Being the second Fire Emblem game to release on the Switch, and with its predecessor, Three Houses, being a nominal departure for the series in both gameplay and narrative, the reception of Engage seems to be somewhat split within the community. Many are currently labeling it as another Fates, meaning poor story and characters, but great gameplay and map design. The series has certainly evolved as it has gained popularity, the recent opening up of the fanbase in the face of what could have been an untimely conclusion has led Intelligent Systems to make appeals towards certain narrative and character tropes series veterans may continue to struggle with. The increasing “anime-ification” of Fire Emblem has ratcheted up with each entry since Awakening, culminating now in what some consider an overly dramatic, cliche-riddled narrative populated by a lifeless cast of overly designed characters more suitable for cereal mascots than European-inspired nobles at war. But it’s important to remember that Fire Emblem has always been this to an extent. Even from the beginning, its origins in high fantasy and Shonen-style scenarios and characters were prominent and appealing aspects of the series. Even by what some consider the series’ narrative peak in Path of Radiance and Radiant Dawn, melodrama and iterative genre tropes are highly appreciated elements fans look forward to as a core part of the Fire Emblem experience alongside the unique and mechanically compelling tactical gameplay the series pioneers. That being said, Engage does not begin all too auspiciously, and instead seems to affirm the frustrated criticisms lobbied towards the series’ uninspired repetition of vapid character archetypes, rehashed doomsday plots, and braindead narrative twists all too common to the genre by now.

Let’s start with the protagonist, Alear (or Toothpaste-chan, as I’ve seen some lovingly call them). As the central figure of Engage, and the first aspect of the game we’re put in control of, Alear is our first impression of this latest Fire Emblem entry, and at first blush they appear to embody the worst of everything the post-Awakening Lords have come to represent. The trouble with a player-insert avatar is that they often demand a certain degree of ambiguity so that the player may project onto them whatever personality they see most fitting. This was at its most extreme when the feature was first implemented, not only allowing you to name the protagonist (as all subsequent entries have also done) but to customize their entire look and sound as well. They try to get around this issue in Awakening by putting Robin (the avatar character) in the backseat for most of the game, having the alternate lord Chrom take the helm for the majority of the narrative. Alear is not quite the same as Robin—you can’t change their design, as much as you might wish to make it anything else—but they do share one played-out trait that really frustrates early attempts to connect with the character: amnesia. This old warhorse of a character trope has been around longer than gaming itself, but it’s still utilized as a lazy means of keeping the audience in the dark about certain pre-story details by essentially “blanking the slate” of the main protagonist without good reason beyond narrative convenience. It hurts the character in question more often than not because it leaves them with no personality, no backstory or interests, things which then have to develop over the course of the game instead. Unlike Awakening, Alear does eventually achieve some distinguishing characters and agency of their own, but it takes a long time and a lot of contrived reveals to garner some proper sympathy. I suppose that’s not entirely true, as there’s a scene quite early on where the voice actors for the character (more so the male variant than the female, but I’ll get to that) get to express a lot of emotion over a devastating familial death. Again, not a very original scenario, even just within Fire Emblem, but the acting sells it more than the cliched writing can, and if you’re down for some bombastic melodrama it’s compelling enough to start.

We can’t talk about Alear without talking about their design, however, which, if nothing else, certainly leaves an impression as no other Lord has before. The split design of their hair and eyes, one half red the other half blue, is a culmination of the growing extremity design philosophy of characters has been gaining since the 3DS era. As mentioned earlier, these more modern/fantastical character designs have always existed to one degree or another (brightly-colored hair, for instance, is hardly an innovation of recent games), but there’s no denying that Engage has taken it to new levels of incredulity, with Alear not even being the worst of the bunch. I’ll admit, the look grew on me over the course of the game. I suppose it’s hard to be totally unagreeable to anything you’ve spent more than 90 hours with on some consistent basis, but it also helps that there was eventually a narrative purpose for the garish dual appearance of the character. As far as costuming goes, generally I think it’s good across the board. Most maintain their ties to the European-inspired wear of the Medieval period the series takes large swaths of its inspiration from. There are some, of course, that significantly clash with the otherwise tame looks of the rest of the cast, but Alear’s outfit (at least in their base class) works, with some exceptions in the female design. There’s definitely a bias as I personally played through the game with Male Alear, but almost everything about Female Alear’s character puts me off greatly. The lifeless expression of her eyes, the physics-defying floor length hair, the plainness of the voice actresses’ performance, and her disproportionate bust all seem geared towards appealing to certain anime archetypes that, if not outright infantilizing, are designed to make the character appear as impressionable as possible without simply making a sexually-attractive husk. The vocal performance to me comes across more as poor direction (and more on a scene-to-scene basis rather than across the board) but everything else feels very intentional and slighted, which is a shame.

One last note for Alear before talking about the game itself: their identity. They are, as we learn very early on, a Divine Dragon. Dragonic protagonists are again, not new to Fire Emblem, so alongside the amnesia hook this introduction feels egregiously uninspired. The narrative doesn’t especially help in fleshing out this dynamic over the course of the game, even as we learn more and more what being a Divine Dragon means (or what it doesn’t mean). Alear’s “dragon-ness” doesn’t even amount in a transformation of any kind, it’s merely an excess to bestow a divine aura onto an otherwise very humanoid character so as to artificially elevate their importance. There are some interesting themes proposed with this dynamic, however, mostly through certain support conversations if you happen to come across them. Alear effectively becomes the figurehead of the region’s religion upon their revival, being both prayed to and worshiped by many of the people they call their companions. It’s a conflicting dynamic that highlights significant shades of Alear’s ongoing identity crisis, but it only ever manifests in fits and starts. In the wider scope of the story, it’s just another narrative sop to give the protagonist a faux grandeur in lieu of properly compelling writing. It makes me long for the days of the prior Lords, leaders who either carved their legacies out of sheer will or were tasked with rising to the occasion against the tides of overwhelming conflict. Fortunately, Engage does fulfill this wish, albeit through perhaps unexpectedly literal means. All those great Lords of the previous games, the iconic leaders who have impressed their legend upon the fans for more than thirty years? They’re all here, in the form of a ridiculously powerful new mechanic which serves as the game’s chief gimmick: Emblem Rings.

Here’s where the game gets good. The Emblem Rings are very powerful tools that allow you to summon the powers of previous Fire Emblem Lords to overwhelm your enemies in ways Fire Emblem traditionally isn’t designed to do. As an example, Sigurd, one of the first Emblems you receive, gives any character an extra five movement when activated, along with one extra movement passively. When paired with units already equipped with high mobility, this becomes insanely powerful insanely fast. Sigurd is only one of many Emblems which give your characters an incredible power boost while harkening back to the whole of Fire Emblem’s history. In order to unlock their full potential, you must also participate in various Paralogue Chapters where you fight the associated Emblems on a map calling back to significant chapters from their own games. Some translate to Engage better than others (with a handful feeling like either an incredibly poor choice based on the lack of comparable mechanics between games, or just like a lazy copy and paste from one to the other), but the reverence for the series in its entirety is very welcome, alongside the potent potential the power of the rings demonstrate over the course of the game. The Emblems are also the chief means by which you acquire skills for your characters, inheriting them from the Emblems based on how high your support is with each and at the cost of an accumulating currency called SP. This is one of several new resources Engage tasks you with managing without properly tutorializing you on, despite how much of the earlier chapters are taken up by lengthy explanations of basic systems and interactions well-established to the series by now. There are some other new mechanics that help further distinguish the gameplay for this entry, such as the supportive Backup units and Break additions to the returning Weapon Triangle, but the fatal combination of invasive explanations of basic features and an often overwhelming amount of information on screen which obscures certain systems which are neglected by tutorials leads to an incredibly frustrating experience until their obtuse understandings can eventually be untangled.

All of this is compounded by the sheer mass of extra crap the game throws at you to manage at the main hub of the game, The Somnial. It’s basically a secluded fortress in the sky where all the characters can relax and interact between battles, safe and secluded from the ongoing conflict below. This feature, and many of the life-sim aspects that accompany it, are clearly a holdover from the previous game, Three Houses, which put a lot more investment into the social elements of the game above that of its tactical RPG origins. I did not partake in most of them, simply because they are not aspects that appeal to me in a Fire Emblem game. For those I could ignore without relative consequence, this was fine. I can’t care that much about optional features so long as they remain that. Optional. I didn’t need to do any strength training to give myself a temporary stat boost, I didn’t need to have my fortune told or to play any fishing minigames. I didn’t need to make meals with other characters or go swimming to boost my supports. These features, while wholly unnecessary, did not impede my experience of the game. However, several features tied themselves directly to aspects of the Somniel, and thus in order to interact properly with the main mechanics of the game, demand additional time and attention. The more these features integrated with central components of the main gameplay, the more attention they took away from progressing the story and actually partaking in the battles themselves. Things like Weapon Forging, which has existed in the series since Path of Radiance, now requires materials in addition to money. You can get these materials either by wandering around the battlefield after a fight, or as drops from particular animals you can adopt for a farm back at the Somniel. Since only one type of animal produces these vital resources, there’s no sense in creating a variety of animals to foster there, thus rendering the mechanic an overly complex means of generating materials you never needed prior to this to achieve the same results.

The mechanic that was most frustrating to try and discern here, though, was the implementation and earning of SP alongside another new resource, Bond Fragments. These two materials are the necessary means by which you grind up supports with the Emblem Rings to then inherit their unique skills afterwards. Being the main, central mechanic of the game, you’re going to want to interact with these features, as they’re going to be the main way you distinguish and customize how your characters play over the course of the game. So why, then, is it presented so obtusely without any concrete explanation of how you earn these vital resources and where to implement them? It is not at all apparent even in the brief segments it’s slightly explained, and was the chief source of ire for me during the bulk of my gameplay. Once I did learn where all this information is displayed, and how to easily access and navigate the requisite menus to redeem these myriad scattered resources, it became a lot more rewarding. However, that doesn’t erase the literal hours I wasted just trying to understand these features on face value, and how needlessly complex they were made by the inundation of new currencies to manage between battles. It’s to a point where I was often spending just as much time preparing for the next chapter as I was playing the chapters themselves, and this was with me spending as little time as I felt I could at the Somniel between fights. At that point, it’s no longer a space to breathe and recuperate between lengthy and demanding segments of gameplay; it’s as much a feature of the game as the battles themselves, and an incredibly tedious one at that.

Which brings me to the purpose of the Somniel as a whole: a sanctuary, for both the players and the characters, to collect themselves between demanding stretches of gameplay. This is another innovation that has existed in the series since Path of Radiance, but only since Three Houses has it become a location all its own. In previous games, this space of relief was a Base Camp, a traveling locale which never distracted from the progression of the narrative while still allowing you the time and space to manage your various inventories and character supports before launching into the next section of tactical deployment. In Three Houses, the story demanded a central location for all the various activities to take place in, so the Base Camp was adapted into a more definitive space for the various social activities to take place in. This shift actually began back as early as Awakening, with the furnishing of the Barracks, and Fates, with “My Castle” becoming a fully customizable base of operations which also utilized the 3DS’s StreetPass feature. The difference when it comes to Engage, however, is that the adventure never felt interrupted by these features, and their presence was never a distraction. Because the Somniel is a bonafide location not just extent without various navigable menus, and is also an in-narrative space defined as being totally separate from the world we’re traveling across, the immersion of the troupe supposedly traveling across the entire continent of Elyos in search of the twelve Emblem Rings is constantly broken by casual returns to this totally serene sky palace detached from the conflict developing below. It’s especially distracting when the narrative turns up the tension and urgency of the conflict, looking to lead the drama right into the next chapter, only for you to zoom off because you have some gardening to attend to or your chibi-dog pet needs petting for more resources.

A lot of this could be allayed simply by not having the Somniel exist. Base Camps were a perfectly fine concept that allowed you to manage resources and character interaction without breaking the flow of the narrative while supplying the player a much-needed break between chapters. The best part is they already have this in Engage. The exploration of the battlefield, gathering resources and talking to characters, is not only a welcome build on the template first provided in Path of Radiance, but also allows you to do most of the things you’d want to do between chapters. Character supports, inventory management, buying new weapons, all can be done while taking a short break on the field you just conquered. I really liked walking around the maps with a new perspective, seeing the space we just spend a great deal of effort to overcome with a new, relieved perspective was very additive to the core gameplay experience I found. Unfortunately, you can’t manage everything from this space, and important core mechanics such as Weapon Forging and Skill Inheritance can only take place in the Somniel, thus rendering the ability to manage aspects in the field lesser by comparison, but also making it yet another tedious activity to manage between battles that ultimately amounts to little more than banal resource gathering.

I do enjoy the managing of units and skills and stats it should be said, however. In point of fact, the minutiae of assembling units to be as optimized in their roles is one of the most enjoyable aspects of any Fire Emblem game for me. As the series has developed, we’ve been given more and more tools to make characters as ridiculously strong as we’d like, and Engage ups that ante further with the Emblem Rings. These, in combination with Skill Inheritance (effectively allowing you to mix and match the best qualities of multiple Emblems at once) and unlimited reclassing, opens the way for some truly disgusting strategies. What this also means is that unlike in earlier games, where characters are locked into a particular class, you can make any character as powerful as you’d like, in any capacity you’d like. There’s something to be said in losing the designated identity of a character by radically altering their base presentation, i.e. turning an axe unit into a mage, for instance. But the trade off is the ability to use the characters you like regardless of how well they’re initially set up to succeed, as well as a nigh unlimited potential of combinations ensuring that no two playthroughs will be the same. The balancing of the various classes is definitely uneven—there are just straight up inferior advanced classes to a notable handful which just dominate the late game completely—but that’s certainly a minor critique of a system that is otherwise very flexible towards utilizing whomever you want for your adventure.

And boy howdy, do you have some options. “Too much of a good thing,” is how I would describe the rate at which Engage throws new units at you. There are 36 total characters you can have by the end of the game, and a whopping 28 of them are given to you before the halfway point of the story. These units are usually deployed three at a time, which not only inundates you with new characters to use and determine their value, but hinders your usage of already established units thanks to the decreased deployment of maps with recruitable characters. There’s also far less going out of your way to recruit optional characters. The two units recruitable from side chapters are available almost immediately, while two additional characters can be recruited by talking to them in a couple of later maps. These latter two are appreciated for reviving this feature of mid-map recruitment, as well as for the characters themselves being of an older disposition (thus injecting some much-needed variety amongst the cast), but their arrival comes so late as to dampen the overall effect of their conclusion, sadly. The excess of characters is still an issue, however, particularly because of how front-loaded they are and the limited ability to utilize everyone at any given time. Very quickly, you will have to decide which of your units you will just stop investing in, and as a result, stop caring about too, because if you’re not using a character, you’re not creating any supports with other units, and due to the nature of the story revolving around the Lords of the region almost exclusively, after the non-royal characters are introduced they’re basically dropped from the narrative. For some, though, this is probably a good thing, because there are a number of characters in Engage who test the limits of my tolerance for cutesy, bold, or outright obnoxious characterizations.

The typical means by which Fire Emblem characters are given “personality” is by assigning them one or two distinctive quirks and making all their interactions about that specific thing. So, for example, Louis, your starting armored unit in Engage, is a people-watcher who likes tea. All of his support conversations are about these two things, with a little bit of backstory injected surrounding his family grape farm. It’s very simple, almost two-dimensional some would say, but for all the interactions that need to be scripted for the branching support conversations of any given two units, a stock approach to characterizations is not the most unreasonable compromise. Not all can be as inoffensively simple as Louis, however, and when combined with some of the most brash character designs ever conceived for a Fire Emblem game, the extremity of it all is just simply too much to endure. The chief offenders are largely denizens of Elusia, a country which begins as an antagonistic force against the heroes before slowly being redeemed over the course of the game (another writing faux pas we will return to). Where the previous kingdoms of Firene and Brodia showcase a strong central theming amongst the cast (Brodia in particular stands out with its consistent dark red color palette between characters and gem-themed character names tying back to the county’s primary industry, not to mention the impeccable overall design of its Lord Diamant being one of the best looking characters in not just the game but the entire series), Elusia’s cast is quite garish and at odds with itself. There’s a mix of sinister color palettes and cutesy kawaii aesthetics in characters like Hortensia, whose candy-colored, mouse-ear-shaped hair belies the glee with which she partakes in systematic murder, and Rosado, who's literally just a femboy with cat ears. I don’t mean that in any kind of pejorative sense, he’s just shockingly out of place in the rest of the cast, even considering how totally detached similar characters are from more traditional Fire Emblem depictions. Characters from Solm have a similarly unconventional philosophy to their design, but at least in the case of Timerra, the heiress to the kingdom, her bubbly personality and ball-coated costume encapsulates an eccentricity that, while loud, it not out of sync with prior characterizations in the series.

Perhaps Elusia stands out so much more because of their initial characterization as a corrupted nation bent on reviving the Fell Dragon, only to be later swayed by the upstanding principles of the primary cast, ultimately joining them in the process. This heel-turn character redemption happens repeatedly throughout Engage, to a point that even at the very end previously heinous villains are revealed to have possessed a tragic backstory which put them on this path to begin with, somehow justifying their total absence of morality up until that point? It usually boils down to something totally asinine like “I always wanted a family of my own, and this crew of objectively evil cohorts was the only place I felt like I belonged.” There’s no space for antagonists to simply be unredeemable, and the constant recycling of these same handful of opponents makes for an often lackluster conflict on the field, as defeating them feels fruitless after you’ve already done it in the three previous chapters. While the alternative of one-off bosses that were basically just mindlessly evil thugs to defeat wasn’t necessarily better, it did provide a variety that Engage can sometimes lack. The consistent presence of the villains does at least benefit the build of the narrative, flawed as it may be. Although the early segments are bogged down by cliched foundations, the evolution of the story finds something of a compelling rhythm as things go along. The familiar trope of a tragic paternal figure falling plays out several times again, but like with Male Alear, the vocal performance is more often compelling enough to sell the melodrama effectively, and lays a good emotional bedrock for their compulsion to continue the fight as the story rolls along. Over the course of the game, I found myself becoming strangely endeared to otherwise contrived narrative twists, forecasted much too openly, and yet still effective thanks to the investment the writing puts into the characters up until that point. It’s basically like a stereotypical soap opera, predictable and overly dramatic, but entertaining and pulpy with a heavy dependance on how capably the actors can sell corny writing. With that kind of mentality, it’s easier to swallow a lot of the dumb contrivances that pop up towards the end, but even I was rolling my eyes with the brief time travel excursion, evil twins, and three different resurrections that take place.

So far, I’ve been intensely critical of the game, but I want to take the time to highlight some of the stand out moments I had while playing, because, in spite of all these critiques, I enjoyed Engage. Quite a lot, actually. It comes down to the gameplay more than anything, as others have more succinctly surmised, and although it took a while to figure everything out, the various systems at play allow for Engage to be one of the most tactical entries in the entire franchise. The Emblem Rings obviously lead to most of the fun with all of this, but there’s one segment about a third of the way in that really turns the expectations of the gameplay on its head. Chapter 11, “Retreat,” sees the power of the Emblem Rings turned against you. All the insanely overpowered abilities you've coveted this whole time are suddenly, and without warning, ripped away and are now weapons of the enemy. All you can do is as the chapter title tells you. Retreat. It’s a tense chase down to the end of the map, stifled by the excess of flying enemies barreling towards you faster than you can run, as well as a creeping band of powerful troops at the back slowing you down with a Freeze staff if you’re not moving carefully. It’s a tough trial made even tougher by the removal of the Time Crystal mechanic, which up until now allowed you to turn back turns if you ever made a mistake. For this chapter, it’s like the old school. If you screw anything up, it’s back to the beginning. This is where the game really started to pick up for me. The helplessness of losing your main tools of destruction demanded a shift towards a more defensive playstyle for a large part of the game. I was able to appreciate how subsequent maps were designed around these more thoughtful tactics, and how going forward you were really having to consider every asset at your disposal to properly clear the increasingly difficult objectives. Chapter 17, “Serenity in Ruin,” felt like the ultimate test of my skills up to that point. It took every resource I had available just to save from dying. Some very careful positioning to stay out of range of intensely powerful bosses and enemies, as well as strategic usage of the few Emblems I had managed to get back by that point for maximum efficacy. It was a brutal fight, made all the tougher by the multiple Revival Stones the various bosses were equipped with, meaning that rushing down a boss to clear a map was rarely a viable option in Engage.

There are some other minor things I could complain about, like the stupidly pointless difficulty of optional skirmishes and their ridiculous fog of war surprises, but there are also minor additions I could praise as well, like the increased viability of three-range weapons such as Thunder Tomes and Longbows, or the support viability of Qi Adept units and their Chain Guard abilities. There’s a lot of smaller aspects in Engage that tip the scale in both directions, while the real weight lies in the hit-or-miss characters and story in tandem with the vastly customizable approach to tactical gameplay provided by the reclass system and mixing and matching of Emblems and inherited skills. The gameplay will always matter more to me than the narrative, which has rarely been especially deep or nuanced throughout the series’ history. Engage by no means should get a pass for its seemingly endless contrivances, and my god do I wish they just simplified the presentation of some of these systems so they weren’t so frustratingly obtuse even for a veteran like myself, but I can’t deny how much fun I was having by the end with some ridiculously overtuned units and a decent cast of characters I found genuinely compelling in large part due to some commendable voice acting across the board. The dispersal of characters should have been less front-loaded to be sure, and their recruitment shouldn’t have been a hindrance on the deployment of my own units as well, but perhaps if I ever do a run where I allow characters to die (what some might argue to be an authentic Fire Emblem experience) then the ratio of inherent units could prove to be a boon depending on the difficulty. As with most of the recent entries, Engage does not amount to be an especially challenging experience, even on the median difficulty, but it does incentivise you to think more strategically as the game goes on, with a number of chapters memorably forcing you into relatively compromised positions requiring a bit more forethought than the usual gungho mentality can often afford. I was very satisfied by the end, and found the potential for replayability quite enticing, even after sinking nearly 100 hours into a single playthrough, which is an endorsement I’ll happily echo without amending any of the due criticisms already lodged.