Even after about forty hours of Fire Emblem: Engage, my opinion of the game hasn’t changed. If anything, I’m starting to feel like I signed up for a task and am personally obligated by my sense of propriety to finish it. Too much of that forty hours is puttering around in chores, trying to do the extra missions, and figuring out the hard way that I’m never going to complete the character support stuff I want to pursue. There’s too much of it and the methods of building support between non-player characters is too frustrating and exhausting to work with. I’ll admit I was pretty spoiled by Fire Emblem: Three Houses, but most of the games before this one also had a huge number of ways to increase inter-character support while the latest entry in the series has battles, meals, and the training stuff that randomly throws another character into a training match with the character you selected. Even thought they’ve added a new support building system since I originally wrote this (more DLC and a free update dropped after last week’s Nintendo Direct), it’s still a very clunky, slow system in a game that gives you a huge number of characters. All in all, it’s a bad system, for a lot of reasons.
Continue reading