engagement farming, pt. 2
Welcome back, friends and enemies, to Engagement Farming, our brand new series in which we play through Fire Emblem Engage. We got through the first "three" chapters1 last week, so this week it's on to chapters 4 and 5! Let's begin. (There will be spoilers but I'm pretty sure no one will have a worse experience playing this game for the first time after reading any of these posts.)
Having successfully gotten rid of our mother and accepted our quest to collect all the pieces of the Key to Timethe twelve Emblem Rings, the story takes us to Firene, the Kingdom of Abundance, to collect the next Emblem Ring. Firene is a kingdom whose hobbies include flowers, peace, and happiness; they haven't, we are told, seen war for centuries, but fortunately they still have a martial tradition or the Firenese companions we have would probably be pretty useless. Anyway, they're under attack! Servants of the evil dragon, it turns out, also want the Emblem Rings for mysterious reasons. Chapter 4 sees us meeting the Firenese Princess and her retainers, and Chapter 5 sees us save the Queen.2
The story will be like this for a while, I suspect: we get some new characters, we save some people from attacks by either the evil dragon's armies or maybe some bandits, we pick up the odd Emblem. This is, of course, kind of par for the course for video games of this ilk; find-the-object quests are useful because they give us a goal to work towards that doesn't really require us knowing anyone's motives. We've got stuff to find. There's bad guys who also want it. And until we have all the things there's no reason to change things up, so we can focus on other things.
The map design of Fire Emblem has always interested me. While different people have different playstyles, I think by and large the default approach is to move your designated tank forward to lure the enemy in with as little damage to your team as possible, secure the terrain the enemies yield, and do that over and over again; so if you want to make an interesting map, you want to create a little friction for that plan.
Chapter 4 gives us that friction by having our two new units start in a place that is inconvenient for the rest of the army to access, and in a place where they will soon be overrun if they don't get a little help soon. There's archers to murder the flier and mages to murder the tank. And then they give us Céline, who comes equipped with the Emblem Ring for Celica, whose special Engage skill is Rewarp Ragnarok, which lets her teleport a pretty long distance and nuke someone with a big magic spell. It's probably possible to clear this one without using that, but I love the "here's a puzzle; here's the tool you will need to solve that puzzle" design here. If you engage with it you will not forget what Celica's Engage skill does, because that skill absolutely slaps.
This is also the map that gives us our Turn Back Time button, a mechanic introduced in Shadows of Valentia which lets you rewind to a previous turn if you lose a unit or if something goes wrong. (Huge fan.) I used that mechanic a ton in Chapter 4; some of it was bad luck, some of it was sloppy play or allocating the wrong units to different parts of the map.
Chapter 5, in contrast, tries to mix things up by giving us the classic "a thief is looting some chests and will get away with the loot if you don't stop him!" setup. The slow and patient approach doesn't work here--he'll get out if you take too long--but you also have some guys you need to deal with along the main path, so you probably want to split your party. Then once you've dealt with the thief you can break a wall and do a cool pincer maneuver on the main room, so for the final fight you're able to bring the whole army to bear on the bad guys. It feels nice.
We're still at the point when you can bring your entire army to each battle, and before we've hit the ability to swap classes or promote or whatever. The Emblems offer some customization and we've found some items that change up a character's utility, but we're not yet at the part where you can really go wild with it, and one of the things I enjoy about Fire Emblem is building my army.3 I'm looking forward to seeing what I end up with.
But that's all I have for you this week. We'll be back next week with more (potentially the week after next, but I'm hoping not); until then, take care of yourselves, friends.
There's also a prologue. Also they're very short.↩
As near as I can tell, the castle was basically not defended at all?↩
One of the things I liked about Three Houses is that you start with a whole House and you have a lot of choice in how to build them up. It suffers a bit from there being a few very strong options, but even without engaging with the recruitment mechanics you've got a lot of ways you can build up your army. Engage's approach (which is the more traditional one as far as I can tell) of giving you a slow trickle of units is probably more approachable but does come with a bit of a loss of flexibility.↩