(yes I can, it's characters, which, RIP Engage)
As Serene's post from last night says, we beat Fire Emblem Engage last night, and, man, what a thoroughly disappointing experience.
Bit of a ramble below the break, because I have an awful lot of thoughts that I just wanna get out.
It's too easy and boring, and too hard and tedious
First off, and this is a me thing, I cannot figure out what kind of difficulty I want out of a Fire Emblem game. This whole post is gonna keep coming back to difficulty and, well, engagement, because all my thoughts about the game (beyond the insultingly bad story and character writing) seem to revolve around them.
We played on Hard, and while there were some spikes, it really wasn't a very challenging experience, largely due to emblems and a few other systems we'll get to later. I do think the maps and scenarios are quite interesting, but an awful lot of that is flattened out when the answer is always to throw your most powerful murder-gremlin at the problem and let them sort it out. And ultimately, I think the game just way overstayed its welcome. At 26 main maps and 15 Paralogues, almost all of which are fairly large and tactically involved, it is one of the longest FE games in terms of time spent in a map. And you'd think that was a good thing, but when I was in the thick of things, the sheer number of maps I knew I still had to do felt so deflating, especially when I basically knew the exact structure they'd follow (every single emblem gets a boring paralogue that has some cute references, we're gonna get 1-2 rings back per chapter from like 10-20, etc). If this game was literally half the length I think I would've liked it a lot more, but the series has basically been going in the opposite direction for nearly 2 decades now.
And that makes the idea of increasing the difficulty incredibly unpalatable. It already feels like every map takes just a little bit too long, at least in the scope of the other 40+ maps I have to do, and the idea of making those maps more dangerous, making me think over every single decision for longer, God forbid ever actually restarting a map (I think we reset after the first 3 turns of a map once in the entire playthrough), all that sounds so incredibly unappealing that I can't even fathom the idea of trying Maddening Mode.
So I guess it's the slightly too easy Hard Mode for me. But why exactly did I find Hard Mode so pedestrian? Did they just beef it with the game mode balancing? From what I've seen online, a lot of people think of this game as one of the harder FEs, at least recently. Well,
The range of balance has been completely broken
Since moving from the tight, highly controlled format of the GBA games to the very open, tune-your-own-experience, 20-paralogue style of Awakening, I feel like the entire concept of balancing an FE game has become impossible. In FE6, 7, and even 9 the map designers knew roughly what level your units would be and could tune the enemy stats and placements accordingly. There's large variance for party composition and character growths but ultimately there is only so much exp available, only so much money and weapons and stat boosters, so your party will be about this good by chapter 20. Modern FEs tend to have nearly as many optional Paralogues as main maps, so suddenly what level the player is at for any given map is impossible to gauge.
And then there's the (fucking) Somniel
This potential power range is made even larger by the other major set of systems I want to talk about: The Somniel. God, it's like they took every part of the Monastery that everyone hated in 3H and doubled down on it while taking out the parts that made it my favorite part of the game, interacting with the characters and seeing how they felt about the current state of the story. Now everyone has a generic quote that isn't voiced (or worth voicing) and so what's left is a series of increasingly irrelevant systems and minigames with juuuust enough behind them to make them nominally worth interacting with. And that's kind of even worse because you're given the option to pick and choose what systems you want to engage with and ignore, but there's so many of them that are so intertwined that the relative power-gained-for-time-spent of any single activity is pretty low. But taken all together they make a huge difference, and basically amount to the bulk of your entire character building experience in the game!
So ultimately I do have to perform a lengthy list of chores on the Somniel every single time I pop in:
- Meals are quick and pretty decent stat boosts, so sure.
- But then I better go pick up the fruits and check on my farm so I don't run out of ingredients (but also I can't see any reason to have anything other than 5 dogs on your farm. A single silver ore is worth more than every other prize we ever received from any other animal).
- And I should probably go pet and feed Sommie for those extra bond points, they might be useful later (they were).
- And I guess Alear's strength could use a buff so let's go that stupid push-up game and hear about how shiny our sweat is (we stopped this one real quick)
- Oh and I'd better check the well for any skill scrolls, I hucked a ton of useless shit in it last time and SP is such a trickle that a single intermediate scroll makes a huge difference (they did).
- Pop by the cheevo board to pick up between 50 and 7000 bond points depending on what arbitrary goals we've hit since last time (again, mega-useful).
- Now we hit the arena, to check on SP and bond levels, maybe learn some skills, cash in that bond points to build my little death machines just the way I want (which was really hard to even consider, because this game seems absolutely hostile to teaching you how its skill system works, or what options even exist).
- And make sure to cash in those ores you have to make fairly massive improvements to your weapons, but don't do it too early, since the ore you spend on iron weapons is basically wasted as you get better weapons that still need like 90 iron per level
- Oh and while you're here, throw some spare bond points into possibly one of the strongest upgrade systems in the entire game, engraving emblems to weapons! You didn't even know this existed? You haven't lived until you've given your mage a 31 weight thoron with 21Mt, or Yunaka a free 30 avoid!
And I'm not even going into the hangouts or the fishing or the flea market or the minor ring gacha or the rail shooter or the Entire Fucking Tower Of Trials, where you can grind easy maps in order to get two of a resource you need 20 of to add a few extra Mt to an Engage weapon you can use 4 turns on a map, how does this system exist, why is this here, ahhhh
Limitations are a blessing
And ultimately, it can be argued, fairly, that interacting with all these systems and minmaxing the hell out of the game breaks the difficulty curve and results in the exact "tedious but not difficult" experience I've been whining about. But the problem is there's no guidance, no limiting factor beyond your unwillingness to grind it. Maybe there's an exact constellation of features with the perfect level of engagement of that would tune the difficulty exactly to my skill level and make the maps the perfect amount of tense without being teeth-grinding, but I can't imagine how I would ever find it with absolutely no feedback on the game about what's worth what and so many booby-trap activities that are basically worthless in the long-run. You can do whatever you want, for as long as you want, as many times as you want in the Somniel, and nothing will force you, or even suggest you should stop.
In the GBA games (6 and 7 really), once a chapter was done, you were never going back. Every 1HP heal you get or turn you sandbag for some extra reinforcements feels like you getting one over on the game. Everything is a finite resource, and that means even if you end up super overpowered you at least feel like you earned it through careful play (or abused the arena for it). And it wasn't perfect, God knows you could end up stuck in a state where you literally could not complete your playthrough due to ruining out of resources or leaving people you put a lot of time into dead, but I found it compelling.
In Engage, it's just a matter of how long I'm willing to do my homework after every map, how many extra generic maps I'm willing to throw myself into, it takes away so much of that satisfaction of building the perfect monster unit for me. FEs lost that interesting resource puzzle aspect a long time ago, and I just don't like the bloated, grating systems they've replaced it with.
Whew
Okay, I think I'm done. If you made it this far, thanks for reading! I feel like I have so many complicated feelings about this game, and it was nice to put them all out there. Sorry if I just spent a few hours shitting on a game you really like.
