Fire Emblem Engage
Wish I was colorblind
The non-protagonist anime characters do look incredible though. It feels like a real breakthrough in anime rendition. I can’t imagine they could make animes look better than this.
I like this game. Compared to 3 houses the story has really devolved to mush but I feel like every other aspect is an improvement. Battles are cool! If you like Fire Emblem.
I’m glad the battalions are gone because I never did really understand them. In like 100 hours.
Digging up this post :
After playing for a long while I feel like the extra activities really don’t matter much. Let’s see :
- Training bonuses from trash minigames are minor stat boosts to the main character for the next battle only. Trash
- Meals are pretty OK (minor stat boosts for the whole team) but also only matter for the next battle so it’s really not a problem if you just pay attention to them late
- Fishing, animals, the mascot etc, all this just gives ingredients for meals but the game just gives you a ton of ingredients early on through the story, maybe enough to last a whole game. You might not have the best super secret meals but that’s OK
- Link fragment points or whatever are given automatically after leaving an area
- You can raise support between characters through side activities, but in practice it’s so cumbersome having allies sit next to each other for support bonuses, I’ve never paid attention to them in battle except in FE4 where you Absolutely Have To
- The well is some FF6 Gau nonsense, throw a weapon in there and you’ll get a random new one? No
- The arena’s good. Just three fights for a little xp though, not gamebreaking if you miss it.
- As far as I know the little cutscenes you get from people waking you if you go to sleep don’t affect anything. By the way, it’s really barely a thing but there are 6+ separate events per character and someone has compiled them all in one youtube video and it lasts 4 hours and 17 minutes of fully voice acted and animated content. One of the worst allocations of resources I’ve ever seen in a game
- Polishing rings is just a really cool bad joke from Int Sys. It’s like these bottom of the barrel minigames where you physically rub your console to uh in game rub some anime girl (also seen in Fire Emblem Awakening I believe) except here you’re just polishing Marth’s ring to make Marth moan.
Anyway it also has a really weak reward
It feels like Int Sys has realized they’ve created a monstrosity with the Fire Emblem 3 Houses monastery gobbling about half the playtime, and they’ve really made non-combat activities matter way less for combat in Engage. Though they still do matter just a little bit, like just the right balance so that the anime nerds will not feel like they’ve wasting their time with them too much, and that the chess nerds can feel like they can skip it.
Obviously it’s kind of a mediocre compromise because they haven’t found an elegant solution to appease both groups