engagement farming, pt. 1
In 2019, Intelligent Systems released Fire Emblem: Three Houses, the sixteenth entry in the long-running Fire Emblem series, to critical acclaim. The narrative attempted to provide its audience with nuanced morality, with different routes you can choose radically changing the story and the fate of the continent of Fodlan, on which the game takes place; it also has a cast of characters that, despite still falling broadly into the tropes and archetypes that Fire Emblem is known for, felt deeper than they often do. It spawned discourse, and discourse about the discourse, and backlash to the discourse about the discourse. Like it or not, Fire Emblem: Three Houses left an impact, and is destined to be a game in the series that is held up as a landmark for future games. Certainly it would raise expectations for whatever game followed it up--Three Houses was, as narratives go, something powerful, something that challenged and interrogated the Fire Emblem formula. I certainly didn't envy the writers the task of trying to equal that in a follow-up.
Enter Fire Emblem Engage. In a stroke of brilliance1, they opted to simply . . . not try, narratively speaking. This story is pure tropey Fire Emblem nonsense: we're the Divine Dragon, a Colgate-hued amnesiac dragon with a small coterie of disturbingly devoted attendants and a big-tiddy dragon mother. There's the Nice Kingdom, the Military Kingdom, the Wizard Kingdom, the Desert Kingdom, and the Evil Kingdom. There's an evil dragon who wants to do evil things, and good dragons who want to maintain peace and beauty. And the core mechanic--the one the game is named for--is that you get to summon action figures of all your favorite Fire Emblem characters from previous games to unlock unique powers. This is pure, dumb fun. How do you follow up a narrative masterpiece? Try to do something else.
I started playing Engage when it launched but didn't get very far--seven chapters in, if my save file is to be believed. (I'm pretty sure it's trustworthy). This happens sometimes--I was having fun but I got distracted or got busy or whatever and just stopped. And I've been meaning to work through it again ever since, and what better way to do that than with you, my beloved readers?
Welcome, my friends, to Engagement Farming. Let's begin. Spoilers below.
As soon as I fired the game up, an extremely anime intro played that I had no memory of. It's all shots of the characters from the game doing cool things with their Emblems (that's what the action figure summons are called), while the most anime intro theme music in the world plays over it. This is important to set the tone. For the first three chapters, which is what we got through this week, we're still stuck in tutorial mode, and the story has only just started.
We wake up after what, we are told, is 1000 years of sleep; our retainers fawn all over us but don't really tell us much except that we are "the Divine Dragon"2 and that they are part of a long line of retainers who have been watching us sleep for 1000 years. We enjoy some conversations about this, and decide to go down to the surface world to meet our mom at her castle, where we're attacked by monsters. Everyone finds them alarming but seems to be like "eh whatever it's probably fine", so we just proceed as if nothing happened, talking about all the fun mother/daughter bonding we'll get to do now that we're finally awake. We do have a dream in which an evil, all-red version of us appears to be cackling over a burning castle, and I'm pretty confident we will find out later on that we're half evil on our father's side somewhere down the line, but, y'know, whatever. Our mother explains that once every 1000 years, the Divine Dragons have to gather all 12 pieces of the TriforceEmblems and use them to make a wish and make the world good again, or keep it good, or something like that. Then we are attacked by forces of the Fell Dragon, and mom dies protecting us (transferring her powers to us in the process; I think this is how we get the rewind power?), everyone's very sad, especially us (this feels extremely unearned), then we resolve to face our fears and go collect the 12 Emblems and save the world from the evil dragon. Neat!
Like I said, the story in this game is . . . it's not the point. We're not here for that. Maybe there's a twist later that makes it more interesting (but I think I'd have heard about that by now) and, this being Fire Emblem, there will definitely be some fun characters down the line, but what struck me about this game, even though I only beat seven chapters before, is how cool the mechanics are.
We've done away with weapon durability3, and we've reworked the classic weapon triangle (spears beat swords beat axes beat spears) so that, instead of getting a bonus in an advantageous fight, you get to inflict a new status called Break when you attack with weapon triangle advantage, which disables the enemy's counterattacks until their next turn. So far, so interesting. Then they have added various unit types (they appear to call it Battle Style?)--Covert units get more benefit from fighting in terrain, Cavalry units have more movement speed, Fliers fly . . . and Armored units are immune to Break. We'll see whether this makes me actually want to use Armored units (they historically tend to have Some Problems) but what a cool way to power up a unit type that has historically struggled to be useful.
Then we have the Emblems. These are narratively and thematically extremely silly (summon all your favorite Fire Emblem characters from previous games!) but mechanically, each one offers a set of unique skills and bonuses that you can use to mix and match with your characters, who all have their own personal skills, to do some cool customization for your army. It makes for some fun choices.
There's not a lot to talk about in terms of encounter design in the first three chapters. We have a couple of battles that are Extremely Tutorial, one where our mom teaches us that enemy units with their own Emblems are capable of surprising you (she can move further than the map tells you she can and she hits real hard), and then, finally, one map that feels real-ish. It starts us in an extremely bad-looking situation, surrounded by baddies. The natural inclination is to retreat into a corner to survive that first turn, and then the enemies close in, and just as you're thinking "oh, I'm not sure how I survive turn two," you get some reinforcements. It's a nice touch, and it teaches us about a few more mechanics, and then we get to chop our way through them. It's not hard but it feels like we're working with a full toolkit here.4
Anyway. I still don't know what the format is going to look like for Engagement Farming moving forward; I'm aiming to do at least one chapter a week, but we might do more (as evidenced by the fact that we did "three" tonight). So, stay tuned, friends: there is a lot more Engagement to farm. I'll see you then.
I'm not being ironic here.↩
In the text they nearly always use our name, but the game is mostly voiced, so they just say "the Divine Dragon" when they talk to us. This creates a bit of dissonance in that there is also our mom, who is the Divine Dragon Queen, but fortunately she dies pretty early on so we don't have to worry about ambiguity.↩
My coldest take is that weapon durability doesn't really add anything interesting to Fire Emblem most of the time; grognards, of course, wail and gnash their teeth any time it's not in the game.↩
We still don't have all of our weird bullshit in our castle area, but eh, that doesn't count.↩