Some context, first, dear reader: I am Bad At Strategy Games. The way my brain works is seemingly incapable of the art of “thinking a few moves ahead”, which is something of a necessary skill in most strategy games. Consequently, over the years, I’ve come to avoid most strategy games, because I know I’ll just be cack at them and never be able to get anywhere.
However, there’s always been one series that I feel like I should enjoy if I just take the time to get to know it and understand how it works, and that is Fire Emblem from Intelligent Systems and Nintendo. Trouble is, being Bad At Strategy Games also means that I Don’t Know How To Improve At Strategy Games, and thus I have, historically, shied away, finding the series somewhat intimidating despite liking the concepts and character designs.
No more, though! I decided that I’d give Fire Emblem Engage a go. And, having beaten it on its Normal difficulty level with permadeath turned off — I am a newbie and wanted a gentle introduction — I can say with confidence that I had a lovely time. So join me after the jump and let’s talk about that a bit more.

Why did I choose Fire Emblem Engage, rather the particularly well-regarded Fire Emblem: Three Houses? Primarily due to length, to be honest; I wasn’t sure going in if I would enjoy the experience, so I wanted a game that didn’t require a vast commitment of time to make it through. As it happens, Fire Emblem Engage still took just shy of 70 hours to beat, but it’s done now, whereas with Three Houses I would want to complete all the narrative paths, which extends the length of the game as a whole considerably.
In Fire Emblem Engage, you take on the role of Alear, a Divine Dragon (in humanoid form, whose gender you choose at the outset) who has just awoken after a long slumber. A thousand years ago, Alear was involved in a war against Sombron, the Fell Dragon, and slept for a millennium after the villain was sealed away in order to recover from the terrible toll the war had taken on them.
As Alear awakes, they have, in true role-playing game style, lost their memories completely, but they are guided through reintegration into society by their stewards Vander, Clanne and Framme, and their mother Lumera, another Divine Dragon.

Before long, Alear is reintroduced to an important part of Fire Emblem Engage’s setting: the existence of Emblem Rings, each of which contains the spirit of a great hero from another world. Specifically, each Emblem Ring contains the spirit of a character from another Fire Emblem game, making Fire Emblem Engage something of a series fanservice game — but take heart, for this doesn’t by any means make the game inaccessible to Fire Emblem newbies like me. Instead, they form the basis of an important mechanical element to Fire Emblem Engage, which we’ll talk about shortly.
Inevitably, Sombron makes a reappearance after being sealed for a thousand years, and it becomes apparent that it’s up to Alear to sort matters out with this big baddy once and for all. In order to achieve this, Alear will need to gather all twelve Emblem Rings; only a few were left in Lumera’s castle, while the rest were divided up between the nations of Elyos: peaceful kingdom Firene, strong military power Brodia, mysterious Elusia and desert queendom Solm.

Thus begins a grand adventure, in which Alear gradually gathers a plucky band of allies to fight alongside them, travels to each of the great nations and attempts to recover the Emblem Rings. Naturally, things don’t go entirely smoothly, with events at the halfway point of the story causing Alear and company to lose all the Emblem Rings they’d collected up until this point to the enemy and have to regain them, but I’ll leave the details of exactly what transpires there for you to discover for yourself.
Fire Emblem Engage’s story is a relatively straightforward “good versus evil” tale. In fact, it feels strongly reminiscent of early role-playing games like the very first Fire Emblem on Famicom, the first Shining Force game and the original Dragon Quest, right down to the main villain of the piece being a “dark dragon”. The elaborate political intrigue of some more recent Fire Emblem games is… not entirely absent, but toned down considerably in favour of a simple hero’s journey-type narrative.
While some may see this as a shortcoming, it does make Fire Emblem Engage quite easy to digest — and, besides, there’s nothing wrong with a straightforward story now and again. Morally ambiguous “dark fantasy” tales that subvert the expectations of the genre are now so commonplace that they’re almost a cliché in themselves, so at times it can be refreshing to return to a story where everything is clear cut: the goodies build up their power to smash the baddies; the baddies cause the goodies to suffer a considerable setback; then the goodies lick their wounds, regain their strength and really smash the baddies to bring things to a satisfying conclusion.

One interesting thing about Fire Emblem Engage’s story is that we don’t actually see a lot of Sombron throughout the narrative as a whole; instead, we see the results of his machinations, primarily delivered through a group of secondary antagonists known as The Four Hounds, and the mute, monstrous Corrupted forces. They destroy towns and murder all their inhabitants; they manipulate heads of state to do their bidding; they engage in necromancy; in general, they tick most of the boxes in the Traditional RPG Being Evil Playbook.
All this has the effect of making Sombron seem like a genuine, major threat, particularly when he does put in a rare appearance — and it also makes the somewhat tragic revelations he delivers during the game’s finale sequence all the more effective. I wouldn’t go so far as to say that Sombron had “good intentions” with what he was up to, nor that he didn’t deserve a good kicking by the forces of Good — but he is at least set up to be somewhat sympathetic when you finally discover what he was really trying to achieve. This gives the finale sequence a nice sense of emotional engagement that ties things up nicely — and reflects the themes of the narrative as a whole rather well.
Much of Fire Emblem Engage is about the forging of strong bonds between people. Alear’s forces become so effective precisely because of those strong bonds between each other — and between them and the Emblems. To emphasise this point, Fire Emblem Engage places a strong focus on these bonds from both narrative and mechanical perspectives through its Support system, a feature of the series that has been present since Game Boy Advance installment Fire Emblem: The Binding Blade.

The Support system allows characters to form relationships with one another by fighting alongside one another — literally. If a unit ends its turn next to another unit, the two units will gain Support points with one another, if they are characters that are predisposed for forming a bond with one another. Not every pairing in the game results in a Support bond, but the pairings that do exist all make thematic sense; the characters have something in common with one another, or would otherwise be likely to be drawn together for one reason or another.
There are other ways to build support, too. Alear is able to give gifts to characters, with different characters preferring different items. Between battles, you can get characters to spar with other members of the squad up to three times. This gives them a bit of bonus experience and also helps them develop their relationship with one another. Characters can cook for Alear and two dining companions, which raises the Support level between the three characters and provides them with a stat boost for the next battle. And, a little later in the game, there are three locations around the “Somniel”, your base of operations, where you can pair off characters to spend a bit of quality recreation time together swimming, picking fruit or cleaning out the stables; again, this helps build the relationship between that pairing.
At various milestones of Support points, characters will gain a Support rank, at which point, between battles, you can enjoy a special scene between the two of them. There are three of these for each pairing, each of which has its own little mini-story to follow over the course of its three episodes. And, as the Support rank goes up, the stat bonuses the units confer on one another when they are standing next to one another in battle increase.

Fire Emblem Engage actually doesn’t take this system quite as far as some other entries in the series in that characters can’t get married and have children; indeed, the only character who can effectively take their relationship with another beyond simple friendship is Alear themselves, who, very late in the game, has the opportunity to acquire a special item known as a Pact Ring and gift this to any of their allies. Doing so usually implies Alear wanting to take the relationship beyond friendship into romance — though there are a few cases, such as where there’s a large age difference between Alear and the recipient, where the bond becomes more one of very close family rather than explicitly romantic.
From the romantic perspective, it’s worth noting that Alear doesn’t have to give the Pact Ring to someone of the opposite sex. Indeed, there are plenty of thoroughly heartwarming same-sex pairings you can choose from, allowing you to secure Alear’s future happiness however you see fit.
So what of those characters? In total, there are 35, not including Alear, and they cover a wide variety of archetypes, giving you a lot of flexibility to build your team how you see fit. In terms of how they’re depicted during dialogue, a lot of them initially appear to be rather one-note in terms of personality, with each character tending to have one “thing” that defines them, which they make a habit of referring to frequently, but the various Support pairings allow us to see a bit more depth and complexity to each of them, and even learn some things that we might not otherwise know.

Of particular note is the character Rosado, who is a character explicitly noted to be male, but very obviously designed to look like a cute girl, right down to the way he dresses. Given that his colour scheme uses a lot of cyan, white and pink, the colours of the transgender pride flag, it’s interesting that he isn’t explicitly depicted as being transgender — he’s just a guy who likes “being cute”, thanks to his upbringing in a village where “beauty” is not tied to the concept of gender — but he’s nonetheless handled sensitively and with respect.
There are no moments of great melodrama about his gender identity or how he chooses to express himself; instead, he’s accepted into the fold without judgement or forcing him into a role of comic relief or ridicule. He’s a source of great support for many characters who struggle with self-confidence or poor self-image, and a genuine pleasure to have around — though he, too, has plenty of opportunity for personal growth as he learns that regarding himself as “the cutest person around” can often come across as a tad arrogant.
The other side of the “bond” mechanics in Fire Emblem Engage relates to the Emblem Rings. Each character is able to equip an Emblem Ring, which confers bonuses to several of their statistics that grow as their bond with the Emblem in the ring deepens. During combat, a unit can “Engage” with their Emblem ring to transform into a more powerful form for several turns, gain access to strong weaponry and, once per Engage, make use of an Engage Attack that has some sort of special characteristic or means of breaking the usual “rules” of combat in some way.

Not only that, but each Emblem Ring also carries passive skills that can affect the way the unit wearing it fights and the benefits they can confer on allies. And, as the unit deepens their bond with the Emblem Ring, they gain the ability to “inherit” skills from the Emblem Ring and equip up to two of them at once, allowing them access to various stat bonuses and the Emblem Ring’s passive skills, even when the ring is not equipped.
A character’s bond with an Emblem Ring can be built up in two main ways. Firstly, simply fighting with the ring equipped increases the bond between the pair. Secondly, between battles, you can take characters into an “Arena” and spent a currency known as Bond Fragments to increase their bond level with an Emblem by significant amounts at a time. This latter function is particularly useful for when the Emblem Ring’s equip bonuses aren’t particularly appropriate for a character to wear it, but you want to be able to inherit some of their passive skills or stat bonuses.
At various milestones in a character’s bond with an Emblem, there’s a short conversation between the unit and the Emblem. These are, honestly, a little underwhelming compared to the Support scenes, tending to consist of an exchange of maybe three or four lines at most, but it’s perhaps understandable, given that there are 12 Emblems, 36 characters and three “bond conversations” for each pairing, making for a total of one thousand two hundred and ninety-six unique conversations. In other words, don’t expect the Emblems to have particularly deep characterisation; they’re primarily there, as previously noted, to be a bit of series fanservice for veterans.

Everything I’ve described so far is the bit of modern Fire Emblem I knew that I’d like. I love games with relationship mechanics, where you’re able to deepen your bonds with your party members, and where you get to know the cast members in a surprisingly intimate amount of detail. The bit I always knew I was going to struggle with was the turn-based strategic battles that form the majority of the “main game”, as it were.
Fire Emblem Engage’s turn-based battles don’t particularly break with the mould for the series as a whole. You have a Player Phase, in which you can move all your characters and get them to attack — notably, except with certain passive skills, characters cannot attack then move like in some board games; an attack is always the end of a turn. Then, once you’ve moved everyone or triggered the end of your turn if you want some units to stay where they are, there’s an Enemy Phase, in which the computer-controlled side has the opportunity to do the same as you: move any or all of their units, and get them to attack.
One notable part of Fire Emblem’s combat that has, to my knowledge, always been a part of proceedings is the fact that when a unit attacks, they will also have to deal with a counterattack from an enemy, unless there’s a mismatch in weapon range. For example, if you attack an archer in close combat, they won’t be able to counterattack, and likewise if you trigger a ranged attack on an enemy who only has a close-ranged weapon. But if melee attacks melee or ranged attacks ranged, the enemy will be able to get a hit in on you right back.

Thus an important part of building your characters in Fire Emblem Engage is determining how best to handle this, and there are several approaches you can take, depending on character. Obviously the optimal approach is outlined above: attack a character with a weapon that means they simply can’t counterattack. But this isn’t always possible, so the three immediately obvious alternative approaches you can take are defeating the enemy before they’re able to counterattack; having sufficient “Avoid” rating that the enemy is unlikely (or unable) to hit you; or having sufficient Defense and/or Resistance stats that you can shrug off or nullify incoming damage completely.
You’ll also need to bear weaknesses in mind. Flying units are vulnerable to archers, for example, while heavily armoured units are vulnerable to magic. There are also weapons particularly designed for dealing with specific unit types such as dragons, mounted cavalry and armoured units and, of course, the series’ iconic “weapon triangle” returns, where sword beats axe, axe beats lance, lance beats sword, and if the character initiating an attack has weapon advantage, they will “break” the opponent, causing them to drop their weapon and be unable to counterattack for the rest of the Player Phase ends. Thus this is another means of avoiding counterattacks: if you can “break” an opponent but not kill them, other units can swoop in and defeat them without fear.
One of the areas where I’ve historically struggled with Fire Emblem on previous attempts to explore is is that combat tends to involve relatively few very hard hits, meaning both enemy units and player characters can feel quite “fragile” at times. This feeling persists even late in the game, when units have considerably higher hit point values, and the upshot of it from a player’s perspective is that if you position your units carelessly, they can get very easily wiped out even by generic, no-name enemies, let alone bosses.

However, Fire Emblem Engage has a number of features that help with your planning, and I found them enormously helpful in learning how to play the game effectively. As a series newcomer, I’m honestly not aware if these features are available in prior games, but I certainly appreciated their presence in Fire Emblem Engage.
The first of these is a “targeting line”: an arcing line from one unit to another similar to those seen in Final Fantasy XII and XIV. These appear when you move a unit within range of an enemy. This line appearing doesn’t necessarily mean that your unit will be attacked by the enemy they’re in range of — particularly if you have several units in range of one enemy — but it just indicates that if you leave them there, they will be in danger.
The second of these is a nice companion to the targeting line: the ability to select one or more enemies and permanently display their effective range on the map while you take your turn. This effectively allows you to mark out the “danger zones” and manoeuvre your more fragile units carefully around them, thereby allowing them to make progress while staying out of danger. If you have a particularly “tanky” unit — there are several characters who can fulfil this role from the complete cast — you can even deliberately send them into this danger zone to bait enemies and “pull” them towards your main forces, or simply lure them into a counterattack.

Between these two functions, I discovered something remarkable: when presented with the information I need in a clear, easy to understand manner, I can play strategy games, and I can plan ahead for success. The bit I’ve always struggled with in a lot of games like this is not being able to easily visualise this information if it’s not made explicit to me, and I guess learning how to Get Good At Strategy Games comes from being able to parse out that information from the situation in front of you without it being made as explicit and obvious as it is here.
In Fire Emblem specifically, success comes from learning not to overextend yourself and put your units in danger unnecessarily. It pays to take a more cautious approach, pulling enemies away from packs one at a time if possible, or making solid use of tanky units to weather the storm from an incoming group before systematically picking off the members of said group one at a time, taking full advantage of strengths and weaknesses where possible for efficient killing and the avoidance of damage.
In some respects, one can look at it as being a bit similar to MMO combat. In an MMO like Final Fantasy XIV, the tank doesn’t rush ahead and pull all the enemies in the dungeon unless they know they (and the healer) are well-equipped enough to be able to endure that assault. By the end of Fire Emblem Engage, it’s very much possible to have multiple characters in that position of being able to shrug off an onslaught of enemies, and it’s satisfying to feel like you’ve successfully trained them to be that way.

Even on the game’s “Normal” difficulty, which is what I was playing on, there’s the feeling that the game will still kick your behind if you don’t prepare and strategise effectively, but it always feels fair; there were no points in the game where I felt like the game was overwhelming me to such a degree that it was impossible to progress. There were one or two stages where multiple waves of reinforcements made things take quite a bit longer than they otherwise would have, but it never felt unfair, crucially; I never felt like I was in a position where there was literally nothing I could have done differently — or that I wasn’t able to consider things more carefully and learn from any mistakes I might have made along the way.
This feeling persists even as you progress through the game and you start running into map-specific gimmicks such as mounted weaponry, environmental hazards or enemies with particularly strong but heavily telegraphed attacks. Rather than these gimmicks feeling like your foe has an unfair advantage, they simply force you to adapt your tactics accordingly, and, crucially, you always have the time to be able to do this.
I suspect part of this is down to Fire Emblem always having been designed with permadeath as part of its mechanics from the outset: if there’s any possibility of permanently losing a unit, you’d better make sure that it’s also possible to avoid losing a unit with careful strategy. And, even playing on the “Casual” setting, in which lost units are ready for action in the next battle, it’s clear that while there are notable consequences for messing up, you always have the time, space and tools needed to avoid danger.

In my 70-hour playthrough, there were certain aspects of the game I felt were a tad superfluous and thus didn’t really engage (no pun intended) with at all, but I suspect these may all be a bit more useful if playing on the harder difficulty settings or with permadeath enabled. For example, there’s a whole series of “Trials” you can take on to earn bonus experience for your characters and stat bonuses for your Emblems’ weapons that just… didn’t feel relevant at all at any point, and likewise the quasi-multiplayer elements, including a cooperative “relay” mode, where you take a turn then pass the battle on to another player, and a competitive mode where you design maps and challenge other folks to beat them, felt like they weren’t particularly well-integrated into the experience as a whole.
And that’s perhaps because they weren’t; Fire Emblem Engage, like many other large-scale Nintendo games, had a swathe of updates since its original release in January 2023, many of which added these additional systems to the game — but the base game still had to be playable and beatable without making use of those features. One would presume that these features were added in an attempt to keep people coming back to Fire Emblem Engage even if they’d finished it — and perhaps encouraging them to pick up the DLC packs, which include additional playable characters, new character classes and a “Xenologue” story which unfolds in a parallel world.
Honestly, it’s nice that those features are there for those who want to take their Fire Emblem Engage experience to another level and continue spending time with these characters even after completing the main story — but I’m also glad that there’s absolutely no obligation to make use of them if you don’t want to. I found Fire Emblem Engage in pretty much its base form to be a satisfying, fulfilling experience that didn’t outstay its welcome, even with its hefty 70-hour runtime. It’s nice to know that there’s stuff to do if I ever decide to come back to it — and that those wanting to play on harder difficulty levels have a wealth of options available to them if they want to challenge themselves or simply buff up their squad to a level that is better equipped to take on the tough battles ahead of them.

For my part, as a Fire Emblem newbie who has never played through a complete entry in the series prior to this one, I came away feeling like I’d had a good time, like I was much more willing to explore other entries in the series, and, perhaps most significantly, like I’d genuinely learned something and improved my skills in a genre that, historically, I’ve tended to bounce off quite hard.
Is it the best Fire Emblem? I have absolutely no idea at this point. But as a newcomer, I feel like it was a solid means of opening my eyes to what the series has to offer. And that, I think, was the main reason I started playing it in the first place. So mission accomplished, I guess!
More about Fire Emblem Engage
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