Fire Emblem Engage

Nintendo's long-running fantasy series looks to its rich history for this smart, satisfying turn-based tactical RPG game. Intelligent Systems has made some ...

While I miss the intrigue which made Three Houses' main story so appealing, a compelling cast and sublime tactical gameplay see Fire Emblem Engage through. Crucially, Engage avoids detailing their history in the main story and saves that for these paralogues, making the nostalgia trips optional. Everything looks cleaner, the environments are more detailed, and a pleasant soundtrack backs that up. Support conversations are back, and Alear can increase a unit's support through sharing meals, gift-giving, and during combat. Eirika's Twin Strike uses both a sword and lance to subvert the triangle, while Corrin's Torrential Roar can flood an area to reduce an enemy's evasion. Engage's worldbuilding is often subtle but usually sticks the landing, and these segments are a fine showcase for the improved visuals. I couldn't test these fully pre-launch , but there's the option to create your own maps and fight another player's army that should help add some appeal beyond the 40 hour campaign. After disappearing in Echoes and Three Houses, the weapons triangle returns with a fresh twist. As the Divine Dragon Alear, you're tasked with recovering the 12 rings, which form the centre of a new conflict with the Fell Dragon, Sombron. Fights at an allied stronghold become a training session instead, and those award bonus EXP to all surviving units like Shadows of Valentia. You'll traverse an explorable overworld map, choosing the chapter's primary mission, a paralogue for side content, or maybe a quick skirmish to level up your units. Diverging from one of this generation's most acclaimed RPGs was always going to be risky, but Engage takes inspiration from older entries while retaining Three House's social mechanics so what's here feels more like a sidestep than the next giant leap.

Content pre-recorded in accordance with current COVID-19 health and safety guidelines. This article has been translated from the original Japanese content.

Engage was something we started working on at the very beginning of development because we felt the need to communicate to players that it was so powerful that it could crush enemies. In Fire Emblem: Genealogy of the Holy War, the marriage system allows the characters to get married and have children who inherit the abilities of the parent characters. Characters equipped with the Emblem Rings can make the Emblems – the heroes from other worlds – appear and synchronize with them to fight together. When a protagonist is a royal, they are often associated with bravery, or thought to have a sense of mission to fight against fate and challenges, and I believe those are the traits that people generally associate with heroes. So, we were very keen to portray Alear in the center of the main visual. Tei: Four royal families collaborated with the Divine Dragon to destroy the Fell Dragon in the past, and Alear will travel to the kingdoms where the descendants of these royal families live. I don't recall any protagonist illustrated in the center of the artwork for Fire Emblem Awakening and later titles. As the producer from the Nintendo side, I worked on this game from the initial planning through to completion and thought about how we shape this new entry in the Fire Emblem series. Alear goes on an adventure in search of the 12 Emblem Rings with the power to prevent the revival of the Fell Dragon. As a director for this title, I was in charge of making decisions from setting the theme to deciding the general direction of the game. My role was to communicate with Intelligent Systems, the developer of this title, on the game content and development process and to manage both companies’ progress. The Super Famicom was released in Europe and North America as the Super Nintendo Entertainment System (Super NES).

Engage starts with Alear, the hero of the tale, waking up to find a mother they forgot existed and a legacy they didn't know they had. They're the Divine Dragon ...

Best of all from a tactics perspective, though, is the stellar map design and subtle, significant changes to how battles unfold. They grant the equipping character some stat boosts, and when you engage with them in battle, they also give you a fancy new weapon and a special attack. Another takes place in a burning village, and the overall layout, the placement of rubble and fire, and the enemy’s formations made for one of the most memorable battles in the game and one where I literally breathed a sigh of relief after it ended. Where before, classes such as the Hero were stuck with swords and axes, you can make a sword-and-lance Hero or a Wolf Knight who wields knives and axes. It helps that everyone has a range of motivations for joining Alear beyond the usual loyalty to lord and country. Your objectives might just be “defeat the enemy general” most of the time, but the path to victory – especially on hard mode – forces you to use every ability and new trick at your disposal. They’re the Divine Dragon, a beneficent ruler, the hero of an ancient war against the Fell Dragon, and owner of the Emblem Rings, which house the spirits of heroes from Fire Emblems past. Like other Fire Emblem games, Engage uses these chats between characters to develop their personalities and expand on some of the themes the main story overlooks. For example, you can feasibly play the entire game with the Firene bunch or your new friends in Brodia, but like Three Houses, the best results – at least as far as support conversations go – come from mixing and matching people with the most disparate backgrounds. Engage starts with Alear, the hero of the tale, waking up to find a mother they forgot existed and a legacy they didn’t know they had. However, unlike the series’ usual MacGuffins, these do actually have a role in the story – albeit a slightly shallow one – and help radically transform Fire Emblem’s tactics on the battlefield. All of this unfolds on a map you could swear you’ve seen before, and the entire setup feels like something out of a Fire Emblem fan’s fever dream.

Following Three Houses, Fire Emblem Engage, which will be released for Nintendo Switch on Jan. 20, is a much more focused tactics game, with an array of ...

In just one visit to the Somniel, you can teach a mage how to wield an ax, a medic how to cast a fireball, and a wolf rider how to summon an obstructive pillar of ice. It was, in the end, a methodical battle, and I relied heavily on the staunch shields of Jade, Louis, and the ax-wielding horseman Bunet to hold the line while we moved through the town. It was downright thrilling, and I grew all the more attached to the recruits who had weathered the storm, and the veteran who guarded them. What was previously the stage for an offensive jaunt had become the site of a desperate amphibious defense. By equipping one of the 12 Emblem rings Alear is seeking, a character can borrow the abilities of the ring’s corresponding hero. The result is an elegant, if initially overwhelming, system in which you can alter your army’s strengths and weaknesses in a matter of minutes. That’s the plot in a nutshell, and honestly, a nutshell is all this plot is worth. Activating Emblem rings can turn the tide of many a particularly tough scuffle. Between encounters, you return to the Somniel, a floating castle and your base of operations, where you purchase supplies, train your recruits, upgrade their weapons, and strengthen their interpersonal bonds, the better to serve your cause. And the litany of possible character classes, including support monks, poison-wielding assassins, and fucking wolf riders, is extensive enough for several playthroughs. Suffice it to say, Engage is not pulling from the relationship-simulation school of RPGs, with its complex interpersonal story arcs and calendar-focused loop. Through all of its iterations, the Fire Emblem series has always been about finding your people: the ones you trust, the ones you worry about, and the ones you just can’t seem to help, though that doesn’t stop you from trying.

This comes from an official interview with director Tsutomu Tei and producer Masahiro Higuchi plus Nintendo's Genki Yokota and Kenta Nakanishi. According to ...

In Fire Emblem: Genealogy of the Holy War, the marriage system allows the characters to get married and have children who inherit the abilities of the parent characters. During those discussions, the marriage systems in Fire Emblem: Genealogy of the Holy War, Fire Emblem Awakening, and Fire Emblem Fates were brought up. The Emblems mechanic for Fire Emblem Engage was ultimately about wanting to have “pairing” gameplay that can be enjoyed more casually.

Nintendo is starting off the new year strong with the release of Fire Emblem Engage on Switch later this week. The turn-based strategy game is the 17th core ...

"Fire Emblem Engage is a great strategy game, but we don't think it's a great modern Fire Emblem game. The Guardians Collection Trailer The Last of Us Stars Pedro Pascal and Nico Parker Break Down Iconic Death Scene The Last of Us Episode 1 Breakdown "It's no small feat that Fire Emblem Engage is able to tell a simple-but-fun story that celebrates the vast history of its series in a way that doesn't rely on prior knowledge of that legacy. And although the Emblem Rings add a deep and satisfying wrinkle to the battles, the heroes contained within them are one-dimensional apparitions that leave a lot to be desired. Players assume the role of Alear, a son or daughter of the Divine Dragon, and can fight alongside previous heroes from the franchise, like Marth and Roy (who also may be remembered from their Super Smash Bros. Nintendo is starting off the new year strong with the release of Fire Emblem Engage on Switch later this week.

Engage” feels like a compromise that fails both tactics and RPG fans. But in a way, it also nails exactly what's been keeping me playing all these years.

And if my biggest qualms are with the game’s least Fire Emblem-y parts, I consider that a solid entry in the series. A few characters’ supports gesture at the web of political alliances and problems of Elyos, but they are few and far between. I spent the majority of my time at the Somniel playing around in the Tower of Trials, home to additional challenges beyond the main campaign. Or going to your room for a “Rest” to unlock a cutscene of a random teammate waking you up; there’s a whopping total of six unique cutscenes for each unit depending on your support level with them. When you’re not duking it out in battle, you can return to your home base, the Somniel, to train your forces, resupply and collect resources. The abilities and weapons available to each Emblem are determined by their bond level with a unit, which increases by using their Emblem Ring in battle or training with them at your home base, the Somniel (more on that in a bit). The Paralogue side quests were some of my favorites; there’s one themed to each Emblem Ring that resembles a level from past Fire Emblem games. Or I’d try to use Corrin’s Dragon Vein, which adds special effects to the terrain surrounding a unit, to set up a blockade of ice, but discover that this particular class can only use her ability to create a healing circle. They seem to take direct inspiration from “Fire Emblem Heroes,” a sort of “greatest hits” mobile game and one of the franchise’s most commercially successful to date. A new class, Qi adepts, can use chain guard to shield adjacent allies from attack and take a portion of that damage instead, which can dramatically shake up how you place your units and which enemies you target first. Apparently, you’ve been snoozing since you used the Emblem Rings, equipable items that let you summon heroes from past Fire Emblem games, to defeat the evil Fell Dragon, a half-cobra-half-dragon-looking monster that terrorized the world of Elyos before you and the other Divine Dragons sealed it away. You play as the Divine Dragon — their gender and name is up to the player — who wakes up with amnesia after a 1,000-long nap.

Here's what critics have to say about Fire Emblem Engage, the latest entry in Nintendo's long-running turn-based tactics series.

‘While Fire Emblem’s combat mechanics have never been better, Engage’s story and structure lack the ambition of its predecessors. ‘Engage, even when it’s fixated on stats and weapons and training, is always rushing toward the next battle, because that’s where the story lies. Smart new mechanics add much to the feel of battle, and once your army begins rolling through enemy forces across the continent, it’s hard to stop.’ However, we observed that the other aspects Fire Emblem has been notable for, namely its characters and social mechanics, felt like they worked in service of elevating the battle system, rather than standing out as marquee features. The first reviews for Fire Emblem Engage, the latest in Nintendo’s long-running turn-based tactics RPG series, are in – and each points to an overall positive reception among critics. The design has also seen mixed reception, with repeated comparisons to the previous title in the series, the excellent Fire Emblem: Three Houses.

There's a reverence for Fire Emblems past that is clear in every aspect of it, even including the spirits of legendary heroes from previous games that power up ...

One mode allows you to fully customize one half of a map to either challenge another player’s computer controlled team on their half of the map, or have your AI team defend against other opponents with the base you’ve built. You can also create smaller stat-boosting rings for your units who don’t have their own Emblem Ring yet through a system that strongly resembles the Fire Emblem Heroes gacha game, with an assortment of tiers for each ring and the ability to meld duplicates into better versions. This encourages lots of customization and passing rings around so everyone can make use of them, and I had a lot of fun planning out the perfect set of skills for everyone to eventually inherit, though the sheer number of skills and point values can sometimes become a bit of a headache. This system is much more satisfying to navigate than simply looking at a list to pick my next task, and the option to fast travel directly to a map point or back to my base made things quick and easy. I can’t even count the number of times I’d have to fight these lackeys, beating them to a pulp only to have them laugh it off in the ensuing cutscene, swearing revenge for next time like a cartoon villain. The various missions and maps in Engage tested my strategic knowledge in different ways, and it was fairly common for battles to last more than half an hour as I carefully considered my path forward (or sometimes rewound time by a turn or two if I realized my path was leading to certain death for a few characters). Thankfully, this isn’t too big of an issue, as the maps themselves would often involve some inventive hazards or features that I couldn’t just charge through – like changing tides on the beach limiting movement, or obstructions that I could have an easier time dealing with if I had the right Emblem Ring equipped on a unit nearby. Whether it was offering helpful anecdotes to my character about the trials they faced, or granting me their power and skills to inherit in combat, they became the backbone of my army, and each new Emblem Ring I collected gave me new strategies to work with. Using an Emblem’s power to teleport across the map and explode some poor sucker with the Ragnarok tome is a ton of fun — but when it happened to me it was downright terrifying. Healers in Fire Emblem have historically always been the weakest link, often requiring the most baby-sitting or being shunted to the back of the army – but no longer! (According to the story, they aren’t actually the exact same heroes from other worlds – more like incorporeal manifestations that retain the knowledge and abilities of their hero's journey… [Fire Emblem: Three Houses](/articles/2019/07/25/fire-emblem-three-houses-review), Fire Emblem Engage makes the potentially surprising decision to take a purposeful step away from that focus on time management and teaching.