Fire emblem engage review embargo12/10/2023 At least in both Fire Emblem Warriors games, we were given the opportunity to learn about our favorites and see them in a new light, while the new characters were mostly just player stand-ins and supports. Sure, Engage is meant to be a more fanservice-y game that just wants to bring everyone together, but when the series icons take a backseat to the less-than-impressive main cast, it just feels bad all around. It’s also hard not to feel like the series’ mainstays like Marth, Celica, Ike, et al have just been shoehorned in for fun. After sinking about ten or so hours into the game, I’ve gotten to meet several other new faces, and things haven’t really improved. That isn’t the case with Engage’s new characters, who often feel trope-y at best and cringey at worst. Now I’m not saying that every character in the main games were compelling with deep backstories that could really suck you in, but they at least had more flavor and personality to them. Engage, by all metrics, is at best an average Fire Emblem entry, and at worst a cynical, soulless product with an identity crisis.The new faces in Engage are woefully lackluster and uninspiring. There is no artistic vision or cohesive idea underlying Engage: it is a bundle of elements of poor quality slapped together on top of a gameplay system that whilst may be impressive to players whose only prior experience was Three Houses, fails to come even remotely close to being the best of what the franchise has to offer, or to make it worthwhile suffering through the other aspects of the game. It would be interesting to see the break and emblem mechanics in a game that knew what its identity was. Character design is awful it is ironic that despite being so flashy and outrageous, none of these characters will stick in the player's mind once they go off-screen. The music is serviceable but the most generic of the post-Awakening Fire Emblem games. Beyond some exceptions such as Diamant, they range from non-entities to Jar Jar Binks level irritating presences that have one personality trait and will repeat it for hundreds of lines of dialogue. I’ll have more to say once the review embargo lifts, but for now, I’d say keep your expectations in. Characters are regression to the shallow tropes of Fates which feel poorly thought out and like there was no underlying intention to them other than to pad out the roster. Fire Emblem Engage takes place on a whole new continent with a cast of new characters. Plot beats range from mind-numbingly bland to hilariously overdramatic and forced: Engage is a game that seems to want emotional pay-off whilst giving you no reason to care for the characters it establishes. It is a plot and world so generic and formulaic that one wonders if they fed the previous scripts into an AI and generated it mechanically. Alear wanders through a generic world of forgettable characters trying to obtain macguffins whilst nothing interesting or of note occurs. Furthermore, whatever pleasure is granted by the battle mechanics fails to compensate for the lacklustre nature of the game in all other areas. Whilst containing an admittedly interesting new battle system, it fails to reach the heights of games like Thracia and Conquest and will seem utterly unremarkable to long-time fans. When viewed in the context of the entire franchise, Engage is a disappointment that represents a regression rather than a progression in When viewed in the context of the entire franchise, Engage is a disappointment that represents a regression rather than a progression in quality.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply.AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |