There’s little engaging about Fire Emblem Engage
-
Loading... - Jerome Ariti
- 17 Jan 2023
- 62 Views
- 0 Like
- 0 Comment
From the first moment Nintendo surprise-revealed the existence of Fire Emblem Engage, I was hooked. I adored Three Houses and Fates and was expecting this new entry to offer the same kind of — forgive me — engaging storytelling that would get me emotionally attached to the world and its characters. But Fire Emblem Engage did not meet those expectations, giving me instead a hollowed-out world with pretty but flat characters that I somehow still spent over 70 hours in.
Engage starts with Alear, a bicolor-haired protagonist initiating what seems to be a final battle with a ghostly Marth — the hero of the first Fire Emblem — at their side. One thousand years later, Alear wakes from a magical slumber greeted by their mother and their stewards, who have kept watch all these long years. Alear learns that they are a Divine Dragon who is destined to defeat the evil Fell Dragons with the help of 12 magical Emblem Rings, each housing the spirit and power of a hero from across Fire Emblem’s 30-plus year history.
My biggest problem with Engage is that there are no stakes in the story. There are no choices to be made that can alter the course of the game, just a single route for the toothpaste-haired protagonist to follow. I felt pulled along, bouncing from story mission to story mission with nothing really to latch onto emotionally. When I played Three Houses, I was a Golden Deer through and through, believing in Claude’s dream of an egalitarian Fódlan. In Fates, I was a daughter of Hoshido, dedicated to protecting the land of my birth. But I just couldn’t invest in Engage the way I had in Three Houses or Fates. There was nothing there to invest in. Read More…
