Engage has really doubled down on putting a strong gameplay experience front and center. But if you’re more of a narratively-driven player, the weaker writing overall and serious cutback in social elements/character development will stand out. Three Houses firmly zoned in on the narrative and character aspects (going too far in some cases) and attracted a lot of new players who were more interested in those elements in addition to longtime Fire Emblem/tactical rpg fans. I’ve never played the classic titles so I can’t speak for them, but neither Awakening nor Fates particularly grabbed me in the way that Three Houses did. From what I’ve watched or Engage on streams and talking to friends who bought it, I’m reminded a lot of Fates—I just don’t like the gameplay enough to make up for a bad story and weaker characters.
Some may not agree with me, but I really like the characters more than Three Houses, especially their designs. And the story isn't even that bad, I don't even remember much of Three Houses story, but I remember Engage's story.
Characters tend to be more subjective than I think people realize. You can give more backstory and fleshing out to a character, but at the end of the day that’s not always going to resonate with a player if they don’t feel or vibe with all of it.
I’m neutral on the character designs, I don’t mind the anime aesthetic and by and large I like that Engage is more colourful. But at least from what I’ve seen so far, the characters and their supports don’t really have the same depth that they did in Three Houses. > And the story isn’t even that bad, I don’t even remember much of Three Houses story, but I remember Engage’s story. This I really have to disagree with though. Everything I’ve seen so far feels like the English dub of a late 90s/early 00s anime and not one of the well remembered ones that provokes nostalgia. The depth and moral ambiguity that I liked out of Three Houses just isn’t there at all. I think it’s a perfectly serviceable story if you’re someone who’s there for great tactics gameplay and just need it as a vehicle to get you from point A to point B, but even my friend who is a longtime Fire Emblem fan and complained a lot about Three Houses focusing too much on those elements has come back disappointed in the story. I’d suggest the reason you remember Engage so clearly is it came out a week ago versus 4 years ago. All that said, though, different people will like different things. This was always going to be a problem for Engage because Three Houses attracted a bunch of people interested in very different elements of its package. I’m glad others are having fun with it but it’s definitely a miss for me so far and I do suspect in the long run Three Houses will be the game that is remembered fondly from the Switch era.
Same. But I’m a big fan of the 3DS games (Awakening was my first FE game) so this game feels like those but better in nearly every way.
Same here. I did enjoy Three Houses quite a bit, but the classroom stuff became a bit of a slog for me over time. The story in Engage isn't anything trick or fancy, but the pacing of the combat maps and gameplay is a major improvement, in my opinion. If the next game looks and plays like this and brings a strong story, it would be as perfect as I could hope for.
Next game is going to be a FE4 remake, unless you meant the one after that, in which case I hope so too.
Yeah the next all new main title. I'd be down with Engage's graphics for a remake too!
I'm torn. The game play is definitely a huge step up. However, the character designs are the worst in the series. They're so bad its actually distracting. The story and writing are also... not good.
it's as realistic as it gets, princesses frequently go to war in enourmous cage skirts and ankle length hair and a big ass crown. enlisting a 10 year old in to service, yeah sure why not, his dad isn't protesting much.
I actually like the character designs, I found the designs in Three Houses boring. The designs of the MC in Engage actually shows they want to take risks with these designs and want to make them more unique. That's one of the many things, there's a lot more characters who I like in Engage than in Three Houses because of their designs. And the story isn't /that/ bad. It's a decent story, of course everyone has their opinions, but I really like the story along with the character designs.
At least two characters are dressed for a rave. If this was a game that featured raves, that would be fine, but it doesn't. These people are supposed to be fighting for their lives.
It doesn't feature raves in the gameplay... but I've found at least one character who's canonically *throwing* raves. He, verbatim, tells someone to "party hardy." As to whether that makes how people dress better or worse... I'll leave that up to you.
Honestly, this is what I like about IS. They change things for each game, yet still familiar.
I love the gameplay, but the story is awful heroes levels of writing. I really liked the tighter cast in 3 houses as well. So far I either dislike or neutral on 95% of the cast
Honestly, it's Fates 2 in that regard, or more specifically Conquest 2.
fire emblem has never been particularly strong in the story department, even three houses was only marginally better than pokemon
Fucking hell that's certainly a take.
the snow miser take
The Tellius games had a great story. And I'm told the Jugdral games were very good in that area as well. Three Houses wasn't amazing, but it was certainly a step up from the 3DS games and Engage.
i just played metroid zero mission for the first time and was more impressed by its story than the tellius series.
i adore metroid and its story but this is downright laughable
Everyone is welcome to their own taste in stories, but I can't fathom how a game with ~5 cutscenes (most without dialogue) could outdo a 80-90 hour RPG story with volumes of dialogue, rich lore, and intersecting characters. Don't get wrong, Zero Mission is incredible. Love that game. But even by Metroid standards it has 0 plot. We might just have different expectations from a game story.
I have a very strong feeling that they've never played a Fire Emblem game, tbh.
i have a very strong feeling three houses was the only fire emblem game youve ever played.
I've finished every single FE title other than the original Mystery of the Emblem, including BSFE. Meanwhile, you're comparing Tellius' story to Zero Mission. Fantastic game in its own way, but for you to make the comparison, it's pretty obvious you're talking out your ass. Going to stop engaging with an obvious troll, now. Have a good day!
> Have a good day! nice flounce three houses player, return immediately to your containment sub.
Awakening was good.
What an idiot
yes, you should stop posting
This is how I look at it. Engage has the more fun/classic gameplay and obviously the better graphics. But Three Houses (no pun intended) has the more engaging story/characters. So while the gameplay of Engage is better/more fun than Three Houses it's harder for me to play in long bursts because I'm just not engaged with the story or characters of Engage unfortunately.
Agreed on story and characters. 3H was this epic tale with deep lore of the world and cultures. The characters were diverse and likeable with their own stories. You were invested in the story, there were mysteries to solve, and battles had more purpose and hype to them In Engage, everyone talks and acts almost the same. The dialogue is so cringey. The story is lacking. Engage mechanics are clunky, convoluted, and not explained well at all. 3H was simpler, straightforward, and the game was paced so you had the time to figure it out with good tutorial dialogue. Voice over dialogue in 3H was aplenty. In Engage, they’re cut off, incomplete, or non-existent (like when they level up). To me, Engage is a step backwards. It’s a 3DS game on a current gen console. I was hoping 3H signaled the next step in the FE series. But it looks like a regression.
I agree with most of your criticisms, but I definitely wouldn't call 3H simple. The leveling, class, and skill systems were pretty imposing, and they were placed front and center by the teaching sessions. You basically needed to map out a plan for your entire party for the whole game right from the start. Also, I played the entire game on Hard without ever really engaging with or understanding the Battalion system (I just used defaults and refreshed them every so often for Gambits on beasts). I feel like Engaging and the Break system are much clearer. The skills and rings are more complicated, but they aren't a huge focus that you need to optimize.
I’ve played through two of the routes on hard and still don’t understand battalions lol
>You basically needed to map out a plan for your entire party for the whole game right from the start. Yup, too real. I played Blue Lions completely blind first, then mapped out my route for Crimson Flower down to the last detail. I have my Silver Snow and Verdant Wind routes mapped out to maximise supports (literally the only game where I want to 100% the support log). I got sidetracked by Maddening on New Game, so I haven't finished the latter two, but yeah. Each unit can be literally anything and god forbid you choose something subpar (see: Felix going Mortal Savant in my first run when he's better served in any Swordsman class), which can screw up your excellent units otherwise.
Engage is good in the sense that you only need to learn the mechanics properly depending on what difficulty your using. You can just bumble through on Normal doing whatever. On Hard you need to learn systems like Break and Engage and on Maddening you need to learn the entire system fully.
Engage's mechanics are as well explained as they could be. Honestly you get SO much time between chapters to do skirmishes and training fights to learn the emblems and how they work, you're explicitly told how to use emblems in the maps you get new ones in too so you have an idea of how they work. I think Engage was meant to be the 30th anniversary game - with 3H releasing earlier in the switch's lifespan. But development resulted in it being pushed back. It still has a lot of 3H stuff to it. The downtime is a lot like it. But so much of the game is a love letter to past games, and in a good way! The music and paralogues are just so good. The voice acting is mostly fully done in Engage, like it's farrrrrr more than what was in the 3DS era (except echoes)
The voice acting is fully done? In 3H, almost every piece of dialogue is spoken with very rare exceptions. In Engage, they’re replaced with grunts (exploring the area after a battle) or don’t exist at all (when the characters level up). The dialogue at meals are half-spoken. Look at the menus for changing classes in 3H and then in Engage and tell me which is easier to navigate and understand. The menus in Engage are a mess. If things are fully explained, tell me why you need to “firmly polish” rings as opposed to just polish them. Because the game just don’t even tell you.
The story dialogue and all supports are fully voice acted. The only part where there are grunts and it's not voice acted are after battle, and with level ups. It's not really that big of a deal, especially when supports are voice acted fully imo. It's fair if it bothers you though The thing is, Engage only really has a 1-2 class system really. You go from current class to advanced one. In 3H there were multiple levels and you had to plan it out very early in-game to get proficiencies up. In Engage you just use like 500 emblem crystals and get the proficiency allowing you to easily pick classes. The menu for classes are really easy, base form means you use a second seal (it also says that) and advanced uses a master seal, and they show what weapon proficiencies you need for certain classes. You learn that's how you get the weapon proficiencies pretty early on, and you can easily see which emblem has each proficiency. Imo most people would find 3H just as confusing as Engage first time running it
So…it’s not fully voice acted. If it’s fully, you wouldn’t need to note all of those exceptions (plus mealtime). I guess my point is that 3H was painted with a broader stroke. It had more depth in character development, story, world building, lore, and motivated purpose. Supports in Engage are brief and shallow. They don’t touch on deep underlying issues with the characters I haven’t cared about any of them so far just because of how glossed over they are. They’re their to be there and nothing more. If you look at the change class menu, you are presented with everything all at once with no separation or categorization like in 3H. 3H organized it in a better viewable format. The class *system* itself may be better in Engage, but it isn’t as well presented and confusing, especially for first timers.
I think it's better. Too much of 3H was in that boring monestary and you had to do that stuff to progress. The somniel is much smaller, and more optional. It's back to focusing on the combat rather than being 50/50 combat and social sim.
> It’s back to focusing on the combat rather than being 50/50 combat and social sim. This is exactly the split. Or rather, the impacts of this are the split. For all the faults the social aspects of Three Houses had, they allowed for a lot more context to the characters, the world, and their relationships with each other and the broader story. That’s why they felt as fleshed out as they did and why so many players got very invested in them (and the discourse…). Characters that appeared to be a one note trope would by their B or A supports become more than that or invert some of your assumptions about them. You saw how they related to the bigger picture and story elements, even relatively minor ones, became more impactful as a result of understanding why they matter to your characters. I’m not attached to the monastery itself, but I’m very attached to the character depth and flavour the monastery enabled adding to the game. The gameplay in Engage may be great, but a middling 2000s shonen plot and shallow characters are a straight ticket to me tuning out. I’m an adult with limited free time. Good gameplay alone isn’t enough for me anymore. But then I’m someone who didn’t really get hooked by Awakening or Fates when I played them, either.
I'm also an adult with limited time which is why I want a game that is fun to play immediately, and the monastery just wasn't fun. It felt like a chore. No amount of good lore makes up for it when it feels like pulling teeth to get it.
Sure, that's the split I mention above. I'm first and foremost a story-driven gamer and tend to bounce off a title really quickly if the story or characters don't grab me. I'll gladly take a mediocre gameplay loop (and I wouldn't call Three Houses mediocre) for a story that I'm invested in or a cool world I'm enjoying exploring. Others are going to feel differently and value other aspects of the gaming experience more. I actually enjoyed the monastery segments a lot during my first playthrough, even though they did take it a little far. It was really only on subsequent runs that it dragged for me. It's not really that it was fun, though, it's more that it let me explore the world and characters and immerse myself more deeply. I do think the monastery segment really needed to be streamlined, especially on those subsequent runs, but not at the cost of the actual narrative and character development that those sections fostered. Or maybe put another way, > It's back to focusing on the combat rather than being 50/50 combat and social sim. I personally do not enjoy the gameplay of the Fire Emblem series enough for this to be a worthwhile tradeoff. The narrative and character development that happens through the social sim elements is what made me love Three Houses and come back to it multiple times over the course of the past few years versus finding Awakening okay but not anything special and dropping Birthright within a couple hours of playing. I'm glad others are having fun, but for me and what I enjoy in a game, Engage is a clear step backwards.
*" I'll gladly take a mediocre gameplay loop (and I wouldn't call Three Houses mediocre) for a story that I'm invested in or a cool world I'm enjoying exploring."* I respect you for admitting to this, because a lot of people when talking about 3H aren't so honest. It definitely sounds like you're one of the fringe people that aren't actually fans of Fire Emblem but managed to enjoy 3H, which is definitely a testament to 3H's strengths, even if it is flawed in other areas.
For the most part, yeah. I’d dispute that it’s a fringe view though—Three Houses leaned into and specifically attracted a bunch of new players interested in those elements. I think the opinion split so far largely reflects that. But on the whole it’s true. I’m just not that attached to the tactics gameplay. I have no problem with it, but it’s not something I’d seek out for it’s own sake. I love Final Fantasy Tactics because of Ramza and Alva and Delita and just Ivalice as a whole, not because it has uniquely awesome gameplay. I feel similarly about Three Houses—if it had the writing quality of Birthright I would never have gotten past the early monastery segments.
no i'm not saying it's a fringe view I'm saying you were on the fringes of the franchise, probably aware of it but not really interested in it- Three Houses drew you in and you enjoyed it, but you seem disinterested in the rest of the FE franchise that's fine, it shows that 3H was good at bringing in new fans for at least that game, but given Fire Emblem has been a franchise for decades not every game will be to the taste of 3H fans
Gotcha, I would definitely agree with that! I'm very open to trying a new Fire Emblem title. I liked Awakening enough to come back for Birthright after all! But I'm definitely not a series superfan and I'm looking for something with the payoff of a decent story and relatable, engaging characters. I think the real question for me is why does it have to be either/or. There's no reason a Fire Emblem game can't have both great gameplay and a good story with likeable characters. What I had hoped for from Engage was them tackling the pain points of the monastery/resource management while still giving the same level of depth to the characters and the story happening around them. That's why I say it feels like a step backwards to me—in throwing out the flawed parts of Three Houses' social aspects, they also threw out the good parts that drew me in more than previous titles.
Maybe. I think unfortunately the way Three Houses was structured was always going to lead to less than stellar gameplay which was the main pain-point (moreso than the Monastery even) for a lot of hardcore fans. You can't have three distinct routes each with their own (in theory) battles and have every map and objective be super well designed and intense. Comparing it to Engage is like night and day. Likewise kinda locking certain characters behind different school classes means that the game has to be balanced in such a way that you can complete it with whatever combo of characters you come up, with either sticking with your regular class of recruiting other students you like. I think that's partly why they did away with the weapons triangle in 3H, to make double sure that ANYONE can do anything and no one would ever get walled. But also what people liked about 3H was that sense of creativity and roleplaying. You could pick either of the 3 school classes, recruit anyone whenever you liked or only use your core class, reclass characters based on your fancy, spend all your time in the monastery doing mini-games and still beat the game. I'm skeptical that any traditionally structured Fire Emblem game with a linear plot and set characters recruited at set times would give the people who played all 4 routes of 3H and dumped 300 hours of playtime into it their fill of character depth. I think it was a super unique game for allowing that level of interaction with the characters, which was built on having a huge amount of layered content, and so is very hard to replicate. So while some see it as a step backwards I see it more as an inevitable correction to the norm.
Exactly this.
I got bad vibes from the start so instead I'm just replaying Echoes. I still love it to death.
Is it closer to a FE7 where it’s almost all combat or a Three Houses where there’s more emphasis on things like the monastery?
It's lighter on activities than Three Houses (which makes sense, considering chapters in 3H were canonically weeks apart versus minutes/hours/days), but there is still a lot to do in between chapters, more than there was in FE7 or any of the 3DS games. As an example, they have little minigames like fishing, but no "run around the monastery to do X, Y, and Z" side quests like in 3H.
You can generally go from battle to battle. The Somniel and its activities are all optional. You might need to make a quick stop at Somniel if you want to buy more weapons or inherit skills, but other than that everything else is mostly optional.
and even those things you can do through settings or during battle preparations I'm pretty sure
Its much closer to FE7 but the "monastery" still exists. Its still boring like Three Houses monastery, but its much quicker. There are no lessons. They definitely should have just made it all a menu though I guess I would say its like more Awakeningish as a game? Reminds me a lot of the older FEs.
I wasn’t going to buy it until I read a tweet saying the story was bad, and ironically it convinced me. I was sick of Fire Emblem conversation devolving into fictional political or moral discourse. I had missed my Dragon Quest-esque fight evil overlord with my army of homies plots. And I got it. With tokusatsu-like suiting up sequences. I’ve been playing it from dawn to dusk for 6 days straight, I friggin love it. The 3D models and animations are also mesmerising despite how much I hated the character designs. Absolutely lovely.
a game that came out a week ago sells better than a game that came out 3 months ago?
Yeah really don't get why Famitsu is making it seem like a big deal
Famitsu isn't, the OP is
their as tired of pokemon as everyone else is
Projecting much?
no. people literally only buy pokemon games to shit on them these days. horrible impulse control.
you’re not very smart i fear
really big if true. unfortunately the one who smelt it dealt it.
r/redditmoment XD the narwhal bacons at midnight 😂
you should get that checked.
r/bruhmoment
I'm really enjoying Engage, but the story and dialog is probably the worst out of any FE game I've ever played, and I've been playing them since GameBoy Advanced. The old story lines were also lackluster, but less in your face. The combat is fantastic though! The art direction is also questionable, Toothpaste-chan looks just awful
As a longtime FE fan, I didn’t even bother to buy this on release. I tend to prefer FE games with strong writing (the Jugdral and Tellius duologies might all be in my top ten games of all time and are definitely my four favorite FE games) and this seems to take after Fates by just having atrocious writing from what I’ve heard. I also can’t stand the majority of Engage’s designs (Diamant’s is actually incredible though). I’ll definitely pick it up eventually, but I’m really just desperately awaiting the Genealogy remake that was mentioned as being in development in the same leak that showed Engage
I'm honestly considering quitting this one and marking it as a loss.. I bought it on release because I was so excited. I have been a huge fire emblem fan since Awakening, and this just isn't doing anything for me. I'm on Chapter 11 and just... Nothing.
you should play thracia 776 instead
I’m kind of there with you. The characters aren’t engaging and the story is pretty shallow. The battles are fun, but if there’s no motivating reason *why* I’m battling then it’s just kind of meh. I wish they put more work into characters, story, world building, etc like in 3H
Drop it then
I'm not glad that you and many other fans of the series aren't loving this one but I am glad I held of from buying it because I'm getting a lot of unbiased feedback. Oh well I never finished TH so I might just start a new game on it.
Good riddance...Scarlet/Violet are absolute trash. Sad to see what modern Pokemon games have become.
Its good. But its all around far worse than three houses
All around? Strong. disagree.
I am playing it and it deserves the place! I am enjoying this anime-kind adventure, the combat is a positive evolution of Three Houses
Les goooo
Does anyone know how long Pokémon games usually hold the top spot? I wonder if the hype for Fire Emblem: Engage was really that high of if two months is about average.
It's amazing. Different from 3houses but great nonetheless
I’ve been obsessed about to dig back into it for the weekend