A quite delightful strategy RPG offering some of the best gameplay in the post-Awakening portion of the series. The emblem ring system let me feel like I could tinker away at my units to satisfaction, and almost all of the maps are very interesting to play. Hell, I’m into the character designs!

Unfortunately, this is sandbagged with some of the worst cutscenes I’ve seen in a video game. The body animations (such as the very theatrical hands-on-hips pose every female character does) feel out of sync with the English dialogue, and the love of constant camera movement for every cut highlights that every background is a static image. It’s ugly, and it caused me to put the game down at least twice, for months. This is a shame, because not only is the game really fun, some of the later story sequences kinda hit me in a way I didn’t expect.

Also, a lot of the characters are unmemorable, but Alfred, Lapis, and Rosado are personal faves.

The gameplay is really tight; there's a lot of customization involved with your various units and the Emblem Rings that fundamentally alter or reinforce their playstyle. The levels are really good too, and if you want to grind endlessly, the game gives you the tools to have a lot of fun doing so. That said, the narrative is hilariously messy and the aesthetic is all over the place. They really went all-out on the character designs and visuals, and not necessarily in a way that I enjoyed. Still, this is a great tactics game and should satisfy anyone who likes Fire Emblem's turn-based action.

I'll admit first and foremost, I saw the leaks before release, I saw the trailers for this game, and I thought it looked like absolute dogshit! I was terrified to see where Fire Emblem was headed with this, and lord knows I wasn't anywhere close to interested in those avatar designs. I thought it looked like complete and utter ridiculousness, but... time went on, and it grew on me. As wheatie does, the game released and I saw a few clips of it floating around on different platforms. It looked ridiculous. Almost... intentionally so?

The story is terrible, yeah, of course, I think that's been made abundantly clear by everybody, but I can't help but smile at it still. Everything about Fire Emblem Engage is silly, from its writing, to its character designs, to just its whole damn premise, it's absurd! And yet, they seem to know that! So instead of desperately trying to claw its way into a dark and brooding story, it almost felt like they were more leaning into the absurdity of what they had. This isn't a game you're supposed to take seriously, and I fuckin' love it.

Looking past that, though, as a Fire Emblem in gameplay, it does a stellar job. I don't feel the need to go over what everyone else already has countless times before, general consensus seems to be shockingly positive regarding the map design and the gameplay, but I also really enjoyed some of the paralogues, getting to revisit maps from the older games and even getting to walk around them somewhat freely after the fight's over. That's something I'd also like to talk about, because good god this game is so fucking pretty! Maybe I'm just surprised after having played Three Houses for so long and staring at its boring and repetitive maps so many times, but even besides that, the hub worlds like the Somniel or the post-battle, fully modeled maps, I was absolutely astounded by just how beautiful Engage was to look at. Could very well be the prettiest game on the Switch, helped by its already vibrant and colorful/flashy design everywhere else.

Now combine those beautiful atmospheres with a just as beautiful soundtrack, pure bliss. I spent so much time in the Somniel just spacing out and wandering the area, listening to whichever song fit the time, and at this point I think it's going to stay with me for the next while. The serenity that comes with these tracks is something I find scarcely matched in other media. Shit, I'm listening to them even now, writing this review, thanks to this cool little compilation I found of all of 'em. That's not to say the other tracks aren't amazing as well. Being as obsessed with this series as I have been for the last eight years or so, it was more than exhilarating listening to the throwbacks they whipped up for all of the Emblem Trial paralogues, or the slow and gratifying buildup of Last Engage at the end, to be followed shortly after by a lovely vocal track for the credits roll, among god knows how many others.

Engage was a stunning, whimsical, and just overall fun experience, in every sense of the word. I regret being so doubtful of this game at first, and I especially regret taking 14 entire months to finish it (oops). It's, as I said, absurd and ridiculous the whole way through, and I've learned to appreciate that sort of thing so much more over the years. I can't call it my favorite Fire Emblem, Sacred Stones has that nostalgia (and GBA) bias over me, but this was still a marvelous love letter to one of my favorite franchises ever, even despite some of its more prominent shortcomings.

"camp" as the kids say

Honestly, this Fire Emblem is very beautiful and its music is spectacular, but apart from that, the game is bad. There's no other way to put it. The story is very weak; it couldn't be more cliché, and the interactions between characters are too few and quite bland. Not to mention that the characters treat you like a deity, which often makes the dialogues seem strange. It's the worst FE game in a long time. I won't say more because I know this game is merely a commemorative one for FE, which is probably why it has this classic storyline reminiscent of the early FE games and a linear plot.

I played this game for the first time through a draft format and had a good bit of fun with it! I think the last few maps can be especially draining if you don't know about micaiah + warp/rewarp to skip through them quickly, but once I found how broken that was the experience got a lot better for me. There's a lot of cool options and plenty of units to play around with and throw them on, so maybe a draft wasn't the ideal starting point, but regardless I think the emblems are a great system to keep any units relevant and ensure you have the power to get through any map!

While I do think there's better written entries, I don't think the writing is all as bad as people say. I'm not gonna lie as an FE4 fan and say I was fully engaged at the end of the day, but it still has some nice moments and I think the characters in supports manage to not be as reliant on their One Trope as some other entries when you get them to higher ranks. That being said, there are a few that from the random C ranks in arena fighting I got to check out who make it seem like it's a bit of a roulette on how hard they rely on their weird personality trait, so it could be a tiny bit of a grab bag.

Running around the somniel is fun, but for your own sanity unless you're a minmax freak don't partake in every activity after every mission, it gets so tiring.

This game didn’t leave a very good impression on me at all and it continued to get worse as the game went on. The gameplay is fantastic and so fun but I value games for their story and Engages story is just short of abysmal. I think I liked about two characters with the rest being cringey weird and bizarre but not in a good way. The story had nothing interesting going for it, with a lot of the story beats being pathetically lacklustre, dragged out and again, bizarre. Worst villains, main character, cast and story I’ve ever experienced in an FE game.

I would have ranked higher up if it weren’t for the sour taste the last 2 chapters left in my mouth when I returned a year later to finish it. They constantly spam enemy reinforcements close to your units as a way of penning you into loads of turns just to drag out gameplay. This was especially frustrating as I could kill enemies with no problem, but because of the sheer amount of them they whittled me down in time and destroyed any enjoyment I had in the first hour.

Overall my least favourite FE game, the gameplay is fun but I can get that elsewhere in other games.

While the writing does feel like a step down (especially many of the support conversations), the game feels great to play. Lots of customisation options for units, and the further use of Emblems is a cool addition. I am also a sucker for "Oh, a reference I understand" which the game has quite a bit of.

It also had possibly the funniest title drop I've seen in a game.

Colgate-chan fights on.

Fire Emblem Engage. Got really, really into Fire Emblem right before its release, playing much of the series in a feverish pitch with this game's release being the climax. Was it worth it? Sure was. One of my favorite Femblems.

Gameplay? Fantastic. The difficulty of the Maddening mode has hands-down the best difficulty pacing in the series; they really got it with this one. It's enough of a toothy challenge right off the bat that always feels hard enough, and it keeps pace with you even as you gain more and more tools to deal with its challenges. It contrasts with Three Houses Maddening, which is comically difficult in the beginning with your do-nothing scrub kids until they grow into their own and it gets much easier. Pretty great last maps, though. It also contrasts with Conquest's Lunatic difficulty, which punches your face in from the start and every mission is a fight for your life. Yeah, Conquest is pretty great, too.

The systems of simple character customization with emblem ring skills and the emblems themselves were really fun. I was worried that the game would be a juggernaut-fest of steamrolling the enemy with superpowered transforming emblem units (this can still happen but only if you really know what you're doing), but was pleasantly surprised at just how fun the emblem engaging mechanics were. The series fanservice was pretty nice, too, having the player take on some of the hardest maps from the old games.

Other production value things - great soundtrack with its dynamic battle themes, excellent animation with throwbacks to GBA battle animations, the previous peak of the series, and some really nice optimization. The game actually runs well on the switch, which is a real shocker.

What I didn't like as much is pretty much what everyone else didn't like, the story and the character designs. The story is Fine, it's a campy Marvel story that I was checked out of and kind of enjoyed the villain's motivations metaphorically as a Femblem gamer who just like me fr. It had hype moments, so what more could I ask for. Oh, I know - less text. The game had so much text and said so little with it! Man!

The character designs. Many will kvetch that they are too "anime," too "weeby," because, well, Fire Emblem has never been animesque! Anyway, Mika Pikazo's art owns, and I like some of the really exaggerated designs. Seeing Celine flip around in a giant poofy onion dress and platform shoes is the funniest and best thing. The problem is, there's no cohesion. Like, none. No one looks like they live where they're from, no one looks like they inhabit the same world, and nothing looks real. They feel like a bunch of gacha game character designs slapped together, and that's pretty much how they were made - IS asked Pikazo to just go and design 50 characters and bada-bing-bada-boom here we go. Bring us back to Echoes... or at least, Thracia...

Anyway, great strategy RPG