Fire Emblem games have a bad habit of bringing new and beloved mechanics forward from previous games without really understanding what made those mechanics work in context. Probably the most egregious example of this was the "offspring" mechanic - in Awakening, when two characters got strong enough support levels, sometimes their children from a post apocalyptic future version of the world came back in time to try and prevent that apocalypse - while this sounds a little silly on the surface, it was well integrated into the story and made your choices for who you built supports between feel like it carried a lot more weight. The next game in the franchise, Fates, decided to have a similar system, but instead of integrating the existence of these children into the overarching storyline, they were children that were essentially born during the events of the story and then raised in the "hyperbolic time chamber" pocket dimension that is your hub world; they're all suffering some deep-seated abandonment issues because your party members were spending months or years away from them in the real world for every battle they engaged in in the story. It just felt completely unnecessary and detached from the story and only there because it had been in the previous game. Engage I feel suffers a lot of the same issues, where the various hub activities and relationship building mechanics that made sense in the context of the Three Houses story just end up feeling tacked on when removed from the framework of Three Houses.
In defense of Fates, not only was the central theme of Fates about family, it also mechanically supported unit customization arguably even better than Awakening, so not having child units would be a missed opportunity. The way Awakening integrated child units was just about as 'silly' as Fates. Lucina was able to travel back to time from an apocalyptic future, and Azura once lived in but escaped from a special separate dimension, so it makes sense how children could be incorporated into each respective universe's lore. If anything, Awakening's use of time travel was more bullshit because, time travel, or timeline travel, is a helluva lot more convoluted than just having separate dimensions. Combine that with the presence of Fate's themes of family, and it makes much more sense for Fates to have child units, as opposed to Awakening.
Also because Fates doesn't have time travel, all the child characters were conceived by your units _at their current age._ At least with Awakening you can pretend that for example, Ricken didn't have contact with his wife until he was a grown man. That's not the case with Fates so the woman you pair with Hayato will be a pedophile. And so will be the man you pair with Elise and Sakura. (And honestly most of the cast...)
@@guy-sl3kr That's only assuming you purposely paired the younger characters with the oldest ones. Hayato with Elise or Sakura doesn't carry that negative connotation. That "just pretend" argument can go both ways, since age is never specified anyone could "just pretend" Hayato is 18 and so is his partner, just like how you could "just pretend" with Ricken.
@@gameplayerone3917 The fact that adults can conceive with children at all speaks for itself. And I don't think kids having kids with other kids is that much better. Sure you can headcanon everyone as being an adult if you want to stretch the limits of your imagination (and ignore your eyes and ears) but the child mechanic just does not work in Fates like it does in Awakening. It's as poorly thought out as the entire rest of its plot.
Nah Awakening did it better, Fates felt shoe horned in.@@gameplayerone3917 They could've forgone child units in order to make the story and characters already present better, especially Corrin.
Fun Fact: During lumeras first death scene my switch actually started going into sleep mode with the screen going dark that's how long that cutscene goes on it actually made me laugh a little at that death scene.
That happened to me like three times - Then, Alears first 'death' then Alears second 'death'. I feel like the console itself is trying to say something to me
So idk if those were the same writers that wrote dialogues and scenarios for Three Houses, but I would like to ask them if they know the principle of “show, don’t tell” and “pacing” What the hell do I care if a random ass person dies 10 minutes in the actual game, that I have seen once. Should I care because they tell me it’s protagonist’s mother? I don’t. Not just bc someone tells me to without giving me any time to even get to know the character or see the relationship. Same goes for literally any “impactful” scene. They were mostly way too late in the game or had weird pacing. Why should I care about some random villain’s sob story in chapter 20? When they have done nothing but annoy me before. Why drop Sombron’s “tragic” backstory right before the final map? Made me laugh, rather than care, honestly, because it was ridiculous.
16:30 ih, you're definitely in the minority here as far as the fanbase is concerned. When the designs were first revealed, people DID NOT like the contrast between the red and blue hair, found the colors too bright and often made mocking comparisons to both Pepsi and Colgate. Someone even posted the design with darker shades of blue and red, which was generally better received. Right now, I wouldn't say people warmed up to the design, but rather their eyes adjusted to it
I would argue the character creation in Baldur's Gate actually *is* incorporated into the story: an illithid puts a tadpole into your brain, then the tadpole demands “Who Are You” and *that's* when you start creating your character; the tadpole is searching your psyche to figure out who exactly you are, and you're revealing it to them via character creation. It's very didactic.
Mass Effect 1 also does this well, if I understand it correctly. Somebody, presumably either Anderson or Commander Shepard herself, is attempting to access Shepard's file. The data is incomplete, though, and certain key points have to be manually reconstructed, namely pre-service history, capabilities, and reputation. And also New Vegas, but c'mon. You could write an essay about character creation in New Vegas. No, this isn't hypothetical, you, reading this, could write an essay about the intricacies of getting shot in the head.
I honestly wish we could get a straight up rip-off as close as possible to baldurs gate but fire emblem. big, glorious open world, with the turn based combat, recruiting units along the way, traveling and talking with them in the open world
This was common in DnD games. Whether it was writing a prophecy about your characters or the enemy scrying your party, they came up with a bunch of ways.
I do not agree with the "x aspect of a fe game does not matter". It often creates circle jerk discussions that go nowhere. Instead, it is best to state the pros and cons of a game and let the individuals decide what they gravitate towards. 3h has good-ish story (as in, in a single playthrough it is great, but playing it all creates some issues and discrepencies on the whole. Like the TWSITD being a big player in all stories and in azure moon, but in the latter, they are unceremoniously dealt with almost as an accident), amazing characters, garbage gameplay and replayability. Engage has garbage story riddled with plotholes, mid cast of characters (they can be fun, Amber's and Zelkov's are a favorite of mine, but they also needed more levity to balance it out) but outstanding gameplay and mechanics, and good replayability. I really love 3h characters. And I believe white clouds' maps range from decent, to genuinely great. But the game falls down the shitter in paralogues and post-timeskip. Making it unbearable to me.
Engage finished development midway through 2021 according to various game classification boards, so even if the developers had been interested in adding 3 Hopes' Shez as an emblem, the timeline shows that simply would not have been possible. Also, the most canon Byleth's Emblem has in Engage is that they're from White Clouds/Part 1. He's not meant to represent any route in particular, which is why his special interaction with Nemesis in Ch 26 of Engage alludes that while Byleth knows who Nemesis IS, he also has not met him beforehand. This special treatment Byleth gets is due to the devs deciding that Three Houses' canon route is... up to each player to decide (which incidentally played a role in much of the discourse involving its plot and characters).
Tbh, I always felt like it would have been more interesting if all 4 routes in 3 Houses were canon, Byleth resetting time each time to find the best outcome up until CF, which is the secret unlockable route where Byleth loses the power of Sothis, indicating that they don't need it any more. Its what I like to imagine. Especially since some endings seem to be made consciously worse than others (like Hapis endings in the og JP text stating that Those Who slither in the Dark attempt a great atrocity in which they succeed in Azure Moon exclusively).
Problem with this is that Byleth does have knowledge of certain events post-White Clouds. It seems like his general 'canon' for him in Engage follows CF the most closely due to appearance but that they do pull from the other routes as if he has (as a result of being an Emblem) become aware of different timelines and paths he could've taken. Also let's be real, everyone knows of Nemesis in Fódlan by yhe time of 3H and I wouldn't even say he's the main antagonist of that game. I think the reason he was picked as the Dark Emblem for 3H is because he's the only other wielder of the SotC and compared to Rhea and Edelgard (in any route that isn't CF) he's the only outright evil major enemy you fight.
@@docphil9602 I'm 30, even if I was into men which I'm not Edelgard has Hubert, Ferdinand and Jeritza on her team, so she is objectively right. Black Eagles men are just too refined for normies.
Probably the biggest issue i have with Engage is the cast, especially on. The first 6 units you get in the game, 2/3 of the cast until Brodia, are the Stewards who's main personality trait is worshipping Alear, and Alfred's group who's main character traits are getting stronger. So when you first unlock supports, your chance to explore how deep these characters are, it feels like you're watching the same two conversations for an hour.
The characters in Engage are atrocious. Absolutely atrocious. I thought a lot of the characters in Fates were derivative but, my god, Engage makes me appreciate Fates characters so much more. There are literally compilations like "Every Celine support but when she mentions tea it skips to the next one" and it's only 3 minutes long. I think her support with Alcryst is the literal only one that doesn't get skipped at all.
Then we also have characters like Ivy, who are supposed to be enemies, but even before they join, they already switched to actively worshiping Alear just like the rest.
It also doesn't help that the majority of your starting units are garbage stat wise. Until you hit Brodia, and especially Elusia, the only unit worth using until the end is Chloe and maybe Louis depending on who you talk to. Hell, some people dislike Amber's personality, but he has the second strongest strength stat in the game, so for many. A lot of these characters are a "pick your poison" kind of scenario. What I find oddly fascinating about the supports though is that Diamant, for some strange reason, is the only unit that comes out of the "stereotype/mentions character quirk" thing unscaved. Every support from him is filled with loads of depth and personality. He is also the only character is the game that gives a quick lore dump about how Brodia was protected by Lumera a thousand years ago. Something I believe none of the other royals ever do. The most we get is some family history drama related to Ivy and Hortensia, but we have been there done that and I found what Diamant was saying more interesting. I just wished the game expanded on the lore a lot more because outside of this one support of with Diamant, the game really needed it...badly...
Oh god the twins were not a good introduction characters. They were annoying with how fanboy/fan girl they were. They would’ve worked later on but they were the first ones you are introduced to.
Honestly I find her performance to always be lackluster, she never puts enough emotion in her voice and for her higher pitched roles she always sounds unnatural, more so than most. ReZero 2x4 is a great example. She sounds like a VA putting on a voice then reading a script, not like a character.
Byleth's lack of emotions is also linked to Sothis. Because in the opening dream Sothis is beginning to awake. Yes, Byleth had the dream before, but now it seems like it's different. Even in the Supports we see that later supports show Byleth being a bit more "human," smiling making jokes etc.
Yeah, also the lack of emotions seems reasonable because they are the child of a mercenary who is raised by mercenaries and that social environment. We see Byleth exploring themself throughout their story. Alears story is basically getting awake and being told who they are without questioning those statements others do about them.
Not only that, but Engage is created for the Anniversary of the Series. Most People don't know half the Emblems from which Marth gets an overwhelming amount of exposure to the Audience, while the Rest have so e introduction and a few Scenes, but that's it
@@Turmfalke94 except for the fact Ike also has the whole Raised by and aroundmercs and he isn't emotionless also the in universe explanation was done solely so they didn't have to actually try with Byleth so much of 3h is build around him/her and yet it fails to utilize it fully
@@larsbohmer6319 I'd argue feh and anyone who isn't Mega casual knows most of them like - Marth (obviously - Celica and Alm (From their own Recent Game] - Sigurd, Seliph and Leif (From Feh and second hand knowledge from other players) - Roy (From Smash) - Lyn (Second Hand Knowledge from older fans, Feh, Known Waifu) - Ike (From Smash but also Feh and Second hand knowledge) - Lucina, Chrom Robin (Smash, Fe 13 and feh) - Corrin (Fates and Feh)
This is actually familiar to a lot of talks people had from the shift from Awakening to Fates. Similar Fates took the aspects people liked from Awakening and dialed them up to a 100 regardless if it made sense, aka Child units, supports, and tropes. Although when comparing Fates and Engage, Engage still feels like the radical change.
Fates has good gameplay, and the occasional decent support. But the thing that made it stick out was how much customization and optimization you can do, without giving *too* much freedom (i.e. every character can be every class in the same run) Engage has good gameplay but the gameplay itself has to do all of the heavy lifting. And I mean *all* of the heavy lifting, because the characters and story is so bland and basic. Fates failed in the story aspect but they were at least trying, and you can kind of pick out what they were trying to do.
@@a_peridox Another thing about Fates, especially at the Conquest end of things is that I found the character design in that game to be one of the best in the series. I know, this could be a personal taste kind of thing, but what made Conquest special was that the characters designs had a dark, yet gritty theme to them that was appealing to look at and those themes stayed consistent through out the whole entire game. Engage has the opposite effect where there is clearly a style to the designs...but no consistency. I think Kagetsu is the worst example of this as someone who REALLY likes him! He has a very distinct Japanese inspired design and is the only character in the game designed that way. So when you see that he is Ivy's retainer. It's very jarring as Ivy's country is suppose to be the "evil-ish" one that is kind of similar to Conquest with it's colors, and because we get very little of where Kagetsu hailed from and that's ONLY if you look at his supports. He feels completely out of place in Engage. Diamant, Merrin, and Chloe also feel out of place in Engage. Mostly because these are really good designs that harken back to classic fire emblem (Excluding Merrin, I just think her design and class is cool)...where the majority of the other designs in no way feels like that. I hope this make sense. I don't think there's going to be another FE game that tops Conquest character design, at least for me anyway.
Three Houses also had the benefit that instead of the game simply telling you that you commanded an army, it *gave* you an army to command. The battalion system made you the commander of an army often exceeding 1'000 soldiers (8 students plus one teacher, each equipped with the largest battalions makes 9 x 120 = 1'080). Engage tells you that you lead an army, but all you have is an armed friend group.
I mean, pretty much every FE game talked as if you lead an army, while you have an armed friend group. Sigurd went to war with an entire nation, TWICE, with only his armed friend group.
So here's my biggest gripe with the premise of Engage - the emblems. Why not make THEM the basis of the religion in the world? Have Alaer be an emblem from the start, but one that nobody knew existed. And (s)he doesn't exist within a ring, she just manifested. Then the rings can have a religious significance, and the old heroes be worshipped. We could see how the worship affects the characters etc. The Divine/Fell Dragon plot was kinda meh to begin with because it really didn't matter one bit. Heck, have the villains revive the antagonists from previous games. Have us fight the Black Knight, and the Death Knight and shit!
Considering the point of Engage was to be a big anthology of previous games as a celebration of how far Fire Emblem has come, actually playing into the nostalgia pandering would have been good... or, at least better than what we have.
@@TheAurgelmir Late response, but this is basically one of my biggest problems with Engage; why didn't we just go ALL IN on the nostalgia pandering? Have the entire STORY be about all these different legends coming together and just interacting together as they fight a larger threat; bam, its cheesy, its cartoony but damn it its fun.
I think a lot of people were put off by how the protagonist of Engage looked when they were first revealed, particularly the hair. Like yeah, I understand there is a lore reason behind why they look like that. But even though Fire Emblem takes a lot of pages from anime design wise, it was never really *this* crazy. Like yeah, Hilda for example has pink hair, but that was basically as far as it went. I feel a lot of people thought the stark half and half colgate hair idea was a little too far the "silly and stupid looking" track, and thus didn't even give Engage a chance.
Honestly this was one of my major issues with this series was the character designs I’m all for extra if it fits their characters or personality but some of the design including the protagonist made me feel like they were going too far and I just felt grating on my eyes. Same issue with some of the English voice lines that kept repeating. It made me actively hate a lot of the characters and the worship made it worse. I honestly couldn’t avoid it especially for my hate of the protagonists appearance and personality. I saw them everywhere.
It's too weird and out there for a fire emblem protag, plus wayyyy too saturated. I'd tone down the saturation and make the colors layered (so like blue on the outside but red on the underside since they're secretely an ~EVIL~ dragon, idk I'd have to play around with it)
The artist that directet the character designs changes almost every FE, expect Awakening/Fates. The artist for Engage draws Vtubers primarily, so this explains a lot
@@NastyyNastya that explains why Awakening and Fates had the best character designs and Engage characters looking like they were plucked straight out of a cartoon
This is utterly fascinating as someone who is a long time fan of the fire emblem series! It’s so refreshing hearing these games, especially the modern ones, looked at from an outsider’s perspective. So much of Three Houses and Engage are building on MODERN mechanics that have built up as radical shifts in the Fire Emblem series since Awakening. Each installment since Awakening has gone to greater and greater lengths to experiment with the series, its most foundational mechanics, and its familiar story formula. Hearing how a NEW player to the series engages with these mechanics, story beats, and their expectations because of them is eye-opening to the absolute core of this beloved franchise of games. Namely its not JUST game mechanics, its not JUST story, its not JUST character or rpg elements. I think you said it best in that you liked Three Houses because of the SUM of its parts rather than any one part by itself. Engage fails to have those parts seamlessly move together. It doesn’t make it a bad game, but it does make it feel less like a good Fire Emblem game. Thank you for the awesome video, I’d love to see more if you ever engage more with the series!
It's quite the opposite imo, Engage is a better FE game as 3H do not capitalize on FE greatness, on the other hand 3H could be seen as an overall better game than Engage which fail in some big aspect of the game despite being far better as a tactical.
@@Haarwyvernengage is a terrible FE game imo. Everything outside of the maps is bad, and frankly the maps aren’t nearly as good as so many act. Gimmicks are nearly non-existent. I remember my first CQ run with CL Hard, I can clearly remember the hype of beating that damn Takumi water mission so clearly more than 2 years later. Engage? The only map I remember is the final one and I can only remember cus of how fucking basic the layout is. Timed levels are used once near the end of the game, almost every mission is a boss or a rout (and unlike Hubert and Death Knight, the characters you’re constantly causing to retreat are actual required enemies, no instance of Hubert and DK are necessary until the final mission with them). The game just isn’t that interesting.
@@mr.stuffdoer8483 Bro gimmick in FE games is mostly a bad thing and what makes Revelations probably the second worst FE game. Engage maps are good because of how ennemies are disposed. Also this game use map narration better than any new era FE. Okay it's not on Tellius Game or Kaga FE but it's still a start. Also emblems does had a lot to how you can play those maps. It's easily one of the top 2 best level design since RD with Conquest They are probably the only two even trying (revelations tried but in a bad way). Three Houses maps have no meanings, they don't tell stories, are not well thought, kinda boring and repetitive the best ones are DLC. Awakening has the worst map design of the franchise and Echoes has map from 1992. Even if there is map narration in it it's not that fun to play. Birthright is maybe better than those but not even close to Engage. So it's between what you prefer from both conquest and Engage. I don't like stupid gimmick so I dislike multiples map of conquest. Do really like some others. Engage don't have my favorite maps there is no chapter like Radiant Dawn 2-E, Vestaria chapter 11 but has I said emblems does make them funnier to play because of how you can change the fate of them with your ideas trying weird things. Difficulties are also more interesting than most of the recent games. So in what it's the worst FE ? Story ? Three Houses has a meh story, Echoes too. Awakening is bad and Fates is as horrible as Engage. So yeah Engage is probably bottom two FE story-wise but in a franchise which has almost only meh to ok story. As for the characters they aren't especially worst than Shadow Dragon, Binding Blade, Awakening or Fates too. Probably better even if I do prefer Shadow Dragons one (being in 4 to 6 different games probably help for them) About characters it's probably pretty subjective. I do love more Awakening, Echoes or Fates Ost if we take recent games but it's not like Engage ost is bad. The hub then ? Three Houses is worse on this aspect except on first run. The only thing that make Engage really bad is story and meh world building but it's not the only one and it's above average in the gameplay aspect. I do agree that map design isn't AMAZING but what game has a clearly better one ? tearring/Berwick/Vestaria Thracia/Radiant Dawn We can argue for Path of Radiance or Conquest. That makes it better than most of FE/Kaga games. And I said that as an GBA games lovers who knows that GBA games are definitely not flawless. As for you remembering Fates, it's maybe because it's earlier in your FE experience making it more impactful ? Still it's only pretty subjective. I basically destroy Conquest chapter 10 in hard at first try in an easy way so everybody's saying it's one of the best map is wrong because I don't think so ? I don't remember it well but I don't think it's a problem. The map that I remembered the most in conquest are bad designed one so...
One funny thing about Alear's "mom" dying......is that they did the exact same thing in Fates and people disliked it there too. So they learned nothing.
That's Intelligent Systems for ya. This is probably on their bulletin board every morning when they go to work. Step 1: *Create game* Step 2: *Ignore feedback* Step 3: *Double down on themes the fan base hates and up them to 11* That's why I have been saying if Arlo didn't get Paper Mario The Thousand Year Door trending. We would have more than likely gotten an equivalent of Sticker Star 2 instead in the next game. Unless things like petitions or extreme dislike ratio's to their trailers happen pretty consistently. They will never listen to the fans unless their beloved series is on the line. Yes, I am talking about Awakening and how IS has NEVER made a game that combined good story and gameplay since 2012.
@@stevenchoza6391 Cause Jeralt died MUCH later and we got to learn who he was and grew to like him. Who the hell cared about Corrin and Alear's moms? We barely knew who they were and they died in the first few chapters.
18:30 The intro to engage is a reference to an important scene in FE Awakening involving Lucina, Lucina tells a tale of her timelines future which has an extremely similar beat and choreography to the engage intro and both are “premeditations” of events to come. But like 99.99% of the references in engage, unless you played the older games then all of these references are go over your head and that is egregious, leaving you with a scene that isn’t trying to support its own narrative but instead piggybacking on your understanding of other, better scene that these are parodying. Makes you truly wonder why they left this game in the direction of someone who never designed tactics games, made the gameplay and design towards younger, newer player… but then made this an anniversary game with everything about its plot and main mechanics be a “Hey remember this dingus from fire emblem and the shadow boiled potato?”
what?? its supposed to be a reference? even knowing the source material i really cant see it, because time travel has nothing to do with engages plot? in fea, its what happened before they got yeeted like 20 years back, but in engage, alear just wakes up and never mentions the dream at all??
Nah, IIRC, Echoes, Awakening, and Fates start with a scene that is shown later with full context. Engage it just makes up a fucking scenario for no reason since the next levels still work as tutorials
Engage made me realize that story in games does matter and is more or less important depending of which games you're talking about. Engage is not a bad game but with a compelling story like Three houses it would've been one of my favorite Nintendo games
Agree. Engage isn’t a bad game but I will say to me it’s disappointing because I really felt bored playing this game despite the fun gameplay because I did not care for anything in this game
Agreed here. It’s probably the most mechanically sound and interesting fire emblem game. The story is so soulless though. It’s a celebration of the series, which is cool but I wish it actually tried more in that framework. Three house’s story was so thoughtful it’s just a shame to have lost that.
@@milesharrison2140 Maybe you can explain it since I don't get it. What did Engage do mechanically that made it so much different that earlier titles? All it added was: 1. The Emblem Rings a game item, that basically allowed you to make a hybrid class kind of like like Fe3H. Except with a few super powers. 2. The Break Mechanic, which was just the weapon triangle on steroids. (It overcorrected the problem in 3H, and should have been a skill exclusive of the assassin / thief.) Unless I am forgetting something, everything else in Engage is not new to engage. As I hear people praise Engages gameplay, but I just don't see what makes it stand out since I noticed a lot more that it stripped away (less classes, less weapon types, less magic) than it added.
@@thenecromancer8805 those two mechanics did a lot for my enjoyment of it mechanically. The emblem rings changed a lot strategy wise that I found interesting, specifically for the amount of them and the differences between them. Moreover their connection to skills made unit optimization interesting, though in some moments a bit time consuming. I do think that there could have been more classes, but with the classes we do have, the flexibility with units is insane units can end up being completely different through play throughs. It also has a good sized character pool, which is something that Fe3H lacked unless you recruit everyone. This left you with two options, playing the game on casual which I prefer not to or playing it on classic and spinning time back if you lose a unit. It’s nice to have a fire emblem game again where I can play with permadeath and still get to the end of the game. Stage design was also pretty solid though I can’t say for sure if it was better. Holy fuck the story is bad though. And not just oh it didn’t live up to the last game. Shit is just bad on its own. Literally skipped all that on the second play through, which is not a god sign.
@@milesharrison2140 Fair enough, I agree the map design was visually a lot better than the previous three games. I guess where I don't see eye to eye is my focus on what was missing. Since I ended up finding most the new mechanics to be too intrusive. That said, what I did like about the Rings mechanic is the idea of merging two classes which unlocked a whole new way to use characters. Which is why I am a fan of the idea of removing the class system entirely, and allowing players to build archetypes however they like. Kind of like an RPG where you can equip armor types, weapons, and mounts however you like for a characters as long as you meet the weapon, armor, and mount skill prerequisites. So instead of using a class token to unlock "paladin" you'd gain the paladin skills if you leveled up your white magic, mount, and armor profs.
I only played Three Houses one and a half times but picking my 70ish% completed Engage after whenever launch was makes me want to go back and finish that Blue Lion run.
Geralts death was incredibly well done, and was forshadowed well in advance, so you as the player saw it coming. It happens at a dramatic moment, but does overpower the scene. Other things can still happen. The tears fall, Byleth has been noticably emotionless for alot of the game, and to see the tears fall, and then the rain start, cutting to the silhouette of the two was powerfull. It didnt need to be over the top and dramatic, it just needed to be somber and sad. And thats what it was. I actually regularly revisited Geralts grave every month, just before the capstone mission.
Plus the aesthetic decisions of Byleth being sad on the Free Time selecting screen, the somber music of "broken routine", everyone comforting Byleth/recalling memories of Jeralt during the explorations, etc. for the following month
I haven't gotten jeralts death but I know its gonna happen via the HUGE death flag of him saying "If I die I'm going to leave something very important in my room you should probably search in here"
@@yourboylos2532it was spoiled for me because I watched the Edge of Dawn video and saw Byleth crying over Jeralt’s dead body. But honestly I’m glad it was, because it made every chapter that included Jeralt more thrilling because I was scared he was gonna finally die.
24:02 to that point I say: Shez. The main character of Fire Emblem Warriors Three Hopes is for me the best of these kind of Characters. You select a option just like with Byleth but Shez actually says the line. And I rather have that. Having the character at least say what you choose 1:1 is what I think should be a must. I don‘t like them to be mute while all others speak their heart out.
@@yunuss58 Shez is also a great balance between how to handle a lead character knowing nothing. Alear is extremely lazy in that regard, and it feels as such. Byleth is very overcomplicated, though it works. Shez is just a dumbass, but they’re so likable you don’t care.
It always felt so weird how the story quality changed between engage and three houses, three houses isn't the best fe game but I still liked it and actually finished it multiple times but I still haven't bothered finishing engage once
Made by different studio's. Engage was written and produced by IS. While in 3H IS was just "supervising." IS can't write since they fired their only good writer ten years ago.
Three Houses was written by Dynasty Warriors writers overseen by the Fire Emblem people. Same writing team as the original FE Warriors. As much as people shit on Dynasty Warriors, the games do usually manage their casts very well, especially in direct interaction, and they have done so many cliches that they know how to really work them. Hubert? Basically just Sima Yi and Jia Chong combined. Edelgard? A massively downgraded but still okay Cao Cao. Lorenz takes inspiration from Zhang He. Linhardt is a lazier Sima Zhao. There's plenty more. Heck, even Dimitri's crazed determination is basically just Yukimura Sanada from Samurai Warriors.
I bought engage on release play until like chapter 16, got bored, and finally forced myself to beat the game literally 3 hours ago. Worst story, I've ever experienced in any game in a long time. Engage genuienly makes me worry what the next FE will be like, while 3H made me nothing but excited for the future of FE.
@@RoyalWreckingBall Depressing that the people at Dynasty Warriors wrote a better story than IS. All They do is write goofier versions of the same events.
Somniel serves as a great example of what I personally found is missing from Engage, that Three Houses has in spades: World building. Three Houses has such a deep backstory, which builds the world. And, from the world the people of the world are born. This is the source of tension. The Church, the Kingdom, the Empire all play major parts in the tension of the game. (The alliance is just there, just like Claude) But, engage has no world. No, a map isn't a world. Engage has a doughnut with four different glazings and a villain. Nothing in the story makes any sense. Which means the stakes don't make any sense. It's also not helped by "magical corrupted" standing in for humans. You fight Humans what? Once in all of Engage? I think the rather bland plot could have been aided a lot with an actual world that has a history - like Three Houses.
I absolutely agree about the Corrupted. Its one thing to have actual monsters like Gaiden and Sacred Stones, but having the main bad guys be an army of undead that are just reskinned humans feels cheap. At least the Morphs in Blazing Sword were rare and mostly only used because Nergal had killed the Black Fang. Even the Risen from Awakening were utilized better thanks to most of them being used as villains to the child units that encountered them before time traveling. Then there is the Vallites, who were poorly implemented and the Corrupted who have nothing going for them; no lore, no mystery.
I'm not going to deny 3H's story was better, but it honestly felt like it was trying too hard with it's world building. A lot of the world building is given to us in long exposition dumps at the start of every chapter, some of which aren't even relevant to the chapter in question. That's not even talking about the other bits of lore that you can only find throughout the monastery. It sometimes feels like the game is handing you homework and expects you to keep up with it instead of giving you the lore naturally. Don't even get me started on how so much of the emotional investment is specifically tailored to the Blue Lion house, *especially* in Part 1. Lonato? Ashe's dad. Miklan? Sylvain's brother. The Dark Knight? Mercedes' brother. The Tragedy of Duscur? Part of Dedue's backstory.
Im pretty late to this video but the community needs videos like this and players like you who provide new insight to a series with a small but diehard fanbase. I enjoyed the video
I have a quote from a game that seems to have burrowed into my deep memory. "There are many ways we can do it, and the choice is yours" That's from the opening of Morrowind, when you are presented with your option on how to create your character - of which there were many. I always liked the in-medias Res type creation sequences.
Agree with basically all of your points except Cindered Shadows. I didn't think it was crazy hard myself, and I liked the background it gave to Geralt and Byleth's mother. Everything else, spot on. Engage probably was the more fun game mechanically (Even if 3H did a great job of validating durability through weapon arts), but in everything else, 3H is my game.
1:05:22 SPOILER FOR FIRE EMBLEM FATES- but they DID in fact do this with the Birthright route After a certain battle a cutscene plays and if you got to a certain support level with Kage (A if I remember correctly) he survives, otherwise he dies
It happened to me when playing Fates, only had B support because I was doing my normal Awakening thing and just only pairing the pairs together and such and of course wasn’t expected to lose one of my units just because we weren’t A rank
I strongly dislike "only the gameplay matters" people that seem to have all popped up post-Engage. The best parts of FE, for me, are when the narrative is woven neatly into the gameplay. My favourite game is FE4, and I think it does that really well, on top of me already enjoying the gameplay in a vacuum. People also treat their personal preferences for Fire Emblem gameplay as a concrete law that could never be broken, when Gaiden and FE4 were the 2nd and 4th games in the series; I'd even toss Thracia in there. They were already experimenting *really* early. FE is at its best when it experiments, and I like what they did with 3H. It isn't without its flaws, but it was a much needed breath of fresh air after Fateswakening lazily frankenstein'd a bunch of past concepts and made games out of it. I've seen more "you aren't a real fan if you don't like Engage (or like Three Houses)" than I ever did "you aren't a real fan if you like Awakening", yet I never see Engage fans labelled as elitist, strange.
I never saw that nearly as much for Fates, on Miiverse. But for some reason the biggest Engage stans just have to rewrite the history of gaming culture to pretend that RPGs and occasionally other genres weren't so popular because people actually enjoyed the worlds and characters within them. Are you trying to make people like or hate FE before they've even played it?
I feel like the biggest problem of Engage is its lack of identity. The gameplay is very barebones and standard Fire Emblem, minus having a gimmick, the story relies on Emblems, tropes and weird references (such as the prologue being way too similar to the one of Awakening). Sure, the gameplay is solid but it gives me no reason to care about the game. Meanwhile Three Houses deviated from certain mechanics and rather went its own way. And while it's not the best game in the story, it's clear what the vision behind the game was, while Engage is a jumbled mess. That's why I hope wholeheartedly that the next game builds upon the mechanics and ideas of Three Houses, as it has lots of potential.
"You arent the center of the universe and the time does not revolve around you" You know...despite having the creator diety and god of time potara fusioned into your soul...
I am with you. I have never played a Fire Emblem game until Three Houses. That was my first experience in the series and I had thought that it was something common among the games, I did not know it was something the development team did something new. I loved almost the entire supporting cast of characters. That is very rare to find in a game. The multiple play throughs are rewarding to see the different perspectives and some events and dialogue options that would otherwise be unknown to you. The only thing I disagree with your overall view of the DLC of Three Houses is that, I play nearly all my games on the hardest difficulty. So the DLC with the fixed leveling just meant I had to rethink the positioning and routes of my allies. Sure it took many attempts at clearing the endgame of the side quest, but it was worth it. Happy is my favorite of the new characters. Sorry you didn't dig Petra, she is my top tier waifu. I was so impressed by Three Houses that I purchased Engage thinking it would follow a similar formula. I heard not so great things about it and now you have confirmed those concerns. I have not even touched the game and I bought it the day it was released. I may eventually get around to playing it, but for now I enjoy replaying Three Houses over and over again.
On Yunaka: that's all her VA. They literally added the impression part of her personality just because Laura Post is that good at them and they wanted an excuse to fuck around with her abilities. It's WILD.
My thought on the bandit attack is that they were never supposed to run into Byleth and Jeralt. I think they were supposed to have the two other heirs killed, but most of all scare away the third professor, so that Jeritza would take over as the teacher for the Black Eagles. So, in a way I think maybe Edelgard being the one under attack in the turn back time scene is a bit of an oversight. Should have been Claud.
I’m saying this at the beginning of the video, so you may cover it later. But the reason I love three houses so much more than engage is: I give a crap about the characters, I know who they are. But three houses is kind of unique in fire emblem in it gives you less characters than normal Fire emblem games (assuming you don’t recruit everyone). Once I realized that engage gives you so many characters so often and expects you to replace your units all the time, I no longer cared about any of them. I could name maybe 5 characters from engage.
@@pandabanaan9208 I think the solution would have been to be able to have faceless generic soldiers like you could hire in Fates. For whatever reason, FE really does not want you to have generic / faceless soldiers. In fact, it would be cool if you started a FE game with mostly faceless soldiers (who when they reach their first support level with you) become a face character. So you have your protagonist and small main cast, but will unlock new characters by what hired characters you use who have the potential to evolve into a side character. I think FE does suffer from character bloat.
@@pandabanaan9208 I'm just speaking from what I see for the most part. In the grand scheme of things I don't play on Iron-man or even hard mode for that matter. As I play games for the stories. Though my idea is more or less just ripping something that they used in Fates since it would solve the permadeath problem in my view. As it relates to the large cast of characters, its more so an earlier FE game mindset. As in the early FE games you had a much smaller cast of characters, and their supports tended to be directly related to the story instead of being about generic character hobbies or quirks. It basically can be summed up as a hope that the writing quality would improve if they focused on doing a few characters right. Though I think this is a false hope since IS is just full of bad writers.
This was super interesting! It’s nice to hear an opinion on this matter who isn’t a long time or hard-core fire emblem fan. I just wanted to mention some things that are often discussed within the community. A big one is many old timers hate avatars, and hub worlds. The only one that hasn’t been seen incredibly negative was Fates castle. Personally i find the monastary repetitive and I have a habit of just wasting time because I loose my train of thought on what of the many things I wanted to do. Avatars is an interesting one I personally like it for the customization options in gameplay but many don’t like it from a story perspective. One comment I found interesting is you liking Alear’s design I don’t like it their hair looks like plastic and the art style shift I think was one of the largest factors because it made Engage start of bad footing with the community and Three Houses fans. Another couple things to note you already briefly touched on this at the beginning but some Engage’s oddities are just standard Fire Emblem gameplay. Like Saphir joining so late is what’s called a replacement unit to replace someone who died. About the difficulty of the DLCs this problem really occurs because Engage and Three Houses is all about character and unit customization and the DLCs rip that away from you making the maps far more difficult than they really should be. I personally found it stupid on their part to rip the customization away from the player. I think another aspect that made Engage loose a lot of interest in the community was the lack of new game plus. Another aspect is the lack of limitation to customization. In three houses and fates there was a lot of effort put into altering class lines training weapon ranks and in fates case supports. Engage seemingly has too little and too many restrictions on class changing and build design at once. Class are really easily to slot anyone in without much thought at all but skills are only limited to two flexible slots hampering goofy builds. The Emblems do bring their own skills but it isn’t nearly as flexible compared to Fates and Three Houses. Overall I think it was a bad start followed by a weak story with good gameplay that was’t repayable that really hurt Engage.
One thing about the hubworlds. In Three Houses, you only NEED to explore once per month - if all you care about is the story beats the characters might give you. Which are often relevant to what's going to happen. After that you can just fight, do seminars or rest. In Engage, whenever you do a side mission... you are incentivized to go back to the Somniel to do all the chores again, because it resets. Meanwhile in Three Houses they go "okay want to fight? You can do 3 fights before the next time you decide what to do. No faffing about in the hub world first"
You are just biased 3h does the exact same shit but worse. The problem is the way the game is designed it objectively unoptimal to do this thing, why would I rest when eating does the same thing? Why would I fight when the arena does the same thing. The way the games are designed in engage you can literally just skip the somniel if you don't care about the fluff dialogue where in three houses because of the cancer that is prof. Level you have incentives to run around and do fetch quests 3 times a month while playing cancerous mini games. The game (on maddening) is not designed around you only going to explore 1 time each month, while engage irs way quicker to get back into the action. There's a reason long time fe find think the monastery sucks balls. The only reason you should do anything else is when there's paralogues available
@@cringekid3993 You just mad an argument for not having the Somniel, not an argument for why the Monastery sucks. The thing is, if you are "conditioned" to think the hub world brings benefits, then the Somniel is 100% worse. Besides neither me, nor the video is debating hub worlds VS none. We are comparing why the one in Three Houses works better. If you also look at the Monastery as a story driver, then it surpasses the Somniel right away. There's plot points being given to you in the Monastery, the Somniel has none. These are plot points I don't really see how you would get elsewhere? Other than longer expositions dumps. Part of why Three Houses cast stands out way more than Engage is also due to you interacting with them outside of Supports. But, again. It's an argument over Monastery VS Somniel, not "how could it be done even better?" I have thoughts on that, for another time. Although the world building and small story and character beats I haven't really figured out how you could do better.
@@TheAurgelmir If you're going based on story alone, yes you're correct the Somniel doesn't hold nearly as much relevance as the Monastery. But if going by gameplay, 3H is much MUCH worse, its a constant grind and if you're playing for efficiency then it's a requirement. Again like the guy said above, long term FE players hate it, you cannot just do it once and move on for the month when playing Maddening otherwise you're shooting yourself in the foot. 3Hopes drastically improved on this, it's too bad it doesn't matter because it's a Warriors game, but they clearly learned from 3H and then moved that into Engage with the Somniel. Players wanted the monastery to be less of a grind and the Somniel is. You could argue "arena battles and meals are just as required/bad" but they take up a forth of the time, you're done with them in 5 minutes vs the drastically increasing time it takes for the monastery. I never thought a video game would make me hate fishing in it, but 3H made that crap unbearable.
While I do find the somniel shallow from a story and character perspective, I think it is better than 3h's monastery as that one was WAY more detrimental to gameplay. Fates and onwards, hub worlds are, imo, at their best when serving as a small stop-gap between difficult and well-designed chapters. A place to shortly gain your composure, managing resources, and planing for the next map. And to be fair, I do think the monastery does fine here up until the arena unlocks. Both encourage participating in activities for resources that can be applied to the maps. But 3H asks you to do it 3 times or more before a chapter. Unfortunately said chapters are very low quality. With nearly all of them blending into one another due to the rampant map reusage. Creating a bad gameplay loop. Engage asks you to do the somniel once before a chapter (not counting tempest trials). As well as having well designed maps, each with a distict theme that test the player fair and square. After completing a chapter, you go back to preparing for the next chapter via gathering bond fragments/supports/money/forges/the well, etc. I personally prefer the Fates hub, as it was more fast paced. But I would rather take the somniel over monastery.
This is just straight bias. Somniel is 100% optional but lets you min max whole team IF you want. Monestary in the other hand is a required slog that you HAVE to do if you want to stand a chance in maddening
No matter how good the map design is, if the game is put into a souless story and bad shell, with the main justification being gameplay, it will fall flat and be forgotten quickly. Not all is gameplay, presentation and character designare important aswell. If a game is "fun" (and i throw that lightly as i could never play engage more than 20 minutes), it will still bore people to death if it has no substance like engage.
To comment on the complexity thing. I believe that 3h is one of the best games to get in to FE with even with how different it is to traditional FE games as the game does a really great job at introducing the mechanics and hooking u with the story
As a hard core Fire Emblem Fan, I agree. Engage was lack luster for me. There was some great ideas and nostalgia but it didn't hold up. I returned it after beating everything, while Three Houses I still have and replay.
This might come off as a very childish excuse, but I think the aesthetic for Engage is what puts me off from playing it. It's a little too anime for Fire Emblem, in my opinion. It's not like I didn't try, I got to the first paralogue before putting the game down and completely stopped. The characters didn't give a good first impression either. Honestly, they were kinda getting on my nerves with their constant Alear worship. Don't get me started on Lumera's death scene. That scene really ticked me off. Throughout that whole scene, I was just unfazed thinking, "Wow, she's dead already? It's only been a chapter? Man, they are really trying to get emotions out of you for a character you barely know anything about." I got more emotions from Jeralts' death, which isn't even half as dragged out or dramatic as Lumera's. I don't know, this might come off as stupid because I barely made any progress in the game, but these were my honest thoughts from what little I played. If I feel like I have to force myself to continue playing, then honestly, the game must not be for me.
The thing about engage is it's heavily trying to appeal to fans of the mobile gacha game FE Heroes, which is extremely anime. A lot of those people haven't touched a FE game in their lives, so this game was an attempt to get them into their mainline games, as well as being an anniversary game. Also, in regards to Lumera's death, it's actually very much an established meme by this point, so many protagonists of FE games in the past literally have this same scene, of their parental figure dying in their arms. I have played every English fire emblem mainline game, and the two noteworthy JPN exclusive ones, and yeah, this happens so often. If you come from FE 3H, then actually that game is the oddball, it's production value and decently crafted story is something I could only see in 3 other FE games, maybe 4. It's not unusual to have an entire game with an incredibly mid story you can predict bar for bar, that's why Engage is not at all out of place when compared to others like Fates/Awakening/Sacred Stones. That being said, your ability to make it through the story is entirely dependent on how fun you find the tactical aspect and maps as well as characters, as this is exclusively where a lot of the replayability factor comes in. And also, the story in engage, it does get better, the characters too, the ones you have at the start are basically the worst out of the cast. So I want to say keep playing, but definitely temper your expectations a little about the story, it has a really strong midpoint, but really falls flat on its face in the end. This is actually very typical of most FE stories of the past too. The developers cannot write a compelling final boss to save their lives. That's why 3H is special lol, imagine Claude's route, but without the dynamic infighting between other houses, you are just exclusively fighting Nemesis and his goons over and over again. That's FE story in a nutshell.
Yeah I get what you say about the art, is like fire emblem is about war I don’t wanna see some anime childish character, is like a whole different ambience
@@alter_ech0that is true. Engage has probably the worst first impressions of a video game I’ve ever seen. Before you even start the game the character design can be off putting and then you get that weird 4ktv opening song which while catchy is a bit cringey. The first characters you meet early on all simp for alear which is annoying because you don’t get to know a lot about the characters when introduced unless they are royals. The retainers are probably handled the worst since many of them only get two lines in the main story not enough to show their personality and even then some it’s just wasted praising alear. While the gameplay is great I feel like one of the things I despise was how skirmishes was handled. They are useful for leveling up however the fact they level up with your strongest unit can make training weaker units a problem which can cause them to be dead weight. I also hate how some things were balanced for example lapis feels like she got screwed over because immediately after her chapter you get Diamant and then kagetsu(though kagetsu also gets a bit screwed over in learning about him since his contribution to the main story is probably the worst of the bunch(he only has 2 generic lines in the main story and he joins in a chapter where your trying to escape not fight. He’s lucky that he’s a really good unit.) which makes her inferior Overall engage is good if your only focusing on gameplay however since it’s a fire emblem game you would think it have a balance between story and characters on top of that
@@Yoshixandir ua-cam.com/video/tu2U5sRTFeA/v-deo.htmlsi=6k2UqCBJrornDhxI (Engage OST) While the opening cinematic is a little cringe I agree, when this song played during the end credits with that amazing final send off just before actually made me cry a little. But this is purely because I've been a long time fan of this franchise for 20 years, it's cringe and cheesy at times but I can't help but love it for those rare special moments that seem to come out of nowhere. Also, Lapis is amazing, trust me, I play exclusively maddening difficulty with random growths. Just give her a class that fixes her low STR growth and she will go bonkers in late game. I pair her with sage Citrinne too. They are my favorite duo at this point. Citrinne also a fantastic user of Celica's emblem. You can make anything work in this game with determination
@@alter_ech0 I don’t disagree however keep in mind in regard to lapis it’s more of how unbalanced. Yes you can invest in her but the issue I have is why give me a sword unit and then the next chapter you get another sword unit with an emblem and then a few more chapter you get kagetsu who is almost consider to be the best unit. I’m going more on a first play through from perspective. I kinda of wish they allow more unit to be used on the maps since usually units come in pairs of 3 and there’s very limited spots
Great video. I'm a somewhat "recent" fan of the series, too, having only played from Awakening onward. Three Houses had rather different vibes to the other Fire Emblem games I had played before, and there were lots of things that I missed from the prior series - but I really loved Three Houses, especially after being disappointed in Fates. I feel like Three Houses had some of the most interesting, rough around the edges characters in the series as far as my experience with it goes (or maybe it just feels that way after, again, being disappointed in Fates lol) Engage just rubbed me wrong right from the start with its lineup of legacy characters. I never managed to get the sour taste of fan service out of my mouth - every time I caught a reference I recognized, I just wished they had made a new, fresh story, like what Three Houses felt like.
Engage feels like it has an identity crisis. It tried to be anniversary game like awakening but they forgot why people enjoyed awakening in the first place. I get they added references with the past heroes however unless you played the past games you are not gonna know that much about them since many of them really don’t talk about their game and when they do it’s very brief in the prologues. It’s so awkward since it tries to appeal to veterans and newcomers but they ended up half committing to it
@@CadmiumPoisoning thats fair, Fire Emblem fans are pretty stupid. I also started in awakening (really i started with Blazing Sword but i played it the same year Awakening came out) but fuck it, ten years is longer than some military expeditions I'm a vet. Don't listen to elitists.
Having played every English released Fire Emblem, I notice that I'm more partial towards the games with more quality and detailed stories. I find the issue surrounding Fire Emblem's gameplay to story dilemma to be bland. Just because a game like Engage has the best gameplay in the series doesn't excuse its plot holes or its shallow characters. The same is true for Three Houses, it's fantastic themes and characters doesn't fully excuse the plot inconsistencies or the gameplay changes. Still, I'd rather have Three Houses, as it feels like a more complete experience compared to Engage. Engage, while a pretty good celebration of the IP itself, really did not feel like it deserved to be a mainline game, and I struggle to understand why the bomb was dropped so hard in nearly every department but the gameplay. Regardless, I hope they learn what makes both games work, as well as what doesn't, and create a new entry with the gameplay quality of Engage, and the character quality of Three Houses.
I agree entirely. I'm honestly not that bothered if they go more an Engage or Three Houses direction in terms of how the narrative presents itself - All I really care about is the strengths being taken from both. Give me an Engage-Style story with decent writing and characters and I'm more than down for that
@@QosmicVoid well as a person who watch’s fire emblem content, atleast it’s not fate’s (fire up the emulator as I recommend the fire emblem binge from the oldest to newest plus “canon spin off’s” as three hopes adds depth to three house’s, though it’s kinda obvious that blue lions are the best route in either game”
@@diegoizaguirre3452 Honestly, there is worse than Fates. Granted, not much worse, but I do think that occassionally, Fates did have it's merits. Three Houses and Awakening were the peak of the series though, no doubt about it.
@@diegoizaguirre3452 eh. fates was fine its just a meme to hate on it. most of the complaints about Fates are mechanics that date back to FE4, and at least it wasnt as visually difficult as Engage (IMO). Conquest had some stellar maps. if you are a person who just watches FE content, id recommend actually playing fates before casting too much judgement. Its not the best but id say its middle quality. its not a good *fire emblem* game but its a good RPG. fates was rather fun and replayable with really memorable characters and careful design.
I play Mario for the gameplay not the narrative or character development but when I play Fire Emblem it's the story and the characters I value more than the gameplay
I am a fan of the Fire Emblem series as a whole, so I want to add my perspective, though I ultimately agree with what you said. With that said, one of the issues with Engage in my mind is that it is to Fire Emblem what Wish is to Disney. Which means referencing plot points from previous titles in indirect ways. For instance, the random Alear is the child of the big bad is a reference to Gaiden; its remake, Shadows of Valentia; and Fates. Sombron's title as Fell Dragon is a reference to Grima from Awakening. So on and so forth. Hell, it directly borrows maps from previous titles. I think this leads to issues with the narrative, as the game tries to balance its more original ideas with the stuff from previous titles, making the plot more messy as a result. Three Houses, while borrowing concepts from Genealogy of the Holy War; namely magic bloodlines and their associated weapons; it borrows the calendar and related mechanics from Persona, and so show the series trying something very different from what it typically does. Combined with the multiple routes, and you get a plot that has one main thematic through line that isn't messed with in some way, even with the different routes. In essence, Engage has two big goals: reference previous titles in various ways and a theme of found family. I would say it tries to use the former to prop up the latter, which does lead to issues with those not well-versed in the series being confused. For instance, the moniker of Fell Dragon is likely meant to refer to a dragon that is made through the use of Divine Dragon blood, human blood, and something known as a Thanatophage; a bug responsible for the Risen, a zombie capable of wielding weapons (which the Corrupted are likely a reference to). This is what previous Fell Dragon Grima was, though he had no ability to do Emblem Ring shenanigans. So the plot gets very easily lost, especially given that this reveal was not in Awakening, but in the post-game of Shadows of Valentia. So that is not really as well known. Engage wants to do a lot, but in attempting to juggle everything, leaves out some of what draws people in (the pairings at the end of the game, for instance) and barely is able to keep it up. It still does so, but looks incredibly clumsy while doing so. (Also, just as a minor point, but the fact you specifically brought up Ike and Micaiah as the example of previous protagonists interacting, given that they did, mostly by trying to kill each other)
Of all the characters I could have referenced interacting, I used two that literally did. That would be hilarious if it wasn’t intensely frustrating. This does seem to explain a lot, though. Engage from what you're saying seems to be an amalgamation of a bunch of radically different ideas trying to co-exist seemingly just to reference other titles certainly would make some of the more baffling choices in this story make more sense. Doesn’t make them any better, mind you, but it does at least make what the developers were going for a bit more clear.
@QosmicVoid the only other funny combo you could have said was Sigurd and Leif given that Sigurd is Leif's uncle, though unlike Ike and Micky they never met in person due to being princes of two separate lands and other reasons.
@@QosmicVoidmy understanding was Engage was meant to be a 30 year anniversary title (thus all the Lords appearing as Emblems) but the pandemic wrecked development time
I think that Alear being the head of a religion could have been very interesting, especially considering they haven't been involved in it at all. There's a lot of alienation in being deified and this would especially be impactful in a young amnesiac character who now has the hopes and dreams of not just a nation, but an entire religious sect on their shoulders. Alear is, no matter how unintentionally, othered, and touching more on insecurity or even resentment to this position and the horrifying reality that their every action is going to influence and shape an entire generation of people that come after them would have been so, so interesting of an arc. The snippets where we see this possible direction could have gone I feel had potential, although that might also be because I played with f!Alear and I quite liked her vocal performance. It's just a lot of wasted potential for conflict and commentary and that's worse than if the game was just memes.
I have the opposite perspective - I played all FE games, except Three Houses, Engage and spin-offs - and I can agree with most points except one. Alear's design is nothing short of horrendous, both aesthetically and in the context of the world they're in. They look like christmas tree with so many clashing design elements that if anything made me appreciate simpler designs of previous main characters and realize why they worked. You can look at Fates characters for example and even without any context figure out which are from different countries or tribes, while in Engage if someone told me Yunaka and Hortensia are sisters, being a part of family circus, which Timerra is also a part of, I would believe it. If someone told me Bunet, Pandreo, Merrin and Panette are retainers of a royal family living in the desert land I would think my leg is being pulled - they don't have even a sliver of a tan on them and their outfits are terrible for desert environment. This is all over Engage, and it feels like characters were designed first, before anyone had any idea where to put them in the world. Everything else you pretty much nailed, though. That calendar system in 3H sounds very interesting, and I'm looking forward to eventually check it out.
@@thenecromancer8805 It wouldn't be a major issue if it wasn't done such haphazardly. Take Elusia as an example - you can make cool looking anime winter outfits. Instead, both Ivy and Hortensia wear something you would see at a masquerade ball or a fancy tea party, and their retainers aren't much better. This game even has a gear system, which was a perfect opportunity to give everyone different outfits based on where the current chapter takes place or even make characters used to a certain environment more effective, since they themed each country after a season. But it's nothing more than a window dressing. Even Fates took the time to explain why Felicia and Flora are not bothered by cold, regardless of their outfits.
Yeah, it all feels super messy. It was one of the first things i even pointed out when we got a list of characters before the game even released. Fates' designs were great when it comes to feeling actually coherent- even Azura and Corrin were designed so they would always slot in to either country while also clearly looking foreign and it was done with a very smart color system that worked alongside pre-existing world influence in outfits as well as design motifs repeated on characters of each kingdom commonly. nohr's being black, purple and blue . with floral shapes on the medallions on characters such as niles, xander, leo. and the "scaled" armor lacing. hoshido's being blue, orange and red. with bow shapes on characters such a ryoma, sakura, saizo, and actually like everyone... these countries SHARE blue, as well as white/ivory/silver as a prominent neutral. meaning corrin and azura both fit in the color schemes of either. the way the characters are designed themself is a perfect example of designing with the intent to tell someone about the character on their first look. i doubt anyone who sees Xander for the first time expects him to be anything except for a stubborn and serious, rather hardcore guy. he's clearly of a high station as well. you get it, i dont need to explain the way traits build up a recognizable personality in a design. but the colors of each country also help reflect the tone of each, literally being "light and dark", "day and night". (and of course, purple is matched to orange and red... main opposing characters even have matching or opposing silhouettes and color placements. its super fun to dig into, compare ryoma and xander side by side, for starters they share a stripe down the center. ill let you have fun picking apart the rest) the point is, i gathered characters from Engage to see what colors each country shared as their main, shared color between citizens of it. the result was messy. some characters look like theyre maybe... related to *eachother*, like siblings seem to have *some* thought, but as a country, youre left shaking your head. so sure, maybe its opinion based on if the designs are any good (they arent IMO. i didnt see a single design in Engage that i was like "WOW..." about. except maybe in disgust.) but its very much factual that there wasnt much thought put into why characters look the way that they do. i look at a character from engage, and i just have to ask myself "who is this person? how do they act, where are they from, what are they about?" and in return feel totally lost. the ones i do pick up on end up feeling more like jokes than anything else. im glad someone else picked up on it. i mean, we're fire emblem fans, we're not in search of anything groundbreaking but its disappointing and this feels like a new low. we'd been doing so well, and IntSys and Nintendo have the money and means to do better than ever in this regard. There really is no excuse. Engage's characters dont even look like theyre from the same game at times. seeing some characters side by side looks like i visited someones deviantart and found crossover fanrenders for franchises ive never heard of. it scares me for the future of FE as someone who's interest is very character and story heavy, espessially with the rumors of FE4's remake just getting more and more credible, and potentially closer. (which im already worried about due to censorship concerns.)
@@LuckyPuppylove To be fair, Nintendo has had the budget to do better with all of its brands for decades. Yet instead chooses to put every title on a shoestring budget, very short dev time, and then pocket the gross profits while giving next to nothing to the devs it publishes. If you're curious as to why the game was such a mess, the lead dev accidently admits he's the reason the game is a disaster in the Ask the Dev interviews if you read them all.
@@thenecromancer8805 yep, and yeah sadly i am aware of it.. i actually hypothesized the day of the nintendo direct trailer that it was to "bring in new, younger fans"... reading more and seeing not just that but admittance to "not liking SRPGs" was really a ride.
Fun fact, Three Houses and Engage had difrent producers and writeing teams. Three Houses was mostly out sourced to the developers of Dynasty Wariors Koei Tecmo with some members of Intelligence Systems also haveing input mainly the members who worked on a remake of Fire Emblem Gaiden called Fire Emblem Echoes shadows of Valentia and most of them didnt agree with the direction the main team was takeing Fire Emblem as while awakening saved the franchise it also took out alot of the fantasy drama earlier titles had for basic seasonal anime tropes and simplified plots Three Houses in a way was a return to form going back to tittles like Genology of the Holy War and the Telius dulology on gamecube and wii. The team that made Awakening and Fates didn't like this and Engage was made to basicly be the anti-three houses as they felt such a dark deep story with complex charicters and a traditionaly serious brave protagonist would be off puting to younger players and newcomers so they simplified as much as posible to apeal to what the belived to be the lowest comon denominator. Engage does have better combat gameplay and maps but theres no soul behind any of it. The story exists to sever the gameplay while in three houses the gameplay exists to help tell its stories
@TheMaestroMizerous It's not even dark they need to realize serious mature elements are popular in the west instead of baseing their data off a Wii rpg which translation butchered the difficulty setting as easy normal hard when it was realy normal, hard and very hard which made the game seem much harder than it really was to casuals and an almost one to one remake of fire emblem 1 people found boring mainly because the plot was from an nes game with very few changes. It was those two flops that made them assume casual western players don't like stories like Three Houses
I have to say that I agree that the enemies being risen corpses really does take away from the game, for me the hardest thing of Three Houses was killing characters I cared about that were just in the other side of the war that I now had to kill as my enemies, it was a painful experience that led me to try to minimize death as much as possible while completing my objectives and finishing the mission. I did my utmost to try killing as few people and students as I could, ironically I got better at war by trying to minimize death, because I got better at killing just who I needed to kill and as few others as possible, Bernadetta was the one doing this most of the time, I would teleport her next to the enemy commander and use her OP stats, powerful bows and skills to insta-kill enemy commanders to end the battle in a few turns. It was tragic to me when I had to fight pitched battles where I had to cut my way through many enemy units and characters, I did it but it hurt to do so, because I knew them I was their teacher, their coworker and friend, I could only do so much to avoid killing them but sometimes I had no other choice because I had a mission to complete, and it hurt a lot, specially because I got to know a lot of the students from other houses as well, got to know what their dreams, aspirations and passions were. It really made me wish that I could have had more of Three Houses not because I wanted to keep fighting but because I wanted to make sure that what Edelgard wanted came to pass, to see it through all the way, because I felt a responsibility to all the dead that I had to make their deaths not be in vain, to make sure that those at the heart of this suffering paid for it, and that the world at the other end of this tragedy would be one that need not require such sacrifices.
I felt for the blue team on my Golden Deer run. Like, Edelguard just stabbed us in the back and they got the WORST of it. But there wasn't much I could do to help.
I appreciate this deep dive. I'm a long-term Fire Emblem fan, and even I struggled with engage. I never even finished it, despite being so excited for it. Which sucks, because it was so cool to see all these different characters from the different games come together, like a celebration of the franchise's history. But yeah, the story is really lack-lustre. And I say that as a fan of Fire Emblem 7 (even I will admit that game's story is a freaking mess - still love it though XD). This is a very long comment because I'm more or less writing it as I watch, and responding/adding to points. I will say, some of your early points are precisely why I NEVER recommend anyone starts with Three Houses as their first Fire Emblem game. It was a great evolution of the franchise, and I adore it (in fact, watching this has made me want to play it all over again), but it is SO different to the older games, even those just before it. The best starting points as indicators of what to expect from fire emblem, in my opinion, are FE7 on GBA, Path of Radiance on Gamecube, or Awakening on 3DS. They are much more representative of the general fire emblem experience. Engage is also very much NOT a typical fire emblem game, but not from a gameplay standpoint, but because it involves the Emblems - whom you will have no connection to if you haven't played their respective games. Engage is honestly even more not recommended for newcomers than Three Houses, in my opinion. This is a franchise KNOWN for bringing in new mechanics and dropping them one game later (just look into Genealogy of the Holy War and Thracia 776 - set in the same world, during THE SAME WAR, but TOTALLY different games, and we haven't had a fire emblem game like genealogy since), so expecting stuff that had a high focus in Three Houses to carry over is an easy pitfall for new fans to fall into (and doing so is a mistake the developers should have already learned from thanks to awakening's good mechanics being transplanted into Fates and NOT WORKING THERE for very similar reasons - the story explanations just don't make narrative sense). Also... on the subject of hub worlds (because honestly I think it's the point where engage fumbled the bag the WORST), I grew a little fatigued with Garreg Mach, but never outright frustrated or bored by it. The Somniel? I was bored by about the fifth time I went back there. It's so TEDIOUS, and I don't know how they managed to screw it up so badly that I was less annoyed by the sprawling monastery than the comparatively tightly designed island. It's a mechanic that I loved in three houses, but that doesn't suit a lot of fire emblem games, where you are travelling across a continent and don't have a base of operations. However, there's a really simple solution, that once again, the devs should KNOW ABOUT if they looked at their own previous games. Path of Radiance and Radiant Dawn have the base menu. This allows you to sort items, view supports (including bonus conversations relevant to the specific chapter you're on) and all that. If you want the "walk around and physically talk to people" thing, just... have a camp? Many fire emblem games mention the army having a camp as they travel. Use a simple map, set up some tents, scatter the characters around. Done. Heck, they even do something similar to this is the post-battle thing IN ENGAGE! I should not be having better ideas than the devs, as a fan who doesn't design games for a living >.< I am so glad you addressed the "forces you to move forward" angle. That is the strength of older fire emblem games, and a weakness that has plagued the series since Awakening. I am a compulsive min-maxer in my games, and have the same impulse to max out supports that you do. I want to get everything I possibly can and get as high a level as I can. Earlier Fire Emblem games tell me "sorry, you can't. This is all you're getting, good luck." and it means I engage (haha) much more with the mechanics and the difficulty. Since Awakening, there have been infinite grind possibilities in the games (FE8 also did this, but they dropped it again for a while because it made things too easy, before realising they needed to bring in a more casual audience to keep the franchise alive blah blah random history stuff, I'm getting off topic). These are nice, sure, but they MURDER the story progression. And yes, I know, "just don't use them then"... Like I said, complusive min-maxer. I can't not. If they are there, I will use them; I know that's a me problem but it's why having a limit to these things in higher difficulties is good. Because then I CAN'T anymore, and it forces me to be more selective with my units and who I train and support with. And then I enjoy my time with the game more. The infinite grinding in engage is why I didn't end up finishing the game. I had spent tens of hours grinding and getting supports, and I got BORED, and realised the story hadn't hooked me enough to make me want to even finish it. If your story is going to be on the same level as FE7 (I'd argue Engage's is actually worse) then for goodness' sake, do what that game did and don't give me any opportunity to avoid it. Having not finished Engage, I did not know that character endings were unaffected by supports... I am HORRIFIED by this. This has been a staple of the franchise for literal DECADES - since Fire Emblem 6 even! Granted, back then it was only for Roy and his various romantic options, which they then expanded on in 7 and beyond. It became one of my favourite parts of fire emblem, seeing how different pairings affected where people ended up. WHY WOULD THEY REMOVE THIS?! Side note: my faves in these games are also almost never the lords (I'm british too, maybe it's cause our own royals are so dull it inadvertantly sours me to them a little - still love the lords of Fire Emblem mostly, but they almost never end up being my favourites). My favourite support conversation tree in Fire Emblem 7 doesn't even involve any lords- it's Lucius and Raven XD Oh jeez, the more you talk about the final plot points of Engage, the more and more it feels like a failed re-hash of FE7... Nergal (the villain of that game) also did awful things in order to reunite with a person/people he lost. But like... it's a really tragic thing if you unlock the additional lore of it (which hints at who it actually is instead of leaving it so open like Engage does), because he FORGETS why he sought power, because said power corrupts him. By the time you face him, he's just gone off the deep end and is trying to destroy everything because he thinks "why else did I want all this power?". FE7 is a mess, but it has interesting emotional beats. It makes enough emotional sense to carry itself through the plot holes, but Engage just doesn't seem to. The plot holes are too gaping, and the emotions aren't strong enough. I will say, Three Houses is also a bit of a mess if you dive into it too deeply. Some stuff doesn't quite make sense, there are deep dives about it that point out the plot holes. But again, it carries itself because of the EMOTIONAL weight of everything. That's the issue here. Engage doesn't carry enough emotional weight to prop up its weak story. I think what you have experienced here is a similar thing to what a lot of us experienced when Fire Emblem Fates came out after Awakening. Awakening was great, well balanced (mostly), had good emotional weight, and strong narrative reasons for its mechanics. Fates copied many of those mechanics over, without the weight, tweaked things, had an overly complicated story with about five billion plot holes, and ended up messier and more confusing as a result. I still like Fates, but it is objectively a complete train-wreck. Engage is very similar. Perhaps in time I'll grow to like it for what it is, and can let go of what I wanted it to be. But gosh it's tiring that Fire Emblem as a franchise seems to be developing a strange pattern for good game, mid/bad game, good remake, and then starting all over again. I hope we get the genealogy remake that everyone has been hoping for, and I hope it's good. I love this franchise, and I don't want it to spiral into obscurity or failure. Engage could have been great, if they'd just thought some stuff through more. I'm very sorry this ended up as an essay. I get very passionate about Fire Emblem, and Engage was kind of a disappointment for me. It's nice to see even someone newer to the franchise recognise similar issues, and I think that's telling. If an outsider's perspective can find the same/similar issues as a long-term fan, then I think they are most likely just... objective issues. Definitely gonna go check out your other videos now! Your approach to analysis is quite refreshing!
This is a great video by all accounts and I pretty much agree with everything in it. But man you could have not chosen a worse time to upload this video! Right now the online consensus in the FE community is “3H is a complete gameplay and narrative mess”, while also pointing out “Engage was a secret masterpiece this whole time?!” It’s just a cycle now where 3H is the popular game to hate on. The same thing happened with FE Echoes (the game before 3H) when 3H initially released people hated FE Echoes but now post engage it is looked back on fondly. Eventually I feel the next FE game will come out and people will move on from bashing 3H towards bashing engage instead. But I have to reiterate: This was a great video that was well presented and paced well, and I can’t wait to see what comes next from you!
I feel like despite finding the story a mess I think most people are lying if they say it’s not good or even better than most fire emblems due to how it handles its supporting cast. Even ppl who I’ve seen be lukewarm on 3 Houses have admitted it has one of the best casts in the series. Tbh I feel like it’s less so “Engage is a secret masterpiece” and more so that all the people who were turned off by Engage’s vibes and writing problems haven’t stuck around. Therefore the ppl who can overlook the writing for the gameplay are the ones that are left.
@@Dakress23 Engage fans are shockingly insecure, even for this fanbase. I've never seen a game where people get more upset if you try to criticize it (outside the Zelda franchise, that is).
@@rileyrose5166 I think this is true of the 3H hatred as well, most people who liked 3H have moved on to other series with time or just dipped after they saw the game that followed it
What a great video. You randomly appeared in my home page. I'm a huge Fire Emblem fan and have played every game. I essentially agree with everything you've said - you hit ever single point possible I would make! Cheers mate. Also, love the commentary. That was hilarious to watch as a dire hard FE fan. Lmao thanks for the laughs.
Three Houses was the first game to make me feel emotional, it was such a good game and still is. It's my favorite game of all time and it'll probably stay that way. Btw my first route was the Dimitri route.
I remember playing until time skip and then being so giddy about seeing what “my kids” would look like now, after 5 years of war and how the reunion would play out, that I stayed up until 2AM just to finish the map. And went “Look at them!!!” several times. Because I cared about the cast. For engage, at chapter 16 or so, I turned to my partner and said, “man, I just want this to be over.”
I went into Three Houses blind, and when I saw my babies after the timeskip again, I was sobbing. In front of my family too. Naturally, I was made fun of for that.
Lions route is gut-wrenching, the scene in the rain after Gronder is so fucking good. “Your hands are so warm… have they always been?” Is better than the entirety of Engage’s script.
FE3H got fans new and old reinvigorated in the series and excited to revisit older entries with fresh new eyes. People loved Fire Emblem when 3H came out. Whether they were new fans who still preferred 3H upon visiting older games or not due to the visible intricacy of its world, the relevance of its characters, its lively voice acting, its beautifully grounded art direction, its exciting soundtrack, or its unique mechanics that both made battles more involved and exciting and told the story using its mechanics with incredible consistency, or if they found a new favorite among the older games because of the many reasons to like those too, 3H didn’t divide a fanbase into people who didn’t understand fire emblem and people who did, it gave people a gateway of a game that was greatly enjoyable to most people, with everything Fire Emblem is about to keep them interested in its past. Mostly, its developers and voice actors and creative team were just as passionate about the game as Fire Emblem fans were. It was made by a team consisting of big fire emblem fans-Koei-after all. It’s not wonder how they could tell just what everyone craved out of the genius FE format, and why 3H stuck the landing so well; it’s creators were among the audience. Fire Emblem Engage……displayed what it looks like when developers are driven by greed in the creation of something people are meant to resonate with, around, and enjoy. Say goodbye to careful detailing of things that make a game feel loved, and say hello to what is immediately, visually, corporate. People picked up on this immediately, and immediately the game dropped off in sales for those that were willing to give it a chance. If Engage wasn’t so grueling to audiences on its own, I would say Fire Emblem Heroes was Fire Emblem Engage’s worst flaw. 3H created a fanbase that loved Fire Emblem, Engage created a fanbase that felt like Fire Emblem hated them.
@@pandabanaan9208 I cant disagree that anything Nintendo will have corporate roots, but I do disagree that it’s so blatantly visible, if visible at all in the games before Engage. It’s nowhere near as obtrusive. 3H most definitely had repeated maps solely because of budget and time limitations. With their ceaseless effort in every other achievable area like diligently consistent dialogue which changes depending on the route or time, the fact that the game was “two times” the size it was originally intended to be, because they were so inspired to keep adding more to the game, I am 100% confident saying if Koei had the ability to expand 3H further they would have. We can go back and forth on whether their time was misplaced in certain areas, which I’d agree with, but that doesn’t have much to do with passion and corporatism. DLC I go back and forth on, but at least it was made after they knew people *wanted* more. The same can be said of spin-offs. Following 3H’s commercial success, Engage had no excuse for its most widely accepted flaws because those flaws had nothing to do with budget. Its story and characters didn’t need more, it just needed to be different, and often times could have actually done with less. The only excuse for it is at best ineptitude and at worst laziness. The director interviews are even more revealing. The game was conceived solely with the idea to “broaden audiences”. They follow this up by saying 3H was conceived with the idea to be an “adult war chronicle”. One is financially driven, the other was naturally inspired. There’s also the gacha mechanic, the game’s ties to Heroes-again, in the director interviews they say they “hope players will become interested in Heroes” after playing Engage-the fanservice and selection of an artist who said herself she was “concerned” about the character designs because she “only draws young characters”… There’s just so much incriminating material and things from the directors’ own mouths that directly seep into every aspect of the game, and that I’m confident in saying soured too many peoples’ experiences and turned them off of the game. I agree that this isn’t mutually exclusive to Engage, but I think 2020 and the ‘vid especially exasperated it to vapid extremes-like they think people have gotten more desperate and reliant on escapism and gacha and the like-and Engage is I think the face of that shift for Fire Emblem
If Engage makes Fire Emblem hate me then I must be a masochist because I'd take a million Engages over one Three Houses. It would be horribly disappointing to me if every FE game from here on out had weak gameplay and a pointless hub because it was always trying to emulate TH.
To the original comment, Engage has sold at best half of the copies three houses did so hopefully they get the message that good stories and character work can drive sales. 3 Houses is my favorite game not just in the series but ever, because of this cast and overall quality story and world. Despite it’s MAAAANNNNYYYYYY flaws I still love this game to bits.
I've played three houses 3 times and I'm on my fourth currently. I got halfway through engage and still haven't finished it. I do think as far as just a game goes engage is a good game but it unfortunately doesn't hold a candle to three houses
Very gratifying to see someone else elucidate all the things I loved about Three Houses and all the reasons that Engage struggles in comparison to it. And hey, best of luck getting rid of your anachronistic vestigial monarchy.
The one and only thing I disagree with is that I think it's fine that you can't romance Bernadetta as female Byleth cuz I think it's just cuz... Bernie's straight. It's kinda refreshing compared to the recent trend of the supporting cast in games being player-character-sexual. I only wish they'd be more consistent and make some of the characters *definitely* gay, such that you can *only* romance them if you share their sex. But, as you so frequently said, maybe that's just me.
While I'm on things I hellllla agreed with though: •I seriously don't get people who side with anyone BESIDES Edelgard - she wants to start a revolutionary war to abolish the privilege of the nobility and the theocratic overreach of the Church while replacing it with an egalitarian meritocracy? Uh, is there any way we can look into a ray gun that make video game characters real? And also, hot damn is the Fell Xenologue a better story than the Saturday morning cartoon that is Engage proper. My brother (much more generous towards Engage's shortcomings than I am) is totally on-board with that too; we'd honestly rather the Fell Xenologue be the main story and Alear's home dimension be the bizarro cartoon "everything is (creepily) fine" plane that it is for the DLC.
Can someone explain to me why Alear can't just go back to the Somniel after things go horribly wrong in chapter 10? Sure, there was a system message that told us we would have to go through multiple chapters without it, but why couldn't we escape from the castle by warping there instead of running through a forest while being hunted by Veyle?
This was a very good analysis and spot on to the general perception at large. Three Houses has great story and more importantly compelling world building that makes you care about the characters and situation you find yourself in on top of having great game play. Engage I would argue that while it has good or even above average game play and map design is severely let down but its train wreck of a narrative and lack of focus or direction.
I’m only at the part where you talked about the good dragon’s death scene thirty minutes in, but, if You want to see a death scene done right, it’s the main one in Awakening. They barely dwell on it in cinematic, but the entire next mission doesn’t have the normal battle music, but a dirge or elegy or whatever for the dead character. Such good music.
So as someone that's played pretty much the entire series their is a bit of context I feel would help, and that is that FE may be 1 franchise but it's not a "constant" franchise. As an example let me say a few things about Thracia 776, the fifth game in the franchise. In Thracia there are no support conversations, weapons have durability but you can very rarely buy anything instead you can "capture", lowering your stats but if you "kill" a until with Capture you instead grab them and can raid their inventory for what you want, all stats for everyone is capped at 20 so stat differences work differently, and storywise it was made to take place in a single year during FE4's story constricting what it could do. FE likes to really change how it works, both gameplay and story. Which often makes it hard to recommend games to people. Liking Three Houses does not mean you'll like Engage, or Fates, or Tellius, and so on. Because they all have different focuses and structures and mechanics. From how you described liking the characters, the romance, and changing how each characters ending works I'd recommend Awakening if you want another FE game. It has some flaws you listed here but it's a great game with a lot of focus on characters and bonds and changing your fate. Quick note on that, Awakening had a bad reputation in some hardcore parts of the fandom, especially Reddit, but ignore them they are just being elitist without any real justification like 2/3rds of the time. I'll also say avoid the first 5 games as that was before support conversations became a thing.
Slight note on Byleth knowing Nemesis. This does not imply that Verdant Wind is canon since that's the only time you fight him. He is a known historical figure within Fodlan. In fact, him acting suprised to see Nemesis revived implies the opposite.
This was a very interesting video. I hope you look into some more fire emblem games and decide to make videos on them to hear what your thoughts on them are. I especially recommend the dawn duology since they’re known for being the best written fire emblem games of all. But will warn you the protagonists of those two games (Ike and Miciah) are not at all avatars like you described enjoying Byleth being. They are very distinct characters who make most of their decisions without player input, but still put the player in charge of battle tactics.
I can very much relate to you: I have only played the Switch games of Fire Emblem: Three Houses as my first ever Fire Emblem game and Engage as my second and have also played Three Hopes. I'm not too familiar with the series outside of the Switch games but some characters I do recognize from Smash. By the way, also loved Three Houses and Three Hopes.
As a veteran FE player - this was certainly worth listening to and I agree on a lot of points. One of the points I disagreed on was the monastery and social sim elements of Three Houses: A lot of older FE fans, myself included, viewed it as time-consuming and unnecessary because you can beat the game without interacting with it anyways (there's even a mod to get rid of it haha). This is because FE just didn't have a social sim element until Three Houses; at most there would be a series of menus covering supports and shopping and it all felt a lot smoother. Having said that I do hope you try some of the earlier Fire Emblems, there are some really great games in it. Some of them are kind of expensive on the used video game market, though ^^;
Three houses is one of my fav games of all time. It was my first fire emblem game, after playing it I immediately sought out another game to play, in my case it was fates conquests. I couldn't get into it, years later I gave engage ago and it reignited my interest in the franchise, I've now been binging the games and loving them. I've played a few at this point and can safely say that three houses is an outlier in the franchise with its functionality and structure. I think its because of this that three houses is a game that anyone can pick up and enjoy, that as well as the fact the narrative in three houses is far more compelling than any of the other games I've played, granted with the franchise as a whole I barely scratched the surface so there may be phenomenal stories in some of the entries ive not played. Also I'm glad no one else know how to say Alear, I've had the following pronounciations in my head and can't settle on one: Al-Ear Al-EE-Ar Ale-eer
What I'm hoping is that they can take some of the more basic things they did great in Engage (the break system is fantastic) along with as much of the intricate map design as their budget can handle, and just put a good story behind it. I'm also hoping that they can take inspiration from the things that did work in 3H and drop the less successful ones (map zoom-in was too budget intensive for its value, for example).
The Break system was atrocious, it took the already "high mobility offense meta" of recent FE games and put the weapon triangle on steroids. The idea you can just go up and disarm anyone just by having their opposed weapon type over-simplifies the game, and punishes counter attacker and defensive builds that were perfectly fine ways to play in all the prior FE games. It makes the attack phase so much more important than prior games in the series. After all, you and the enemy are just going to swarm a unit any chance you gets because once disarmed the unit can't counter at all for the rest of the phase which makes the defense phase pretty moot. The traditional weapon triangle is how the FE games should be, nothing more. If the break mechanic is included in the future it should only be a thief / assassin exclusive skill.
@@thenecromancer8805the break function actually makes you think about placement of units a lot more, sure you could break someone but they could just as easily break you and that is a lot more punishing then you breaking an enemy, since there are a lot more enemies then your units, your units can easily get dogpiled with no defense if you aren’t careful, that’s how I think about it anyway.
Great video, as a long time Fire Emblem fan I think you did an amazing job analyzing the two games and even without knowing that 3 Houses production was far more rushed than Engage's you still made a lot of good points especially when it came to the covergence of gameplay with story . Even as a long time player of these game 3 Houses is my favorite, it was the first time I was angry that a character (Claude) wasn't gay/bi which revealed a lot about how I think about character writing. Additionally Byleth is almost as perfect as I think you can get having a story around a 'silent' protagonist. However with that said, Byleth's appearance in Engage made me realize that I don't actually like avatar characters that much, Especially when they are no longer in their story, because they sort of lack a definitive story to build off of.
I personally like the main character not to be an extension of one's self. When it comes to characters that are meant to represent you as the person playing the game, it almost always leads to mary-sue situations where the main character can do absolutely no wrong. Or can't make a bad decision. It often makes the story feel worse to me. Engage does a poor job of telling a story *in general,* so this difference isn't really shown very well here, but in other titles outside of fire emblem, I prefer when the main character has their own personality and does their own things, provided that they go through a proper arc of character development. The fact that Ike is my favourite fire emblem lord, and he *is* one such character, along with path of radiance and radiant dawn being my favourite games in the whole series, I think it makes a lot of sense.
Three Houses is quite the standout in regards to the Fire Emblem series as a whole. A common take I hear is that Three House fans are not Fire Emblem fans. - Prologue: "It was a dream/premonition" This has been occurring since Fire Emblem Awakening. I don't like it either but it's just a thing they do now. - "You are god" This is the worst incarnation of avatar circle-jerking they've ever done. - "Alear talking bad. Silent Byleth good." I don't agree with this take. Byleth talking in Three Hopes was much more preferable to being silent. Shez is a great example of the best of both worlds in this case: having both dialogue choices and them being spoken. Side-note: I can hardly consider Alear an avatar. They are very much just a lord that you can name. - The Divine Pulse This mechanic actually was introduced in the 3DS remake of FE Gaiden--Fire Emblem Echoes: Shadows of Valentia. It was introduced to the player in a way similar to the Time Crystal in Engage as just a doodad someone gives you. - Lumera's 15 minute long death yeah. lol - Jeralt's death POV: You are a parent in Fire Emblem This is essentially a trope in the entire series where your parent will just eventually die. - Battle System Engage's maps are more condensed and it feels nicer than Three Houses. You pretty much covered all the good bits of Engage's gameplay. - "What are Emblems" They seem to be akin to AI Chatbots that are aware they aren't the original person. They also seem to be an amalgamation of the person they're based off of from various points in their life. (Or route in Byleth's case.) You can see examples of this being the case - "I wonder how Ike and Micaiah would have bonded" They're both in Radiant Dawn, which is a sequel to Path of Radiance. So you don't really need to wonder that much. - "Byleth's canon route" No, there are cases of him referencing things from other routes too. Like I said before, they feel like amalgamations, or more like the general *idea* of that person. - All games take place in the same universe Nope. Some games share the same universe, which you can see be the case in FE Awakening where you travel to the continent of Valm (FE Gaiden/Shadows of Valentia) and with Ike's descendant appearing in that game as well, though that one feels sort of iffy almost like it was just shoved in there with no reasoning. Excluding those, most of the games take place in their own universe or realm. - The social aspect This is unique to Three Houses. - The Hub Many veterans of the series do not like the hub areas. They are fine on a first playthrough but become very tiring on subsequent playthroughs, which they addressed in Engage by making the somniel smaller in scale. After playing the game for the nth time, you'll grow to hate it. Only FE Fates, Three Houses/Hopes, and Engage have a hub area. Fate's hub area can actually be attacked and acted as the PVP map for online play and you could customize the layout to your liking. It was also significantly smaller. Like, you would pretty much enter it for 1 minute and move on. You bring up how the monastery is better than the somiel as a hub area because it makes sense for them to go back there after every map, but not really. Even if it is in the center of the world map, it still takes significant time to travel back and forth. Three Hopes did this better by just having the hub area being a camp that your army picks up and moves with them. - Why are they dicking around Because Engage's story is just lighter in tone. That's pretty much it. The Somniel is a place for the player to dick around. - The calendar I don't mind it. It's not a plus or a negative to the game. This only appears in Three Houses. - "No clock or calendar, great that means I can 100% the supports!" You didn't *have* to do that. The boredom was all on you man. Not to mention the supports aren't very good in Engage. The calendar would not fix Engage's supports. The supports were gutted by the localization team as well. - "I couldn't S support Bernadetta as a female Byleth" This is normal. Engage is the only game to allow S supports regardless of gender. Every other game with S support mechanics only has one or two characters that will S support you regardless. - "Her S rank support was arbitrarily cut off without any warning or ability to know this was going to happen" I haven't played Three Houses in a while, but I'm pretty sure you can see [A B C S] in the support screen, so I'm not sure how much more clearer that could have been. - "You should do the DLC as soon as possible" You should absolutely not do this in Engage. You will cause skirmishes to scale up to their recruitment level and make your playthrough incredibly difficult should you engage in them. - "I don't care for the corrupted" Yeah no one really does. This enemy archetype exists to provide the player a faceless enemy to defeat. - Conclusion You should play the Tellius games. Start with Path of Radiance.
I appreciate such an in-depth comment but I can't respond to everything, so I'll just focus on a few. "Other people say Three Houses Fans aren't Fire Emblem Fans" That's very funny to me. I like to imagine people who talk like that saying 'You think my favourite game series is GOOD? How dare you "Byleth in Three Hopes" Yes, but in Three Hopes, Byleth wasn't the player-character, so them talking made sense. The rest may well just be a preference thing. "Amalgamation Emblems" This makes sense from a design perspective but from a narrative one that is hauntingly existential. And you could do something interesting with that. "didn't have to 100% supports" To be fair I didn't have to play the game at all - I don't feel like that's much of a reason for the Supports to get away with being bad and the process to be as agonizing as it is. "All games take place in the same universe" Well, Engage has changed the rules so, technically they all can, or can exist separately depending on whatever you want. "S-Ranks being cut off based on sex is normal" Normal does not equate to Good. Also you only got that Support Screen after you started a new playthrough. You'd have to restart the game to do that in that case, and you shouldn't have to do that anyway. "Ike and Micaiah" I have learned this, and it is both hilarious and frustrating to me that the two examples I picked at random did actually interact with one another.
@@QosmicVoidwith Ike and Micky I'm pretty sure during her side chapter, which is based off Fire Emblem Radiant Dawn chapter 3-13, at that was the location where she fought Ike. Note in their game they don't really like each other because Micky invades Ikes friend's country and Micky doesn't like Ike because her grooming project idolized him.
I hate this idea that Three Houses fans and series vets are mutually exclusive. The demographics between GBA or Tellius and Three Houses are pretty different but you'll find a huge amount of its fans are Jugdral vets, and you can't tell me that doesn't make a lot of sense, just look at all the name homages. To me acting like 3H fans don't have heavy overlap with the greater series fandom just feels like either taking a couple annoying people's tweets as a broad picture of the fandom, or just plain misplaced elitism. Idk all I'm saying is that fe7 boomers love to say things that deviate are "Not real fire emblem" but they get that mindset from growing up thinking fe7 was the first. Prior to Kaga leaving, every fe game was super different, hell I'd say Three Houses really carries the torch of Kaga, so yeah loads of us Series vets love Three Houses, forgive the rant.
This is great! I've never really been super into the fire emblem series, but this video reminded me that it's important to have themes coincide with a story to make it fun and engaging 💜💛
7:54 You actually said it correctly the first time, there were apparently cut voice lines that say Alear’s name out loud. 9:58 Correction: Byleth has only had the dream about the opening battle multiple times, them meeting Sothis was actually the first occurrence.
1. You'll pry pirate "Ale-Arrr" from my cold dead hands 2. If you select the option that says that Byleth saw a young girl, Jeralt will confirm that Byleth has mentioned her before. Unless this is a translation quirk, I can't think of any other explanation than Byleth mentioning Sothis previously. I guess it could be referring to Seiros/Rhea, but that seems a strange way of going about that.
@@QosmicVoid 1:04:45 Misunderstanding there my friend, Engage and Three Houses were not only developed by two different companies, but also developed at the same time (They’ve claimed this, but I still hold my reservations on the fact that Covid was somehow responsible for delaying Engage). So it wasn’t a decision to undo what the previous game did, it was a deliberate decision to just not do it in the first place. 1:06:33 I’ve seen a few other comments tell you that the Game showed you how far your Supports can go, so I won’t repeat that here. What I will say, is that I view the inability to not be able to romance whatever character you want, regardless of Gender, to be better in terms of the characters. I don’t care if it’s 2024, or if it’s fiction, not everyone is Bisexual or Gay/Lesbian, the characters more than likely still have preferences of their own. I’m honestly surprised that Engage went one step further and have only a few of the S Supports for Alear be romantic.
@@QosmicVoid 1:27:55 I’m actually of the mind that Fell Xenologue was as bad as Engage’s Main Story. I treated Cindered Shadows as a non-canon Movie for an Anime, with a Story that even if it wasn’t that interesting, still gave SOME new insight to Fódlan as a whole, and thus I was able to enjoy it. Fell Xenologue on the other hand just felt lazy no matter how I looked at it “Ooh, the Good guys are Bad and the Bad guys are Good”, the explanation that everyone had been turned into Corrupted left me asking questions, rather than me being shocked. And the Final twist of Nil being Rafael, while good and interesting, was immediately ruined by Nel committing Persona 3, and Rafal having a FALSE Redemption Arc. By the end of the Xenologue, I cared about NONE of the characters enough for me to not create a save over the File with the completed DLC, and pretend it never happened. Finally, at the very least, you only have to beat Cindered Shadows ONCE to unlock the Ashen Wolves in the Main Story. You have to beat Fell Xenologue EVERY SINGLE TIME, to unlock the New Characters for a Single playthrough.
1:16:10 in the defense of Three houses, in Fire Emblem as a series most characters tend to have romantic endings with people of the opposite sex, with very few exceptions, and about the same amount of vaguely *implied* romantic relations between people of the same sex. Essentially in the previous 2 FE games where you could choose your main character's sex, you were also choosing what sex your spouse would be, opposite to your own (unless you marry the one granted bi-sexual for each sex in Fates). Three Houses was quite progressive in this, with several female characters being bi-sexual, and 1 bi-sexual man (3 if you include post-release updates and DLC). Bernedetta, and a few other characters, only swing one way, which can be "hypocritical" in some cases where characters who do not want to marry Byleth will still have paired romantic implied endings with members of the same sex anyway. You're not their type I guess.
I don't say this to mean that gay people aren't real or anything homophobic, just that choosing a character at the beginning of the game, it's assumed that most other characters are straight, however in Byleth's support screen you can see everyone who can potentially be S supported from the start as well for exceptions.
In all fairness the non-gay options who have gay endings very much are a “they were very good friends” type of writing to it. Granted three hopes fueled the gay shipping for 3H so fucking hard
I started going for English dub instead of sub when I forgot to change it to Sub for 3H, but then I realized Jeralt was the same voice actor as Jirayia in Naruto so I didn't change it🥲
Pokémon is an incredible litmus test for this formula as Pokémon’s story could be dog water but if the game is fun people will stan in. It took black and white YEARS to be appreciated for the story it was as a standout narrative in the franchise that they haven’t come close to trying since
I feel like Black and White was always appreciated by the people who played it and just hated by those who didn't. I have yet to meet a person who has actually played any gen 5 game and thought it was bad (unless they don't like any Pokémon games anyway).
@@Lysvsyl Yeah, I loved B/W from the start and I fully remember fighting many people on it online xD Nowadays everyone agrees that we were right all along and Gen 5 goes hard af
I actually prefer Alear's character over Byleths silent protag ***in concept***. Seeing the characters have their own dreams, fears, problems and how they solve it is fun for me to watch, where i find silent protags a lost potential, and why i prefer 3 hopes Byleth as he has a more distinct personality The only issue is engage's story overall sucks, alear falls into one of the many characters whose personality i do not care for much.
I cannot add much more to the conversation than all the other commenters have already written, but there are two things I want to say: 1. Who the characters end up marrying if they have multiple A supports isn't random. You need a set number of support points to reach the next support level. Even once you've reached A, the game will still continue to count. The characters end up with the person they have the highest support, aka the highest number of support points, with. I always managed to get exactly the pairings I wanted, even without bothering to count. 2. Since you seem to enjoy the social sim aspects and the calendar system of Three Houses, I think you might enjoy the Persona series (the modern games: 3, 4 and 5).
45:00 "There's so much to do but there's no reason to actually fo it. " Yea, this is how I felt about this game. The somniel kinda reminded me of when Awakening had the babies from the future, and then Fates brought that same mechanic back. But it felt off, because it wasn't relevant to its context like in Awakening. Idk, Engage is just kinda meh for me
3h is a good excution of the principles of modern gaming, it's story while flawed is very servicable an compelling, everyone has their favorite and the gameplay is also good enough to support , the mian problem with is overambition (golden deer is irrelevent in over half the routes) but the fact people look that deep and care shows how intruging the lore/story was, it feels like a world . Engage is fates of the gen, good gameplay but an complete failure of world immersion to captivate the player.
One reason why I enjoy Three Houses more simplistic battle system more than Engages is because I have more of a connection to the characters. I feel more on the battle field. Engage may be more interesting in its battle mechanics but with the context of the rest of the games, Three Houses wins in that aspect for me at least too.
You are not callous for thinking, that Queen Lumera's death scene is awkward. With the scene being just a few minutes into the game, at that point I was thinking "Oh God, how bad is this game going to be"? It is almost like the game is patting itself on the back for having a "tragic" moment, not even realizing, that it is completely unearned. This scene would be as if you were watching Star Wars and instead of only the viewer not having a connection to Luke's family on Tatooine, uncle Owen and Aunt Beru are also strangers to Luke, but the acting is the same as in the movie. While the gameplay is good in Engage, the story just wanted to make me skip it at every point and no FE game going all the way back to the originals had ever made me want to do that.
Btw if you're curious about the pronunciation of Alear, there's audio of pretty much every playable character saying there name on the cutting room floor.
My main gripes with the game were the story, the characters (and supports)/character designs, some tiny gameplay things, and a ton of other nitpicks. The main issue with the story to me personally wasn't that it was weird or very basic/tropey, it was how insanely predictable it was to me. Predictable does not necessarily mean it's bad, but with Engage to me I was jokingly guessing major story moments, only for those to actually be true, listing but not limited to Lumera's death (to be expected), Veyle being the killer of Lumera, Alear being the child of Sombron, etc. There is a lot more I do not like, but that is just some of it. My biggest issue then lies with the characters/designs/supports. Some of the more out there designs like Alear, and Panette who's my favorite Engage character, are perfectly fine, and I look at characters like Hortensia. As for the characters themselves, and also namely the supports, they severely disappointed me. Some of them were good like the ones you mentioned with Yunaka, but the rest of them to me either felt insanely mundane or annoying, more specifically a bunch of the ones with AlearI get that Alear is their god and all, but every C-support starting in more or less a similar way, even with certain characters being hyper obsessive over them (ie Clanne and Framme who are the worst offenders) makes the whole thing a lot worse. Lastly regarding supports/characters was the whole S-Support/Ring Support thing I felt was handled poorly in some ways. It was nice that Alear could support anyone and everyone whether it be platonic or romantic. My main issue with how they were done was that it was ONLY for Alear and that we couldn't play machmaker and pair people with each other. Also not to mention the whole way of getting supports was annoying and tedious, only for them to not even do much. I say all this coming from a person who has 3H as their favorite video game of all time, while Engage is their least favorite game of all time. And it may seem that I only hate Engage because it isn't 3H when that could not be any further form the truth. Yes I do wish some things in Engage were more like 3H, but that is not the entire reason. This is also coming from someone who before Engage had only played Awakening, Fates, and 3H, but after playing Engage decided to go back and play most all of the other FE games. I do now have a wider variety of knowledge of the FE series, and would be willing to go back and give Engage a 2nd chance, but honestly idk if I want to. Engage to me is a very messy game as a whole, and I understand why so many people like it and even prefer it to 3H, but I just can't myself.
Three Houses characters and Supports: Traumatized people who work through their trauma, and how they exist in the world Engage's characters and supports: We are vtuber moe-blobs, doing moe-blob things.
this isnt really accurate, though. a lot of engage supports are pretty good, it just so happens that the first few characters you get (and hence the first supports you unlock) are super trope-y. seadall, ivy, diamant, citrinne, alcryst, panette, goldmary, yunaka - that's just a handful of engage characters with great supports. unfortunately a good chunk of other characters have middling supports, but i found even the weaker supports to be fun and charming. alear is the one that surprised me the most. his supports with the twins leave a bad first impression but they genuinely have some really great supports, too. if we're being fair, bernadetta's supports are pretty garbage. they all start the same and end the same. same with byleth's. i wint deny that 3H has some of the best character writing in the series but we shouldn't act like engage is far worse
For me, Fire Emblem 3 Houses did something I didn't think possible. Make me actually like the majority of the characters outside of Support and ingame usability, with 3 different path and allowing me to not only see all characters in each house get involved in the story alot, but also letting us recruit them between houses was wonderful too. This was one of the biggest selling point for me, along with the update to the Gameplay with more freedom in Class option and advancement and so forth. The fact that all the characters are involved/have a moment in the Main Story of the game was already a huge plus, but not only that, the fact we have the "Option" to recruit more if we needed to was a huge plus, whether to fill in the roster, certain roles or, to "save" the characters within the story, it made recruiting the extra students from the different houses way more meaningful. After playing all 3 story-lines, I come to love almost all the characters in 3 Houses alot. In comparison, I wouldn't say Engage was "Bad", personally I enjoyed it since it felt similar to Awakening for me the gameplay aspect here and there (I love the Break System alot). The thing that was jarring for me, was after 3 Houses, having so many Units that automatically get added into my roster almost every chapter, and other than the main characters (Your avatar + the Princes/princesses of the other nations), none of the other characters EVER got involved in the story other than the chapter they get recruited. This I did not like at all, and while some of the supports were "okay", it was too disjointed from the story that to me it felt more of a "After thought" than anything. As mentioned Awakening to me had very similar problems too, but it was a first of it's kind on the 3DS and the gameplay was a upgrade from before and, the inclusion of the Child Unit made "most" of the characters, even if they were left out in the main-story, a BIT more meaningful still. Story to me is important in any game that has alot of characters and a driving direction overall as much as the gameplay.
Y'know it's weird, three houses and engage have opposite problems when it comes to just the gameplay. Three houses map design and long months cause it to be a chore to play in map, but the monastery segments are probably close to the best they could be. Meanwhile the somniel kinda feels like a chore and the maps are more than "grid with a couple bridges and occasionally a monster or 7"
This an interesting take on things. Having the unique perspective of only playing the 2 latest games. When it comes to Nobles, every FE game is about Nobles, the protag is always higher ranking/a noble in some way (very few exceptions). 3 houses happens to be the deviation from almost everything fire emblem had done before, hence why it has become my favorite FE. Engage was a return to form, but as you saw, the original formula wasn't always the best. I really hope for a 3houses style game again, but one in a different location or time.
@@kirbyslayer20 SS and VW only exist to add the lore, AM is the best actual story, because there is one. Dimitri is basically the only character with a canon arc.
I’ve been a Nintendo fan since childhood, although not specifically a Fire Emblem fan, and I’ve stayed mostly up to date on the company’s news and announcements since 2017. Despite this, I either missed or forgot about Engage’s announcement. When I did become aware of it, it was already after release and I first thought it was a mobile spin off or something.
I think the characters themselves have broken the argument between the two games. At least when the argument was between Fates and 3H, Fates didn't just have gameplay to carry it. It had amazing sprites, one of the best OST's for any game period, and great character design, for the most part. For every memorable character Engage has, Fates has 4 more.
Saying that Fates did not have the gameplay to carry it is weird, as mostly everyone agrees that before this game, Fates (Conquest) was the best FE game in terms of gameplay
I think what helps fates a lot is that despite the cast also being tropes it was nowhere near as bad as engage. What also helped is that when you get introduced to the cast majority of them had a chance to show off their personalities within the available time they have. Something that also helped was the fates retainer majority of them were spread out enough that they didn’t get overshadowed by the royals and those who were paired up with the royal (Selena beruka Effie Arthur) were useful in their join chapter so you at least didn’t let the royal do all the work. Engages royals majority of them didn’t have a chance to show off their personality many of them just simp for alear with a few exceptions (Chloe and Louis despite their trope had a nice cutscene of them in battle and rosemary rosado were a lot more relevant in the main story so you got a small idea on how their personalities are like) meanwhile others like kagetsu and zekalov you wouldn’t know anything about them from their join chapter.
Not all fire emblems happen on the same world as far as we know, there are several games that do take place on the same place, like Archeanea and Zofia/Rigel, as well as another game.
Well here’s something that incidentally happens when most of your opponents are zombies, undermining the tragedy of war. They’re not having the conflict weigh on them, so they are just hanging out. The reanimated just know how to wield weapons, likely not prepare any kind of timely action against the good guys. I do generally dislike mindless entities in games, mostly because even early game boss units tend to feel like a person in the world of the game, unless the effect is deliberate and powerful such as a scene with Orson in FE8.
@pandabanaan9208 honestly I think I prefer the older monsters/terrors simply cause they looked unique from the humans and had some sick designs (even if a number were basically just reskinned regular enemies) Awakening, Fates, and Engage all having undead mooks that look and fight identical to regular living soldiers definitely makes things a bit blander imo Did definitely make zombie versions of characters you DID know alot sadder, like at Blazing Blade's final chapter
My Fire Emblem journey also started with Pokemon frustration lol. Around that time, Game Freak (SWSH), Blizzard (WoW BfA), and Bethesda (76) had all let me down. Felt like nothing new or good was coming from the franchises I loved all my life. Then my yt recommended me Alpharad's vid of him playing the first few chapters of Three Houses, and it made me curious to check it out. I had never played a true JRPG in my life by that point, 3H was my first, and about around the 80 hour mark, I started to think it might be my fave game of all time. So glad I took a chance on a style of game I thought I had no interest in, gave me my favorite game and got me to try other games that would jump right up my favorites list.
I only got into FE because of 3H. The part I loved the most was how close the character felt. Though the characters were still collections of tropes, they still expressed themselves and felt like real people. Despite how I like the mechanics of engage more, it falls flat before FE3H when we consider the whole package.
16:50 Yeah, the design is great.....if you wanna be compared to Colgate toothpaste colors. 23:15 I dunno I feel like Byleth would've been fine with full voice acting since they made it work in Three Hopes.....then again I suppose since that was made by a different company their standards are higher. 31:30 the funniest thing about this cutscene is the fact that Jeralt always wears a shield on his back whenever you see him in gameplay but the ONE time he needs it is when he dies, the irony. 35:40 Honestly having Claude's ending being the canon route is rather fitting. Though Dimitri's might be good as well since you take out Those Who Slither In the Dark without knowing from previous playthroughs. 52:00 What would've been cool is if you DO end your month early you get to save Monica from dying and being replaced with the assassin (I forgot her name). Now granted the only thing that would change of that would be Jeralt living. 57:30 I knew straight away with Clanne and Framme that this game was one big avatar jerk off. 1:08:40 It's sad when the one character with actual detail is the best one, Yunaka standards should've been the norm. 1:42:45 I agree if it had at least a great story, so much of this game wouldn't feel as bad compared to FETH. 1:44:13 That's the reason why people still argue about whether or not Edelgard was right in doing the war to begin with, maybe it's due to her shortened life span so she needed to act quickly even if there was a lot of death and her being called a tyrant by most of Fodlan. Engage was good but the story made it feel boring, hell the Fell Xenologue was my favorite with how grim the story is, though the ending part was kinda dumb with Nel doing something stupid to get through Rafal's ego.
I do think 3h story has issues, but the shield thing in jeralt's death is not one of them. And even if he had the shield on his back, kronya could have just stabbed him on the side of the torsto to the kidney or something. It is not a razorback scenario from tf2 lol
While I agree with engages avatar worship being egregious, people strangely seem to forget that 3h does the exact same thing. Byleth is constantly told that they're so wonderful and kind and strong and can save the world, and they're so strong that they could defeat entire armies by themselves. But I will grant this, for some reason, despite the avatar worship being pretty samey, it's somehow a bit less grating. But apples and oranges to me, I love both games and will happily replay both
@@Rui_Vuusen It's due to that unlike clanne and framme who come off as fan club screamers (which is annoying), everyone else compliments Byleth as a resourceful due to them growing up as a mercenary which in case mercenaries need to know survival and strategy so I can see the decent difference between the toothpaste divine dragon and the merc turned teacher.
About Jeralt living…. when I fought berserk Rhea and church members with the Brest of Seiros, I thought “holly shit I’m glad Jeralt is dead because it would have been heartbreaking for Byleth to kill their own berserking father”. So now I just want the stops of the assassination to be possible in the Silver Snow route to twist more the knife lol
I know I'm late to this party but the whole discourse around this game has been so strange to me as someone who's first experience of Fire Emblem was 3 houses. I absolutely loved 3H, the combination of an RTS and a social sim is an itch that rarely gets scratched and outside of 3H the only other one that instantly comes to mind is Valkyria Chronicles (if anyone has any recommendations I'm all ears). To me it just makes every tactical decision that much more tense when the people you're ordering into combat are your friends you were sitting having lunch with an hour ago rather than just faceless damage sponges. Naturally Engage was a let down coming off of that, and I keep reading from long time fans that 3H is actually the outlier, and that the combat focus of Engage is a welcome return to form. I can't really judge so I suppose that's fair. Much as I loved 3H I know that I as an outsider don't really have much right to be telling long time fans what their franchise should be like. What it has done though is rather than convincing me to give Engage another chance, all it's done is convince me that Fire Emblem is not the franchise for me, which is a shame.
Hey! I really enjoyed the video. You gave a random internet user some interesting things to think about. I am someone who started Fire Emblem with 3H like you, except I started working my way backwards after I beat and fell in love with it. I played most of the GBA and 3DS games, and while I appreciated aspects of some of them, few felt like 3H. The only one that came close for me was Fire Emblem Echoes: Shadows of Valentia (the one Celica is from). The story enraptured me in a way similar to my time in Fodlan. Characters had enough depth to be funny and somber in the same scene. Even the gameplay was markedly different from the other entries, and a lot of these differences (such as the lack of a rock-paper-scissors weapon triangle or the Combat Art system) were shared with 3H. The game came out directly before 3H, and that fact gave me a lot of hope for the future of the series. I wanted my playthrough of Engage to be as impactful as my first 3H run. In that playthrough I joined Black Eagles and sympathized with Edelgard. I let too many students die in the academy phase (sorry, Caspar). I was entertained by Bernadetta's antics only to be genuinely touched at how her story paralleled struggles in my own life. I accidentally missed Edelgard's coronation and was forced on the Silver Snow route. I cried when I killed Edelgard. I continued to let people die until I was left with literally nobody but Byleth and Bernadetta who had to win the final boss by themselves, only barely doing so with the help of (unbeknownst to me at the time) hacked weapons that I had purchased from the online feature. I attempted this fight 27 times and ended up marrying Bernadetta after the war. I still remember an excruciating level of detail about this run, because I felt engaged (get it?) in the world presented as both a player and a human being. I could talk even more about that and the four other playthroughs like it, but I think you get what I mean. Despite existing in a world that started and ended within the borders of one entry (Three Hopes doesn't count, this was the case before it existed), the world felt like it operated on it's own rather than around Byleth. 3H was in development during the time that Persona 5 was stealing the industry's heart, and so I suspect that many of the unique elements present such as the calendar system or allowance of more than just three support ranks (which I feel is desperately needed to tell more interesting stories) were inspired by it. If you enjoyed 3H, I would earnestly recommend trying Persona. It does a lot of what you praised 3H for very well, and the games are very much "you can only play them for the first time once" memorable. Regardless, there is a good reason that 3H still dominates community discourse, even in the presence of the following title. So what was my first playthrough of Engage like? ...that isn't rhetorical, I'm actually asking. Aside from the broad story beats, nothing stood out to me about the experience. The game ceased to occupy my mind the instant I closed it. Branching paths aside, there were really no questions or concepts of the world that interested me in any real sense. Gone were the I want to preface this with the statement that my ramblings here are based primarily on the narratives of these games, rather than gameplay. Engage is much more interesting when discussing combat itself to me. However, story and characters are a major part of why people play RPGs. It's certainly what attracted me to the genre after playing the first two Xenoblade games in middle school. There are aspects of Engage's writing that I like. I also was blown away by Yunaka's depth and charm. I was interested by Alcryst at first, assuming there was more beneath the over-the-top schtick that he does, only to discover that he kind of just boiled down to being Bernadetta without the nuance that makes characters feel human. I could still be entertained by Alcryst (and honestly, most of the rest of the cast), but not much stuck with me. Ultimately, I can accept that Three Houses is lightning in a bottle and focus on series that do have these traits that I value, but Three Houses also made me see the potential that this series has to resonate with it's audience. I hope that Intelligent Systems is able to take the meteoric success of Three Houses and the irrelevance of Engage and let this series be something truly special in the future. If not, I'll always have a phenomenal game in my library.
Fire Emblem games have a bad habit of bringing new and beloved mechanics forward from previous games without really understanding what made those mechanics work in context.
Probably the most egregious example of this was the "offspring" mechanic - in Awakening, when two characters got strong enough support levels, sometimes their children from a post apocalyptic future version of the world came back in time to try and prevent that apocalypse - while this sounds a little silly on the surface, it was well integrated into the story and made your choices for who you built supports between feel like it carried a lot more weight. The next game in the franchise, Fates, decided to have a similar system, but instead of integrating the existence of these children into the overarching storyline, they were children that were essentially born during the events of the story and then raised in the "hyperbolic time chamber" pocket dimension that is your hub world; they're all suffering some deep-seated abandonment issues because your party members were spending months or years away from them in the real world for every battle they engaged in in the story. It just felt completely unnecessary and detached from the story and only there because it had been in the previous game.
Engage I feel suffers a lot of the same issues, where the various hub activities and relationship building mechanics that made sense in the context of the Three Houses story just end up feeling tacked on when removed from the framework of Three Houses.
In defense of Fates, not only was the central theme of Fates about family, it also mechanically supported unit customization arguably even better than Awakening, so not having child units would be a missed opportunity.
The way Awakening integrated child units was just about as 'silly' as Fates. Lucina was able to travel back to time from an apocalyptic future, and Azura once lived in but escaped from a special separate dimension, so it makes sense how children could be incorporated into each respective universe's lore.
If anything, Awakening's use of time travel was more bullshit because, time travel, or timeline travel, is a helluva lot more convoluted than just having separate dimensions. Combine that with the presence of Fate's themes of family, and it makes much more sense for Fates to have child units, as opposed to Awakening.
Also because Fates doesn't have time travel, all the child characters were conceived by your units _at their current age._ At least with Awakening you can pretend that for example, Ricken didn't have contact with his wife until he was a grown man. That's not the case with Fates so the woman you pair with Hayato will be a pedophile. And so will be the man you pair with Elise and Sakura. (And honestly most of the cast...)
@@guy-sl3kr That's only assuming you purposely paired the younger characters with the oldest ones. Hayato with Elise or Sakura doesn't carry that negative connotation. That "just pretend" argument can go both ways, since age is never specified anyone could "just pretend" Hayato is 18 and so is his partner, just like how you could "just pretend" with Ricken.
@@gameplayerone3917 The fact that adults can conceive with children at all speaks for itself. And I don't think kids having kids with other kids is that much better. Sure you can headcanon everyone as being an adult if you want to stretch the limits of your imagination (and ignore your eyes and ears) but the child mechanic just does not work in Fates like it does in Awakening. It's as poorly thought out as the entire rest of its plot.
Nah Awakening did it better, Fates felt shoe horned in.@@gameplayerone3917
They could've forgone child units in order to make the story and characters already present better, especially Corrin.
Fun Fact: During lumeras first death scene my switch actually started going into sleep mode with the screen going dark that's how long that cutscene goes on it actually made me laugh a little at that death scene.
That happened to me like three times - Then, Alears first 'death' then Alears second 'death'.
I feel like the console itself is trying to say something to me
@@QosmicVoid It's another benefit of Three Houses giving Byleth dialogue options; it forces you to press a button on your controller every so often
This exact thing happened to me too and had a hysterical laugh when it went started going into sleep mode
Just a little?
So idk if those were the same writers that wrote dialogues and scenarios for Three Houses, but I would like to ask them if they know the principle of “show, don’t tell” and “pacing”
What the hell do I care if a random ass person dies 10 minutes in the actual game, that I have seen once. Should I care because they tell me it’s protagonist’s mother? I don’t. Not just bc someone tells me to without giving me any time to even get to know the character or see the relationship.
Same goes for literally any “impactful” scene. They were mostly way too late in the game or had weird pacing. Why should I care about some random villain’s sob story in chapter 20? When they have done nothing but annoy me before.
Why drop Sombron’s “tragic” backstory right before the final map? Made me laugh, rather than care, honestly, because it was ridiculous.
16:30 ih, you're definitely in the minority here as far as the fanbase is concerned. When the designs were first revealed, people DID NOT like the contrast between the red and blue hair, found the colors too bright and often made mocking comparisons to both Pepsi and Colgate. Someone even posted the design with darker shades of blue and red, which was generally better received. Right now, I wouldn't say people warmed up to the design, but rather their eyes adjusted to it
i'd say this - for how stupid the story is, mc looking like colgate clown is rather fitting
You can really see it when they engage with an emblem and your eyes get a break for some nice pastels
"This plot is like the most teenager fantasy" he said...dude, the main character is literally an OC.
@@ML7WL I don't know how to tell you this but almost every character is an original character
To me designs are ok! Just they dont go so well in my opinion with the 3d lolol
I would argue the character creation in Baldur's Gate actually *is* incorporated into the story: an illithid puts a tadpole into your brain, then the tadpole demands “Who Are You” and *that's* when you start creating your character; the tadpole is searching your psyche to figure out who exactly you are, and you're revealing it to them via character creation. It's very didactic.
Mass Effect 1 also does this well, if I understand it correctly.
Somebody, presumably either Anderson or Commander Shepard herself, is attempting to access Shepard's file. The data is incomplete, though, and certain key points have to be manually reconstructed, namely pre-service history, capabilities, and reputation.
And also New Vegas, but c'mon. You could write an essay about character creation in New Vegas. No, this isn't hypothetical, you, reading this, could write an essay about the intricacies of getting shot in the head.
I honestly wish we could get a straight up rip-off as close as possible to baldurs gate but fire emblem. big, glorious open world, with the turn based combat, recruiting units along the way, traveling and talking with them in the open world
@@iamjonreed Sooooooo Total War with a visual novel?
This was common in DnD games. Whether it was writing a prophecy about your characters or the enemy scrying your party, they came up with a bunch of ways.
@@toe_sucker_4165 The character background for Tyranny and Mass Effect 2's without using your Mass Effect 1 save file are also really good.
There’s a lot of people who say only gameplay matters and Engage is the game that put that theory to the test.
I should have used that line to sign off the video, that would have been perfect
Yep, and Engage is far better then three houses.
I do not agree with the "x aspect of a fe game does not matter". It often creates circle jerk discussions that go nowhere.
Instead, it is best to state the pros and cons of a game and let the individuals decide what they gravitate towards.
3h has good-ish story (as in, in a single playthrough it is great, but playing it all creates some issues and discrepencies on the whole. Like the TWSITD being a big player in all stories and in azure moon, but in the latter, they are unceremoniously dealt with almost as an accident), amazing characters, garbage gameplay and replayability.
Engage has garbage story riddled with plotholes, mid cast of characters (they can be fun, Amber's and Zelkov's are a favorite of mine, but they also needed more levity to balance it out) but outstanding gameplay and mechanics, and good replayability.
I really love 3h characters. And I believe white clouds' maps range from decent, to genuinely great. But the game falls down the shitter in paralogues and post-timeskip. Making it unbearable to me.
@@Ai-jr4ou Yikes
@@heisdarkness7141 I mean... I have to agree with him Engage is a fun game to play while three houses is a fun read
Engage finished development midway through 2021 according to various game classification boards, so even if the developers had been interested in adding 3 Hopes' Shez as an emblem, the timeline shows that simply would not have been possible.
Also, the most canon Byleth's Emblem has in Engage is that they're from White Clouds/Part 1. He's not meant to represent any route in particular, which is why his special interaction with Nemesis in Ch 26 of Engage alludes that while Byleth knows who Nemesis IS, he also has not met him beforehand. This special treatment Byleth gets is due to the devs deciding that Three Houses' canon route is... up to each player to decide (which incidentally played a role in much of the discourse involving its plot and characters).
Tbh, I always felt like it would have been more interesting if all 4 routes in 3 Houses were canon, Byleth resetting time each time to find the best outcome up until CF, which is the secret unlockable route where Byleth loses the power of Sothis, indicating that they don't need it any more. Its what I like to imagine. Especially since some endings seem to be made consciously worse than others (like Hapis endings in the og JP text stating that Those Who slither in the Dark attempt a great atrocity in which they succeed in Azure Moon exclusively).
but ! crimson flower is edelgard related and shes not a sexy man so..... is it rly the most interesting.
Problem with this is that Byleth does have knowledge of certain events post-White Clouds.
It seems like his general 'canon' for him in Engage follows CF the most closely due to appearance but that they do pull from the other routes as if he has (as a result of being an Emblem) become aware of different timelines and paths he could've taken.
Also let's be real, everyone knows of Nemesis in Fódlan by yhe time of 3H and I wouldn't even say he's the main antagonist of that game. I think the reason he was picked as the Dark Emblem for 3H is because he's the only other wielder of the SotC and compared to Rhea and Edelgard (in any route that isn't CF) he's the only outright evil major enemy you fight.
@@docphil9602 I'm 30, even if I was into men which I'm not Edelgard has Hubert, Ferdinand and Jeritza on her team, so she is objectively right. Black Eagles men are just too refined for normies.
Probably the biggest issue i have with Engage is the cast, especially on.
The first 6 units you get in the game, 2/3 of the cast until Brodia, are the Stewards who's main personality trait is worshipping Alear, and Alfred's group who's main character traits are getting stronger. So when you first unlock supports, your chance to explore how deep these characters are, it feels like you're watching the same two conversations for an hour.
The characters in Engage are atrocious. Absolutely atrocious. I thought a lot of the characters in Fates were derivative but, my god, Engage makes me appreciate Fates characters so much more.
There are literally compilations like "Every Celine support but when she mentions tea it skips to the next one" and it's only 3 minutes long. I think her support with Alcryst is the literal only one that doesn't get skipped at all.
Then we also have characters like Ivy, who are supposed to be enemies, but even before they join, they already switched to actively worshiping Alear just like the rest.
The Divine Dragon spoke to me!
It also doesn't help that the majority of your starting units are garbage stat wise. Until you hit Brodia, and especially Elusia, the only unit worth using until the end is Chloe and maybe Louis depending on who you talk to. Hell, some people dislike Amber's personality, but he has the second strongest strength stat in the game, so for many. A lot of these characters are a "pick your poison" kind of scenario.
What I find oddly fascinating about the supports though is that Diamant, for some strange reason, is the only unit that comes out of the "stereotype/mentions character quirk" thing unscaved. Every support from him is filled with loads of depth and personality. He is also the only character is the game that gives a quick lore dump about how Brodia was protected by Lumera a thousand years ago. Something I believe none of the other royals ever do. The most we get is some family history drama related to Ivy and Hortensia, but we have been there done that and I found what Diamant was saying more interesting. I just wished the game expanded on the lore a lot more because outside of this one support of with Diamant, the game really needed it...badly...
Oh god the twins were not a good introduction characters. They were annoying with how fanboy/fan girl they were. They would’ve worked later on but they were the first ones you are introduced to.
Yunaka's voice actress IS that good. Laura Post is extremely talented.
Yunaka sucks
@@elise6894 Does she though? I loved her
@@mr.shtinko983 she does she’s annoying as hell
@@elise6894byeya papaya :(
Honestly I find her performance to always be lackluster, she never puts enough emotion in her voice and for her higher pitched roles she always sounds unnatural, more so than most. ReZero 2x4 is a great example. She sounds like a VA putting on a voice then reading a script, not like a character.
Byleth's lack of emotions is also linked to Sothis.
Because in the opening dream Sothis is beginning to awake. Yes, Byleth had the dream before, but now it seems like it's different.
Even in the Supports we see that later supports show Byleth being a bit more "human," smiling making jokes etc.
Yeah, also the lack of emotions seems reasonable because they are the child of a mercenary who is raised by mercenaries and that social environment. We see Byleth exploring themself throughout their story.
Alears story is basically getting awake and being told who they are without questioning those statements others do about them.
Not only that, but Engage is created for the Anniversary of the Series.
Most People don't know half the Emblems from which Marth gets an overwhelming amount of exposure to the Audience, while the Rest have so e introduction and a few Scenes, but that's it
@@Turmfalke94 except for the fact Ike also has the whole Raised by and aroundmercs and he isn't emotionless also the in universe explanation was done solely so they didn't have to actually try with Byleth so much of 3h is build around him/her and yet it fails to utilize it fully
@@larsbohmer6319 I'd argue feh and anyone who isn't Mega casual knows most of them like
- Marth (obviously
- Celica and Alm (From their own Recent Game]
- Sigurd, Seliph and Leif (From Feh and second hand knowledge from other players)
- Roy (From Smash)
- Lyn (Second Hand Knowledge from older fans, Feh, Known Waifu)
- Ike (From Smash but also Feh and Second hand knowledge)
- Lucina, Chrom Robin (Smash, Fe 13 and feh)
- Corrin (Fates and Feh)
@@RocketSlime Sure, but they were poorly presented as Emblems with Marth hugging most of the Screentime of all Emblems
This is actually familiar to a lot of talks people had from the shift from Awakening to Fates. Similar Fates took the aspects people liked from Awakening and dialed them up to a 100 regardless if it made sense, aka Child units, supports, and tropes. Although when comparing Fates and Engage, Engage still feels like the radical change.
Then splitting it into 3 games 2 which were pretty easy and conquest which is the 2nd hardest game I've played in the series behind only radiant dawn
Fates has good gameplay, and the occasional decent support. But the thing that made it stick out was how much customization and optimization you can do, without giving *too* much freedom (i.e. every character can be every class in the same run)
Engage has good gameplay but the gameplay itself has to do all of the heavy lifting. And I mean *all* of the heavy lifting, because the characters and story is so bland and basic.
Fates failed in the story aspect but they were at least trying, and you can kind of pick out what they were trying to do.
@@a_peridox Another thing about Fates, especially at the Conquest end of things is that I found the character design in that game to be one of the best in the series. I know, this could be a personal taste kind of thing, but what made Conquest special was that the characters designs had a dark, yet gritty theme to them that was appealing to look at and those themes stayed consistent through out the whole entire game. Engage has the opposite effect where there is clearly a style to the designs...but no consistency.
I think Kagetsu is the worst example of this as someone who REALLY likes him! He has a very distinct Japanese inspired design and is the only character in the game designed that way. So when you see that he is Ivy's retainer. It's very jarring as Ivy's country is suppose to be the "evil-ish" one that is kind of similar to Conquest with it's colors, and because we get very little of where Kagetsu hailed from and that's ONLY if you look at his supports. He feels completely out of place in Engage. Diamant, Merrin, and Chloe also feel out of place in Engage. Mostly because these are really good designs that harken back to classic fire emblem (Excluding Merrin, I just think her design and class is cool)...where the majority of the other designs in no way feels like that.
I hope this make sense. I don't think there's going to be another FE game that tops Conquest character design, at least for me anyway.
Makes me wonder if the next two games are going to follow that same pattern.
And Fates is better than Awakening the same way Engage is better as an FE game than 3H.
On my first playthrough, I just laughed about how awkward and long the first Lumera death scene was.
I accidentally skipped it partway through, bc I pushed the skip button when my Switch wanted to go to sleep mode.
Fr it's way too early, didn't feel anything after that scene
Three Houses also had the benefit that instead of the game simply telling you that you commanded an army, it *gave* you an army to command. The battalion system made you the commander of an army often exceeding 1'000 soldiers (8 students plus one teacher, each equipped with the largest battalions makes 9 x 120 = 1'080). Engage tells you that you lead an army, but all you have is an armed friend group.
I mean, pretty much every FE game talked as if you lead an army, while you have an armed friend group. Sigurd went to war with an entire nation, TWICE, with only his armed friend group.
3H has arguably done that in the worst way
@@Emiturbina Yet it did it, and the other games didn't.
@@IchHassePasswoerter No, not at all, I meant it did it the worst in the series, even worse than fucking TMS
@@Emiturbina Then, how, exactly, is *not* displaying an army a better way to show an army than literally having one?
So here's my biggest gripe with the premise of Engage - the emblems. Why not make THEM the basis of the religion in the world? Have Alaer be an emblem from the start, but one that nobody knew existed. And (s)he doesn't exist within a ring, she just manifested. Then the rings can have a religious significance, and the old heroes be worshipped. We could see how the worship affects the characters etc. The Divine/Fell Dragon plot was kinda meh to begin with because it really didn't matter one bit.
Heck, have the villains revive the antagonists from previous games. Have us fight the Black Knight, and the Death Knight and shit!
Considering the point of Engage was to be a big anthology of previous games as a celebration of how far Fire Emblem has come, actually playing into the nostalgia pandering would have been good... or, at least better than what we have.
@@lo4tr I also toyed with the idea that why woudln't they just make the Emblems the party members? Instead of having them just hang around.
@@TheAurgelmir Late response, but this is basically one of my biggest problems with Engage; why didn't we just go ALL IN on the nostalgia pandering? Have the entire STORY be about all these different legends coming together and just interacting together as they fight a larger threat; bam, its cheesy, its cartoony but damn it its fun.
@@TheAurgelmirthey did in previous games like EoV, Fates and it did not go well, they’re extremely overpowered hahaha
I think a lot of people were put off by how the protagonist of Engage looked when they were first revealed, particularly the hair. Like yeah, I understand there is a lore reason behind why they look like that. But even though Fire Emblem takes a lot of pages from anime design wise, it was never really *this* crazy. Like yeah, Hilda for example has pink hair, but that was basically as far as it went. I feel a lot of people thought the stark half and half colgate hair idea was a little too far the "silly and stupid looking" track, and thus didn't even give Engage a chance.
Honestly this was one of my major issues with this series was the character designs I’m all for extra if it fits their characters or personality but some of the design including the protagonist made me feel like they were going too far and I just felt grating on my eyes. Same issue with some of the English voice lines that kept repeating. It made me actively hate a lot of the characters and the worship made it worse. I honestly couldn’t avoid it especially for my hate of the protagonists appearance and personality. I saw them everywhere.
It's too weird and out there for a fire emblem protag, plus wayyyy too saturated. I'd tone down the saturation and make the colors layered (so like blue on the outside but red on the underside since they're secretely an ~EVIL~ dragon, idk I'd have to play around with it)
The artist that directet the character designs changes almost every FE, expect Awakening/Fates. The artist for Engage draws Vtubers primarily, so this explains a lot
@@NastyyNastya that explains why Awakening and Fates had the best character designs and Engage characters looking like they were plucked straight out of a cartoon
@@Eveevil_13
Echoes had much better character art than Awakening and Fates. I say this liking all 3 games
This is utterly fascinating as someone who is a long time fan of the fire emblem series! It’s so refreshing hearing these games, especially the modern ones, looked at from an outsider’s perspective. So much of Three Houses and Engage are building on MODERN mechanics that have built up as radical shifts in the Fire Emblem series since Awakening. Each installment since Awakening has gone to greater and greater lengths to experiment with the series, its most foundational mechanics, and its familiar story formula.
Hearing how a NEW player to the series engages with these mechanics, story beats, and their expectations because of them is eye-opening to the absolute core of this beloved franchise of games. Namely its not JUST game mechanics, its not JUST story, its not JUST character or rpg elements. I think you said it best in that you liked Three Houses because of the SUM of its parts rather than any one part by itself. Engage fails to have those parts seamlessly move together. It doesn’t make it a bad game, but it does make it feel less like a good Fire Emblem game.
Thank you for the awesome video, I’d love to see more if you ever engage more with the series!
It's quite the opposite imo, Engage is a better FE game as 3H do not capitalize on FE greatness, on the other hand 3H could be seen as an overall better game than Engage which fail in some big aspect of the game despite being far better as a tactical.
@@Haarwyvernengage is a terrible FE game imo. Everything outside of the maps is bad, and frankly the maps aren’t nearly as good as so many act. Gimmicks are nearly non-existent. I remember my first CQ run with CL Hard, I can clearly remember the hype of beating that damn Takumi water mission so clearly more than 2 years later. Engage? The only map I remember is the final one and I can only remember cus of how fucking basic the layout is. Timed levels are used once near the end of the game, almost every mission is a boss or a rout (and unlike Hubert and Death Knight, the characters you’re constantly causing to retreat are actual required enemies, no instance of Hubert and DK are necessary until the final mission with them). The game just isn’t that interesting.
@@mr.stuffdoer8483 Bro gimmick in FE games is mostly a bad thing and what makes Revelations probably the second worst FE game.
Engage maps are good because of how ennemies are disposed. Also this game use map narration better than any new era FE.
Okay it's not on Tellius Game or Kaga FE but it's still a start.
Also emblems does had a lot to how you can play those maps.
It's easily one of the top 2 best level design since RD with Conquest
They are probably the only two even trying (revelations tried but in a bad way).
Three Houses maps have no meanings, they don't tell stories, are not well thought, kinda boring and repetitive the best ones are DLC.
Awakening has the worst map design of the franchise and Echoes has map from 1992.
Even if there is map narration in it it's not that fun to play.
Birthright is maybe better than those but not even close to Engage.
So it's between what you prefer from both conquest and Engage.
I don't like stupid gimmick so I dislike multiples map of conquest. Do really like some others. Engage don't have my favorite maps there is no chapter like Radiant Dawn 2-E, Vestaria chapter 11 but has I said emblems does make them funnier to play because of how you can change the fate of them with your ideas trying weird things.
Difficulties are also more interesting than most of the recent games.
So in what it's the worst FE ?
Story ?
Three Houses has a meh story, Echoes too.
Awakening is bad and Fates is as horrible as Engage.
So yeah Engage is probably bottom two FE story-wise but in a franchise which has almost only meh to ok story.
As for the characters they aren't especially worst than Shadow Dragon, Binding Blade, Awakening or Fates too. Probably better even if I do prefer Shadow Dragons one (being in 4 to 6 different games probably help for them)
About characters it's probably pretty subjective.
I do love more Awakening, Echoes or Fates Ost if we take recent games but it's not like Engage ost is bad.
The hub then ? Three Houses is worse on this aspect except on first run.
The only thing that make Engage really bad is story and meh world building but it's not the only one and it's above average in the gameplay aspect.
I do agree that map design isn't AMAZING but what game has a clearly better one ?
tearring/Berwick/Vestaria
Thracia/Radiant Dawn
We can argue for Path of Radiance or Conquest.
That makes it better than most of FE/Kaga games.
And I said that as an GBA games lovers who knows that GBA games are definitely not flawless.
As for you remembering Fates, it's maybe because it's earlier in your FE experience making it more impactful ? Still it's only pretty subjective. I basically destroy Conquest chapter 10 in hard at first try in an easy way so everybody's saying it's one of the best map is wrong because I don't think so ?
I don't remember it well but I don't think it's a problem.
The map that I remembered the most in conquest are bad designed one so...
One funny thing about Alear's "mom" dying......is that they did the exact same thing in Fates and people disliked it there too.
So they learned nothing.
That's Intelligent Systems for ya. This is probably on their bulletin board every morning when they go to work.
Step 1: *Create game*
Step 2: *Ignore feedback*
Step 3: *Double down on themes the fan base hates and up them to 11*
That's why I have been saying if Arlo didn't get Paper Mario The Thousand Year Door trending. We would have more than likely gotten an equivalent of Sticker Star 2 instead in the next game. Unless things like petitions or extreme dislike ratio's to their trailers happen pretty consistently. They will never listen to the fans unless their beloved series is on the line. Yes, I am talking about Awakening and how IS has NEVER made a game that combined good story and gameplay since 2012.
Nami Komuro is an awful writer and I'm not sure why she keeps getting work.
Jeralt’s death worked fine, though.
It's just common for dead parents in FE, but Jeralt has to have the best parent death ever imho
@@stevenchoza6391 Cause Jeralt died MUCH later and we got to learn who he was and grew to like him.
Who the hell cared about Corrin and Alear's moms? We barely knew who they were and they died in the first few chapters.
18:30 The intro to engage is a reference to an important scene in FE Awakening involving Lucina, Lucina tells a tale of her timelines future which has an extremely similar beat and choreography to the engage intro and both are “premeditations” of events to come.
But like 99.99% of the references in engage, unless you played the older games then all of these references are go over your head and that is egregious, leaving you with a scene that isn’t trying to support its own narrative but instead piggybacking on your understanding of other, better scene that these are parodying.
Makes you truly wonder why they left this game in the direction of someone who never designed tactics games, made the gameplay and design towards younger, newer player… but then made this an anniversary game with everything about its plot and main mechanics be a “Hey remember this dingus from fire emblem and the shadow boiled potato?”
Wait, but the intro scene in Awakening actually happened in Lucina's future didn't it?
@@Jfernandez02 It did yeah, and is logically consistent with the story, so it's considerably better than this one.
what?? its supposed to be a reference? even knowing the source material i really cant see it, because time travel has nothing to do with engages plot? in fea, its what happened before they got yeeted like 20 years back, but in engage, alear just wakes up and never mentions the dream at all??
@@grammy_hnng yeah, nostalgia bait for the sake of nostalgic callbacks tends to be nonsensical and not plot relevant
Nah, IIRC, Echoes, Awakening, and Fates start with a scene that is shown later with full context. Engage it just makes up a fucking scenario for no reason since the next levels still work as tutorials
Engage made me realize that story in games does matter and is more or less important depending of which games you're talking about. Engage is not a bad game but with a compelling story like Three houses it would've been one of my favorite Nintendo games
Agree. Engage isn’t a bad game but I will say to me it’s disappointing because I really felt bored playing this game despite the fun gameplay because I did not care for anything in this game
Agreed here. It’s probably the most mechanically sound and interesting fire emblem game. The story is so soulless though. It’s a celebration of the series, which is cool but I wish it actually tried more in that framework. Three house’s story was so thoughtful it’s just a shame to have lost that.
@@milesharrison2140 Maybe you can explain it since I don't get it.
What did Engage do mechanically that made it so much different that earlier titles? All it added was:
1. The Emblem Rings a game item, that basically allowed you to make a hybrid class kind of like like Fe3H. Except with a few super powers.
2. The Break Mechanic, which was just the weapon triangle on steroids. (It overcorrected the problem in 3H, and should have been a skill exclusive of the assassin / thief.)
Unless I am forgetting something, everything else in Engage is not new to engage. As I hear people praise Engages gameplay, but I just don't see what makes it stand out since I noticed a lot more that it stripped away (less classes, less weapon types, less magic) than it added.
@@thenecromancer8805 those two mechanics did a lot for my enjoyment of it mechanically. The emblem rings changed a lot strategy wise that I found interesting, specifically for the amount of them and the differences between them. Moreover their connection to skills made unit optimization interesting, though in some moments a bit time consuming. I do think that there could have been more classes, but with the classes we do have, the flexibility with units is insane units can end up being completely different through play throughs. It also has a good sized character pool, which is something that Fe3H lacked unless you recruit everyone. This left you with two options, playing the game on casual which I prefer not to or playing it on classic and spinning time back if you lose a unit. It’s nice to have a fire emblem game again where I can play with permadeath and still get to the end of the game. Stage design was also pretty solid though I can’t say for sure if it was better. Holy fuck the story is bad though. And not just oh it didn’t live up to the last game. Shit is just bad on its own. Literally skipped all that on the second play through, which is not a god sign.
@@milesharrison2140 Fair enough, I agree the map design was visually a lot better than the previous three games.
I guess where I don't see eye to eye is my focus on what was missing. Since I ended up finding most the new mechanics to be too intrusive.
That said, what I did like about the Rings mechanic is the idea of merging two classes which unlocked a whole new way to use characters.
Which is why I am a fan of the idea of removing the class system entirely, and allowing players to build archetypes however they like. Kind of like an RPG where you can equip armor types, weapons, and mounts however you like for a characters as long as you meet the weapon, armor, and mount skill prerequisites. So instead of using a class token to unlock "paladin" you'd gain the paladin skills if you leveled up your white magic, mount, and armor profs.
I played three houses 4 and a half times, meanwhile i still haven't finished engage even once
I haven't even bothered picking up Engage, but I have played 3 Houses two more times
I only played Three Houses one and a half times but picking my 70ish% completed Engage after whenever launch was makes me want to go back and finish that Blue Lion run.
Hahahahaha you are a noob
Finish all 4 routes of three house, and engage like chapter 5 ot 6😭 shit boring.
@@ermanope6442 Engage has better gameplay , three houses has nothing
Geralts death was incredibly well done, and was forshadowed well in advance, so you as the player saw it coming. It happens at a dramatic moment, but does overpower the scene. Other things can still happen. The tears fall, Byleth has been noticably emotionless for alot of the game, and to see the tears fall, and then the rain start, cutting to the silhouette of the two was powerfull. It didnt need to be over the top and dramatic, it just needed to be somber and sad. And thats what it was. I actually regularly revisited Geralts grave every month, just before the capstone mission.
Plus the aesthetic decisions of Byleth being sad on the Free Time selecting screen, the somber music of "broken routine", everyone comforting Byleth/recalling memories of Jeralt during the explorations, etc. for the following month
I haven't gotten jeralts death but I know its gonna happen via the HUGE death flag of him saying "If I die I'm going to leave something very important in my room you should probably search in here"
@@yourboylos2532it was spoiled for me because I watched the Edge of Dawn video and saw Byleth crying over Jeralt’s dead body. But honestly I’m glad it was, because it made every chapter that included Jeralt more thrilling because I was scared he was gonna finally die.
I mean. He was a fire emblem parent. That's usually a death sentence. Lol.
24:02 to that point I say: Shez. The main character of Fire Emblem Warriors Three Hopes is for me the best of these kind of Characters. You select a option just like with Byleth but Shez actually says the line. And I rather have that. Having the character at least say what you choose 1:1 is what I think should be a must. I don‘t like them to be mute while all others speak their heart out.
Shez is so good.
You know who else is like Shez? Itsuki from TMS #FE. ACKNOWLEDGE TMS.
@@happyfat4620No.
@@yunuss58 Shez is also a great balance between how to handle a lead character knowing nothing. Alear is extremely lazy in that regard, and it feels as such. Byleth is very overcomplicated, though it works. Shez is just a dumbass, but they’re so likable you don’t care.
It always felt so weird how the story quality changed between engage and three houses, three houses isn't the best fe game but I still liked it and actually finished it multiple times but I still haven't bothered finishing engage once
Made by different studio's.
Engage was written and produced by IS. While in 3H IS was just "supervising." IS can't write since they fired their only good writer ten years ago.
Three Houses was written by Dynasty Warriors writers overseen by the Fire Emblem people. Same writing team as the original FE Warriors.
As much as people shit on Dynasty Warriors, the games do usually manage their casts very well, especially in direct interaction, and they have done so many cliches that they know how to really work them.
Hubert? Basically just Sima Yi and Jia Chong combined.
Edelgard? A massively downgraded but still okay Cao Cao.
Lorenz takes inspiration from Zhang He.
Linhardt is a lazier Sima Zhao.
There's plenty more.
Heck, even Dimitri's crazed determination is basically just Yukimura Sanada from Samurai Warriors.
I bought engage on release play until like chapter 16, got bored, and finally forced myself to beat the game literally 3 hours ago. Worst story, I've ever experienced in any game in a long time. Engage genuienly makes me worry what the next FE will be like, while 3H made me nothing but excited for the future of FE.
@@thenecromancer8805 wait who was their last Writer? Ik kaga was one obviously (look at fe 4, 5 and berwick saga)
@@RoyalWreckingBall Depressing that the people at Dynasty Warriors wrote a better story than IS. All They do is write goofier versions of the same events.
Someone said all the characters look like VTubers and now i cant unsee it
Holy shit, that's spot on
Somniel serves as a great example of what I personally found is missing from Engage, that Three Houses has in spades: World building.
Three Houses has such a deep backstory, which builds the world. And, from the world the people of the world are born. This is the source of tension. The Church, the Kingdom, the Empire all play major parts in the tension of the game. (The alliance is just there, just like Claude)
But, engage has no world. No, a map isn't a world. Engage has a doughnut with four different glazings and a villain. Nothing in the story makes any sense. Which means the stakes don't make any sense. It's also not helped by "magical corrupted" standing in for humans. You fight Humans what? Once in all of Engage?
I think the rather bland plot could have been aided a lot with an actual world that has a history - like Three Houses.
I absolutely agree about the Corrupted. Its one thing to have actual monsters like Gaiden and Sacred Stones, but having the main bad guys be an army of undead that are just reskinned humans feels cheap. At least the Morphs in Blazing Sword were rare and mostly only used because Nergal had killed the Black Fang. Even the Risen from Awakening were utilized better thanks to most of them being used as villains to the child units that encountered them before time traveling. Then there is the Vallites, who were poorly implemented and the Corrupted who have nothing going for them; no lore, no mystery.
You just have to ignore all of 3hs other MASSIVE glaring flaws
I'm not going to deny 3H's story was better, but it honestly felt like it was trying too hard with it's world building. A lot of the world building is given to us in long exposition dumps at the start of every chapter, some of which aren't even relevant to the chapter in question. That's not even talking about the other bits of lore that you can only find throughout the monastery. It sometimes feels like the game is handing you homework and expects you to keep up with it instead of giving you the lore naturally.
Don't even get me started on how so much of the emotional investment is specifically tailored to the Blue Lion house, *especially* in Part 1. Lonato? Ashe's dad. Miklan? Sylvain's brother. The Dark Knight? Mercedes' brother. The Tragedy of Duscur? Part of Dedue's backstory.
@@esteban8471 it's "better" than engage but that's not super hard and the story of 3h itself is a fucking mess
Im pretty late to this video but the community needs videos like this and players like you who provide new insight to a series with a small but diehard fanbase. I enjoyed the video
I have a quote from a game that seems to have burrowed into my deep memory.
"There are many ways we can do it, and the choice is yours"
That's from the opening of Morrowind, when you are presented with your option on how to create your character - of which there were many. I always liked the in-medias Res type creation sequences.
Agree with basically all of your points except Cindered Shadows. I didn't think it was crazy hard myself, and I liked the background it gave to Geralt and Byleth's mother. Everything else, spot on. Engage probably was the more fun game mechanically (Even if 3H did a great job of validating durability through weapon arts), but in everything else, 3H is my game.
1:05:22
SPOILER FOR FIRE EMBLEM FATES- but
they DID in fact do this with the Birthright route
After a certain battle a cutscene plays and if you got to a certain support level with Kage (A if I remember correctly) he survives, otherwise he dies
Which, honestly, was surprisingly ballsy for that game.
Similar thing happens with Dedue and Lysithea. Really bit me in the ass when I first played Three Houses.
@@fatfeline7164and Marianne
It happened to me when playing Fates, only had B support because I was doing my normal Awakening thing and just only pairing the pairs together and such and of course wasn’t expected to lose one of my units just because we weren’t A rank
@@fatfeline7164 Lysithea is a post-game thing so that’s not as brutal as losing a unit due to story, and Dedue happens if you skip the paralogue.
I strongly dislike "only the gameplay matters" people that seem to have all popped up post-Engage. The best parts of FE, for me, are when the narrative is woven neatly into the gameplay. My favourite game is FE4, and I think it does that really well, on top of me already enjoying the gameplay in a vacuum.
People also treat their personal preferences for Fire Emblem gameplay as a concrete law that could never be broken, when Gaiden and FE4 were the 2nd and 4th games in the series; I'd even toss Thracia in there. They were already experimenting *really* early. FE is at its best when it experiments, and I like what they did with 3H. It isn't without its flaws, but it was a much needed breath of fresh air after Fateswakening lazily frankenstein'd a bunch of past concepts and made games out of it.
I've seen more "you aren't a real fan if you don't like Engage (or like Three Houses)" than I ever did "you aren't a real fan if you like Awakening", yet I never see Engage fans labelled as elitist, strange.
I’ve never seen people like that. Sucks you had a shit experience like that though
I never saw that nearly as much for Fates, on Miiverse.
But for some reason the biggest Engage stans just have to rewrite the history of gaming culture to pretend that RPGs and occasionally other genres weren't so popular because people actually enjoyed the worlds and characters within them.
Are you trying to make people like or hate FE before they've even played it?
@@AkameGaKillfan777 what? people saying "they aren’t true fans if they liked it" or "they aren’t true fans if they didn’t like it".
I feel like the biggest problem of Engage is its lack of identity. The gameplay is very barebones and standard Fire Emblem, minus having a gimmick, the story relies on Emblems, tropes and weird references (such as the prologue being way too similar to the one of Awakening). Sure, the gameplay is solid but it gives me no reason to care about the game. Meanwhile Three Houses deviated from certain mechanics and rather went its own way. And while it's not the best game in the story, it's clear what the vision behind the game was, while Engage is a jumbled mess. That's why I hope wholeheartedly that the next game builds upon the mechanics and ideas of Three Houses, as it has lots of potential.
I’ve only seen people say if you like houses engage then you’re not a real fe fan
"You arent the center of the universe and the time does not revolve around you"
You know...despite having the creator diety and god of time potara fusioned into your soul...
I am with you. I have never played a Fire Emblem game until Three Houses. That was my first experience in the series and I had thought that it was something common among the games, I did not know it was something the development team did something new.
I loved almost the entire supporting cast of characters. That is very rare to find in a game. The multiple play throughs are rewarding to see the different perspectives and some events and dialogue options that would otherwise be unknown to you.
The only thing I disagree with your overall view of the DLC of Three Houses is that, I play nearly all my games on the hardest difficulty. So the DLC with the fixed leveling just meant I had to rethink the positioning and routes of my allies. Sure it took many attempts at clearing the endgame of the side quest, but it was worth it.
Happy is my favorite of the new characters. Sorry you didn't dig Petra, she is my top tier waifu.
I was so impressed by Three Houses that I purchased Engage thinking it would follow a similar formula. I heard not so great things about it and now you have confirmed those concerns. I have not even touched the game and I bought it the day it was released. I may eventually get around to playing it, but for now I enjoy replaying Three Houses over and over again.
On Yunaka: that's all her VA. They literally added the impression part of her personality just because Laura Post is that good at them and they wanted an excuse to fuck around with her abilities. It's WILD.
My thought on the bandit attack is that they were never supposed to run into Byleth and Jeralt. I think they were supposed to have the two other heirs killed, but most of all scare away the third professor, so that Jeritza would take over as the teacher for the Black Eagles.
So, in a way I think maybe Edelgard being the one under attack in the turn back time scene is a bit of an oversight. Should have been Claud.
I’m saying this at the beginning of the video, so you may cover it later.
But the reason I love three houses so much more than engage is: I give a crap about the characters, I know who they are.
But three houses is kind of unique in fire emblem in it gives you less characters than normal Fire emblem games (assuming you don’t recruit everyone).
Once I realized that engage gives you so many characters so often and expects you to replace your units all the time, I no longer cared about any of them.
I could name maybe 5 characters from engage.
@@pandabanaan9208 I think the solution would have been to be able to have faceless generic soldiers like you could hire in Fates. For whatever reason, FE really does not want you to have generic / faceless soldiers. In fact, it would be cool if you started a FE game with mostly faceless soldiers (who when they reach their first support level with you) become a face character. So you have your protagonist and small main cast, but will unlock new characters by what hired characters you use who have the potential to evolve into a side character.
I think FE does suffer from character bloat.
@@pandabanaan9208 I'm just speaking from what I see for the most part. In the grand scheme of things I don't play on Iron-man or even hard mode for that matter. As I play games for the stories.
Though my idea is more or less just ripping something that they used in Fates since it would solve the permadeath problem in my view.
As it relates to the large cast of characters, its more so an earlier FE game mindset. As in the early FE games you had a much smaller cast of characters, and their supports tended to be directly related to the story instead of being about generic character hobbies or quirks.
It basically can be summed up as a hope that the writing quality would improve if they focused on doing a few characters right. Though I think this is a false hope since IS is just full of bad writers.
I had the opposite impression of Dimitri on my first playthrough.
“Holy Kingdom, eh? Sounds interesting, count me in!”
This was super interesting! It’s nice to hear an opinion on this matter who isn’t a long time or hard-core fire emblem fan. I just wanted to mention some things that are often discussed within the community.
A big one is many old timers hate avatars, and hub worlds. The only one that hasn’t been seen incredibly negative was Fates castle. Personally i find the monastary repetitive and I have a habit of just wasting time because I loose my train of thought on what of the many things I wanted to do. Avatars is an interesting one I personally like it for the customization options in gameplay but many don’t like it from a story perspective. One comment I found interesting is you liking Alear’s design I don’t like it their hair looks like plastic and the art style shift I think was one of the largest factors because it made Engage start of bad footing with the community and Three Houses fans.
Another couple things to note you already briefly touched on this at the beginning but some Engage’s oddities are just standard Fire Emblem gameplay. Like Saphir joining so late is what’s called a replacement unit to replace someone who died.
About the difficulty of the DLCs this problem really occurs because Engage and Three Houses is all about character and unit customization and the DLCs rip that away from you making the maps far more difficult than they really should be. I personally found it stupid on their part to rip the customization away from the player.
I think another aspect that made Engage loose a lot of interest in the community was the lack of new game plus. Another aspect is the lack of limitation to customization. In three houses and fates there was a lot of effort put into altering class lines training weapon ranks and in fates case supports. Engage seemingly has too little and too many restrictions on class changing and build design at once. Class are really easily to slot anyone in without much thought at all but skills are only limited to two flexible slots hampering goofy builds. The Emblems do bring their own skills but it isn’t nearly as flexible compared to Fates and Three Houses.
Overall I think it was a bad start followed by a weak story with good gameplay that was’t repayable that really hurt Engage.
One thing about the hubworlds. In Three Houses, you only NEED to explore once per month - if all you care about is the story beats the characters might give you. Which are often relevant to what's going to happen.
After that you can just fight, do seminars or rest.
In Engage, whenever you do a side mission... you are incentivized to go back to the Somniel to do all the chores again, because it resets.
Meanwhile in Three Houses they go "okay want to fight? You can do 3 fights before the next time you decide what to do. No faffing about in the hub world first"
You are just biased 3h does the exact same shit but worse. The problem is the way the game is designed it objectively unoptimal to do this thing, why would I rest when eating does the same thing? Why would I fight when the arena does the same thing. The way the games are designed in engage you can literally just skip the somniel if you don't care about the fluff dialogue where in three houses because of the cancer that is prof. Level you have incentives to run around and do fetch quests 3 times a month while playing cancerous mini games. The game (on maddening) is not designed around you only going to explore 1 time each month, while engage irs way quicker to get back into the action. There's a reason long time fe find think the monastery sucks balls. The only reason you should do anything else is when there's paralogues available
@@cringekid3993 You just mad an argument for not having the Somniel, not an argument for why the Monastery sucks.
The thing is, if you are "conditioned" to think the hub world brings benefits, then the Somniel is 100% worse.
Besides neither me, nor the video is debating hub worlds VS none. We are comparing why the one in Three Houses works better.
If you also look at the Monastery as a story driver, then it surpasses the Somniel right away. There's plot points being given to you in the Monastery, the Somniel has none.
These are plot points I don't really see how you would get elsewhere? Other than longer expositions dumps.
Part of why Three Houses cast stands out way more than Engage is also due to you interacting with them outside of Supports.
But, again. It's an argument over Monastery VS Somniel, not "how could it be done even better?"
I have thoughts on that, for another time. Although the world building and small story and character beats I haven't really figured out how you could do better.
@@TheAurgelmir If you're going based on story alone, yes you're correct the Somniel doesn't hold nearly as much relevance as the Monastery.
But if going by gameplay, 3H is much MUCH worse, its a constant grind and if you're playing for efficiency then it's a requirement. Again like the guy said above, long term FE players hate it, you cannot just do it once and move on for the month when playing Maddening otherwise you're shooting yourself in the foot. 3Hopes drastically improved on this, it's too bad it doesn't matter because it's a Warriors game, but they clearly learned from 3H and then moved that into Engage with the Somniel. Players wanted the monastery to be less of a grind and the Somniel is. You could argue "arena battles and meals are just as required/bad" but they take up a forth of the time, you're done with them in 5 minutes vs the drastically increasing time it takes for the monastery.
I never thought a video game would make me hate fishing in it, but 3H made that crap unbearable.
While I do find the somniel shallow from a story and character perspective, I think it is better than 3h's monastery as that one was WAY more detrimental to gameplay.
Fates and onwards, hub worlds are, imo, at their best when serving as a small stop-gap between difficult and well-designed chapters.
A place to shortly gain your composure, managing resources, and planing for the next map.
And to be fair, I do think the monastery does fine here up until the arena unlocks.
Both encourage participating in activities for resources that can be applied to the maps.
But 3H asks you to do it 3 times or more before a chapter. Unfortunately said chapters are very low quality.
With nearly all of them blending into one another due to the rampant map reusage. Creating a bad gameplay loop.
Engage asks you to do the somniel once before a chapter (not counting tempest trials). As well as having well designed maps, each with a distict theme that test the player fair and square. After completing a chapter, you go back to preparing for the next chapter via gathering bond fragments/supports/money/forges/the well, etc.
I personally prefer the Fates hub, as it was more fast paced. But I would rather take the somniel over monastery.
This is just straight bias. Somniel is 100% optional but lets you min max whole team IF you want.
Monestary in the other hand is a required slog that you HAVE to do if you want to stand a chance in maddening
No matter how good the map design is, if the game is put into a souless story and bad shell, with the main justification being gameplay, it will fall flat and be forgotten quickly.
Not all is gameplay, presentation and character designare important aswell. If a game is "fun" (and i throw that lightly as i could never play engage more than 20 minutes), it will still bore people to death if it has no substance like engage.
To comment on the complexity thing.
I believe that 3h is one of the best games to get in to FE with even with how different it is to traditional FE games as the game does a really great job at introducing the mechanics and hooking u with the story
Honestly I think 3H is the perfect starter for the franchise, then awakening is good to test the waters of the typical formula.
As a hard core Fire Emblem Fan, I agree. Engage was lack luster for me. There was some great ideas and nostalgia but it didn't hold up. I returned it after beating everything, while Three Houses I still have and replay.
This might come off as a very childish excuse, but I think the aesthetic for Engage is what puts me off from playing it. It's a little too anime for Fire Emblem, in my opinion. It's not like I didn't try, I got to the first paralogue before putting the game down and completely stopped.
The characters didn't give a good first impression either. Honestly, they were kinda getting on my nerves with their constant Alear worship. Don't get me started on Lumera's death scene. That scene really ticked me off. Throughout that whole scene, I was just unfazed thinking, "Wow, she's dead already? It's only been a chapter? Man, they are really trying to get emotions out of you for a character you barely know anything about."
I got more emotions from Jeralts' death, which isn't even half as dragged out or dramatic as Lumera's. I don't know, this might come off as stupid because I barely made any progress in the game, but these were my honest thoughts from what little I played. If I feel like I have to force myself to continue playing, then honestly, the game must not be for me.
The thing about engage is it's heavily trying to appeal to fans of the mobile gacha game FE Heroes, which is extremely anime. A lot of those people haven't touched a FE game in their lives, so this game was an attempt to get them into their mainline games, as well as being an anniversary game.
Also, in regards to Lumera's death, it's actually very much an established meme by this point, so many protagonists of FE games in the past literally have this same scene, of their parental figure dying in their arms. I have played every English fire emblem mainline game, and the two noteworthy JPN exclusive ones, and yeah, this happens so often.
If you come from FE 3H, then actually that game is the oddball, it's production value and decently crafted story is something I could only see in 3 other FE games, maybe 4. It's not unusual to have an entire game with an incredibly mid story you can predict bar for bar, that's why Engage is not at all out of place when compared to others like Fates/Awakening/Sacred Stones.
That being said, your ability to make it through the story is entirely dependent on how fun you find the tactical aspect and maps as well as characters, as this is exclusively where a lot of the replayability factor comes in.
And also, the story in engage, it does get better, the characters too, the ones you have at the start are basically the worst out of the cast.
So I want to say keep playing, but definitely temper your expectations a little about the story, it has a really strong midpoint, but really falls flat on its face in the end. This is actually very typical of most FE stories of the past too. The developers cannot write a compelling final boss to save their lives. That's why 3H is special lol, imagine Claude's route, but without the dynamic infighting between other houses, you are just exclusively fighting Nemesis and his goons over and over again. That's FE story in a nutshell.
Yeah I get what you say about the art, is like fire emblem is about war I don’t wanna see some anime childish character, is like a whole different ambience
@@alter_ech0that is true. Engage has probably the worst first impressions of a video game I’ve ever seen. Before you even start the game the character design can be off putting and then you get that weird 4ktv opening song which while catchy is a bit cringey. The first characters you meet early on all simp for alear which is annoying because you don’t get to know a lot about the characters when introduced unless they are royals. The retainers are probably handled the worst since many of them only get two lines in the main story not enough to show their personality and even then some it’s just wasted praising alear.
While the gameplay is great I feel like one of the things I despise was how skirmishes was handled. They are useful for leveling up however the fact they level up with your strongest unit can make training weaker units a problem which can cause them to be dead weight. I also hate how some things were balanced for example lapis feels like she got screwed over because immediately after her chapter you get Diamant and then kagetsu(though kagetsu also gets a bit screwed over in learning about him since his contribution to the main story is probably the worst of the bunch(he only has 2 generic lines in the main story and he joins in a chapter where your trying to escape not fight. He’s lucky that he’s a really good unit.) which makes her inferior
Overall engage is good if your only focusing on gameplay however since it’s a fire emblem game you would think it have a balance between story and characters on top of that
@@Yoshixandir ua-cam.com/video/tu2U5sRTFeA/v-deo.htmlsi=6k2UqCBJrornDhxI (Engage OST)
While the opening cinematic is a little cringe I agree, when this song played during the end credits with that amazing final send off just before actually made me cry a little. But this is purely because I've been a long time fan of this franchise for 20 years, it's cringe and cheesy at times but I can't help but love it for those rare special moments that seem to come out of nowhere.
Also, Lapis is amazing, trust me, I play exclusively maddening difficulty with random growths. Just give her a class that fixes her low STR growth and she will go bonkers in late game.
I pair her with sage Citrinne too. They are my favorite duo at this point. Citrinne also a fantastic user of Celica's emblem.
You can make anything work in this game with determination
@@alter_ech0 I don’t disagree however keep in mind in regard to lapis it’s more of how unbalanced. Yes you can invest in her but the issue I have is why give me a sword unit and then the next chapter you get another sword unit with an emblem and then a few more chapter you get kagetsu who is almost consider to be the best unit.
I’m going more on a first play through from perspective. I kinda of wish they allow more unit to be used on the maps since usually units come in pairs of 3 and there’s very limited spots
Great video. I'm a somewhat "recent" fan of the series, too, having only played from Awakening onward. Three Houses had rather different vibes to the other Fire Emblem games I had played before, and there were lots of things that I missed from the prior series - but I really loved Three Houses, especially after being disappointed in Fates. I feel like Three Houses had some of the most interesting, rough around the edges characters in the series as far as my experience with it goes (or maybe it just feels that way after, again, being disappointed in Fates lol)
Engage just rubbed me wrong right from the start with its lineup of legacy characters. I never managed to get the sour taste of fan service out of my mouth - every time I caught a reference I recognized, I just wished they had made a new, fresh story, like what Three Houses felt like.
Engage feels like it has an identity crisis. It tried to be anniversary game like awakening but they forgot why people enjoyed awakening in the first place. I get they added references with the past heroes however unless you played the past games you are not gonna know that much about them since many of them really don’t talk about their game and when they do it’s very brief in the prologues. It’s so awkward since it tries to appeal to veterans and newcomers but they ended up half committing to it
I mean the "fanservice" was always the point. The game was made to celebrate the 30th anniversary of the series, which is a big milestone.
Bruh Awakening is a decade old.
@@xacmashe3852 i know but fire emblem fandom can be a bit gate-keepey, and many would consider me a total newbie
@@CadmiumPoisoning thats fair, Fire Emblem fans are pretty stupid. I also started in awakening (really i started with Blazing Sword but i played it the same year Awakening came out) but fuck it, ten years is longer than some military expeditions I'm a vet. Don't listen to elitists.
Having played every English released Fire Emblem, I notice that I'm more partial towards the games with more quality and detailed stories. I find the issue surrounding Fire Emblem's gameplay to story dilemma to be bland. Just because a game like Engage has the best gameplay in the series doesn't excuse its plot holes or its shallow characters. The same is true for Three Houses, it's fantastic themes and characters doesn't fully excuse the plot inconsistencies or the gameplay changes. Still, I'd rather have Three Houses, as it feels like a more complete experience compared to Engage. Engage, while a pretty good celebration of the IP itself, really did not feel like it deserved to be a mainline game, and I struggle to understand why the bomb was dropped so hard in nearly every department but the gameplay. Regardless, I hope they learn what makes both games work, as well as what doesn't, and create a new entry with the gameplay quality of Engage, and the character quality of Three Houses.
I agree entirely. I'm honestly not that bothered if they go more an Engage or Three Houses direction in terms of how the narrative presents itself - All I really care about is the strengths being taken from both. Give me an Engage-Style story with decent writing and characters and I'm more than down for that
@@QosmicVoid well as a person who watch’s fire emblem content, atleast it’s not fate’s (fire up the emulator as I recommend the fire emblem binge from the oldest to newest plus “canon spin off’s” as three hopes adds depth to three house’s, though it’s kinda obvious that blue lions are the best route in either game”
@@diegoizaguirre3452 Honestly, there is worse than Fates.
Granted, not much worse, but I do think that occassionally, Fates did have it's merits.
Three Houses and Awakening were the peak of the series though, no doubt about it.
@@diegoizaguirre3452 eh. fates was fine its just a meme to hate on it. most of the complaints about Fates are mechanics that date back to FE4, and at least it wasnt as visually difficult as Engage (IMO). Conquest had some stellar maps. if you are a person who just watches FE content, id recommend actually playing fates before casting too much judgement. Its not the best but id say its middle quality. its not a good *fire emblem* game but its a good RPG. fates was rather fun and replayable with really memorable characters and careful design.
@@LuckyPuppylove I thought fates was the one with increadable gameplay but an absolute garbage story
Engage was the first physical videogame I've ever returned in my life.
I play Mario for the gameplay not the narrative or character development but when I play Fire Emblem it's the story and the characters I value more than the gameplay
"I wish Ike and Michiah could interact"
Us FE fans "They do wdym, there is a whole game with them as primary protags"
Radiant Dawn moment
@@Pogma776 Best fire emblem game moment
Blood pact moment
@@BHox01 the bird turned into me moment
$300 for a GameCube game moment
Unless, you know... Sail the high seas.
I am a fan of the Fire Emblem series as a whole, so I want to add my perspective, though I ultimately agree with what you said. With that said, one of the issues with Engage in my mind is that it is to Fire Emblem what Wish is to Disney. Which means referencing plot points from previous titles in indirect ways. For instance, the random Alear is the child of the big bad is a reference to Gaiden; its remake, Shadows of Valentia; and Fates. Sombron's title as Fell Dragon is a reference to Grima from Awakening. So on and so forth. Hell, it directly borrows maps from previous titles. I think this leads to issues with the narrative, as the game tries to balance its more original ideas with the stuff from previous titles, making the plot more messy as a result. Three Houses, while borrowing concepts from Genealogy of the Holy War; namely magic bloodlines and their associated weapons; it borrows the calendar and related mechanics from Persona, and so show the series trying something very different from what it typically does. Combined with the multiple routes, and you get a plot that has one main thematic through line that isn't messed with in some way, even with the different routes. In essence, Engage has two big goals: reference previous titles in various ways and a theme of found family.
I would say it tries to use the former to prop up the latter, which does lead to issues with those not well-versed in the series being confused. For instance, the moniker of Fell Dragon is likely meant to refer to a dragon that is made through the use of Divine Dragon blood, human blood, and something known as a Thanatophage; a bug responsible for the Risen, a zombie capable of wielding weapons (which the Corrupted are likely a reference to). This is what previous Fell Dragon Grima was, though he had no ability to do Emblem Ring shenanigans. So the plot gets very easily lost, especially given that this reveal was not in Awakening, but in the post-game of Shadows of Valentia. So that is not really as well known. Engage wants to do a lot, but in attempting to juggle everything, leaves out some of what draws people in (the pairings at the end of the game, for instance) and barely is able to keep it up. It still does so, but looks incredibly clumsy while doing so.
(Also, just as a minor point, but the fact you specifically brought up Ike and Micaiah as the example of previous protagonists interacting, given that they did, mostly by trying to kill each other)
Of all the characters I could have referenced interacting, I used two that literally did. That would be hilarious if it wasn’t intensely frustrating.
This does seem to explain a lot, though. Engage from what you're saying seems to be an amalgamation of a bunch of radically different ideas trying to co-exist seemingly just to reference other titles certainly would make some of the more baffling choices in this story make more sense. Doesn’t make them any better, mind you, but it does at least make what the developers were going for a bit more clear.
@QosmicVoid the only other funny combo you could have said was Sigurd and Leif given that Sigurd is Leif's uncle, though unlike Ike and Micky they never met in person due to being princes of two separate lands and other reasons.
@@QosmicVoidmy understanding was Engage was meant to be a 30 year anniversary title (thus all the Lords appearing as Emblems) but the pandemic wrecked development time
I think that Alear being the head of a religion could have been very interesting, especially considering they haven't been involved in it at all. There's a lot of alienation in being deified and this would especially be impactful in a young amnesiac character who now has the hopes and dreams of not just a nation, but an entire religious sect on their shoulders. Alear is, no matter how unintentionally, othered, and touching more on insecurity or even resentment to this position and the horrifying reality that their every action is going to influence and shape an entire generation of people that come after them would have been so, so interesting of an arc.
The snippets where we see this possible direction could have gone I feel had potential, although that might also be because I played with f!Alear and I quite liked her vocal performance. It's just a lot of wasted potential for conflict and commentary and that's worse than if the game was just memes.
I have the opposite perspective - I played all FE games, except Three Houses, Engage and spin-offs - and I can agree with most points except one.
Alear's design is nothing short of horrendous, both aesthetically and in the context of the world they're in. They look like christmas tree with so many clashing design elements that if anything made me appreciate simpler designs of previous main characters and realize why they worked.
You can look at Fates characters for example and even without any context figure out which are from different countries or tribes, while in Engage if someone told me Yunaka and Hortensia are sisters, being a part of family circus, which Timerra is also a part of, I would believe it. If someone told me Bunet, Pandreo, Merrin and Panette are retainers of a royal family living in the desert land I would think my leg is being pulled - they don't have even a sliver of a tan on them and their outfits are terrible for desert environment. This is all over Engage, and it feels like characters were designed first, before anyone had any idea where to put them in the world.
Everything else you pretty much nailed, though. That calendar system in 3H sounds very interesting, and I'm looking forward to eventually check it out.
Yep, it's such a stretch from a medieval fantasy aesthetic and jumps straight into high fantasy anime.
@@thenecromancer8805 It wouldn't be a major issue if it wasn't done such haphazardly. Take Elusia as an example - you can make cool looking anime winter outfits. Instead, both Ivy and Hortensia wear something you would see at a masquerade ball or a fancy tea party, and their retainers aren't much better. This game even has a gear system, which was a perfect opportunity to give everyone different outfits based on where the current chapter takes place or even make characters used to a certain environment more effective, since they themed each country after a season. But it's nothing more than a window dressing.
Even Fates took the time to explain why Felicia and Flora are not bothered by cold, regardless of their outfits.
Yeah, it all feels super messy. It was one of the first things i even pointed out when we got a list of characters before the game even released. Fates' designs were great when it comes to feeling actually coherent- even Azura and Corrin were designed so they would always slot in to either country while also clearly looking foreign and it was done with a very smart color system that worked alongside pre-existing world influence in outfits as well as design motifs repeated on characters of each kingdom commonly.
nohr's being black, purple and blue . with floral shapes on the medallions on characters such as niles, xander, leo. and the "scaled" armor lacing.
hoshido's being blue, orange and red. with bow shapes on characters such a ryoma, sakura, saizo, and actually like everyone...
these countries SHARE blue, as well as white/ivory/silver as a prominent neutral. meaning corrin and azura both fit in the color schemes of either.
the way the characters are designed themself is a perfect example of designing with the intent to tell someone about the character on their first look. i doubt anyone who sees Xander for the first time expects him to be anything except for a stubborn and serious, rather hardcore guy. he's clearly of a high station as well. you get it, i dont need to explain the way traits build up a recognizable personality in a design. but the colors of each country also help reflect the tone of each, literally being "light and dark", "day and night".
(and of course, purple is matched to orange and red... main opposing characters even have matching or opposing silhouettes and color placements. its super fun to dig into, compare ryoma and xander side by side, for starters they share a stripe down the center. ill let you have fun picking apart the rest)
the point is, i gathered characters from Engage to see what colors each country shared as their main, shared color between citizens of it. the result was messy. some characters look like theyre maybe... related to *eachother*, like siblings seem to have *some* thought, but as a country, youre left shaking your head. so sure, maybe its opinion based on if the designs are any good (they arent IMO. i didnt see a single design in Engage that i was like "WOW..." about. except maybe in disgust.) but its very much factual that there wasnt much thought put into why characters look the way that they do. i look at a character from engage, and i just have to ask myself "who is this person? how do they act, where are they from, what are they about?" and in return feel totally lost. the ones i do pick up on end up feeling more like jokes than anything else.
im glad someone else picked up on it. i mean, we're fire emblem fans, we're not in search of anything groundbreaking but its disappointing and this feels like a new low. we'd been doing so well, and IntSys and Nintendo have the money and means to do better than ever in this regard. There really is no excuse. Engage's characters dont even look like theyre from the same game at times. seeing some characters side by side looks like i visited someones deviantart and found crossover fanrenders for franchises ive never heard of. it scares me for the future of FE as someone who's interest is very character and story heavy, espessially with the rumors of FE4's remake just getting more and more credible, and potentially closer. (which im already worried about due to censorship concerns.)
@@LuckyPuppylove To be fair, Nintendo has had the budget to do better with all of its brands for decades. Yet instead chooses to put every title on a shoestring budget, very short dev time, and then pocket the gross profits while giving next to nothing to the devs it publishes.
If you're curious as to why the game was such a mess, the lead dev accidently admits he's the reason the game is a disaster in the Ask the Dev interviews if you read them all.
@@thenecromancer8805 yep, and yeah sadly i am aware of it.. i actually hypothesized the day of the nintendo direct trailer that it was to "bring in new, younger fans"... reading more and seeing not just that but admittance to "not liking SRPGs" was really a ride.
Fun fact, Three Houses and Engage had difrent producers and writeing teams. Three Houses was mostly out sourced to the developers of Dynasty Wariors Koei Tecmo with some members of Intelligence Systems also haveing input mainly the members who worked on a remake of Fire Emblem Gaiden called Fire Emblem Echoes shadows of Valentia and most of them didnt agree with the direction the main team was takeing Fire Emblem as while awakening saved the franchise it also took out alot of the fantasy drama earlier titles had for basic seasonal anime tropes and simplified plots Three Houses in a way was a return to form going back to tittles like Genology of the Holy War and the Telius dulology on gamecube and wii. The team that made Awakening and Fates didn't like this and Engage was made to basicly be the anti-three houses as they felt such a dark deep story with complex charicters and a traditionaly serious brave protagonist would be off puting to younger players and newcomers so they simplified as much as posible to apeal to what the belived to be the lowest comon denominator. Engage does have better combat gameplay and maps but theres no soul behind any of it. The story exists to sever the gameplay while in three houses the gameplay exists to help tell its stories
I think they need to realize dark stories aren't bad all the time.
@TheMaestroMizerous It's not even dark they need to realize serious mature elements are popular in the west instead of baseing their data off a Wii rpg which translation butchered the difficulty setting as easy normal hard when it was realy normal, hard and very hard which made the game seem much harder than it really was to casuals and an almost one to one remake of fire emblem 1 people found boring mainly because the plot was from an nes game with very few changes. It was those two flops that made them assume casual western players don't like stories like Three Houses
Three houses did already bring new fans, including me and the creator of this video. Engage was so jarring and disappointing for me.
I have to say that I agree that the enemies being risen corpses really does take away from the game, for me the hardest thing of Three Houses was killing characters I cared about that were just in the other side of the war that I now had to kill as my enemies, it was a painful experience that led me to try to minimize death as much as possible while completing my objectives and finishing the mission.
I did my utmost to try killing as few people and students as I could, ironically I got better at war by trying to minimize death, because I got better at killing just who I needed to kill and as few others as possible, Bernadetta was the one doing this most of the time, I would teleport her next to the enemy commander and use her OP stats, powerful bows and skills to insta-kill enemy commanders to end the battle in a few turns.
It was tragic to me when I had to fight pitched battles where I had to cut my way through many enemy units and characters, I did it but it hurt to do so, because I knew them I was their teacher, their coworker and friend, I could only do so much to avoid killing them but sometimes I had no other choice because I had a mission to complete, and it hurt a lot, specially because I got to know a lot of the students from other houses as well, got to know what their dreams, aspirations and passions were.
It really made me wish that I could have had more of Three Houses not because I wanted to keep fighting but because I wanted to make sure that what Edelgard wanted came to pass, to see it through all the way, because I felt a responsibility to all the dead that I had to make their deaths not be in vain, to make sure that those at the heart of this suffering paid for it, and that the world at the other end of this tragedy would be one that need not require such sacrifices.
I felt for the blue team on my Golden Deer run.
Like, Edelguard just stabbed us in the back and they got the WORST of it. But there wasn't much I could do to help.
I appreciate this deep dive. I'm a long-term Fire Emblem fan, and even I struggled with engage. I never even finished it, despite being so excited for it. Which sucks, because it was so cool to see all these different characters from the different games come together, like a celebration of the franchise's history. But yeah, the story is really lack-lustre. And I say that as a fan of Fire Emblem 7 (even I will admit that game's story is a freaking mess - still love it though XD). This is a very long comment because I'm more or less writing it as I watch, and responding/adding to points.
I will say, some of your early points are precisely why I NEVER recommend anyone starts with Three Houses as their first Fire Emblem game. It was a great evolution of the franchise, and I adore it (in fact, watching this has made me want to play it all over again), but it is SO different to the older games, even those just before it. The best starting points as indicators of what to expect from fire emblem, in my opinion, are FE7 on GBA, Path of Radiance on Gamecube, or Awakening on 3DS. They are much more representative of the general fire emblem experience. Engage is also very much NOT a typical fire emblem game, but not from a gameplay standpoint, but because it involves the Emblems - whom you will have no connection to if you haven't played their respective games. Engage is honestly even more not recommended for newcomers than Three Houses, in my opinion.
This is a franchise KNOWN for bringing in new mechanics and dropping them one game later (just look into Genealogy of the Holy War and Thracia 776 - set in the same world, during THE SAME WAR, but TOTALLY different games, and we haven't had a fire emblem game like genealogy since), so expecting stuff that had a high focus in Three Houses to carry over is an easy pitfall for new fans to fall into (and doing so is a mistake the developers should have already learned from thanks to awakening's good mechanics being transplanted into Fates and NOT WORKING THERE for very similar reasons - the story explanations just don't make narrative sense).
Also... on the subject of hub worlds (because honestly I think it's the point where engage fumbled the bag the WORST), I grew a little fatigued with Garreg Mach, but never outright frustrated or bored by it. The Somniel? I was bored by about the fifth time I went back there. It's so TEDIOUS, and I don't know how they managed to screw it up so badly that I was less annoyed by the sprawling monastery than the comparatively tightly designed island.
It's a mechanic that I loved in three houses, but that doesn't suit a lot of fire emblem games, where you are travelling across a continent and don't have a base of operations. However, there's a really simple solution, that once again, the devs should KNOW ABOUT if they looked at their own previous games. Path of Radiance and Radiant Dawn have the base menu. This allows you to sort items, view supports (including bonus conversations relevant to the specific chapter you're on) and all that. If you want the "walk around and physically talk to people" thing, just... have a camp? Many fire emblem games mention the army having a camp as they travel. Use a simple map, set up some tents, scatter the characters around. Done. Heck, they even do something similar to this is the post-battle thing IN ENGAGE! I should not be having better ideas than the devs, as a fan who doesn't design games for a living >.<
I am so glad you addressed the "forces you to move forward" angle. That is the strength of older fire emblem games, and a weakness that has plagued the series since Awakening. I am a compulsive min-maxer in my games, and have the same impulse to max out supports that you do. I want to get everything I possibly can and get as high a level as I can. Earlier Fire Emblem games tell me "sorry, you can't. This is all you're getting, good luck." and it means I engage (haha) much more with the mechanics and the difficulty. Since Awakening, there have been infinite grind possibilities in the games (FE8 also did this, but they dropped it again for a while because it made things too easy, before realising they needed to bring in a more casual audience to keep the franchise alive blah blah random history stuff, I'm getting off topic). These are nice, sure, but they MURDER the story progression. And yes, I know, "just don't use them then"... Like I said, complusive min-maxer. I can't not. If they are there, I will use them; I know that's a me problem but it's why having a limit to these things in higher difficulties is good. Because then I CAN'T anymore, and it forces me to be more selective with my units and who I train and support with. And then I enjoy my time with the game more. The infinite grinding in engage is why I didn't end up finishing the game. I had spent tens of hours grinding and getting supports, and I got BORED, and realised the story hadn't hooked me enough to make me want to even finish it. If your story is going to be on the same level as FE7 (I'd argue Engage's is actually worse) then for goodness' sake, do what that game did and don't give me any opportunity to avoid it.
Having not finished Engage, I did not know that character endings were unaffected by supports... I am HORRIFIED by this. This has been a staple of the franchise for literal DECADES - since Fire Emblem 6 even! Granted, back then it was only for Roy and his various romantic options, which they then expanded on in 7 and beyond. It became one of my favourite parts of fire emblem, seeing how different pairings affected where people ended up. WHY WOULD THEY REMOVE THIS?!
Side note: my faves in these games are also almost never the lords (I'm british too, maybe it's cause our own royals are so dull it inadvertantly sours me to them a little - still love the lords of Fire Emblem mostly, but they almost never end up being my favourites). My favourite support conversation tree in Fire Emblem 7 doesn't even involve any lords- it's Lucius and Raven XD
Oh jeez, the more you talk about the final plot points of Engage, the more and more it feels like a failed re-hash of FE7... Nergal (the villain of that game) also did awful things in order to reunite with a person/people he lost. But like... it's a really tragic thing if you unlock the additional lore of it (which hints at who it actually is instead of leaving it so open like Engage does), because he FORGETS why he sought power, because said power corrupts him. By the time you face him, he's just gone off the deep end and is trying to destroy everything because he thinks "why else did I want all this power?". FE7 is a mess, but it has interesting emotional beats. It makes enough emotional sense to carry itself through the plot holes, but Engage just doesn't seem to. The plot holes are too gaping, and the emotions aren't strong enough.
I will say, Three Houses is also a bit of a mess if you dive into it too deeply. Some stuff doesn't quite make sense, there are deep dives about it that point out the plot holes. But again, it carries itself because of the EMOTIONAL weight of everything. That's the issue here. Engage doesn't carry enough emotional weight to prop up its weak story.
I think what you have experienced here is a similar thing to what a lot of us experienced when Fire Emblem Fates came out after Awakening. Awakening was great, well balanced (mostly), had good emotional weight, and strong narrative reasons for its mechanics. Fates copied many of those mechanics over, without the weight, tweaked things, had an overly complicated story with about five billion plot holes, and ended up messier and more confusing as a result. I still like Fates, but it is objectively a complete train-wreck.
Engage is very similar. Perhaps in time I'll grow to like it for what it is, and can let go of what I wanted it to be. But gosh it's tiring that Fire Emblem as a franchise seems to be developing a strange pattern for good game, mid/bad game, good remake, and then starting all over again. I hope we get the genealogy remake that everyone has been hoping for, and I hope it's good. I love this franchise, and I don't want it to spiral into obscurity or failure. Engage could have been great, if they'd just thought some stuff through more.
I'm very sorry this ended up as an essay. I get very passionate about Fire Emblem, and Engage was kind of a disappointment for me. It's nice to see even someone newer to the franchise recognise similar issues, and I think that's telling. If an outsider's perspective can find the same/similar issues as a long-term fan, then I think they are most likely just... objective issues.
Definitely gonna go check out your other videos now! Your approach to analysis is quite refreshing!
This is a great video by all accounts and I pretty much agree with everything in it. But man you could have not chosen a worse time to upload this video! Right now the online consensus in the FE community is “3H is a complete gameplay and narrative mess”, while also pointing out “Engage was a secret masterpiece this whole time?!”
It’s just a cycle now where 3H is the popular game to hate on. The same thing happened with FE Echoes (the game before 3H) when 3H initially released people hated FE Echoes but now post engage it is looked back on fondly. Eventually I feel the next FE game will come out and people will move on from bashing 3H towards bashing engage instead.
But I have to reiterate: This was a great video that was well presented and paced well, and I can’t wait to see what comes next from you!
That would explain a few things.
My comments section for a start.
I feel like despite finding the story a mess I think most people are lying if they say it’s not good or even better than most fire emblems due to how it handles its supporting cast. Even ppl who I’ve seen be lukewarm on 3 Houses have admitted it has one of the best casts in the series.
Tbh I feel like it’s less so “Engage is a secret masterpiece” and more so that all the people who were turned off by Engage’s vibes and writing problems haven’t stuck around. Therefore the ppl who can overlook the writing for the gameplay are the ones that are left.
Lol what you just described just reeks of insecurity bias. That does not speak well of Engage if you think about it.
@@Dakress23 Engage fans are shockingly insecure, even for this fanbase. I've never seen a game where people get more upset if you try to criticize it (outside the Zelda franchise, that is).
@@rileyrose5166 I think this is true of the 3H hatred as well, most people who liked 3H have moved on to other series with time or just dipped after they saw the game that followed it
What a great video. You randomly appeared in my home page. I'm a huge Fire Emblem fan and have played every game. I essentially agree with everything you've said - you hit ever single point possible I would make! Cheers mate.
Also, love the commentary. That was hilarious to watch as a dire hard FE fan. Lmao thanks for the laughs.
Three Houses was the first game to make me feel emotional, it was such a good game and still is. It's my favorite game of all time and it'll probably stay that way.
Btw my first route was the Dimitri route.
I remember playing until time skip and then being so giddy about seeing what “my kids” would look like now, after 5 years of war and how the reunion would play out, that I stayed up until 2AM just to finish the map.
And went “Look at them!!!” several times. Because I cared about the cast.
For engage, at chapter 16 or so, I turned to my partner and said, “man, I just want this to be over.”
I went into Three Houses blind, and when I saw my babies after the timeskip again, I was sobbing. In front of my family too. Naturally, I was made fun of for that.
@@fatfeline7164 fr tho that shit was so emotional for no reason lmao
Lions route is gut-wrenching, the scene in the rain after Gronder is so fucking good.
“Your hands are so warm… have they always been?” Is better than the entirety of Engage’s script.
FE3H got fans new and old reinvigorated in the series and excited to revisit older entries with fresh new eyes. People loved Fire Emblem when 3H came out. Whether they were new fans who still preferred 3H upon visiting older games or not due to the visible intricacy of its world, the relevance of its characters, its lively voice acting, its beautifully grounded art direction, its exciting soundtrack, or its unique mechanics that both made battles more involved and exciting and told the story using its mechanics with incredible consistency, or if they found a new favorite among the older games because of the many reasons to like those too, 3H didn’t divide a fanbase into people who didn’t understand fire emblem and people who did, it gave people a gateway of a game that was greatly enjoyable to most people, with everything Fire Emblem is about to keep them interested in its past. Mostly, its developers and voice actors and creative team were just as passionate about the game as Fire Emblem fans were. It was made by a team consisting of big fire emblem fans-Koei-after all. It’s not wonder how they could tell just what everyone craved out of the genius FE format, and why 3H stuck the landing so well; it’s creators were among the audience.
Fire Emblem Engage……displayed what it looks like when developers are driven by greed in the creation of something people are meant to resonate with, around, and enjoy. Say goodbye to careful detailing of things that make a game feel loved, and say hello to what is immediately, visually, corporate. People picked up on this immediately, and immediately the game dropped off in sales for those that were willing to give it a chance. If Engage wasn’t so grueling to audiences on its own, I would say Fire Emblem Heroes was Fire Emblem Engage’s worst flaw.
3H created a fanbase that loved Fire Emblem, Engage created a fanbase that felt like Fire Emblem hated them.
@@pandabanaan9208 I cant disagree that anything Nintendo will have corporate roots, but I do disagree that it’s so blatantly visible, if visible at all in the games before Engage. It’s nowhere near as obtrusive. 3H most definitely had repeated maps solely because of budget and time limitations. With their ceaseless effort in every other achievable area like diligently consistent dialogue which changes depending on the route or time, the fact that the game was “two times” the size it was originally intended to be, because they were so inspired to keep adding more to the game, I am 100% confident saying if Koei had the ability to expand 3H further they would have. We can go back and forth on whether their time was misplaced in certain areas, which I’d agree with, but that doesn’t have much to do with passion and corporatism. DLC I go back and forth on, but at least it was made after they knew people *wanted* more. The same can be said of spin-offs. Following 3H’s commercial success, Engage had no excuse for its most widely accepted flaws because those flaws had nothing to do with budget. Its story and characters didn’t need more, it just needed to be different, and often times could have actually done with less. The only excuse for it is at best ineptitude and at worst laziness. The director interviews are even more revealing. The game was conceived solely with the idea to “broaden audiences”. They follow this up by saying 3H was conceived with the idea to be an “adult war chronicle”. One is financially driven, the other was naturally inspired. There’s also the gacha mechanic, the game’s ties to Heroes-again, in the director interviews they say they “hope players will become interested in Heroes” after playing Engage-the fanservice and selection of an artist who said herself she was “concerned” about the character designs because she “only draws young characters”… There’s just so much incriminating material and things from the directors’ own mouths that directly seep into every aspect of the game, and that I’m confident in saying soured too many peoples’ experiences and turned them off of the game. I agree that this isn’t mutually exclusive to Engage, but I think 2020 and the ‘vid especially exasperated it to vapid extremes-like they think people have gotten more desperate and reliant on escapism and gacha and the like-and Engage is I think the face of that shift for Fire Emblem
If Engage makes Fire Emblem hate me then I must be a masochist because I'd take a million Engages over one Three Houses. It would be horribly disappointing to me if every FE game from here on out had weak gameplay and a pointless hub because it was always trying to emulate TH.
@@pandabanaan9208 Nintendo doesn't make Fire Emblem or Pokemon. Most of this argument doesn't make any sense.
@@pandabanaan9208 UA-cam is eating my responses. Oh well.
To the original comment, Engage has sold at best half of the copies three houses did so hopefully they get the message that good stories and character work can drive sales. 3 Houses is my favorite game not just in the series but ever, because of this cast and overall quality story and world. Despite it’s MAAAANNNNYYYYYY flaws I still love this game to bits.
I've played three houses 3 times and I'm on my fourth currently. I got halfway through engage and still haven't finished it. I do think as far as just a game goes engage is a good game but it unfortunately doesn't hold a candle to three houses
Very gratifying to see someone else elucidate all the things I loved about Three Houses and all the reasons that Engage struggles in comparison to it. And hey, best of luck getting rid of your anachronistic vestigial monarchy.
The one and only thing I disagree with is that I think it's fine that you can't romance Bernadetta as female Byleth cuz I think it's just cuz... Bernie's straight. It's kinda refreshing compared to the recent trend of the supporting cast in games being player-character-sexual. I only wish they'd be more consistent and make some of the characters *definitely* gay, such that you can *only* romance them if you share their sex. But, as you so frequently said, maybe that's just me.
While I'm on things I hellllla agreed with though:
•I seriously don't get people who side with anyone BESIDES Edelgard - she wants to start a revolutionary war to abolish the privilege of the nobility and the theocratic overreach of the Church while replacing it with an egalitarian meritocracy? Uh, is there any way we can look into a ray gun that make video game characters real?
And also, hot damn is the Fell Xenologue a better story than the Saturday morning cartoon that is Engage proper.
My brother (much more generous towards Engage's shortcomings than I am) is totally on-board with that too; we'd honestly rather the Fell Xenologue be the main story and Alear's home dimension be the bizarro cartoon "everything is (creepily) fine" plane that it is for the DLC.
I Fully agree with every word. Signed a day 1 Fire Emblem fan.
Can someone explain to me why Alear can't just go back to the Somniel after things go horribly wrong in chapter 10? Sure, there was a system message that told us we would have to go through multiple chapters without it, but why couldn't we escape from the castle by warping there instead of running through a forest while being hunted by Veyle?
This was a very good analysis and spot on to the general perception at large. Three Houses has great story and more importantly compelling world building that makes you care about the characters and situation you find yourself in on top of having great game play. Engage I would argue that while it has good or even above average game play and map design is severely let down but its train wreck of a narrative and lack of focus or direction.
I’m only at the part where you talked about the good dragon’s death scene thirty minutes in, but, if You want to see a death scene done right, it’s the main one in Awakening. They barely dwell on it in cinematic, but the entire next mission doesn’t have the normal battle music, but a dirge or elegy or whatever for the dead character. Such good music.
So as someone that's played pretty much the entire series their is a bit of context I feel would help, and that is that FE may be 1 franchise but it's not a "constant" franchise.
As an example let me say a few things about Thracia 776, the fifth game in the franchise. In Thracia there are no support conversations, weapons have durability but you can very rarely buy anything instead you can "capture", lowering your stats but if you "kill" a until with Capture you instead grab them and can raid their inventory for what you want, all stats for everyone is capped at 20 so stat differences work differently, and storywise it was made to take place in a single year during FE4's story constricting what it could do.
FE likes to really change how it works, both gameplay and story. Which often makes it hard to recommend games to people. Liking Three Houses does not mean you'll like Engage, or Fates, or Tellius, and so on. Because they all have different focuses and structures and mechanics.
From how you described liking the characters, the romance, and changing how each characters ending works I'd recommend Awakening if you want another FE game. It has some flaws you listed here but it's a great game with a lot of focus on characters and bonds and changing your fate. Quick note on that, Awakening had a bad reputation in some hardcore parts of the fandom, especially Reddit, but ignore them they are just being elitist without any real justification like 2/3rds of the time. I'll also say avoid the first 5 games as that was before support conversations became a thing.
Nah the view on awakening has mellowed out over the years it's really fates people have a problem with
Slight note on Byleth knowing Nemesis. This does not imply that Verdant Wind is canon since that's the only time you fight him. He is a known historical figure within Fodlan. In fact, him acting suprised to see Nemesis revived implies the opposite.
Except Byleth doesn’t know shit about history
This was a very interesting video. I hope you look into some more fire emblem games and decide to make videos on them to hear what your thoughts on them are.
I especially recommend the dawn duology since they’re known for being the best written fire emblem games of all. But will warn you the protagonists of those two games (Ike and Miciah) are not at all avatars like you described enjoying Byleth being. They are very distinct characters who make most of their decisions without player input, but still put the player in charge of battle tactics.
I can very much relate to you: I have only played the Switch games of Fire Emblem: Three Houses as my first ever Fire Emblem game and Engage as my second and have also played Three Hopes. I'm not too familiar with the series outside of the Switch games but some characters I do recognize from Smash. By the way, also loved Three Houses and Three Hopes.
As a veteran FE player - this was certainly worth listening to and I agree on a lot of points. One of the points I disagreed on was the monastery and social sim elements of Three Houses: A lot of older FE fans, myself included, viewed it as time-consuming and unnecessary because you can beat the game without interacting with it anyways (there's even a mod to get rid of it haha). This is because FE just didn't have a social sim element until Three Houses; at most there would be a series of menus covering supports and shopping and it all felt a lot smoother.
Having said that I do hope you try some of the earlier Fire Emblems, there are some really great games in it. Some of them are kind of expensive on the used video game market, though ^^;
Three houses is one of my fav games of all time. It was my first fire emblem game, after playing it I immediately sought out another game to play, in my case it was fates conquests. I couldn't get into it, years later I gave engage ago and it reignited my interest in the franchise, I've now been binging the games and loving them. I've played a few at this point and can safely say that three houses is an outlier in the franchise with its functionality and structure. I think its because of this that three houses is a game that anyone can pick up and enjoy, that as well as the fact the narrative in three houses is far more compelling than any of the other games I've played, granted with the franchise as a whole I barely scratched the surface so there may be phenomenal stories in some of the entries ive not played.
Also I'm glad no one else know how to say Alear, I've had the following pronounciations in my head and can't settle on one:
Al-Ear
Al-EE-Ar
Ale-eer
What I'm hoping is that they can take some of the more basic things they did great in Engage (the break system is fantastic) along with as much of the intricate map design as their budget can handle, and just put a good story behind it.
I'm also hoping that they can take inspiration from the things that did work in 3H and drop the less successful ones (map zoom-in was too budget intensive for its value, for example).
If a Fire Emblem game was like Engage (And from what I've learned a lot of them are) but it had a decent story - I think I'd be totally on board.
@@QosmicVoid You are in for a treat 😊
The Break system was atrocious, it took the already "high mobility offense meta" of recent FE games and put the weapon triangle on steroids. The idea you can just go up and disarm anyone just by having their opposed weapon type over-simplifies the game, and punishes counter attacker and defensive builds that were perfectly fine ways to play in all the prior FE games. It makes the attack phase so much more important than prior games in the series. After all, you and the enemy are just going to swarm a unit any chance you gets because once disarmed the unit can't counter at all for the rest of the phase which makes the defense phase pretty moot.
The traditional weapon triangle is how the FE games should be, nothing more. If the break mechanic is included in the future it should only be a thief / assassin exclusive skill.
@@thenecromancer8805the break function actually makes you think about placement of units a lot more, sure you could break someone but they could just as easily break you and that is a lot more punishing then you breaking an enemy, since there are a lot more enemies then your units, your units can easily get dogpiled with no defense if you aren’t careful, that’s how I think about it anyway.
Great video, as a long time Fire Emblem fan I think you did an amazing job analyzing the two games and even without knowing that 3 Houses production was far more rushed than Engage's you still made a lot of good points especially when it came to the covergence of gameplay with story . Even as a long time player of these game 3 Houses is my favorite, it was the first time I was angry that a character (Claude) wasn't gay/bi which revealed a lot about how I think about character writing. Additionally Byleth is almost as perfect as I think you can get having a story around a 'silent' protagonist. However with that said, Byleth's appearance in Engage made me realize that I don't actually like avatar characters that much, Especially when they are no longer in their story, because they sort of lack a definitive story to build off of.
I personally like the main character not to be an extension of one's self. When it comes to characters that are meant to represent you as the person playing the game, it almost always leads to mary-sue situations where the main character can do absolutely no wrong. Or can't make a bad decision. It often makes the story feel worse to me. Engage does a poor job of telling a story *in general,* so this difference isn't really shown very well here, but in other titles outside of fire emblem, I prefer when the main character has their own personality and does their own things, provided that they go through a proper arc of character development. The fact that Ike is my favourite fire emblem lord, and he *is* one such character, along with path of radiance and radiant dawn being my favourite games in the whole series, I think it makes a lot of sense.
Three Houses is quite the standout in regards to the Fire Emblem series as a whole. A common take I hear is that
Three House fans are not Fire Emblem fans.
- Prologue: "It was a dream/premonition"
This has been occurring since Fire Emblem Awakening. I don't like it either but it's just a thing they do now.
- "You are god"
This is the worst incarnation of avatar circle-jerking they've ever done.
- "Alear talking bad. Silent Byleth good."
I don't agree with this take. Byleth talking in Three Hopes was much more preferable to being silent.
Shez is a great example of the best of both worlds in this case: having both dialogue choices and them being
spoken.
Side-note: I can hardly consider Alear an avatar. They are very much just a lord that you can name.
- The Divine Pulse
This mechanic actually was introduced in the 3DS remake of FE Gaiden--Fire Emblem Echoes: Shadows of Valentia.
It was introduced to the player in a way similar to the Time Crystal in Engage as just a doodad someone gives you.
- Lumera's 15 minute long death
yeah. lol
- Jeralt's death
POV: You are a parent in Fire Emblem
This is essentially a trope in the entire series where your parent will just eventually die.
- Battle System
Engage's maps are more condensed and it feels nicer than Three Houses. You pretty much covered all the good bits of
Engage's gameplay.
- "What are Emblems"
They seem to be akin to AI Chatbots that are aware they aren't the original person. They also seem to be an amalgamation
of the person they're based off of from various points in their life. (Or route in Byleth's case.)
You can see examples of this being the case
- "I wonder how Ike and Micaiah would have bonded"
They're both in Radiant Dawn, which is a sequel to Path of Radiance. So you don't really need to wonder that much.
- "Byleth's canon route"
No, there are cases of him referencing things from other routes too. Like I said before, they feel like amalgamations, or
more like the general *idea* of that person.
- All games take place in the same universe
Nope. Some games share the same universe, which you can see be the case in FE Awakening where you travel to the continent of
Valm (FE Gaiden/Shadows of Valentia) and with Ike's descendant appearing in that game as well, though that one feels sort of
iffy almost like it was just shoved in there with no reasoning. Excluding those, most of the games take place in their own
universe or realm.
- The social aspect
This is unique to Three Houses.
- The Hub
Many veterans of the series do not like the hub areas. They are fine on a first playthrough but become very tiring on
subsequent playthroughs, which they addressed in Engage by making the somniel smaller in scale. After playing the game
for the nth time, you'll grow to hate it. Only FE Fates, Three Houses/Hopes, and Engage have a hub area. Fate's hub area
can actually be attacked and acted as the PVP map for online play and you could customize the layout to your liking. It was
also significantly smaller. Like, you would pretty much enter it for 1 minute and move on. You bring up how the monastery is
better than the somiel as a hub area because it makes sense for them to go back there after every map, but not really. Even if
it is in the center of the world map, it still takes significant time to travel back and forth. Three Hopes did this better by
just having the hub area being a camp that your army picks up and moves with them.
- Why are they dicking around
Because Engage's story is just lighter in tone. That's pretty much it. The Somniel is a place for the player to dick around.
- The calendar
I don't mind it. It's not a plus or a negative to the game. This only appears in Three Houses.
- "No clock or calendar, great that means I can 100% the supports!"
You didn't *have* to do that. The boredom was all on you man. Not to mention the supports aren't very good in Engage.
The calendar would not fix Engage's supports. The supports were gutted by the localization team as well.
- "I couldn't S support Bernadetta as a female Byleth"
This is normal. Engage is the only game to allow S supports regardless of gender. Every other game with S support mechanics
only has one or two characters that will S support you regardless.
- "Her S rank support was arbitrarily cut off without any warning or ability to know this was going to happen"
I haven't played Three Houses in a while, but I'm pretty sure you can see [A B C S] in the support screen, so I'm not sure
how much more clearer that could have been.
- "You should do the DLC as soon as possible"
You should absolutely not do this in Engage. You will cause skirmishes to scale up to their recruitment level and make your
playthrough incredibly difficult should you engage in them.
- "I don't care for the corrupted"
Yeah no one really does. This enemy archetype exists to provide the player a faceless enemy to defeat.
- Conclusion
You should play the Tellius games. Start with Path of Radiance.
I appreciate such an in-depth comment but I can't respond to everything, so I'll just focus on a few.
"Other people say Three Houses Fans aren't Fire Emblem Fans"
That's very funny to me. I like to imagine people who talk like that saying 'You think my favourite game series is GOOD? How dare you
"Byleth in Three Hopes"
Yes, but in Three Hopes, Byleth wasn't the player-character, so them talking made sense. The rest may well just be a preference thing.
"Amalgamation Emblems"
This makes sense from a design perspective but from a narrative one that is hauntingly existential. And you could do something interesting with that.
"didn't have to 100% supports"
To be fair I didn't have to play the game at all - I don't feel like that's much of a reason for the Supports to get away with being bad and the process to be as agonizing as it is.
"All games take place in the same universe"
Well, Engage has changed the rules so, technically they all can, or can exist separately depending on whatever you want.
"S-Ranks being cut off based on sex is normal"
Normal does not equate to Good. Also you only got that Support Screen after you started a new playthrough. You'd have to restart the game to do that in that case, and you shouldn't have to do that anyway.
"Ike and Micaiah"
I have learned this, and it is both hilarious and frustrating to me that the two examples I picked at random did actually interact with one another.
@@QosmicVoidwith Ike and Micky I'm pretty sure during her side chapter, which is based off Fire Emblem Radiant Dawn chapter 3-13, at that was the location where she fought Ike. Note in their game they don't really like each other because Micky invades Ikes friend's country and Micky doesn't like Ike because her grooming project idolized him.
I hate this idea that Three Houses fans and series vets are mutually exclusive.
The demographics between GBA or Tellius and Three Houses are pretty different but you'll find a huge amount of its fans are Jugdral vets, and you can't tell me that doesn't make a lot of sense, just look at all the name homages.
To me acting like 3H fans don't have heavy overlap with the greater series fandom just feels like either taking a couple annoying people's tweets as a broad picture of the fandom, or just plain misplaced elitism.
Idk all I'm saying is that fe7 boomers love to say things that deviate are "Not real fire emblem" but they get that mindset from growing up thinking fe7 was the first. Prior to Kaga leaving, every fe game was super different, hell I'd say Three Houses really carries the torch of Kaga, so yeah loads of us Series vets love Three Houses, forgive the rant.
Elitism is very dumb, I agree
-3H fans are not Fire Emblem fans
There’s some deranged people who take it a step further and say 3H is not a Fire Emblem game.
This is great! I've never really been super into the fire emblem series, but this video reminded me that it's important to have themes coincide with a story to make it fun and engaging 💜💛
Didn’t expect a FE video from this channel but happy to watch
7:54 You actually said it correctly the first time, there were apparently cut voice lines that say Alear’s name out loud.
9:58 Correction: Byleth has only had the dream about the opening battle multiple times, them meeting Sothis was actually the first occurrence.
1. You'll pry pirate "Ale-Arrr" from my cold dead hands
2. If you select the option that says that Byleth saw a young girl, Jeralt will confirm that Byleth has mentioned her before. Unless this is a translation quirk, I can't think of any other explanation than Byleth mentioning Sothis previously. I guess it could be referring to Seiros/Rhea, but that seems a strange way of going about that.
@@QosmicVoid I might be remembering the part of Byleth mentioning Sothis wrong, as I always choose the first option for most of my playthroughs.
@@QosmicVoid 1:04:45 Misunderstanding there my friend, Engage and Three Houses were not only developed by two different companies, but also developed at the same time (They’ve claimed this, but I still hold my reservations on the fact that Covid was somehow responsible for delaying Engage). So it wasn’t a decision to undo what the previous game did, it was a deliberate decision to just not do it in the first place.
1:06:33 I’ve seen a few other comments tell you that the Game showed you how far your Supports can go, so I won’t repeat that here. What I will say, is that I view the inability to not be able to romance whatever character you want, regardless of Gender, to be better in terms of the characters. I don’t care if it’s 2024, or if it’s fiction, not everyone is Bisexual or Gay/Lesbian, the characters more than likely still have preferences of their own. I’m honestly surprised that Engage went one step further and have only a few of the S Supports for Alear be romantic.
@@QosmicVoid 1:27:55 I’m actually of the mind that Fell Xenologue was as bad as Engage’s Main Story. I treated Cindered Shadows as a non-canon Movie for an Anime, with a Story that even if it wasn’t that interesting, still gave SOME new insight to Fódlan as a whole, and thus I was able to enjoy it.
Fell Xenologue on the other hand just felt lazy no matter how I looked at it “Ooh, the Good guys are Bad and the Bad guys are Good”, the explanation that everyone had been turned into Corrupted left me asking questions, rather than me being shocked. And the Final twist of Nil being Rafael, while good and interesting, was immediately ruined by Nel committing Persona 3, and Rafal having a FALSE Redemption Arc. By the end of the Xenologue, I cared about NONE of the characters enough for me to not create a save over the File with the completed DLC, and pretend it never happened.
Finally, at the very least, you only have to beat Cindered Shadows ONCE to unlock the Ashen Wolves in the Main Story. You have to beat Fell Xenologue EVERY SINGLE TIME, to unlock the New Characters for a Single playthrough.
1:16:10 in the defense of Three houses, in Fire Emblem as a series most characters tend to have romantic endings with people of the opposite sex, with very few exceptions, and about the same amount of vaguely *implied* romantic relations between people of the same sex. Essentially in the previous 2 FE games where you could choose your main character's sex, you were also choosing what sex your spouse would be, opposite to your own (unless you marry the one granted bi-sexual for each sex in Fates). Three Houses was quite progressive in this, with several female characters being bi-sexual, and 1 bi-sexual man (3 if you include post-release updates and DLC).
Bernedetta, and a few other characters, only swing one way, which can be "hypocritical" in some cases where characters who do not want to marry Byleth will still have paired romantic implied endings with members of the same sex anyway. You're not their type I guess.
I don't say this to mean that gay people aren't real or anything homophobic, just that choosing a character at the beginning of the game, it's assumed that most other characters are straight, however in Byleth's support screen you can see everyone who can potentially be S supported from the start as well for exceptions.
In all fairness the non-gay options who have gay endings very much are a “they were very good friends” type of writing to it.
Granted three hopes fueled the gay shipping for 3H so fucking hard
I started going for English dub instead of sub when I forgot to change it to Sub for 3H, but then I realized Jeralt was the same voice actor as Jirayia in Naruto so I didn't change it🥲
Pokémon is an incredible litmus test for this formula as Pokémon’s story could be dog water but if the game is fun people will stan in. It took black and white YEARS to be appreciated for the story it was as a standout narrative in the franchise that they haven’t come close to trying since
I feel like Black and White was always appreciated by the people who played it and just hated by those who didn't. I have yet to meet a person who has actually played any gen 5 game and thought it was bad (unless they don't like any Pokémon games anyway).
@@Lysvsyl it was not.
@@Lysvsyl Yeah, I loved B/W from the start and I fully remember fighting many people on it online xD
Nowadays everyone agrees that we were right all along and Gen 5 goes hard af
@@Lysvsyl I bounced off Black and White due to the art style.
That’s unfair, they did try with the stories for S/M and S/V
I actually prefer Alear's character over Byleths silent protag ***in concept***. Seeing the characters have their own dreams, fears, problems and how they solve it is fun for me to watch, where i find silent protags a lost potential, and why i prefer 3 hopes Byleth as he has a more distinct personality
The only issue is engage's story overall sucks, alear falls into one of the many characters whose personality i do not care for much.
I cannot add much more to the conversation than all the other commenters have already written, but there are two things I want to say:
1. Who the characters end up marrying if they have multiple A supports isn't random. You need a set number of support points to reach the next support level. Even once you've reached A, the game will still continue to count. The characters end up with the person they have the highest support, aka the highest number of support points, with. I always managed to get exactly the pairings I wanted, even without bothering to count.
2. Since you seem to enjoy the social sim aspects and the calendar system of Three Houses, I think you might enjoy the Persona series (the modern games: 3, 4 and 5).
45:00
"There's so much to do but there's no reason to actually fo it. "
Yea, this is how I felt about this game. The somniel kinda reminded me of when Awakening had the babies from the future, and then Fates brought that same mechanic back. But it felt off, because it wasn't relevant to its context like in Awakening. Idk, Engage is just kinda meh for me
3h is a good excution of the principles of modern gaming, it's story while flawed is very servicable an compelling, everyone has their favorite and the gameplay is also good enough to support , the mian problem with is overambition (golden deer is irrelevent in over half the routes) but the fact people look that deep and care shows how intruging the lore/story was, it feels like a world . Engage is fates of the gen, good gameplay but an complete failure of world immersion to captivate the player.
One reason why I enjoy Three Houses more simplistic battle system more than Engages is because I have more of a connection to the characters. I feel more on the battle field. Engage may be more interesting in its battle mechanics but with the context of the rest of the games, Three Houses wins in that aspect for me at least too.
You are not callous for thinking, that Queen Lumera's death scene is awkward. With the scene being just a few minutes into the game, at that point I was thinking "Oh God, how bad is this game going to be"? It is almost like the game is patting itself on the back for having a "tragic" moment, not even realizing, that it is completely unearned. This scene would be as if you were watching Star Wars and instead of only the viewer not having a connection to Luke's family on Tatooine, uncle Owen and Aunt Beru are also strangers to Luke, but the acting is the same as in the movie. While the gameplay is good in Engage, the story just wanted to make me skip it at every point and no FE game going all the way back to the originals had ever made me want to do that.
Btw if you're curious about the pronunciation of Alear, there's audio of pretty much every playable character saying there name on the cutting room floor.
My main gripes with the game were the story, the characters (and supports)/character designs, some tiny gameplay things, and a ton of other nitpicks. The main issue with the story to me personally wasn't that it was weird or very basic/tropey, it was how insanely predictable it was to me. Predictable does not necessarily mean it's bad, but with Engage to me I was jokingly guessing major story moments, only for those to actually be true, listing but not limited to Lumera's death (to be expected), Veyle being the killer of Lumera, Alear being the child of Sombron, etc. There is a lot more I do not like, but that is just some of it.
My biggest issue then lies with the characters/designs/supports. Some of the more out there designs like Alear, and Panette who's my favorite Engage character, are perfectly fine, and I look at characters like Hortensia. As for the characters themselves, and also namely the supports, they severely disappointed me. Some of them were good like the ones you mentioned with Yunaka, but the rest of them to me either felt insanely mundane or annoying, more specifically a bunch of the ones with AlearI get that Alear is their god and all, but every C-support starting in more or less a similar way, even with certain characters being hyper obsessive over them (ie Clanne and Framme who are the worst offenders) makes the whole thing a lot worse. Lastly regarding supports/characters was the whole S-Support/Ring Support thing I felt was handled poorly in some ways. It was nice that Alear could support anyone and everyone whether it be platonic or romantic. My main issue with how they were done was that it was ONLY for Alear and that we couldn't play machmaker and pair people with each other. Also not to mention the whole way of getting supports was annoying and tedious, only for them to not even do much.
I say all this coming from a person who has 3H as their favorite video game of all time, while Engage is their least favorite game of all time. And it may seem that I only hate Engage because it isn't 3H when that could not be any further form the truth. Yes I do wish some things in Engage were more like 3H, but that is not the entire reason. This is also coming from someone who before Engage had only played Awakening, Fates, and 3H, but after playing Engage decided to go back and play most all of the other FE games. I do now have a wider variety of knowledge of the FE series, and would be willing to go back and give Engage a 2nd chance, but honestly idk if I want to. Engage to me is a very messy game as a whole, and I understand why so many people like it and even prefer it to 3H, but I just can't myself.
Three Houses characters and Supports: Traumatized people who work through their trauma, and how they exist in the world
Engage's characters and supports: We are vtuber moe-blobs, doing moe-blob things.
this isnt really accurate, though. a lot of engage supports are pretty good, it just so happens that the first few characters you get (and hence the first supports you unlock) are super trope-y.
seadall, ivy, diamant, citrinne, alcryst, panette, goldmary, yunaka - that's just a handful of engage characters with great supports. unfortunately a good chunk of other characters have middling supports, but i found even the weaker supports to be fun and charming. alear is the one that surprised me the most. his supports with the twins leave a bad first impression but they genuinely have some really great supports, too.
if we're being fair, bernadetta's supports are pretty garbage. they all start the same and end the same. same with byleth's. i wint deny that 3H has some of the best character writing in the series but we shouldn't act like engage is far worse
@@jerielc709honest it's got a few duds in 3h more than it's fan boys wanna admit tbh
Dude have you read Bernadetta’s supports? It is not “working through trauma”, it’s constantly repeating one character trait
@@Logans_Login this! Not just that but sometimes the main plot will literally make her act like she hasn't gone through her character growth
I like vtubers but I do not like most of these designs being in this game, especially next to the previous game characters
For me, Fire Emblem 3 Houses did something I didn't think possible. Make me actually like the majority of the characters outside of Support and ingame usability, with 3 different path and allowing me to not only see all characters in each house get involved in the story alot, but also letting us recruit them between houses was wonderful too. This was one of the biggest selling point for me, along with the update to the Gameplay with more freedom in Class option and advancement and so forth.
The fact that all the characters are involved/have a moment in the Main Story of the game was already a huge plus, but not only that, the fact we have the "Option" to recruit more if we needed to was a huge plus, whether to fill in the roster, certain roles or, to "save" the characters within the story, it made recruiting the extra students from the different houses way more meaningful. After playing all 3 story-lines, I come to love almost all the characters in 3 Houses alot.
In comparison, I wouldn't say Engage was "Bad", personally I enjoyed it since it felt similar to Awakening for me the gameplay aspect here and there (I love the Break System alot). The thing that was jarring for me, was after 3 Houses, having so many Units that automatically get added into my roster almost every chapter, and other than the main characters (Your avatar + the Princes/princesses of the other nations), none of the other characters EVER got involved in the story other than the chapter they get recruited. This I did not like at all, and while some of the supports were "okay", it was too disjointed from the story that to me it felt more of a "After thought" than anything.
As mentioned Awakening to me had very similar problems too, but it was a first of it's kind on the 3DS and the gameplay was a upgrade from before and, the inclusion of the Child Unit made "most" of the characters, even if they were left out in the main-story, a BIT more meaningful still.
Story to me is important in any game that has alot of characters and a driving direction overall as much as the gameplay.
Y'know it's weird, three houses and engage have opposite problems when it comes to just the gameplay. Three houses map design and long months cause it to be a chore to play in map, but the monastery segments are probably close to the best they could be. Meanwhile the somniel kinda feels like a chore and the maps are more than "grid with a couple bridges and occasionally a monster or 7"
This an interesting take on things. Having the unique perspective of only playing the 2 latest games. When it comes to Nobles, every FE game is about Nobles, the protag is always higher ranking/a noble in some way (very few exceptions). 3 houses happens to be the deviation from almost everything fire emblem had done before, hence why it has become my favorite FE. Engage was a return to form, but as you saw, the original formula wasn't always the best. I really hope for a 3houses style game again, but one in a different location or time.
14:25 "Dimitri was a no go for me"
AAAAAND he immediately missed the best route by default
coming from an edelgard fan, the best route is golden deer
@@kirbyslayer20 SS and VW only exist to add the lore, AM is the best actual story, because there is one. Dimitri is basically the only character with a canon arc.
I’ve been a Nintendo fan since childhood, although not specifically a Fire Emblem fan, and I’ve stayed mostly up to date on the company’s news and announcements since 2017. Despite this, I either missed or forgot about Engage’s announcement. When I did become aware of it, it was already after release and I first thought it was a mobile spin off or something.
I think the characters themselves have broken the argument between the two games. At least when the argument was between Fates and 3H, Fates didn't just have gameplay to carry it. It had amazing sprites, one of the best OST's for any game period, and great character design, for the most part. For every memorable character Engage has, Fates has 4 more.
Saying that Fates did not have the gameplay to carry it is weird, as mostly everyone agrees that before this game, Fates (Conquest) was the best FE game in terms of gameplay
I think what helps fates a lot is that despite the cast also being tropes it was nowhere near as bad as engage. What also helped is that when you get introduced to the cast majority of them had a chance to show off their personalities within the available time they have. Something that also helped was the fates retainer majority of them were spread out enough that they didn’t get overshadowed by the royals and those who were paired up with the royal (Selena beruka Effie Arthur) were useful in their join chapter so you at least didn’t let the royal do all the work. Engages royals majority of them didn’t have a chance to show off their personality many of them just simp for alear with a few exceptions (Chloe and Louis despite their trope had a nice cutscene of them in battle and rosemary rosado were a lot more relevant in the main story so you got a small idea on how their personalities are like) meanwhile others like kagetsu and zekalov you wouldn’t know anything about them from their join chapter.
Not all fire emblems happen on the same world as far as we know, there are several games that do take place on the same place, like Archeanea and Zofia/Rigel, as well as another game.
Well here’s something that incidentally happens when most of your opponents are zombies, undermining the tragedy of war. They’re not having the conflict weigh on them, so they are just hanging out. The reanimated just know how to wield weapons, likely not prepare any kind of timely action against the good guys. I do generally dislike mindless entities in games, mostly because even early game boss units tend to feel like a person in the world of the game, unless the effect is deliberate and powerful such as a scene with Orson in FE8.
@pandabanaan9208 honestly I think I prefer the older monsters/terrors simply cause they looked unique from the humans and had some sick designs (even if a number were basically just reskinned regular enemies)
Awakening, Fates, and Engage all having undead mooks that look and fight identical to regular living soldiers definitely makes things a bit blander imo
Did definitely make zombie versions of characters you DID know alot sadder, like at Blazing Blade's final chapter
My Fire Emblem journey also started with Pokemon frustration lol. Around that time, Game Freak (SWSH), Blizzard (WoW BfA), and Bethesda (76) had all let me down. Felt like nothing new or good was coming from the franchises I loved all my life. Then my yt recommended me Alpharad's vid of him playing the first few chapters of Three Houses, and it made me curious to check it out.
I had never played a true JRPG in my life by that point, 3H was my first, and about around the 80 hour mark, I started to think it might be my fave game of all time. So glad I took a chance on a style of game I thought I had no interest in, gave me my favorite game and got me to try other games that would jump right up my favorites list.
I only got into FE because of 3H.
The part I loved the most was how close the character felt. Though the characters were still collections of tropes, they still expressed themselves and felt like real people.
Despite how I like the mechanics of engage more, it falls flat before FE3H when we consider the whole package.
16:50 Yeah, the design is great.....if you wanna be compared to Colgate toothpaste colors.
23:15 I dunno I feel like Byleth would've been fine with full voice acting since they made it work in Three Hopes.....then again I suppose since that was made by a different company their standards are higher.
31:30 the funniest thing about this cutscene is the fact that Jeralt always wears a shield on his back whenever you see him in gameplay but the ONE time he needs it is when he dies, the irony.
35:40 Honestly having Claude's ending being the canon route is rather fitting. Though Dimitri's might be good as well since you take out Those Who Slither In the Dark without knowing from previous playthroughs.
52:00 What would've been cool is if you DO end your month early you get to save Monica from dying and being replaced with the assassin (I forgot her name). Now granted the only thing that would change of that would be Jeralt living.
57:30 I knew straight away with Clanne and Framme that this game was one big avatar jerk off.
1:08:40 It's sad when the one character with actual detail is the best one, Yunaka standards should've been the norm.
1:42:45 I agree if it had at least a great story, so much of this game wouldn't feel as bad compared to FETH.
1:44:13 That's the reason why people still argue about whether or not Edelgard was right in doing the war to begin with, maybe it's due to her shortened life span so she needed to act quickly even if there was a lot of death and her being called a tyrant by most of Fodlan.
Engage was good but the story made it feel boring, hell the Fell Xenologue was my favorite with how grim the story is, though the ending part was kinda dumb with Nel doing something stupid to get through Rafal's ego.
I do think 3h story has issues, but the shield thing in jeralt's death is not one of them.
And even if he had the shield on his back, kronya could have just stabbed him on the side of the torsto to the kidney or something.
It is not a razorback scenario from tf2 lol
While I agree with engages avatar worship being egregious, people strangely seem to forget that 3h does the exact same thing. Byleth is constantly told that they're so wonderful and kind and strong and can save the world, and they're so strong that they could defeat entire armies by themselves. But I will grant this, for some reason, despite the avatar worship being pretty samey, it's somehow a bit less grating. But apples and oranges to me, I love both games and will happily replay both
@@Danitron904 Darn no wonder.....I had TF2 on the brain lol.
@@Rui_Vuusen It's due to that unlike clanne and framme who come off as fan club screamers (which is annoying), everyone else compliments Byleth as a resourceful due to them growing up as a mercenary which in case mercenaries need to know survival and strategy so I can see the decent difference between the toothpaste divine dragon and the merc turned teacher.
About Jeralt living…. when I fought berserk Rhea and church members with the Brest of Seiros, I thought “holly shit I’m glad Jeralt is dead because it would have been heartbreaking for Byleth to kill their own berserking father”. So now I just want the stops of the assassination to be possible in the Silver Snow route to twist more the knife lol
I know I'm late to this party but the whole discourse around this game has been so strange to me as someone who's first experience of Fire Emblem was 3 houses.
I absolutely loved 3H, the combination of an RTS and a social sim is an itch that rarely gets scratched and outside of 3H the only other one that instantly comes to mind is Valkyria Chronicles (if anyone has any recommendations I'm all ears). To me it just makes every tactical decision that much more tense when the people you're ordering into combat are your friends you were sitting having lunch with an hour ago rather than just faceless damage sponges.
Naturally Engage was a let down coming off of that, and I keep reading from long time fans that 3H is actually the outlier, and that the combat focus of Engage is a welcome return to form. I can't really judge so I suppose that's fair. Much as I loved 3H I know that I as an outsider don't really have much right to be telling long time fans what their franchise should be like.
What it has done though is rather than convincing me to give Engage another chance, all it's done is convince me that Fire Emblem is not the franchise for me, which is a shame.
Hey! I really enjoyed the video. You gave a random internet user some interesting things to think about. I am someone who started Fire Emblem with 3H like you, except I started working my way backwards after I beat and fell in love with it. I played most of the GBA and 3DS games, and while I appreciated aspects of some of them, few felt like 3H. The only one that came close for me was Fire Emblem Echoes: Shadows of Valentia (the one Celica is from). The story enraptured me in a way similar to my time in Fodlan. Characters had enough depth to be funny and somber in the same scene. Even the gameplay was markedly different from the other entries, and a lot of these differences (such as the lack of a rock-paper-scissors weapon triangle or the Combat Art system) were shared with 3H. The game came out directly before 3H, and that fact gave me a lot of hope for the future of the series.
I wanted my playthrough of Engage to be as impactful as my first 3H run. In that playthrough I joined Black Eagles and sympathized with Edelgard. I let too many students die in the academy phase (sorry, Caspar). I was entertained by Bernadetta's antics only to be genuinely touched at how her story paralleled struggles in my own life. I accidentally missed Edelgard's coronation and was forced on the Silver Snow route. I cried when I killed Edelgard. I continued to let people die until I was left with literally nobody but Byleth and Bernadetta who had to win the final boss by themselves, only barely doing so with the help of (unbeknownst to me at the time) hacked weapons that I had purchased from the online feature. I attempted this fight 27 times and ended up marrying Bernadetta after the war. I still remember an excruciating level of detail about this run, because I felt engaged (get it?) in the world presented as both a player and a human being. I could talk even more about that and the four other playthroughs like it, but I think you get what I mean. Despite existing in a world that started and ended within the borders of one entry (Three Hopes doesn't count, this was the case before it existed), the world felt like it operated on it's own rather than around Byleth. 3H was in development during the time that Persona 5 was stealing the industry's heart, and so I suspect that many of the unique elements present such as the calendar system or allowance of more than just three support ranks (which I feel is desperately needed to tell more interesting stories) were inspired by it. If you enjoyed 3H, I would earnestly recommend trying Persona. It does a lot of what you praised 3H for very well, and the games are very much "you can only play them for the first time once" memorable. Regardless, there is a good reason that 3H still dominates community discourse, even in the presence of the following title.
So what was my first playthrough of Engage like?
...that isn't rhetorical, I'm actually asking. Aside from the broad story beats, nothing stood out to me about the experience. The game ceased to occupy my mind the instant I closed it. Branching paths aside, there were really no questions or concepts of the world that interested me in any real sense. Gone were the I want to preface this with the statement that my ramblings here are based primarily on the narratives of these games, rather than gameplay. Engage is much more interesting when discussing combat itself to me. However, story and characters are a major part of why people play RPGs. It's certainly what attracted me to the genre after playing the first two Xenoblade games in middle school. There are aspects of Engage's writing that I like. I also was blown away by Yunaka's depth and charm. I was interested by Alcryst at first, assuming there was more beneath the over-the-top schtick that he does, only to discover that he kind of just boiled down to being Bernadetta without the nuance that makes characters feel human. I could still be entertained by Alcryst (and honestly, most of the rest of the cast), but not much stuck with me. Ultimately, I can accept that Three Houses is lightning in a bottle and focus on series that do have these traits that I value, but Three Houses also made me see the potential that this series has to resonate with it's audience. I hope that Intelligent Systems is able to take the meteoric success of Three Houses and the irrelevance of Engage and let this series be something truly special in the future. If not, I'll always have a phenomenal game in my library.