I love the Fire Emblem games and have fond memories of playing the classic ones. I had never played Three Houses or Engage and many friends thought I would like both, but suggested Engage for a fun gameplay with story. I picked up Engage along with the DLC for it and was ready to begin my adventure. I was pleasantly surprised that I could play the main character as male or female. The default name is Alear, but you can change the name if you wish. I also liked that I was able to adjust the game settings with the volume of music and sound effects and adjust the sizing of the subtitles. Another thing that pleased me was that I could have the game set to casual and I could turn permanent death off. That was one thing I never really enjoyed in the previous Fire Emblem games, that if you lost a character on the tactics map they were gone forever. Engage allows you to turn that off so that they can join you in the next battle.
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| Alear is ready to fight. |
I was curious about the land of Elyos and its five regions that each had an Emblem ring. With the DLC I also got Emblem bracelets. I was intrigued by the fact that Alear is a dragon who was asleep for a thousand years and didn't remember anything. That added a bit of mystery to who she was before and how she got to be there which does get revealed in the story over time. The game does give a solid tutorial on how to summon the Emblem they're equipped with while also going over the tactics and strategy mechanics. I was excited to see the Emblems were heroes from past Fire Emblem games. I was really happy to see Hector and Lynn who are favorites of mine.
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| Learning how to summon and how to battle. |
I learned very quickly which Emblems worked better with various characters. Engage does let you play around with it and you can swap between characters. For example, Lynn worked amazingly well with my favorite archer Alcryst while Tiki was a great fit with Alear. The battles are fun and the Engage actions are beautifully done with fantastic artwork and animated scenes. Level grinding wasn't really a chore because I was having so much fun. The overhead map has you running along paths to the highlighted spots for skirmishes and story battles. It's fairly easy to navigate and very pretty.
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| Running on the map. |
The story itself is quite good. There's a lot of interesting characters that support Alear and the conversations she had with them revealed new things about them. The villains of the story were great too because they weren't one note and were actually complex with their own ideas about how the world should be and reveals about how they came to be where they were. Story and skirmishes weren't the only thing to do in Engage. You have your own stronghold known as Somniel and here you can rest and spend time with Alear's friends. There's also a variety of minigames like fishing, training exercises, and wyvern riding. You can also adopt animals all over the map ranging from cats to bunnies which you can find on Somniel.
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| Fishing time! |
You can play multiplayer via Relay Trials, but I didn't really bother with that too much as I prefer to play story games on my own. I loved every minute of Fire Emblem Engage because of how much fun the battles were, but I also really liked the story meeting new characters and happy to see past memorable characters from previous Fire Emblem games. Overall, Engage does an amazing job of melding story and gameplay together creating a grand adventure.
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| What an adventure! |
*Fire Emblem Engage is available on the Nintendo Switch
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