I’m still a huge newbie when it comes to the Fire Emblem games. Despite owning every single game on the 3DS and Switch and it being one of my top four gaming franchise of all time, I haven’t played any of the games before Fates. So when I heard about Fire Emblem Engage’s gimmick of bringing back many of the characters from older games, I knew that this would be a good chance to start getting to know some of the older characters.

I knew this was already done multiple times before. There are multiple characters in the first Fire Emblem Warriors game and Heroes is a massive crossover, but with Engage, it seemed as if they would be more pivotal to the story than in those two. I was also excited for Engage because this would have been the first mainline game that I was excited for on release since I didn’t become a fan until two years after Three Houses came out. On top of that, Three Houses became my third most favorite game of all time so I had a lot of high hopes for Engage.

CHARACTERS: 10/10

The main draw of Fire Emblem Engage is the sheer number of characters scattered across the entire game, both playable and not. In total there are almost 40 characters that you can recruit throughout the game to serve as your units. This is about the same as what you got in Three Houses but the cast of overall characters is massively increased through the use of Emblem Rings, Bond Rings, and DLC. The Emblem Rings are basically the MacGuffin of the game and when you use one, it allows you to summon a specific Fire Emblem character from a previous game to fight alongside you and do special attacks. They don’t fight like an actual playable unit though but they are still very cool.

In the base game, there are 12 Emblem Rings to collect. They summon Marth, Celica, Sigurd, Leif, Roy, Lyn, Erika/Ephraim, Ike, Micaiah, Lucina, Corrin, and Byleth. One really cool aspect of this is that you can get support ranks with these characters instead of just the playable units. You can easily get like 30 to 60 minutes worth of dialogue and story with each character as you increase your bond with them. That’s just a ton of extra lore and content. If you get the Expansion Pass, you get access to 10 more emblems including Camilla, Robin, and Edelgard and they all get supports as well.

In addition to the Emblem Rings, there are also Bond Rings. These are very similar to Emblem Rings and let you equip an older character but are nowhere near as powerful, mostly just little boosts. There are multiple Bond Rings for every Fire Emblem generation and bring in more than 100 characters in total. That’s already a ton of characters and we didn’t get to talk about the nearly 40 playable characters that each have their own supports and stats to grow. Working with these characters are a lot easier than working with the characters in Three Houses since they aren’t tied to a specific route and all of them can be recruited in a single playthrough. It’s also incredibly easy to fall in love with many of them.

GRAPHICS: 9/10

The graphics for the most part is a slight improvement over Three Houses. The animated cutscenes are as beautiful as ever and many of the 3D models look really good. When you’re in battle, the environment looks really good overall. The top down perspective seems to have more detail and when you zoom into the 3D attacks, the backgrounds look great in some cases and the attacks themselves seem to be more fluid and crisp. There also seems to be a lot more color and better contrasts than with Three Houses. When you’re doing supports or specific cutscenes, the backgrounds are also much better with enhanced lighting and more of a 3D effect. Overall the graphics are really good.

SOUND: 8/10

If I’m being completely honest, Engage had the weakest sound aspect of the Fire Emblem games that I have played. The voice acting is as good as it can be with the original voice actors returning for their characters and many of the new characters having pretty decent actors as well. A few of my other favorite voice actors joined the cast for some of the new characters like Nick Wolfhard and Laura Stahl. My only complaint with the voices is that because there was so many more characters in total than we’re used to, it just seems like there’s fewer lines per character in total that were fully voiced that’s not something that I was a big fan of.

As for the soundtrack, I thought it was amazing but I didn’t like it as much as Three Houses. The entire soundtrack as a whole is massive with lots of great tracks, just none of them were really iconic to me.

STORY: 8/10

The story is nowhere near as good as Three Houses or Awakening and there are many times where it just doesn’t make any sense but it’s still pretty enjoyable. You play as the Divine Dragon Alear who awakens after hundreds of years. Most of the story revolves around trying to defeat the Fell Dragon by collecting the Emblem Rings. Personally I feel like the overall story takes a backseat to the characters and gameplay in this one. I even thought at times that the story you could piece together from supports was better than the main story.

GAMEPLAY: 10/10

The gameplay of Fire Emblem Engage is as good as it can be for a Fire Emblem game. It’s basically your average Fire Emblem combat mechanic, which is great on its own, but with the added mechanic of the Emblem Rings. We already talked about increasing your bond with an Emblem character through supports and doing that will increase your stats when you’re merged with that character. Since there’s a bunch of characters you can merge with, it adds so much to the amount of strategy you have to use in addition to the standard grid based RPG tactics.

Somniel also adds a lot to the entire experience. It’s basically an overworld hub that’s similar to the Monastery in Three Houses and let’s you do so many activities, and it’s massive. The main area of Somniel is the plaza area that has multiple shops. It’s like the marketplace in the Monastery but with even more shops. There’s also two training area, a room where you can improve your ring, a farm, recreation areas, a fishing spot, and so much more.

Two of my favorite areas were the Tower of Trials and the Café. In the Tower of Trials you can do extra battles and in the Café you can cook for units like in the cafeteria in Three Houses. Personally I think this hub area is as good as the Monastery if not better when it comes to features and gameplay mechanics.

ADDICTIVENESS: 10/10

Fire Emblem Engage will be incredibly addicting for any fan of the series, maybe even more addicting than Three Houses was. For starters, the battles themselves are lots of fun. There’s definitely a chance that you’ll want to do some battles over or take on extra challenges simply because of how much fun thee battles are. I personally didn’t do as many battles as I did in Three Houses but I still had a lot of fun. But if you’re also a fan of Fire Emblem as a whole, you’ll have so much fun interacting with the older Fire Emblem characters, working on their supports, and making them as strong as you can. You’ll also all in love with some of the new additions to the roster and want to work on them a well. There’s lots to fall in love with in Engage.

DEPTH: 10/10

There’s really just so much going on in Fire Emblem Engage. You might not get as many hours as Three Houses since that had multiple story routes but you’ll easily be able to rack up hours with all the content. You can get lost in Somniel alone. When I first unlocked Somniel, I spent hours exploring and throughout my entire playthrough, I probably spent more than 30 hours just doing the variety of activities that hub had to offer. We also talked about the sheer number of characters that are featured in the game, which would be enough to give most games a 10 in depth. The amount of battles there are to take part in, characters to grow, skills, and weapons available is also really impressive.

Lastly, there’s also the amount of stuff that you get from the Expansion Pass. We already talked about the characters and Emblem Rings that it adds, but you also get more battles, classes, maps, items, and an extra story. If you speed run the game you can push 50 hour while doing everything will allow you to cross 100 hours easily. Between the extra story and the supports/growth of the new characters, the Expansion Pass could cost you 20 or more hours as well.

DIFFICULTY: 4

If the game gets to tough for you at times, you really just need to work on improving your supports or do a little bit of grinding to increase your stats. You can even change the difficulty if you really have to. It can be a tough game at times but the game gives you options to make it easier.

FINAL THOUGHTS

The game does focus more on fanservice in bringing in all the old characters than on making an amazing store but there’s still a lot to love about it between the cast of characters, gameplay, visuals, and sound design. If you love Fire Emblem, you won’t find it to be as strong as Three Houses or Awakening but it will definitely give you your fair share of Fire Emblem content. If you can get yours hands on the Divine Edition of the game, you should try to go for that too. The game has been out for nearly a year already and the cost for the Divine Edition hasn’t gone up like most Fire Emblem special editions do. This edition comes with a steelbook and artbook plus a few other cool things. Overall Engage is perfect for any Fire Emblem fan and I give it a 9.2 out of 10.