Fire Emblem Engage has come out on the Nintendo Switch. Is the gameplay great? Are the visuals pretty to look at? The answers to that and more in Game8’s review of the latest installment to the Fire Emblem franchise.
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Fire Emblem Engage Review and Score Explanation
Fire Emblem Engage Score Explanation
| Overall | The total rating of the game. The scores available range from 1-10 with 1 being the lowest and 10 being the highest. The scores are added together, then multiplied by two. |
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| Story | Rating the plot, characters, as well as pacing, and overall depth of the story. |
| Gameplay | How we rate the gameplay mechanics and systems designed in the game. |
| Visuals | Rating how beautiful the game's graphics are as well as its user interface. |
| Audio | Rating how the game's music grips players during battle and cutscenes, and how well the voice acting and other sounds are done. |
| Value for Money | The base game's length, replayability, and time needed for 100% completion. |
Fire Emblem Engage Review: Engaging Gameplay, but Not-So-Engaging Plot and Characters
Fire Emblem Engage has probably the best strategy gameplay seen in the Fire Emblem series so far, with the game’s “Engage” mechanic being the star of the show, along with quality of life improvements in inventory management and strategy being implemented.
However, it is hindered by its lackluster story, generic characters, and potentially divisive character design.
Still, we recommend this game to newcomers to the Fire Emblem franchise. Because even though it’s not a great story by the standards of the series, it is a good game nonetheless, and may even serve as an entry point to other titles.
Fire Emblem Engage Full Game Review
Pros of Fire Emblem Engage
| Things Fire Emblem Engage Got Right |
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 Great Turn-Based Strategy Gameplay Many Quality of Life Improvements Small Tweaks Indicate a Lot of Care in Developing This Game Loads of Playtime and Replay Value Great Visuals and Brighter Color Palette |
Great Turn-Based Strategy Gameplay
Let’s start off with the best thing about Fire Emblem Engage: the gameplay. The turn-based RPG strategy you’ve known and loved for the past 30 years is still here, with the rock-paper-scissors weapon triangle still being the core mechanic.
Swords beat axes, axes beat spears, and spears beat swords, but other weapons like daggers, arrows, magic, and bare fists have been thrown into the mix. When you attack an enemy with a weapon that beats their weapon, you’ll break their stance which stops them from counter-attacking. Be warned, though. They can do the same thing to your troops.
But the real star of the show is the new “Engage” mechanic, where your chosen unit can merge with different heroes from past Fire Emblem titles, called “Emblems” in this game. Once your unit is in Engage mode, they can draw upon their emblem to unleash devastating Engage Attacks.
For example, going into Engage Mode with Marth from Fire Emblem 1 lets you hack enemies into pieces with a flurry of sword strikes called “Lodestar Rush”, while engaging with Celica from Fire Emblem Gaiden gives you the “Warp Ragnarok” ability, where you teleport across the map and destroy enemies with your magic.
The Engage mechanic adds a host of extra options when you’re in battle, because units with Emblem Rings can be used to distract, flank, or finish off enemy units. But the game doesn’t make them too overpowered, since your enemy can make use of Emblems and their abilities as well.
The game lets you choose between three difficulty modes (Normal, Hard, and Maddening) and two game modes (Casual and Classic).
If you’re playing on Classic Mode, units that die on the battlefield will be dead forever, so you’ll have to play it like you mean it if you want all of your units to survive. That means considering not just your own moves, but the enemy’s potential counter-moves, whether you can get hit by a Chain Attack or Stance Break, whether you’ll get hit with a ranged attack, or whether you’re standing on the right kind of tile (a fort, shrubbery, protection tile, whatever).
On the flipside, if you're playing on Casual Mode, your units will simply retreat once their HP hits zero. Though this is convenient for casual players who have grown attached to their characters, it also drains out a lot of the challenge from the gameplay since you can employ suicide tactics. Still, some people might appreciate Casual Mode, then try out Classic Mode when they’re confident enough to play it.
Another plus factor to the gameplay are the maps. Almost every map has some sort of gimmick: Fog of War, destructible obstacles, your army being split in two groups, or you needing to come to the aid of an allied group. Most maps are, pun fully intended, engaging to play on, since you’ll be thinking of the best positioning so your troops won’t get ambushed or ganked on by the enemy.
Overall, the strategy gameplay is the strongest element in Fire Emblem Engage, with deep and rich opportunities to employ all sorts of tactics to get the better of your foes. It’ll give your brain a real workout, whether you’re the type of strategist that devises the perfect plan to win a round turns in advance, or the tactician that makes stuff up as they go along.
Many Quality of Life Improvements
Another one of Fire Emblem Engage’s strong suits is the many Quality-of-Life improvements implemented in this title, many of them new and others retained from previous titles.
Let’s start off with something simple but that makes buying items hella convenient. In previous Fire Emblem titles, you would have to manually arm your units and make sure they all have Vulneraries. This entails combing through their inventories one by one. But now, in FE Engage, you just have to press the L Button and all your party members will be equipped with the best weapons at your disposal and vulneraries. Sure, you have to still set some things manually, but this simple add-on still saves a lot of time and effort.
Another QoL feature that made it into Engage is the Turn Rewind mechanic, which was first introduced in Fire Emblem Echoes: Shadow of Valentia. Here, you use a Time Crystal to undo moves you made that may have resulted in getting a character of yours killed, allowing you to take a different approach to the battle.
Players of past Fire Emblems might scoff at the idea, but the Time Crystal mechanic has a limited amount of uses. Once you run out, either you’ll have to eat the loss or restart the battle from the very beginning. So, the feature is balanced out.
There’s a lot of other QoL features I’ll breeze through to give you an idea of how many improvements have been made to the gameplay:
1.) You can buy items before battle now, so you won’t run out of vulneraries.
2.) You can choose to either retain the EXP you made before a Game Over, or let it go before starting over.
3.) You can see whether one of your units can talk to a neutral unit, showing you who can recruit who.
The Quality of Life additions in Fire Emblem Engage greatly enhances its already solid gameplay, and even series veterans might find playing the older titles a bit harder to play after they’ve gotten a taste of these improvements.
Small Tweaks Indicate a Lot of Care in Developing This Game
Speaking of tweaks, there are just so many small ones that indicate a lot of care that went into developing Fire Emblem Engage.
There’s the combat animations that look fluid and badass enough to be on an ARPG instead of a Fire Emblem game. Each model is lovingly detailed with crests and floral mouldings, and uniform trimmings, making them good eye candy.
There’s the environmental damage that happens during battles, where if you knock an enemy into a fence, the fence actually breaks. Not to mention, if you’re attacking from a specific tile like a Fort or Protection Tile, the battle animation will actually show your unit being on top of a fort or stepping on the said tile.
There’s the animated unit icons that pop up when you’re going to attack or defend against an enemy unit. Here, your unit and the enemy unit will strut their stuff a little before actually engaging in battle.
Plus, there’s even a bit of a post-battle exploration mechanic, where you get to go around the battlefield you just fought in. Here, you can pick up random items and adopt animals to bring with you up to your headquarters, the Somniel (more on that later).
The tweaks give a level of polish that hasn’t been seen in previous Fire Emblem titles, possibly showing the result of bigger production budgets. We hope Intelligent Systems keeps these in the next FE installment as well.
Loads of Playtime and Replay Value
Since this is a Fire Emblem game, it’s natural that you’ll be spending up to two hours a battle just to get that “perfect” no-death run of a Chapter where your favorite unit keeps dying over and over again. Just the first playthrough on Classic Hard will already have you going through the game for a good part of a week, and that’s not counting all the completion-related stuff and other distractions you can indulge in.
Let’s start with the Somniel, the Divine Dragon’s resting place and your de facto headquarters. Here, you can talk with your party members, give them gifts, and have Support conversations with them. You can also do activities like working out, making food, fighting in the arena, taking on the Tower of Trials, and sleeping. Yes, you get to sleep! Who knew?
But most importantly, you get to take care of Sommie the Dog! I won’t give Fire Emblem Engage perfect marks, but I’ll give this dog/cat/ice demon thing 10 out of 10 in cuteness.
Now for the completionists, there’s a lot of stuff you can work on after you’ve seen the credits roll. There’s the support conversations between units and bond conversations between Emblems and their ring bearers. There are the paralogues where you can recruit new units, as well as adopt more animals for your farm up in the Somniel. There are clothes you can buy, weapons you can engrave or upgrade, and an investment system that lets you upgrade your drops depending on which continent you fought.
All in all, there are a lot of things to do for both casual players and the devoted completionists. Both parties will not be disappointed.
Great Visuals and Brighter Color Palette
Compared to previous Fire Emblem titles, Engage has a brighter color palette reminiscent of the Game Boy Advance FE games. The main characters alone have bright shades of red, blue, yellow, white, violet and green.
You’ll also notice that a lot of the character designs, especially the main female character, are reminiscent of virtual YouTubers or “vtubers” and characters in the hit online action RPG Genshin Impact. That’s because Intelligent Systems got Mika Pikazo as the game’s character designer. Pikazo has not only worked on designing manga characters, but also vtubers like Hakos Baelz from Hololive English.
Shifting character designs are nothing new in the Fire Emblem franchise, with the vast differences between the first Fire Emblem titles on the NES, the later titles on the GBA and Gamecube, and later on the 3DS and Switch being very apparent. But the contrast between the design of those characters and the design of the ones in Engage become apparent once you summon them as Emblems – you will notice the differences in eyes, hair, and overall coloration very quickly.
For me, the character designs could be a breath of fresh air for the franchise. Also, there’s no doubt that Intelligent Systems may have been angling to get new players into the fanbase. What better way to do that than by showing attractive, Genshin-esque characters?
As a side note, the combat animations and maps are good enough for the title. Combat animations, especially Engage Attacks and magic spells, are spectacles you will hesitate to skip watching during a fight. The maps themselves don’t look too bad, especially by Switch standards, with the map variety running the gamut of villages, castles, deserts, snowy fields and dungeons. At least the maps are not too boring to look at, especially while your troops duke it out with the enemy on them.
Cons of Fire Emblem Engage
| Things That Fire Emblem Engage Can Improve |
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Generic Premise and Characters Average Sound Design and Soundtrack New Character Art Style Might Turn Off Long-Time Fans Some Features Feel Cumbersome, Tacked On |
Generic Premise and Characters
By far, the weakest factor in Fire Emblem Engage is the premise and the story. Aside from what I’ve already said, don’t expect too much from the story. This may be a spoiler, but trust me you’re not really missing anything.
Without even looking at past Fire Emblem titles, you can tell that it’s a generic fantasy plot from the get-go: An ancient evil rises, and the hero must go around the land in search of objects of power that they can use to destroy this evil once and for all. “Lord of the Rings” much?
The plot is like something Tolkien would’ve written if he was an anime writer, but even then he’d pull it off in a much better fashion than what Intelligent Systems did. There’s really nothing that pushes you to care about what’s happening to Elyos except the great gameplay and challenging maps.
You’d think FE Engage’s story would be okay if the characters in it were interesting, right? Wrong. The main character, Alear, is more or less a generic MC meant for a player self-insert. It seems the 1,000 year-sleep erased not just their memories but whatever personality they had as well. The other characters are not much better either.
Where do we start? Clanne and Framme, whose personalities are more or less “The Divine One looked at me!” and “I’ll become the best Steward out there!”, Vander the typical “valiant knight that will die before failing you” but old, Alfred the Half-Baked Prince, and his delicate flower of a sister Céline.
The characters are glorified cardboard cutouts, more or less. There are some exceptions, of course, and even if the rest are cardboard cutouts, they’re still well-characterized and entertaining to watch. But don’t compare Engage’s story and characters to other titles in the Fire Emblem series. Just don’t.
Average Sound Design and Soundtrack
Another (much smaller) gripe I have with Fire Emblem Engage is its soundtrack. The English version of the game’s song has forced, awkward lyrics, and I wish they just stuck to using the Japanese version instead. Voice acting is inoffensive, if campy at times.
The soundtrack, meanwhile, is your usual Fire Emblem fare of gallant trumpets and rock beats that’s supposed to get your blood pumping as you strategize your next move. While it’s okay, you can’t help but feel that you’ve already heard these kinds of tracks before not just in Fire Emblem games, but in anime-style RPGs in general. An old game with similar mechanics, Yggdra Union, comes to mind.
The soundtrack and sound design is inoffensive, overall. But it’s this inoffensiveness that makes you wonder what could’ve happened had Intelligent Systems decided to put as much effort in the story and sound design as they did in enhancing the gameplay.
New Character Art Style Might Turn Off Long-Time Fans
Now, I did say that the character designs were a “breath of fresh air” to the franchise, but that doesn’t mean that anyone wouldn’t find it polarizing. I’m sure that there are fans out there who still liked the design of characters in Three Houses and the past Fire Emblem titles who would be shocked at how the units look in the latest entry to the franchise.
Personally, I find the designs all right except for one thing: Alear. Like, there’s so much going on with this character that I struggle to find the appropriate words. Blue and red hair? Really? With white and gold elements in their outfit?
He/she looks more like a vtuber commissioned by Crest Toothpaste than a Fire Emblem protagonist. Without any context, she could also be a vtuber for Venezuela, the Philippines, Colgate, and anything else with a red-white-blue-yellow color scheme.
And before anyone asks in the comments section, yes the hair and heterochromia are plot-relevant. Still, couldn't the character designers think of a better way to design Alear than what we ended up with?
To put it simply, Alear may be okay as a character, if generic. But they also look like a mess.
Some Features Feel Cumbersome, Tacked On
Finally, a word on some of the features. Most of the features in FE Engage are great at best, to okay at worst. But for one thing, if you’re not interested in the story (I wouldn’t blame you), then you’ll find little reason to go around the Somniel and use its features except perhaps for the Cafe, Arena, and Ring Chamber.
The Investment System especially (where you donate cash to regions so battles that take place there yield more items) feels more like a useless money sink rather than an actual game mechanic.
Plus, another small thing: for all the conveniences we got in managing character inventories, why can’t we still buy items in bulk? Vulneraries, in particular. It would’ve been great if we could just buy 10 vulneraries, toss them into the Convoy, and optimize our party’s inventory.
But nope; you still have to buy vulneraries for the convoy one by one as a workaround. Wish the devs went all the way in enhancing the inventory management, though they’ve done a good job of polishing it already.
Fire Emblem Engage Story Plot
A thousand years ago on the continent of Elyos, the Divine Dragon Alear defeated the Fell Dragon Sombron and sealed him away with the help of heroes from other worlds called “Emblems”. But now, Sombron threatens to awaken once again, and it’s up to the Divine Dragon to gather an army of valiant warriors to gather all the Emblem Rings and defeat the ancient evil once and for all.
Engage is the latest title in the long-running Fire Emblem franchise, developed by Intelligent Systems. Here, you once again control an army of warriors, knights, and other misfits on various maps, making use of their abilities to win turn-based battles. But Fire Emblem Engage mixes this up a bit with a new “Engage” mechanic, where your units unleash the power of characters from previous Fire Emblem titles (similar to the Einherjar from Fire Emblem Awakening).
Will you be able to collect all of the Emblem Rings? Or will you let Elyos and its four kingdoms fall to the Fell Dragon? You decide.
Who Should Play Fire Emblem Engage?
Newcomers to the Fire Emblem Series & Turn-Based RPG Enthusiasts
Engage has the best, if not, most convenient gameplay in the franchise so far, making it perfect for those who want to dip their toes in the series. There are many features that can help more casual players get used to the game, like the Time Crystal and Casual Mode. Plus, the character designs may appeal to younger audiences, and those who play popular gacha games or watch virtual YouTubers.
The convenient gameplay is also the main draw for any hardcore turn-based RPG player, since the mechanics offer opportunities for deep strategy and tactics. Almost all maps are challenging, and you’ll have a good time thinking of how to use your units’ strengths as best as possible.
Is Fire Emblem Engage Worth It?
Fire Emblem Engage Is Worth Your Money
The game is definitely worth your money. Like I’ve said above, your first playthrough alone will have you devoting the better part of your week to finishing it, and that’s without all of the completion-related stuff and the distractions you can get into while playing.
Some people might balk at the $60 dollar price tag, and that’s fine. Though if you’re not really concerned about the story and want to experience the best gameplay the FE franchise has to offer so far, I recommend trying Engage out.
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Buy Fire Emblem Engage on Amazon
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Fire Emblem Engage Trailer
Game8 Reviews
Fire Emblem Engage Product Information
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| Title | FIRE EMBLEM ENGAGE |
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| Release Date | January 20, 2023 |
| Developer | Intelligent Systems |
| Supported Platforms | Nintendo Switch |
| Genre | Tactical Role-Playing Game |
| Number of Players | 1 |
| ESRB Rating | Teen |
| Official Website | N/A |
