Fire Emblem Engage is a straightforward entry in the long-running strategy skirmish series. It leans heavily into nostalgia for earlier releases, and eschews the branching storylines of recent entries (Three Houses for Switch and Birthright for the 3DS) in favor of a linear story.

As with its predecessors, Engage puts you in control of a squad of 6-to-12 characters, which battle their way across myriad grid-based battlefields. Each character has unique abilities based on their classes (priests can heal, rogues get bonuses to avoid attacks when fighting from cover, cavalry can move farther than others, fliers can ignore terrain) and can acquire power and more abilities through advanced classes.

The story setup is also familiar. You are the son of the Divine Dragon, a powerful protective force. You have slumbered for centuries, watched over by successive generations of stewards and guardians. You awaken as a new threat has awakened: the Fell Dragon, which seizes control of a kingdom and uses it as a base to send its corrupt minions to attack neighboring nations.

Very quickly, you find yourself taking on the role of Divine Dragon and trying to rally the nations against this new existential threat. Along the way, you acquire the usual gang of followers, but Engage adds a new element: Emblems.

Emblems are the spirits of heroes from alternative universes – specifically, the universes of the other fire emblem games – who are bound to magic rings. When worn by a hero, they augment that character’s abilities and – as their bond increases – grant them special skills. They also allow the use of the Engage action, in which the hero and emblem merge.

These grant access to super-powered abilities for a limited time, such as creating a multi-square healing aura, charging through multiple enemies at once, shielding surrounding allies from attack, firing a volley of arrows that can hit faraway enemies, and creating illusionary duplicates.

After a few rounds (the “engagement” lasts longer as the bond strengthens) the power is depleted. It can be replenished by heroic actions during combat or by finding one of the infrequently placed recharge zones on the map. Either way, the ability is available again after the battle is finished, and the next one begins.

Relaxingly Straightforward

I started the Fire Emblem series with Fire Emblem: Awakening on the Nintendo 3DS and was instantly hooked. It provided a mix of tactical battles with a touch of role-playing.

It also introduced high stakes: any member of your team could die in battle and then truly be gone from the game.

No resurrection. Not miraculous returns.

Dead.

Unless, of course, you re-booted your 3DS and tried the battle again.

And then rebooted again.

And again.

Of course, I didn’t have to play it this way. Unlike earlier games in the series, Awakening gave you the choice to play between Casual mode (where chapters come back if they die in battle) and Classic mode (in which they are permanently dead). Being new to the series, and based on the recommendation of friends, I decided to go with the classic mode.

While it was much more challenging to play that way (and yes, I did reboot quite a bit), it made advancing in the game more satisfying and made the deaths of characters more meaningful.

It also had a relationship mechanic in which you could build the bonds between character, eventually leading to those characters becoming romantically involved. That in turn led to an offspring who (because of some time travel handwaving) became available as a playable character as well.

Fire Emblem: Awakening was a huge hit, bringing lots of people like me to the series. It was followed up by Fire Emblem Fates (also for the 3DS), which was released in two versions: Birthright (which was the easier, more story driven of the two) and Conquest (which was harder and more combat oriented). A third downloadable campaign, Revelation, was also released. Each version followed its own unique storyline, with Revelation pulling the various threads together.

Fates also had a relationship-based offspring, as well as new in-game mechanics like “dragon veins”, which were special battlefield effects that could be enabled by the main character.

The game jumped to the Nintendo Switch with Fire Emblem: Three Houses, which took place in a military academic and featured your character as an unexpected and unlikely teacher. During the game, you allied yourself with one of the houses, which in turn drove how the story advanced.

All of this is to say that Fire Emblem games have a ton of depth and choices, with lots of fiddly mechanics that you might want to ignore … until you realize that they were important parts of the game (like, say, managing relationships between characters)

Fire Emblem Engage simplifies things considerably. There are no branching stories. It has a kinder, gentler “classic” mode thanks to the Time Crystal, which lets you replay the battle from any point you like. Typically, the Time Crystal has unlimited uses, but in a few scenarios, it’s more limited (or even more rarely, completely unavailable). It’s a helpful mechanic, though I can see diehard Fire Emblem fans disliking it as a blow against tradition.

Engage’s greatest strength is that it’s a straightforward fantasy tactical RPG. Like its predecessors, there are a variety of side tasks that you can engage in – adopting animals, seeking out resources, farming random encounters for experience and gold, building up relationships between characters.

With Engage, though, it’s much easier to ignore these side quests and focus on the story and advancing the game. Now, the story itself isn’t as engaging as that of Three Houses (or really, any of the games I mentioned earlier) but its adequate and the game play scratches that Fire Emblem itch that I periodically get (and never knew I had until picking up Awakening).

Another strength of the game is its nostalgia for previous games. Granted, I came into Fire Emblem late, so my experience is limited to the previous three games, but I did enjoy being re-united with my old digital friends. I imagine the nostalgic impact would be even greater for people who’ve been playing it longer.

I’ll admit that I bounced off Engage when I first got it. I fought through the first few chapters, but after Three Houses, it felt … too basic.

After letting, it sit for a year and coming back to it – and with a day job that regularly overwhelms my brain – I appreciate its simplicity and straightforwardness.

It’s a decent game. Not a great game, not a terrible game, but a decent one. The sort of thing you can easily spend an hour or so playing while sitting on the couch watching some random TV show.

It’s a comfort food sort of video game, and that alone may make it worth playing.

Featured Image Meta

A screenshot from Fire Emblem: Engage.