engagement farming, pt. 8
Welcome back, my friends, to Engagement Farming, our ongoing series in which we play through Fire Emblem Engage. We missed a couple weeks due to various real-life things happening and this week's a short one because we have a headache but, you know, onward and upward and all that. Let's begin.
We get to meet with the Queen of Solm and ask her for the Ring and she doesn't remember where she left it but then realizes, oh yeah, her daughter has it, she's probably out wandering around aimlessly. We go help her, she gets attacked by some bandits who have monsters working for them for . . . some reason (I kind of assume this never gets explained), and then it turns out they've just been pretending to not know what's going on so they can figure out if we're legit. I guess they have since decided we're legit! Also there's another Emblem Ring here for us to pick up, but first, it looks like Elusia has invaded the palace. Good thing we're here I guess?
There is something about the format of "we will be adding 2-3 characters to our army every chapter for half or so of the game's playtime" which I think really makes these stories fit into a very . . . episodic nature. Sometimes, of course, they're just there, but often we have to go meet this person and deal with whatever wacky hijinks they've gotten themselves into this time. Three Houses recruitment happened independent of the story, which I think helped free its story up to be doing more things than just introduce us to the character of the week.
This format, though, does a good job of letting the maps have a gimmick that at least one of the new units is good at dealing with. In this case we have a map full of obstacles and Timerra has the Emblem skill "Demolish" that lets her blow them up in one hit. It's also, for good measure, a night-time mission, so we need torches (or Yunaka) to see all the enemies. To top it off the bandits are also trying to blow up some friendly houses that have cool items inside them, so while you really want to try slow and steady out you really can't do that here. It ended up playing fairly straightforward (despite some heavy hitting fliers flying in from the darkness to cause me some problems occasionally), though at least part of this is because at this point Yunaka is an astonishingly powerful evade tank and I feel safe just sending her into the middle of the darkness and assuming she'll probably be fine. We love Yunaka here.
Anyway, that's what I got this week. Hopefully I'll be back next week but I gotta go out of town this weekend and that tends to take a lot out of me these days. But I'm enjoying this. We got more Emblem Rings to find, more friends to make, and so many more dudes to murder. I will see you then, friends.