Fire Emblem Engage: Excellent In Some Ways, Far From Engaging In Others

Console: Nintendo Switch

Time played: 48 hours

There isn’t a game in recent memory that I’ve felt more divided on than the newest entry to the Fire Emblem series. On one hand, the tactical role-playing game aspects of Engage are fantastic and fine-tuned. On the other, saying that the story elements and acting in the game’s cutscenes leaves something to be desired would be putting it pretty nicely.

But let’s talk about what works first. If you love strategy games, there’s a lot of great stuff here. In Engage, you’ll assemble your party for battles choosing typically around 8-12 units out of 37 playable characters.

Not only can your units be customized with different weapons and strengthened with various abilities, they can also be outfitted with emblem rings. Each of the games 12 emblem rings contains a different character from a previous Fire Emblem game and allows whoever wields a ring to “engage” and fight alongside the character within, as well as have elevated stats and special abilities.

When you consider the number of characters and the 12 rings, there are 444 options for pairings right there, and that’s not even getting into bond rings (for characters not teamed up with emblems) and the ways in which you can change the classes of particular units. Basically, if you love assembling a group of characters and customizing them to make them as strong and battle-ready as possible, this is the game for you.

All of this might sound confusing when written out quickly here, but it’s important to note that all the strategy aspects of the game are explained in a way that makes sense over the first few hours of gameplay. I never felt lost due to all of the strategic options available to me in the game.

In the previous Fire Emblem game, 2019’s Fire Emblem: Three Houses (which I played last year and wrote about in this post), time between battles was spent at the academy. I really enjoyed this aspect of that game, doing things like cooking with characters or inviting them to tea. There are still aspects similar to that in Engage, but most of the social aspects of the game involving relationship-building with characters are either gone or feel unimportant.

In Three Houses, learning about the characters in your house felt significant and was an integral part of the game that I liked equally as much as the strategic battles in it. That game also had vastly different stories (and thus replayability) depending on which house you chose to lead and the choices you made. Here, there’s only one path you can take. 

Speaking of the storyline, that’s where we get into what really didn’t work at all for me: the story. I’ll be the first to admit that most RPGs have a somewhat generic story, but I’m usually fine with that, and as long as the plot of the game moves us along and is serviceable, I’m on board. But here, it’s all really lacking.

The story of Engage is as generic as RPGs come and the script feels like a first draft written by ChatGPT. Our protagonist has been asleep for 1,000 years and awakens with no memory. He (or she) is the “divine dragon” though, and must go up against the (recently returned) fell dragon, gaining help from a loyal group of followers from the world’s four kingdoms along the way.

It’s basic, sure, but I could excuse it if the cutscenes didn’t feel like melodramatic fanfiction. Characters react in overly dramatic goofy ways and our hero is oblivious to the obvious twists that we, the player, know will be revealed later.

There’s also the issue of the emblems. I think it’s fine to have returning characters, but none of them are really developed at all in this game, and as someone who didn’t play every other entry in the Fire Emblem series, they really weren’t too interesting to me. This issue pales in comparison to the problems with the overall story and acting though.

These pretty glaring problems made it a bit tough for me to come up with an overall grade for Engage. I really enjoy strategy games overall, and I think the tactical aspects to Engage, when you’re actually customizing your characters or fighting in a battle, work great. If you can get past the awful story, there’s still a lot of fun to be had here.

If you haven’t played it already, I’d really recommend checking out Three Houses instead. I found that story to be more engaging (for lack of a better word) and the social aspects of that game added to the overall enjoyment factor for me. As for Engage, I’d recommend it for hardcore fans of tactical RPGs or just fans of the Fire Emblem series in general. For everyone else though, your gaming-allotted hours are probably best spent elsewhere.

Grade: 6.5/10