For a more holistic take, I’m generally aligned with most of what Pandan shared.
The moment-to-moment gameplay on maps was probably my favorite since DSFE. While I can respect some of ingenuity of Conquest’s design, I disliked heavy use of skills and pair-up as mechanics, and find I prefer Emblems and break. Enemies are not a joke but also feel manageable and fair, aside from some cases where AI can be funky and do things you don’t expect. You have most all of the information you need at one time, and it doesn’t overload you.
As others have touched on, bosses are a big focus of the challenge of Engage. A good chunk of maps have what I’d call a “gauntlet” set-up, meaning there are maybe 2-3 discrete challenges/clusters of enemies on a map with dead time in between. This is a good way to create challenges and keep them relatively fair. But it is also not that conducive to splitting up and stretching yourself over the course of a map, and I found myself forming a death ball of units often by the end. This is exacerbated by the structure and side objective design of many maps.
I am not that into overly gimmicky maps, and I already knew this going in. I tend to enjoy a straightforward challenge, or a familiar concept with a bit of twist. Engage’s 2nd half maps go for a number of gimmicks, and I’d say a lot of them didn’t land with me, although some may have with different map structure. I do appreciate that they tried something different to try to keep it fresh, and I can see others enjoying these maps more than I did.
The outside-battle systems and economy are a mixed bag for me, but I’d echo what others have said and say my main gripe is things just take too long. Exploration offers little flavor and is largely a bore, Somniel and loading screens fatigued me after the earlygame. Despite being generally pro-weapon durability, I did like that this game eschewed it as it would have just been one more thing to manage.
I’d say the plot was unremarkable at its best, and hard to read at worst. I tend to prefer stories that follow the “simple story, complex characters” mold. As thin and silly as Engage’s plot can be, its deeper failing for me is that I simply did not care about the characters.
Few seemed like anything resembling a real person to me, with most sticking to spouting on about a weird quirk or giving compulsory dialogue about the next plot point. There was little to no world developed around characters to help give depth and life. The ratio of supports/overall writing in this game to moments I connected to on any level was staggeringly poor.
The style of writing didn’t help in this regard, as I found the dialogue to generally be pretty ropy and hard to take seriously. I do realize some of this was played for comedy, but a lot fell flat for me. And at the worst, I often found myself laughing incredulously at what were clearly intended to be fairly profound moments.
I would have rated Engage very highly despite its bottom of the barrel writing through Ch. 14 or so. But gimmick maps and fatigue from out-of-battle systems got to me, and unfortunately the game didn’t have the compelling characters or narrative to keep me hooked. I’m not sure how I’d rate it now since the overall experience was such a mixed bag. But I do think it was worth playing.