With Fire Emblem Engage releasing soon and only a few months left before all of the 3DS games go into the Nintendo Vault never to be seen again, I think it‘s time for a Fire Emblem thread. This weekend I’ve been picking up DLCs that I missed out on before the 3DS eShop closes and realized there’s a lot I want to revisit. Someday I hope to beat all of the FE games, plus Shouzou Kaga’s TearRing Saga and Vestaria Saga – but that's a pretty tall task.
Fire Emblem is both a formulaic series, but also with well defined ‘eras’ where the series evolved alongside the hardware it was on. It always has grand storylines, great map design, strong gameplay and progression, and large casts of characters with personality and utility. [Maybe too many characters](https://youtu.be/EMVjPDqrkyg). What’s changed over time is the presentation, side content, time/relationship management, and the addition of colorful anime v-tubers.
I'm downloading The Future Past maps for Awakening right now... hopefully it adds some flavor to Morgan, so he's not just the blue-headed stepchild of FE13. At some point in the new year I plan to restart Path of Radiance (since I accidentally formatted my emulation box), or check out some of the other games in the series 😈
@“JoJoestar”#p98848 me too. I’m a hater of all the games past sacred stones, when things got especially horny soon after. I’m horny for how good and smooth and efficient the sprite animations were in sacred stones though.
Soon I’ll play through this series from the beginning. For now Ive only ever beaten Sacred Stones. But I did it way back in the 6th grade, and it was my first tactical rpg! My gateway drug to final fantasy tactics advance.
I currently own the first game on family computer, and the first two on super famicom cib. Put them all up for sale here, but surprisingly no takers! That’s fine though, I listed them for pretty low 😉
I am now pretty pumped about Fire Emblem Engage following this more recent video about the home base activities. The game seems to recycle and correct everything attempted in Fire Emblem Fates but done better, simpler and leaner.
Which in turn should also make the sim elements way less intrusive than the Hogwarts part of Three Houses. And the battles seems to return to the style of the GBA games in terms of scope and strategy – but with support closer to how Awakening worked.
Basically, every part seems at the right scope of how much it expects for me to be involved. I certainly would not be able to digest something as stuffed (sometimes nonsensically) as Fire Emblem Fates or Fire Emblem Three Houses this January.
I am just worried that the Engage system is gonna be so overpowered that regular attacks won’t matter much (in the same way that the fusion forms in Xenoblade 3 made regular characters feel completely accessory to the battles sometimes).
@“chazumaru”#p98928 Basically, every part seems at the right scope of how much it expects to me to be involved.
I think that's the key. As much as I personally enjoyed Garreg Mach, it slowed everything down if you try to min-max growth and supports for Hard or Lunatic mode. During my first two routes I loved the slow pace because it allowed for more characterization. But then I lost interest during my Blue Lions playthrough (possibly because they're the least interesting characters and I already recruited them before).
My ideal would be if Intelligent Systems copied the Dragon Quest XI S idea, by letting you switch to 2D mode, where you have a home base like the castle in Fates where you can quickly handle things and get back into the next map.
Sadly, the more new FE games I play, the less of the series I like (in that Awakening was bad, and 3 Houses was even worse) - I‘d be glad if Engage is ditching the "you can technically turn any unit into anything but 99% of the time they’re meant to be one kind of thing" aspect, but since it kept the home base concept (which was useless/boring/empty filler in 3 houses) with even more mobage/mind-numbing/soul-sucking minigame accoutrements, I think I‘m gonna skip this one. As a kid I could ignore the writing because the gameplay was fun, but they’ve still never made the specials (or even just normal attacks) as cool to watch as they were in the gba games (which was half the fun). They went over the top on horrible color palates instead - now it's hard to trust if they could even avoid remaking the old games we never got in this kind of style.
@“Kite006”#p99887 they’ve still never made the specials (or even just normal attacks) as cool to watch as they were in the gba games (which was half the fun)
I should point out the oft forgotten FE Echoes on 3DS, which came out a few weeks after the Switch had already launched and was grabbing all the attention, probably had the best 3D animations on the system outside of its six Monster Hunter games.
@“chazumaru”#p100220 It's a shame that Echoes was, on the whole, a bit boring, because there was quite a lot to like about it, in addition to how great it looked. I enjoyed the light exploration parts, for example.
The character designer of Fire Emblem Engage is counting down to the release of the game (this Friday) with daily character portraits on her Twitter Account
Reviews have come in, and the overwhelming sentiment seems to be: more focus on battles, less of the fluff that bogged Three Houses down. I for one am pleasantly surprised by this! Judging from the much more colourful presentation and apparently less serious tone (compared to Three Houses), I was expecting Engage to double down on all the non-battle Persona elements. Sounds like that‘s not exactly the case! I hope they got the balance right. Can’t wait for Friday.
Seems like all the reviews say the story sucks. Which is too bad!
Three Houses was the first Fire Emblem game I played and I liked it way more than expected. Despite the rave reviews, I avoided it for about a year because the social Sim had no interest for me.
Until I played it! I can't believe how enjoyable I found that aspect of the game. I don't think it's something I necessarily want out of another game, but if I just want to play a tactics game without a story, Into the Breach is sitting right there.
@“edward”#p100890 But what if you wanted Into The Breach with pretty and colourful animes!
I cannot stress the importance of pretty animes enough when it comes to Fire Emblem's appeal. Even back in the mysterious, "Who is this 'Marth' and why is he a Smash Brother?" days, his pretty anime-ness stood out and captivated.
I‘ve been trying to avoid reviews and the discourse around Engage but I’m at peace with them reducing the social sim aspects as long as they make it more hardcore. My hope is with Fates/Echoes, then 3H/Engage they are trying to create a cadence of “one for the new fans, one for the classic fans”, which I respect. I guess we'll see when we get our hands on the game.
@whatsarobot I cannot stress the importance of pretty animes enough when it comes to Fire Emblem’s appeal. Even back in the mysterious, “Who is this ‘Marth’ and why is he a Smash Brother?” days, his pretty anime-ness stood out and captivated.
The character designs are deeply important since the very beginning. For example, in the first row below you can see Abel is a happy chappy while Cain is a fuckboy. They didn't have enough room for dialogue in the original game to flesh out those character traits, but you can infer it from their pfps. Then when they remade this game on DS they got rid of the personality lol
The cynic in me does think the more outlandish costumes they've shown in Engage trailers is just to add variety to Fire Emblem Heroes skins, but at the end of the day it adds personality to the characters and makes them more unique so I'm for it.
