Fire Emblem Engage Review: An Unengaging Step Back for the Classic TRPG Series

There are few decisions as paramount as the first move you decide to make when starting a battle in Fire Emblem Engage. Do you send your Paladins, horse-mounted allies with a wider range of mobility, out to the front lines to deal some initial damage, or do you allow your spell-wielding Mages to fight from a distance? Or maybe the better option is to make your Great Knights, who are all armored and have stacked defense skills, engage with enemies so your Thieves, who are better at dodging, can sneak up behind them. Or is the most optimal choice playing defense and waiting a turn to see what your opposition is up to?

Any and all of these options are valid in Fire Emblem Engage, a game that favors strategy and a willingness to experiment above everything else. After all, given that there are 36 playable characters in total, mixing up your unit selection can be advantageous depending on the situation. A stage might call for multiple archers, who are incredibly effective against flying enemies, to be called onto the field, while the heavy hitters are momentarily sidelined.

Taking things one step further in the game is the inclusion of Emblem Rings, which are equipable items that summon the spirits of previous Fire Emblem protagonists, which you can assign to any of your teammates in order to give them stat boosts and a special attack. Giving Ike, the main lead of the 2005 fan-favorite Fire Emblem: Path of Radiance, to a Mage will allow them to wield axes and swords. Likewise, Micaiah, the leading lady of 2007’s Fire Emblem: Radiant Dawn, can make the muscle heads in your team perform healing magic.

It’s a shame, then, that outside of the captivating combat mechanics and consistently handsome presentation, there’s little about Fire Emblem Engage that’s all that engaging, especially in regard to its barebones story. While the game has plenty of love for past entries in the Fire Emblem series and their leads, that same affection hasn’t been spared for this one. If anything, the constant presence of past Lords only underscores the cookie-cutter nature of the game.

Alear, whose most notable feature is their flagrantly ridiculous anime-styled haircut, is a purposely blank cipher: Suffering from amnesia, this so-called Divine Dragon has been awakened from a 1,000-year slumber in order to bring peace to the continent of Elyos and defeat the evil Fell Dragon Sombron. Near the start of the game, they witness their mother, Lumera, die at the hands of the equally dastardly Elusians, and while this event serves as the catalyst for the rest of Alear’s actions, considering they’ve, more or less, just been introduced to this person, the intended pathos hardly registers. Their motivations are ultimately fueled not so much by a personal investment in this conflict, but by a sense of honor and duty, which isn’t a terribly effective means by which to invest in this type of narrative.

Things don’t get much better with the remaining cast of characters, who are even less fully dimensional and suggest a walking list of JRPG clichés: from the dizzy, childlike females, such as Framme and Yunaka, who faun over Alear as if they’re the second coming of Christ; to the standoffish “cool” types, like Diamant and Jade, whose only definable character trait is swearing up and down they’re stronger than everyone else; to the countless villains you beat, mainly Ivy and Zelkov, who will recognize the error of their ways and eventually switch sides.

After a certain point, you’ll hardly feel compelled to use some of these characters in battle, as the game is constantly giving you at least one new party member per mission, and usually one who outclasses an ally obtained during an earlier battle. For example, once you have Timerra, a lance-brandishing princess of Solm, you can stop relying on the axe-swinging Boucheron to deal out massive amounts of damage, as she’s much stronger and more agile than his blocky ass.

Frustratingly, your party members’ interactions with Alear, and with themselves, have been scuttled away to the main menu in the form of minute-long cutscenes, all of which lean rather heavily on lame Disney Channel-esque banter and humor that practically beg for a laugh track. In classic Fire Emblem fashion, if any of these characters do perish in battle, they’re gone forever, but you’d be hard-pressed to really care about the milquetoast likes of Clanne never coming back. That is, unless you play the game on Casual Mode, where, instead of dying, they merely sit out for the rest of the battle like they’re in a time-out. Considering that Fire Emblem Engage allows you to go back and undo every move you’ve made with the assistance of a Time Crystal, the option feels like a total cop-out and a betrayal of the series’ ethos.

It’s gameplay decisions like this, along with a generally rudimentary understanding of international conflict and how everything can be boiled down to either “good” or “bad,” that initially makes it seem as if the game were designed for a younger demographic. But considering how steep Fire Emblem Engage’s difficulty curve gets in its home stretch, where the many skirmishes that pop up regularly are even harder than the main missions, that appears unlikely.

But what will likely be most maddening to players of all ages is how unsupportive the game’s user interface regularly is, where important information, like how to advance your party members to a higher class, is often withheld for no good reason. Hopefully, you’ll have good enough insight to stumble upon it in the menu’s inventory tab, where the game feels the need to start explaining itself, but what it’s doing there in the first place is anyone’s guess.

What makes Fire Emblem Engage especially frustrating is that, even for all of its glaring issues, there’s an undeniable joy in successfully conquering a difficult battalion through a mixture of skill, luck, and good timing. That, or spamming a series of well-placed special moves and calling it a day. But since the infrastructure around these battles is so lacking, this latest entry in Intelligent Systems’s long-standing series amounts to not much more than a glorified chess match, albeit one with a few more fire-spewing dragons running around to spice things up.

This game was reviewed with code provided by Golin on January 24.