Fire Emblem Engage opts for a more classic version of the Fire Emblem experience, with a mix of deep strategic combat, quirky characters and goofy fan-service, but doesn’t try to really remake or refine the experience in a meaningful way. The upcoming Fire Emblem game is largely a celebration of the franchise as a whole, with numerous characters and maps from Fire Emblem games making an appearance through the new Emblem Ring system and accompanying Paralogues. However, because the game leans into what has made the franchise so appealing over the course of the last 25 years, it fails to really rise above the franchise’s history or innovate gameplay at all. The result is a game that’s enjoyable but safe, an experience that sticks to the hits instead of trying to build on what’s come before to create a new experience.
Fire Emblem Engage is set on the continent of Elyos, which is dominated by four countries living in relative peace. At the start of the game, players take over Alear, a Divine Dragon and living god, who has just woken up from a thousand year slumber caused by injuries during a conflict with the Fell Dragon Sombron, a snake-headed demon-like dragon. Over the course of the game, Alear learns that his awakening is tied to the Fell Dragon’s rebirth in the northern country of Elusia. In order to defeat the dragon, Alear and his allies must collect a dozen Engage Rings from various countries, with each ring possessing the spirt of a hero from another world and granting its viewers new abilities.
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If you’ve played a Fire Emblem game besides the 2019 game Fire Emblem: Three Houses, you are likely familiar with the combat systems and mechanics at the heart of the game. Combat is dictated by the all-important Weapons Triangle which grants advantage when wielding a certain kind of weapon against users of another kind of weapon. In Fire Emblem Engage, the Weapon Triangle most importantly deals the Break condition, which prevents a defender from counter-attacking for the rest of the round. Other standbys from previous games make a return, such as bow users being able to down most flying units in a single shot, while unarmed attackers can now Break dagger users, magic users, and bow users.
The Weapon Triangle really dictates the pace of combat – the AI will always take advantage of leaving a unit vulnerable, so most rounds of combat are rather methodical with players pushing enemy lines back with stronger units while healers and ranged units remain in the rear for support. This is aided along by a series of mostly open and unoriginal maps, which gives little room for alternative strategies, especially when playing one of the harder modes in which your units die permanently when they fall on the battlefield.
As such, it’s really the new Engage system that really lends room for customization. Wearing an Engage ring grants a unit access to a temporary merging with the Engage spirit, which grants that unit bonus attacks, access to more powerful weapons, and other extra abilities. As players build their relationship between units and the Engage rings they wear, they unlock new passive abilities and buffs. Players can freely equip rings with units at the start of every combat, but each unit has a separate Engage level with individual rings. So, if you want to unlock a ring’s full abilities, you need to send a unit into combat with the same Engage ring many times. Complicating matters is that eventually players can “inherit” skills from various Engage rings that can be equipped and used even when they aren’t wearing a ring. So, players will need to decide whether to fully commit to a unit/Engage ring combo or spread a beneficial Engage ring out among several units so they can all inherit a particularly beneficial skill.
Of course, the other major draw to the Fire Emblem games are the characters themselves, which have always brought the game a certain degree of goofy charm. While the characters of the 2019 game Fire Emblem: Three Houses had surprisingly complex backstories that occasionally intersected with the main storyline, the characters of Fire Emblem Engage are largely one-note. The character support conversations bring out some additional characterization when units are paired with the right character, but I was honestly surprised about just how vapid and disappointingly basic the personalities of many of the characters are. While the character designs are mostly better than those found in Fire Emblem: Three Houses, you have to work a bit to really discover the charm of the characters, which is something that Three Houses seemed to showcase with ease.
The pace in which the game adds characters is also something of a letdown – when playing in Casual mode (or when being cautious in harder modes), the game adds new units at a pace of two or three new units per storyline scenario, with the new characters often at a higher level or having a more advanced class than current units. Unless your units are actively dying throughout the game, you’ll have little incentive to level up an early game character, although players will at least have the option to do so through a variety of optional skirmishes and fights.
While I might have some issues with the rather light character work and overall lack of imagination in Fire Emblem Engage, I will say that this game is easily the most gorgeous and cleanest-looking Fire Emblem game yet. It’s truly stunning how much of an upgrade Fire Emblem Engage’s graphics are compared to its immediate predecessor Three Houses, which was a perfectly fine game to look at. The fight animations are super smooth and I appreciated how much detail you could see in the characters even when viewing them on the overworld map. This is definitely a graphical treat – the best-looking Fire Emblem game ever made by far.
As a fan of the Fire Emblem series, I enjoyed the new game for what it was. The story isn’t exactly original, the gameplay isn’t exactly innovative, and there’s perhaps a bit too much emphasis on nostalgia (nostalgia that English language fans can’t even truly appreciate, given how many Fire Emblem games didn’t get released outside of Japan). However, the game is a treat to view and the combat is just challenging enough to keep you on the edge of your seat even if the same handful of tactics seem to work on every map. Fire Emblem Engage neither stands above the other Fire Emblem games nor does it fall below them. It firmly sits in the middle of the pack, which should be good enough for most fans of the franchise but might not appeal to those who haven’t really experienced the franchise before.
Rating: 3.5 out of 5
Fire Emblem Engage comes out on January 20th on the Nintendo Switch. It was reviewed on a Nintendo Switch OLED with a review code provided by the publisher.
