The Fire Emblem.
Over the past three decades, Fire Emblem has proved to be one of Nintendo’s most consistent and reliable franchises. From its standard tactical mainline series to action-focused spin off’s, to earning over a billion dollars on mobile. Fire Emblem might not have the wider appeal of Nintendo’s biggest titles, but it’s a series that many still hold dear.
While Fire Emblem Three Houses was largely successful for Nintendo, it is Fire Emblem Heroes, its mobile title that is easily its most successful entry yet, amassing over 18 million downloads since its release back in 2017. So, when Fire Emblem Engage was first announced, I wasn’t surprised to see some of that title’s gacha-based systems at play. While these systems don’t impress as much as I think they could, it’s sadly the character work, story, and dialogue here that hold this title back.
Engage confidently feels one step ahead of its previous entries in its combat and visuals, but about five steps back in almost everything else. Now, that will certainly vary on what you are wanting from a Fire Emblem experience, but I feel that I had far more fun with Three Houses due in large part to its memorable cast and story than anything I found here in Engage. When I think back to Awakening, Fates, and Three Houses, I made emotional connections with those characters because the game made them feel important to me.
Where I feel that a lot of this comes from is how absent most of the cast is during key story moments. You’ll have brief interactions with your companions between missions, but nearly all story cutscenes feature only a small handful of the entire cast. And, should you not employ those specific characters in your squad, it detaches you significantly from becoming invested in your team.
Where this continues to fall apart is how abrupt and unfinished the actual conversations you have with your team or those they have amongst themselves. This further presents no real reward for the bonds that grow between one another. Conversations are largely nonsense and tend to only pay attention to their core personality traits than actually having something important to say. Engage simply doesn’t pull you in towards its cast in any meaningful way. In Three Houses I couldn’t wait to talk to my team, whereas in Engage I never found enough reason to bother, and that’s unfortunate.
Engage has you taking on the role of the Divine Dragon, Alear, who has woken up from a thousand-year rest. While this may be a moment of celebration for those who worship you, you soon find out that an ancient evil has also awoken from a deep slumber, spreading its influence and enemy forces across this once-peaceful land. And as it turns out, you have amnesia, unable to remember anything before you mysteriously fell into this long rest.
While the payoff to what is locked behind that amnesia is a decent enough concept, the better aspects of the story only really start to pick up within the last few chapters, making for a largely uninteresting road to get there. While Engage might have the best-looking cutscenes of the entire series, the narrative elements on display don’t quite hold up as well, making for my least favorite story I’ve played of the series.
While you’ll soon build friendships and allegiances with neighboring nations, thus building out your army, the pace at which the Divine Dragon just accepts these unknown nations as allies without much thought can, at times, feel like a narrative conceit to simply move the story forward and build your forces up. While there is a reason as to why we should trust them, there isn’t much here earned through Alear themself, making them far too trusting for their own good as they makes friendships that never feel genuine. This is on top of various character turns where you have to suspend some disbelief at the events that are transpiring for the sake of earning more characters and moving the story forward.
The main mechanic to Engage is through the use of Emblem Rings. These rings hold the essence of previous Fire Emblem protagonists such as Marth, Roy, Celica, and Byleth. These rings are gained, stolen, lost, and returned throughout the story, giving you time to grasp their power before being overwhelmed with too many options at once. Each Emblem Ring will also have their own quests that increase their bond level maximum, it’s just a shame that every narrative structured around those quests is the exact same concept.
And, since you often won’t have enough rings to outfit your whole party, you can use their power to fashion similar bond rings, comprised of characters from their own adventures. This is done via a gacha system built on obtaining different rarities, similar to Fire Emblem Heroes; however, without spending real money. These rings are weaker but provide stat bonuses and the ability to gain SP, a currency used to unlock perks gained from bonding with the Emblem Rings, such as more health, speed, or defense.
Emblem Rings can be equipped to any hero, granting them options and weapons they wouldn’t normally learn or have on their own as well as a wealth of powers such as allowing an archer to hit any target on the map regardless of distance, a strong teleporting strike, to attacking multiple spaces at once with a large energy blast. These rings really open up variety as you can use them to fill in gaps that some characters may face due to how limited their options can be due to lacking certain weapon proficiencies. While they can feel like a gimmick at times, they really do service gameplay extremely well and don’t feel too overpowered for those still looking for a challenge.
The characters you recruit are bright, colorful, and vibrant, which all benefit greatly from the Switch OLED’s impressive screen. Many of the designs were created by artist and vtuber designer, Mika Pikazo. While many have been split on the multicolor look of Alear, I didn’t mind it too much apart from the female Alear’s hair just being a bit too much at times. While I don’t think Engage will have many characters that stand the test of time like some previous entries, I did find a few favorites in Goldmary and Merrin, even if I didn’t care for much of their dialogue.
After each battle, you can wander about the battlefield, talking to characters and collecting resources you’ll use to create culinary dishes or weapon enhancements. You can also invest into each nation which will grant additional resources, hub-location costumes, as well as being able to adopt animals that you find in those post-match skirmishes. These all contribute to earning valuable resources that will benefit you in some way.
While the concept of wandering the map is an interesting one, it’s an idea that ends up feeling somewhat hollow in that characters usually only have a single line of dialogue and most of those resources could have just been a mission reward instead of having to run around the map to collect the glowing objects you see scattered on each end of the environment. It’s a neat idea but can feel like filler in most cases.
When not in battle, you’ll retreat back to the Somneil, a floating city where the resurrected evil cannot reach you. This is where you can feed and train your units, take in conversations, purchase new gear, upgrade to new classes, as well as take in a few mini-games, such as Wyvern racing, or a few fitness and fishing orientated activities. You can run around and collect resources, purchase gifts to win over your favorites, or dress everyone up and pretend that the Somniel is one big beach party.
There is also a feature where a random character will wake up the Divine Dragon when you rest, which doesn’t really serve any purpose. There is also a weird pet named Sommie that you can feed and pet, and while it can help you out in the mini-games and give you a few resources, it feels like a half-baked idea that might find appeal to certain players but doesn’t really contribute to much. In fact, Sommie reflects how I feel about most of the Somneil location, it can offer you rewards for interacting with it, but those rewards don’t really feel worth the hassle and some of this location can feel like a chore to take in.
The Somneil is also the only place where you’ll really have any sort of engagement with your team, apart from story sequences and the post-battle moments. It’s also here where you’ll upgrade the bonds between your party and each of the respected Emblem Rings. These conversations are pretty awkward and are generally just a single line of dialogue from each party, making them feel very abrupt and uninteresting. It’s a shame since many of these characters have not made an appearance to Fire Emblem fans outside of Japan, so seeing these iconic characters in such a shallow and brief series of conversations just feels wasteful.
While I have been heavily critical of the way in which Engage handles its characters, it nonetheless offers what could be the best feeling combat in the series, with one pretty annoying problem that I’ll bring up shortly. Still, battles felt remarkably balanced when taking on skirmishes that were at my current level or maybe one or two levels above where I was. Granted, this challenge will vary on the difficulty setting you’ve chosen, but normal was more or less fairly easy from time to time, so you may want to bump up the difficulty if you are wanting a challenge.
With somewhat limited deployment slots available on certain maps, you’ll often come to rely on a few key players that you find to fit your team and playstyle. I often rolled with as many archers as I could as I found the ranged combat they offered could destroy almost anything that came my way, especially as the enemy would hound me with waves of wyvern riders that I could often one-shot with Etie, Fogado, or Alcryst with almost no resistance.
With levels being based on character level requirements, I often had to neglect almost half of my roster to keep those I relied on leveled appropriately alongside my main hero. This is the annoyance I mentioned earlier and remained with me throughout the entire game. While you can train back at the Somneil, you can only do that three times each visit and their training opponent is always random, often pitting them against someone twice their level, resulting in barely any experience gains as they were destined to lose.
This resulted in returning back to the Somneil after every battle to train lower-level characters and barely making any progress with them. Eventually, I had to leave more than half my roster on the bench as I just couldn’t do anything with them apart from excessive grinding in the Tower of Trials mode, which is meant to farm resources to upgrade your Emblem Ring weapons. While I adore the combat, the idea of grinding away to maybe use these other characters felt like a waste of time and thus, they remained benched as I focused on the roughly dozen or so fighters that were high enough in level to remain dependable in a fight. I also found it odd that during training their opponents wouldn’t gain experience for the fight as well, something that is also shared through chain attacks not benefitting all those involved.
Combat still follows the tried and true formula Fire Emblem has been known for. You move characters around on a grid-like environment, each having various stats that affect how far they can move or if their mount can fly over inaccessible parts of the map where on-foot troops have to detour around. Some maps have certain gimmicks that I adored, such as having to dodge special attacks every few rounds, using light sources to reveal parts of the map, or the rising and lowering of water that would limit my ability to move around quickly. These moments of variety don’t happen too often, but were pleasantly varied and really caused me to shake up my strategy.
Weapons each have differences in their range of either attacking horizontally, vertically or even diagonally, allowing for some clean hits without the enemy being able to counter. And, if you are close enough to your other companions, you can perform chain attacks to sneak in an extra bit of damage, something the enemy can do as well. Each weapon as usual will have the chance to miss, and by raising certain stats through items or class changes, you can raise those stats to be able to avoid incoming strikes as well, making you almost untouchable.
Fire Emblem Engage relies greatly on the triangle weapon system more so than previous entries via the sword/axe/lance system. And by exploiting this system you can hurt enemies with greater damage and even prevent them from countering during that round, making it a solid choice to employ a wide range of attackers instead of just one general type, even if, as I’ve mentioned, archers really tore up most enemies like they were nothing. Still, having that balance really helps.
Each skirmish you take part in succeeds a lot due to some really fantastic level design, allowing you to funnel enemies for an easy kill or often having the ability to flank them and hide in areas that increase your avoid stat. Maps often split up your team, causing you to play around with placement, your roster, and make any last-minute changes to who has what Emblem Ring. Even despite some simplicity here with Engage in contrast to previous entries, combat feels just as deep as ever before.
Another feature towards combat is the Draconic Time Crystal, granting you the ability to rewind a move you were not happy with or an entire round due to the enemy killing a few of your troops. In normal difficulty, you have unlimited charges, so it’s a system that you can fully exploit to victory. In harsher difficulties, you have a set limit of ten charges, making you really analyze when and where to use it.
Every time I took to the battlefield, I forgot about most of the game’s problems as the level design was just incredible, the Embem Ring powers kept battles fresh, and the visuals just really created fun scenarios with flashy attacks and often gorgeous locations. The improvements to balancing and weapon systems made battles constantly feel rewarding and I enjoyed just taking in the random skirmishes that filled the map for hours on end. Again, the game has several issues that I feel are considerably weaker than some of the previous games, but everything that takes place in and around combat to be the strongest it's ever been.
Lastly, Fire Emblem Enage does offer some multiplayer features that take advantage of the Nintendo Switch Online membership. The most noticeable feature are the spirits of the fallen, which are displayed in-game as a purple swirling marker on the map showing where other players have died. These spaces reward you with EXP, bond levels, and items, should you place a character there. Secondly are the game’s PVP and Co-op modes that allow you to create battlefields and take on AI teams or work alongside your friends in a few quick skirmishes.
With each new entry in the series, the visual side of Fire Emblem continues to make strides, and Engage is no different. Characters look great, and the various cutscenes are absolutely gorgeous. I do have small issues with new class outfits not appearing in some conversation moments, but it’s a small gripe that you’ll continue to notice, especially as their new outfits are really great depending on the class.
Environments all have a good variety, especially as you continue to unlock new areas for skirmishes that prevent you from grinding away at the same few layouts again and again. Some locations really pop in color and everything is very readable in how you can progress and where navigation makes sense, which is great for being able to plan out paths and options in advance.
Fire Emblem Engage is certainly not my favorite of the series, but I quite enjoyed the bulk of it. There are a lot of great ideas here in regards to combat, but feel it disappoints in making me care about its cast. With stronger writing and better systems to keep my benched characters viable, I think this could have easily been one of my favorites of the series, but that sadly isn’t the case here.
What you make of this entry will certainly vary depending on what you want from the series in general, whether you want a stronger focus on combat or how you interact with your companions. The structure of the school in Three Houses felt like it gave me a purpose for how I handled both combat and character work, and that’s something I don’t feel is as strong here cohesively. Engage is a solid entry for the series due to its combat, but for those looking to dive deep into its ever-expanding roster, your mileage may vary.
Developer - Intelligent Systems. Publisher - Nintendo. Released - January 20th, 2023. Available On - Nintendo Switch. Rated - (T) Fantasy Violence, Mild Language, Mild Suggestive Themes. Platform Reviewed - Nintendo Switch OLED. Review Access - Fire Emblem Engage was purchased for review.
Jeff is the original founder of Analog Stick Gaming. His favorite games include The Witcher III, the Mass Effect Trilogy, Hi-Fi Rush, Stellar Blade, Hellbade: Senua’s Sacrifice, and the Legend of Heroes series, especially Trails of Cold Steel III & IV.