Fire Emblem Engage

Fire Emblem Engage is one of the most bizarre, funny, and challenging entries in the franchise. It marks a stark change in tone from the previous game – the ambitious and brilliant Three Houses – and makes up for its weird narrative shortcomings with great map design and new mechanics.

Alear – we can choose their gender and rename them – is the last member of “a royal family of dragons revered as deities,” who one day suddenly awakes after a thousand-year slumber with no memories of their previous life. In front of them, there’s Clanne and Framme, some overly enthusiastic stewards who promptly tell Alear that they’re the son of the divine dragon Lumera. Alear also learns that the Fell Dragon Sombron is about to be resurrected and, with a name like that, he’ll probably be up to no good. The plan is to set out to the nearby Kingdoms and save them from the rising monsters while gathering “Emblems”: the spirits of warriors from other worlds who reside in special rings.

The first thing that stands out in Engage is the drastic change in tone from Three Houses: if the latter’s narrative was dead serious in its attempt to discuss social inequality and the oppressive nature of religions while portraying the complex descent to madness of its main characters (Dimitri almost turns into a bloodthirsty incel at one point), Engage’s narrative is simply all over the place: it moves back and forth from the deadpan humor of a Leslie Nielsen movie to melodramatic scenes in the blink of an eye; at one point, it’s veering into slapstick comedy, with characters full of exaggerated expressions and movements, but at another, it’s developing a surprisingly poignant portrayal of an abusive family unit. In other words, Engage’s story is so bonkers that it defies any reductive description.

Three Houses built its main characters around a constant display of pathos, where they lament the horrible deeds they must commit for the greater good, openly sacrificing their notions of morality to the cause after realizing the social order can’t change without violence, and so saying lines that would make Luthen Rael proud, like “The path I must walk is soaked in blood. It’s a path that can lead to madness, can snatch away one’s future, and can even take one’s life. And the pool of blood at my feet is growing larger. Those stains can never be washed clean.” Fire Emblem Engage, on the other hand, has its main characters saying stuff like, “I’m the Fire Emblem,” and “It’s time to Engage.” It’s operating on another vibe entirely.

At first, it’s the comedy that prevails in Engage. When Alear tells Vander – a knight sworn to protect the Divine Dragon – to fall back when they meet some monsters for the first time, the knight is about to charge at the creatures, sure that Alear will support his decision. “Shall we fight them?” Vander asks and, without waiting for an answer, continues, “As you wish, Divine One! You whose bravery knows no equal.” So, when Alear says, “No. Let’s run,” the humor comes from the camera movement, which mimics Vander’s gesture of assuming that the answer is going to be yes and so, while Alear is still uttering the word “No,” quickly pans back to the knight preparing to charge, making Vander’s sudden “Huh?” even funnier.

In Chapter 6, Alear and his newfound friend Alfred, the prince of Firene, are walking through a forest talking about how hard is going to be to find the Emblem Rings, since they are very small objects and the world is a very large place. Surely, they’ll never come across one accidentally, what are the odds of that? This is when they meet a lonely girl who seems to be in a scrape. She has lost something in the woods and needs help to find it. “It’s a little round ring,” she says, before describing the object in more exquisite detail: “Kind of shiny with a hole in the middle.” This certainly narrows it down, then, now that we can safely exclude all the holeless rings from the search. Finally, to top it off, as if it were just an odd detail that just slipped her mind, the girl says, “Oh, and it talks, for some reason.”  Alear, always with a keen mind, swiftly concludes, “It might be an Emblem Ring.” What a stroke of luck!

The comedy in the game is often built by the most absurd things being said with a straight face. When Alfred introduces himself as the prince of Firene to that girl, for example, she is utterly flabbergasted: “Holy brocc-oly! Why didn’t you lead with that? I think I just had a heart attack…Nope, false alarm. Whew,” she says, to which Alfred replies with the gravest of tones, “I’m so sorry. I never meant to impact your health.”

There’s a moment when a villain called Hortensia takes a queen hostage and threatens to kill her if Alear doesn’t hand over his Emblem Rings. Alear, always with a keen mind, realizes that this is a bad idea and refuses to do so. Hortensia, then, grunts in frustration, not knowing exactly how to proceed: Alear, after all, has basically foiled her evil plans by just saying “no.” What a hero!

The same silly tone carries over to the support conversations – a hallmark of the modern Fire Emblem games – where characters talk about their personal problems with their colleagues at headquarters. In Three Houses, these support conversations were driven by conflict, with characters always striving to touch a nerve, making for intense scenes where both parties in the conversation seem to want to hurt each other – emotionally and physically. In Engage, everyone is not only friendly but also… well, clearly horny, so the conversations feel more like awkward attempts at flirting. The former type of support conversation exposes and develops the characters’ flaws in a raw way, they’re dramatic and revelatory, while the latter… make us laugh.

In Three Houses, for example, we have Petra, a fierce woman who is a political hostage in the country of another party member, an outgoing boy named Caspar, who treats Petra like a friend. Their support conversation reveals how she’s not exactly grateful for that, though: “Your optimism is not making sense. It is not possible that you are not having hatred for me. My father was killed. By the Empire. By your father. And so I will be impaling you on this blade to satisfy a deep wish of mine,” she says in her characteristically broken English (that reinforces her foreignness). Support conversations in Engage, on the other hand, have Alfred coming to his jacked friend Baucheron and saying, “I’ve said it before, but I really admire your muscles, Baucheron.” Engage has the knight Amber revealing that he spent his childhood in an Alpaca Ranch and then making some strange, uncomfortable sounds that rival that brilliant Rhino scream in Kraven the Hunter – one of the most Jellicle moments in Cinema history.

There’s one support conversation where Alear stains his robes with food and gets perplexed after hearing his friend’s proposal: “You want to taste the sauce… on my clothing?” Alear asks Bunet, a royal knight and chef, who confirms that yes, he Bunet indeed wants to lick the sauce out of Alear’s clothes… while they’re standing there… wearing them. But just a quick lick. No need to be nervous. Bunet is almost an eldritch monster in his characterization: something truly unfathomable to contemplate existing. Imagine an unhinged Lickitung who is hellbent on tasting everything that exists in the world – and when I say everything, I mean everything, from a piece of armor to even lava – and then give this cursed being access to powerful weapons, a complete lack of common sense, and very poor social skills. Bunet flat-out asks a woman if her ring tastes like candy, and her warning that he would choke on it doesn’t seem to dissuade him from his course. Bunet asks his friend – a priest – to roll up his sleeves so that he Bunet can taste him. But just a quick lick. No need to be nervous. Imagine waking up one day to Bunet standing right next to you in your room saying, “Good morning! Sorry to bother you, but may I have a taste of that pillar or even your bed?” Play Fire Emblem Engage and you won’t have to imagine it. But be careful, because before you know it, Bunet will have tasted your legendary sword, your special ring, your feet, your momma, Bunet will have tasted even the Game (that you just lost). But just a quick lick. No need to be nervous. Bunet is a thing nightmares are made of.

During its first half, when Engage is trying to be this absurd comedy, the narrative works wonders and we can even excuse many of the writing’s “shortcuts” – such as the extreme ease with which villains take over huge castles in heavily defended capitals, without anyone even noticing their army approaching beforehand – as part of the joke. However, when it tries to be serious, such as with the melodramatic death that happens in chapter 3, it rings hollow. First, there’s no way that the death can have any impact on us, as it happens too soon in the game and Alear, suffering from amnesia, had no recollection of that person until then. So, when the protagonist screams and cries and makes heartfelt speeches over the body… it all rings false, forced, and unearned. And, since the writing – silly as it is – lacks any kind of complexity or nuance in these first hours, it also means that the scene seems to drag on for too long, boring us more than anything else.

But then we get to the latter half of Engage and everything changes. Sombron’s main lackeys are the Four Hounds: led by the witch Zephia, they are the knight Mauvier, the young Marni, and the assassin Gris. They’re the main antagonists in the game, the main bosses we’ll fight in most maps – since Alear, always with a keen mind, often thinks it’s a good idea to let them escape. The first thing that stands out is their design: while Zephia and Griss are clearly coded as villains, Mauvier and Marni seem like people who could be in Alear’s party, with the former being an honorable, solemn knight, while Marni possesses an energic, infantile demeanor (which hides some sadism, but no one’s perfect). So, what are these two doing working for Sombron?

Zephia treats the Four Hounds as a family unity, where she takes the whole of the mother, taking care of them and making sure they’re alright, but also punishing them when they misbehave. Marni, because of her troubled childhood, craves the support and praise that Zephia gives her. She works for Sombron because the Fell Dragon gives her a group to belong, a place where she feels safe. This family, however, is toxic: the relationship is used as a bargaining chip, where the members are taken hostage, with no chance of escaping – they must endure the abuse because that’s what being family means. They can’t just leave. Much like modern companies weaponize the concept of family, Zephia tells her hounds they are one to gain their unwavering loyalty, to breed obedience, and to demand personal sacrifice in the family’s name. But the family is a ruse: as some of them will eventually discover, an employee can be discarded without a second thought, as soon as their presence becomes inconvenient.

The Fell Dragon himself embodies this theme, calling any children who dare disobey him a “defect”. Sombron puts his views on the matter in clear terms to Zephia, “Family is function and utility. You put blood in. You get loyalty out.” In a way, Zephia – who has always honestly yearned for a family – learns how to mistreat her newfound one with Sombron, who gives her the family she has always wanted but also pushes her to manipulate and gaslight them, teaching a worldview that will make Zephia jeopardize precisely the thing she has always wanted the most. The Four Hounds are fascinating, tragic characters that greatly elevate the latter half of Engage’s story.

In terms of gameplay, Fire Emblem Engage continues to be a Tactical RPG, where we move characters in a grid in our turn to attack the opposing army. The main gimmick here is the Emblem Rings, which bestow special powers and attributes to those who wear them. One ring lets a character teleport halfway across the map and launch a devastating magical attack at an enemy. Another ring lets the wearer fully heal all the members of our party, and a third one sets some places on the grid on fire, doing damage to many enemies over time. But these rings usually have some major drawbacks, too, balancing things out: after teleporting to attack an enemy, for example, our unit will stay next to her target, probably distant from the rest of our army, in a vulnerable position. After fully healing our party, the unit who used the ring will lose most of their health, becoming an enticing target for the enemy. And the fire on the ground limits our movement and hurts our units, too.

Rings also bestow special skills to each unit, who can permanently learn them with skill points and then wear another ring to earn a different set of skills: the Emblem Rings, in other words, allow us to create specific builds tailormade for each character, making them a unique powerhouse in the battlefield. And to make matters even more strategic, we can’t use the rings’ special powers – the so-called Engage ability – anytime we want,  but must wait for the gauge to fill up after using them, which takes many combat turns – there are some spots on each map that do that instantly, but they’re usually heavily guarded or hard to reach, making us think twice before going for them.

The maps in Engage are usually creative, too, and in the latter half especially punishing to compensate for all the crazy things we can do with the rings: there’s one set in a snowy mountain that divides our party in two lanes and gives us a specific number of turns to kill the boss at the end. The catch? Every couple of turns an avalanche will push all units in one lane back to the beginning and the only way to avoid that is to position them behind the very few barriers on the map – or somehow move them to the other lane. Another map spawns an infinite number of reinforcements – which don’t give a single point of XP – until we kill the boss – and dispatching these reinforcements is no walk in the park either.

This is why, despite giving us fantastic abilities with the rings, Engage is still one of the hardest games in the franchise. It offers one of the most memorable maps, too, where it not only takes all our Emblem Rings away from us – making characters whose build depended on them suddenly fragile – but also gives those same rings to our enemies, making them even stronger and suddenly capable of all the crazy things that we could do before, like teleporting right next to us to deal massive magic damage or setting the ground on fire. We’re suddenly unprotected and at the bottom of the food chain: the chapter is the complete opposite of a power fantasy and a true stellar moment in the game, forcing us to rethink our whole battle strategy and improvise.

Fire Emblem Engage works as a sort of celebration of the franchise as well. Not only the Emblem Rings are the main characters from previous games, but most of the “Paralogues” (Fire Emblem’s version of sidequests) are recreations of famous maps of those games. Byleth’s paralogue, for example, takes place in a copy of Garreg Mach’s underground temple, where the party learns the true identity of the Flame Emperor in Three Houses, for example, with a new rendition of that game’s theme playing in the background.

Finally, we have the major changes made in the overall gameplay, like the introduction of the “broke” status. In Fire Emblem, when a unit attacks another, they receive a counterattack if the enemy’s weapon has the necessary range (a swordsman won’t counterattack a bowman, for example). The franchise is also known for its weapon triangle, where swords beat axes, which beat lances, which beat swords: these “beat” usually means the unit gains some stat bonuses against the one with the disadvantage. But in Engage, when a swordsman attacks and damages someone wielding an axe, the swordsman “breaks” this adversary, who becomes unable to counterattack anyone until the end of the turn. This unit becomes suddenly vulnerable to everyone, unable to defend themselves, basically a prime target for a bloody massacre. In other words, if in some Fire Emblem games, we can even ignore the triangle’s existence in the easier difficulties, here taking advantage of it is crucial to success.

Chain attacks also reward moving in groups, as characters near the target will do follow-up attacks that deal significantly less damage, but can stack up and become worrisome after a while. Breaking, chain attacks, and the Emblem Rings are the most important tools at our disposal to defeat the bosses in Engage, who pose much more of a threat than in previous games. First, there’s the fact that they have multiple health bars, never going down quickly. Then, there’s the fact that they move against our team after a while, rarely standing still in one spot for the entirety of the map – as it happened in previous games. And finally, there’s the fact that the Four Hounds usually wear Emblem Rings of their own, too, which also makes them capable of doing some ridiculous things against us.

Fire Emblem Engage’s combat system is simply fire with all those emblems, making for a very engaging experience. Its narrative, meanwhile, operates in a similar vibe to the previous sentence, but sometimes doubling down on the bizarre aspect of its comedy, when it’s not developing a tragic portrayal of a toxic family unit. It’s a strange game all around, in other words, but also a fascinating one to play.

March 02, 2025.