engagement farming, pt. 3
Another week, another installment of Engagement Farming, our ongoing journey to play through Fire Emblem Engage. (Is there a colon in the title for this one? I don't think there's a colon in the title.) Last week we embarked on our find-the-object quest; this week we meet a pop star murderess in the woods! Let's begin.
I played through the first paralogue, in which we recruit Jean, this game's kid-with-Aptitude (the personal skill that makes all of his growths better), and Chapter 6 this week. There's not much to report narratively; the paralogue is a standard "save the village, one of the people we saved asks to join our army" map, and in Chapter 6 we get our next Emblem Ring by helping out our new pal Yunaka, who actually originally stole it for the cash and then felt bad when it started talking to her and asking for help, so now she's on our team. We do meet the mysterious traveling child Veyne once again, who is looking for her long-lost sibling. Both our interactions with her so far have been very "this person will be important to the plot later but right now it's just mysterious"; given that we are probably half evil on our dad's side I'm guessing she's probably our half sister, and we are probably the person she's looking for, but there's several options that seem plausible here.
Coming from the character work of Three Houses it is very funny to me how one-dimensional the cast here is so far. Everyone (especially Alear) is just very nice; we have our coterie of muscle enthusiasts in Prince Alfred and his retainers; our coterie of tea enthusiasts in Princess Celine and her retainers; and then we have our Divine Dragon Fan Club children and our aging butler, all of whom, as I noted, are way too devoted to us.
The paralogue map was another classic setup: there are bad guys and they're attacking some defenseless villagers on the other end of the map. They had two healers to help them tread water for a while, but there is a flier coming in from the northeast (we start on the southwest) who will make that no longer adequate. I really like this setup: you have some time before the villagers are seriously threatened but you do need to get someone up there to draw the attackers away. There's a couple of options, but apparently the AI really highly values getting a Break if they have the option, so that was what I ended up doing: luring them out with a unit they could Break, and then closing the trap around them.
NPC defense quests like this can be very frustrating because the actions of the NPCs are out of your control; in this one the fact that they are mostly stationary helps alleviate that, as does the fact that there's no penalty if they die. (I'm pretty sure we get a bonus item if they all live; that's usually how it works.)
Chapter 6, meanwhile, introduces us to the fog/darkness mechanic, in which our visibility is limited unless we use a torch or other light source to light the way. (It appears that the Thief class (or maybe just Yunaka?) also acts as a mobile torch, which is handy.) I'm not especially fond of this particular gimmick; instead of interesting positioning it's mainly about moving forward cautiously with your strongest units, so they can take whatever ambush is waiting for them, and keeping the weaker units behind where it's probably safe so they can close in and finish off any given fight. It can be fun to try to intuit which squares are safe based on previous information, but overall I think I prefer a straightforward map. That said, there is something to be said for making decisions based on incomplete information.
And with that I think I am officially caught up to my past self. We've got access to some of the DLC paralogues now, and also the Three Houses DLC Emblem (it looks like all the DLC Emblems aren't rings; this one is a bracelet; this is presumably why they don't count towards collecting the 12 Emblem Rings). I don't yet have a handle on how broken the DLC is in this game; sometimes DLC content in Fire Emblem just makes the game easier and sometimes it just adds interesting choices. I'm here because I like an interesting challenge so I tend to avoid using things that make the game too easy, but I do enjoy trying out new interesting maps (which is what I get the DLC for in the first place). So, we'll see.
But in any case, that's all I got for you this week. Next time we will do Chapter 7 and probably some paralogues, and probably meet some characters I haven't seen before. And by probably I mean definitely. So until next time, friends, take care, and I will see you then.