How I Learned To Let Go and (mostly) Accept Modern Fire Emblem // a review of Fire Emblem Engage

Community
21

It’s the best non-remake they’ve done since the Bush Presidency, so it may as well be.

Yeah this is true. There’s very little to debate. The game doesn’t feel like a waste of potential. IS nailed what they wanted to make and the game didn’t “try and fail” in a way that 3H or Fates did. The premise is goofy and the game owns it.

Yeah it feels like you have to fight the game a bit to make it happen. I appreciate that it is harder to put everyone into the “optimal” class, but it’s generally too obtuse. So while I appreciate the spirit of “limited reclassing”, how figuring it out and executing it is more challenging than it needs to be.

I’m inclined to agree with this, at least from a pure gameplay standpoint.

Chief I didn’t say this? I agree w/ you on the 2nd sentence here.

Sure. What I mean is that the systems are obtuse to navigate. Like for example, you need to level up bonds in the arena (using “bond fragment” currency), then go to another place in the Somniel to see how much SP (another currency) you have to see which skills you can get. This is also the screen you need to view to see when you get the specific weapon proficiencies for reclassing (another menu). Similarly, forging requires bond fragments and materials (another currency). It’s not that the ideas behind the mechanics are bad, but they made it tedious to navigate and do anything, resulting in a lot of wasted time.

It’s easy enough to figure out where you want to go, but having to take a meandering path to get there vs. walking in a straight line. Hope that helps clear things up.

My TV is also pretty old so it could just be a me thing – I didn’t play on handheld so IDK.

Agree. The direction piece is interesting given how 3H was almost an entirely different team. It’s tough to get a sense of IS’ direction knowing that it may as well be different organizations working on these games. It makes me feel better about parts I dislike, knowing that the next crew of devs may take a wholly different approach vs. “building” on previous entries in the way I think we often think of long running series.

No problem, glad you found it helpful. If you like good on-map gameplay, this is definitely worth a shot. The rest is a wash, but I do think Engage is the most playable “modern” FE.

2 Likes
22

Honestly I have mixed feelings on the whole with engage. I rather enjoyed myself even taking into account the obscene amount of grinding I like to do (Its a personal quirk sue me).

I actually found myself enjoying it’s story and characters decently, though it was mostly the royals supports, oh and bunet desire to eat literally everything.

Before it can be used against me, Normal, still had some rough parts due to just how hard some units can be hit and somehow even with like 50 levels my ivy still only had 7 luck.

I also think some of the wierd quirks in the skill cost was actually intended, if anything speed was never an issue, damage was, some armors have silly amounts of defense and some late game magic users have really high res.

To add to the complexity, as well as a slight correction, engraving is a thing, and bond weapon forging, and it just gets so gold taxing.

At the end of the day I atleast felt like I didn’t waste the money, so there’s that.

1 Like
23

This is the one thing that I will bash engage for fully lol it looks way too saturated on a TV, well at least mine but it’s also a bit old. Looks perfectly fine in handheld mode though from my experience which I usually play in anyway personally.

1 Like
24

To be honest, I don’t really know what is meant by modern “Fire Emblem”. I’m not trying to be obtuse, I know there’s a focus on open-endedness that only really existed in Gaiden and FE8 prior, but Awakening, Conquest (didn’t play Birthright or Rev) and Three Houses all feel like vastly different games to me still. If it’s the tone, well, I’ll be charitable and say that Conquest actually has a rougher tone than Awakening, their tone is mostly shared in supports. 3H is of course vastly different than both. If it’s gameplay, I think that shakes it up even further. 3H is definitely a huge departure from the older games, but I think it’s a massive departure from Fateswakening as well. The planning and raising mechanics didn’t really exist in those games, and I think the skill system in 3H largely defines the experience. I’d say Awakening is more like a breed of FE4 (in a shallow way) and FE8 than anything, with Conquest being a bit of Awakening but more like “oldFE”.
As for what constitutes oldFE, that’s a lot more consistent, but as someone who’s favourites are FE4 through FE6, those three games are vastly different feeling. However, I do personally feel there’s a heavy consistency between FE6 through FE10 in terms of tone, game mechanics and intent, so I can definitely see what someone means when they reference that era of FE.
Is it the means of progression? That one has ongoing maps and others let you stop between maps to do extra things? I’ve no interest in Engage, so I don’t know other than people likening it to Conquest apparently.
Though, I do believe modern FE is defined by its tone more than anything. 3H being the outlier, but that game had minimal IS involvement. I personally do not see many links between modern FE outside of that, it’d be hard to argue for it considering newer fans have already splintered in several ways.

The weird thing is… I didn’t grow up with the older era of FE. Yet I still enjoy it more than the modern era. There’s something about it that’s been lost across the years, and frankly, it hurts.

A bit of a tangent, and not what either of you were saying, but this reminds me of how annoying it is when people say “you just like it because you grew up with it, and now you’re just jaded because you’re older” and how nonsensical it is to claim that magic nostalgia particles exist that cloud everyone of a specific fanbase’s judgement on a game. Thankfully that “argument” has died down in the FE community since, you know, I’m pretty sure people weren’t emulating Thracia when they were 5, but it’s still way too common in the broader internet.

2 Likes
25

Engage is well done MMB.
I think FE’s UI has always been a step ahead of other SPRG games.
The ease of use of the UI is one of the reasons why FE beat other SRPGs such as Daisenryaku to become the king of SPRG games.

For Engage, MMB displays the character in the lower left corner of the screen in a large size, and displays the important parameters on the screen.
I saw this and modified all the minimugs in my work.
Since FE is also a character game, a good looking character image should be displayed on the MMB as well.
When I saw this screen, I was impressed that the FE developers understand character games.
I would like to show them in their original size of 96x80, which is larger than the GBA’s 32x32, but the current MMB does not allow it, so I have made a compromise there.

The GBA only has a 248x160 resolution and is not a wide display.
Engage’s MMB would be one of the UIs specifically designed for the wide display era.
Such a UI that takes advantage of the characteristics of the hardware is an interesting place.

2 Likes
26

Just wanted to quick chime in and say something that I haven’t seen anyone talk about in-depth yet, but has been touched upon briefly or indirectly. Others have mentioned above that the bond fragment economy is very funky.

I think one of the biggest reasons for this is that IS assumed you would actually be using the terrible gacha system. I don’t think I’ve seen or heard of players actually investing significant time/resources into the bond ring system as it was intended to be used - only ignoring it beyond buying a few rings early, or rigging to get some of the few powerful rings that matter.

Engaging with the system as intended means you run the risk of spending a lot of resources and not even getting what you want. You are likely much better off spending the fragments to help gain proficiencies and inherit skills, and saving to have enough of a slush fund to play with engraves as you so please. Additionally, the system is tedious and time-consuming to use between buying, seeing what you got, and going to a different menu to meld. The payoff isn’t good even if you get fairly lucky as nearly all bond rings become obsolete once you have a substantial amount of Emblems.

I really think IS thought this would be a fun collectible thing players would enjoy that has some gameplay relevance. But for me, it’s maybe the biggest misfire in the entire game, mechanically, and the failure of this system has a trickle down effect of the bong fragment economy feeling weird.

Players largely ignoring bond rings leads to other systems like reclassing and inheritance feeling a bit off since you have enough bond fragments to get almost any proficiency and inheritance you’d want very easily from a cost perspective, which I don’t think was the intention until probably late in the game.

Maybe there are sections of the fandom that are really into the bong ring mechanic and I just haven’t encountered these people. But the system seems to be a near-universal miss with players from what I’ve seen.

5 Likes
27

I’d also add that the achievement system is what really broke the economy wide open – really could do whatever I wanted w/ bond frags (and it wasn’t bond rings!). It’s not like the achievements were anything more rewarding than “playing the game as is”, either.

It’s frustrating this part of the economy was so borked, when I’d argue the general gold economy was actually pretty well done for most of the game. I never felt “rich”, but I also splurged on high-end forges since they were better than any other weapon available in the armory.

2 Likes
28

Modern video game trends & technology combined with the modern art/anime industry & consumerism are what keep me from far, FAR away from modern FEs.

I hope anyone who’s begrudgingly played a modern FE game hasn’t “let go” and accepted lower standards, but rather adjusted their likes/dislikes and have come to terms with with them.

As for me, I won’t accept or not accept modern FE. I see these games as completely different things altogether. Things that I personally have no interest in and will never have interest in.

29

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.

3 Likes
30

I also found most of the game’s systems for building units oddly opaque. I don’t think it was really apparent right away that the proficiencies were prerequisites to change classes, and at first I thought they might be allowing units to wield any weapon, Three Houses style. It didn’t really dawn on me until I was nearly done with the game that to get skills on multiple characters, you’re meant to buy up bond ranks in the arena rather than swap emblems around and fight with them, so I barely spent any SP until I had only four or so chapters to go. On one hand, I can appreciate the amount of customization the game offers, but on the other hand, I don’t appreciate the amount of time the player is meant to spend in menus. This game has a ton of resources: gold, bond fragments, smithing ingots, skill points, emblem engraves and it feels like such a time sink to work out how to use it all.

I agree with the story rarely giving a problem or inciting incident time to breathe. A lot of the time, supposedly big obstacles or revelations are resolved in the same scenes they come up in. I also found it odd that the emblems are mostly absent from the story outside of Marth and to a much lesser degree, Sigurd. Ephraim is supposed to be sharing a ring with Eirika, and he never speaks or is even acknowledged by any of the characters unless I missed something. But the characters all act like getting to know the emblems had a huge effect on them at the end of the game. And characters that you would think would interact just don’t like Marth and Lucina or Sigurd and Leif. It’s possible for Lyn to be Roy’s mother, but they never speak to each other either. I get that it’s not really the legacy characters’ story, but not a lot would change if the emblems didn’t have a spirit inside, and it seems like a waste to bring all these characters back just to have a few generic lines each.

As far as aesthetics, I never had a problem with the brightness, and I actually like the fairy tale aesthetics of the Firene characters quite a bit. I won’t pretend that Celine’s dress is in any way practical for combat, but outside of Echoes, I’ve found the character designs in modern FE pretty bland, so it was nice to see some more fun designs for the cast. Some characters are over designed to the point of being off-putting, with Alear and Hortensia probably being the worst. Alear’s outfit has so many layers and straps that putting it on would be quite the undertaking.

Overall, I can’t say I was disappointed because I wasn’t expecting a good story, and it was mostly fun to play. Though in some ways the story was worse than what I was expecting, but this was mostly the tedious scenes of trying to build sympathy for the villains as they laid dying.

5 Likes
31

Yeah, the bond ring stuff would have been a fun little thing to use if its currency wasn’t used for anything else. The rings themselves are still really weak, an S rank bond ring being about on par with, what, a bond level 3 engage ring?

And this reminds me I never even thought to mention the Break mechanic, which is telling. I think it’s less impactful than the standard system of +damage +hit. The old weapon triangle impacted both your offense and defense. While this Break system sure looks flashy and impactful from the animations, it’s not actually doing much? It just prevents some player-phase counterattacks. You can’t even break an enemy on enemy phase.

Break only impacts your defense, as it only keeps you from being hit. It doesn’t help you do more damage, and personally the most damning thing is, it doesn’t increase hit. It shouldn’t be so stressful to try to break lance enemies with an axe.

There are exceptions to this of course, like the warrior class skill(probably the only good use of break) and Marth’s break defenses which you aren’t going to be able to inherit before he’s gone. This conclusion probably won’t be shared by everyone, but I thought it was a disappointing mechanical change.

1 Like
32

I liked the simplicity and predictable behavior of break, and I liked the player-phase focus of it, although you still need to account for it on enemy phase. I tend to enjoy matchup-focused gameplay, and break facilitated that more in the earlygame than the traditional triangle tends to do, I thought. The twist on something familiar was welcome, although I do agree that, say, getting hit when you were at weapon advantage would have also been a nice touch.

My main criticism of break in Engage is probably not too dissimilar from my criticism of triangle in most other games in that it doesn’t matter too much after a certain point in the game. This is due to the game starting to revolve a lot more around big numbers and powerful abilities late, as well as magical attacks with 1-2 range in general being superior to focusing on break. Hitting resistance with no counter was better than breaking for the majority of the game, and came to be the dominant strategy once I had more options available to me past the earlygame.

The secondary break relation of arts breaking tomes, knives, and bows (lol) disappointingly wasn’t much of a factor in my playthrough because arts, and the classes that get them, are typically a pretty poor option, and enemies that use arts are not that threatening in general.

Overall I think break was a cool idea and a welcome simplistic addition to moment-to-moment gameplay, but it could have been a lot more impactful in a game featuring less powerful player abilities and with less of a focus on units becoming giant balls of stats late. A game without reclassing and some intentional unit balance could also help facilitate matchups and niches induced by break quite a bit more, I feel.

5 Likes
33

I completed Fire Emblem: Engage
I haven’t finished the final chapter

???

Aren’t those sentences contradictory? If you haven’t reached the end credits, have you really completed it? Then again, it’s been a couple of days now so maybe you have already finished it. Or at least watched someone else do it if you really didn’t want to do that final map.

34

Well, time to get crucified for such a weird opinion. I’m one of those who actually enjoyed the story, it was fun and I actually felt emotional at … well end events. No caveats, I loved most everything about it. Didn’t enjoy a few characters but that’s about it.

4 Likes
35

Same tbh, there’s a surprising amount of depth to quite a few aspects of the story.

1 Like
36

Yeah gotta agree to this. There’re quite a few great beats/aspects there that in total makes this on the same level as your average FE story.

And average Story + GOAT Gameplay is all i want and expect from FE tbh. Because honestly i’d rather they focus on the gameplay. They proved more than once that when they put focus on gameplay they can make it S-tier, but they can never put a story above B-tier no matter how much they try (and that includes the Kaga games as well, for that matter). They should focus on their strengths (gameplay, sometimes characters), instead of trying to fix their weakness and while doing that bringing down their strength.

Themes, ideals, whatever, FE can’t get it right and betrays them for shitty cult/fantasy bs. Just keep the story an afterthought if it means i get Conquest/Engage levels of gameplay.

2 Likes
37

You know, something after reading the summary and closing thoughts and the specially the “and accept that this is what IS wants to make now” and the “Thankfully, we still have the hack” parts that is maybe to me at least solves a mystery I had for some time about why IS or Nintendo doesn’t usually go after stuff like Vision Quest, TLP, Scared Echoes, etc., is because they simply don’t care about the pre-awaking games and fanbase, they know at least know about FEU somewhat, and they know that they would prefer the older non-modern style more than the modern style which again is selling extremely well. To me this seems like they know if they tried to shut down the site and rom hacking in general and tried to force the modern style on everyone it would be an extremely risky move and could result in a massive finical loss for them, so they chose to leave FEU alone and focus on the modern style knowing that the older fans would be disappointed and chose not to support the newer games.

Or I could be completely wrong about this and there is non-conispity like reason for this, lol!

38

The idea of Break that blocks a counterattack if the first attack is hit is clearly based on Berwick Saga, and this is a love letter from Fire Emblem to Mr. Kaga in honor of its 30th anniversary. Some consider that the Emblem of Foundation may be a reference to Kaga.

As for the story, it seems to have been deliberately kept to a similar amount of text as SNES FE. This makes the time spent just watching the story very short. This is a right style for a game whose main focus is on gameplay, and an interesting choice for a modern game that no longer has to worry about data capacity limits and is more prone to bloat. (That’s why it’s a bit disappointing to see so much time wasted on Somniel and explore).

2 Likes
39

tbh I don’t think its that big a surprise that people aren’t discussing engage much on here. It has some major strengths but also major weaknesses on top of being the most “anime” fe game ( i fucking hate using that label btw, they are all somewhat anime). I think the main reason though, is that on this site it seems like people don’t like the modern fe games as much for the reasons you listed, which is perfectly fine, they don’t have to, and I’m not saying this website is elitist or anything. But the rom hack older fanbase of the side of the community does tend to shoot down certain opinions a bit more, like I remember on another fe discord besides FEU that I tried to argue that things like supports and dialogue contribute to an FE game’s overall writing quality as much as the plot itself does in regards to three houses and got a paragraph in response essentially saying it didn’t matter cause Rodrigue’s death was predictable. Generally when people are pretty negative about a game people aren’t gonna wanna talk about it much, valid criticism or otherwise

7 Likes
40

So I just finished FE Engage and all of its DLC on Maddening/Classic (Fell Xenologue on Maddening). Some thoughts.

I'm very displeased with the story.

  • The main character being worshipped by all their allies feels very powerfantasy-contrived. An environment where everyone continuously praises you and stresses how superior you are to them is a recipe for disaster and I hate how this game does not criticize it at all. Sure the MC might say they’re just like everyone else, and they should just be treated normally, but all that amounts to is to emphasize how modest MC is instead. It’s just not healthy, and MC not getting punished for that (MC growing overconfident and learning that their allies treating them like this is not conducive to results or something similar) sends a very wrong message.

  • If the second crystal had been destroyed a thousand years ago, why would MC worry about it being submerged and all? I get that they still needed to travel to the past to ensure it actually gets destroyed (actually, do I get that? Time travel gets a bit fuzzy), but somehow nobody at any point seems to sense it’s already gone or anything?

  • Characters don’t seem to take danger seriously, and as a result make choices that should be poor IRL, but somehow get rewarded in plot. Punishment similarly gets handed out arbitrarily, like “Oh, your time crystal was taken off-screen, now you lost your emblem rings, time to run.” Examples of this:

    • Ch21, pre-battle. Mauvier ‘defects’ (he hasn’t yet, really, and MC knows this, but w/e) and Marni notices this AFTER approaching him, somehow not noticing he’s with MC and crew until it’s too late. Marni should have been captured/killed at this point by MC. Instead, MC offers to take Marni with them to Lythos castle, where her allies, and therefore MC’s enemies are. This doesn’t make sense, MC is increasing their enemies’ firepower. Marni decides to take MC up on this offer even though these are her enemies and she’s vastly outnumbered with no way to escape on open sea. MC and co. + Marni arrive at Lythos castle and MC allows Marni to join her allies. Ultimately, it doesn’t matter how this move only serves to strengthen the bad guys because Marni defects and gets killed, solidifying Mauviers defection to the MC’s crew.

    These events all ignore basic stakes to get to Marni’s tragic death/redemption. Enemies are far too willing to lend one another a helping hand with no chance of gaining anything, within reason at least. MC helping Marni SHOULD hinder their main goal and therefore not be done. Yet, it somehow ends up working out as because of this Mauvier joins the party and Veyle’s helmet gets cracked allowing her to break free and join the party as well. There’s no logic here and I hate it.

    • Ch25, pre-battle. Veyle decides to enter Gradlon Temple alone to kill Corrupted Lumera and spare the MC (and their allies) the burden of having to kill MC’s mother. This is obviously a terrible idea that ends up backfiring when Veyle (surprise-surprise) learns that C. Lumera can beat her handily. I don’t know why Veyle thought why she alone would be enough to beat a crystal guardian, when the other guardians (presumably) took a party of fourteen units to beat. Where does this confidence come from?

    • Ch25, pre-battle. Veyle locks out MC and crew by barricading the door, somehow. MC manages to break through just before C. Lumera would kill Veyle. “How did you get here? I blocked the door” Asks Veyle, to which MC responds: “We… broke through.” This line, is just so funny to me. Like, yeah, obviously MC and co. numbering about three dozen people will be able to take down a barricade improvised by one person who went ahead of them 1 minute ago, but this somehow surprises Veyle. Like, as if the writer just admitted that their stakes were so shoddily built that they don’t need a good explanation to break them. I reckon at some point the idea of this level is that you break Veyle free, but this got scrapped and the plot got changed to fit… poorly.

  • Bit anticlimactic at the end there, where we don’t get even a glimpse of the Emblem of Foundations. Figured we would get a third phase considering the first can handily be beaten in one turn, and the second is over pretty fast too. like somehow you can just skip eight of the twelve dark emblems if you just beat the boss in the first turn you down the shield. This, the final boss, is also the only lategame boss without Veteran+. Why? I suppose it’s fine to have the final battle be a formality. Not sure, but I was also kinda done with this game by now, so I suppose I welcome it.

Unit customization is really satisfying.

  • Being able to reclass everyone into any class is fine by me as I prefer to have as diverse a cast (when it comes to their classes) as possible regardless of efficiency (unless it gets really egregious); I won’t end up having a cast of all berserkers or w/e is considered meta.

  • Emblem Bracelets tend to serve multiple (not complementary) roles, which can really drive creativity. “Do I put Chrom on a physical unit to blast armor classes with Giga Levin Sword, or a magic unit to take advantage of +10 magic damage on player phase, or a support unit to rally spectrum+ my allies? Put Camilla on a cavalry type to get +4 movement due to Soar’s type bonus, or slap her on a Qi Adept type for the +2 movement tile of frost, or even a dragon type for even more dragon vein utility?” etc.

  • Drawbacks can be taken advantage of. Emblem of Radiance’s engraving increases a weapon’s Mt at the cost of far greater weight. But then, Heavy Attack increases damage by max(weight-speed, 5). Enchanter has access to the convoy, but is a Qi Adept that does not have access to staves. However, give them Micaiah and now they have access to a far greater array of staves in the convoy with increased range and area-of-effect. Only S-rank staves are unavailable, but then the only S-rank staff I’ve seen is Nodus in FX Ch6, and you won’t have enchanter the first time you do that, so it matters not.

Incomplete information on maps is extremely frustrating. Halfway through Fell Xenologue I just decided to look up info regarding reinforcements and such beforehand.

  • Sigurd’s paralogue. You beat the enemy at the southern fort and suddenly two dozen more enemies spawn, all aggroed immediately. Yeah I wasn’t prepared for that, sorry? Like, How was I supposed to know the bridge would lower without me even pulling a lever or anything?

  • FX Ch3. I managed to trigger all three different sets of flier reinforcements at once by overextending. I just didn’t cross any of the thresholds until I crossed all three of them in the same turn. I can’t deal with this many enemies at once, but how was I supposed to know this is how these reinforcements would trigger?

  • FX Ch6. Extremely trial-and-error. Had to look up when and where reinforcements would spawn so I could plan an extra move ahead, because otherwise I wouldn’t make it. Punishment for letting Fell Nil kill units when moving is very small compared to the effort it takes to ensure the punishment isn’t meted out. Not to mention, only up to two revival crystals can be gained by Fell Nil in this manner. Meaning, if you succesfully cleared out the first four islands but failed at the last two, it makes no difference compared to failing all six. Chose to hurry along and just let Fell Nil clear each island, which made the stage a lot more manageable. It just sucks I had to restart the stage halfway through simply because I couldn’t have known this beforehand.

  • Every Fog-of-War stage, but especially Ch20. I hate FOW. Put a randomly placed high-damage-dealing boss in and you somehow make things worse. Fortunately, he hangs out at the end of the stage after you clear one revive crystal, but, of course, I had no way of knowing that beforehand.

Some other gameplay things tested the limits of my vocabulary. Maybe Maddening mode was not tested properly?

  • Fishing minigame. The giant fishes you get when you unlock the supreme fishing rod. Holy cow, these are annoying. Maybe it’s a joycon thing, but I can’t for the life of me get the game to acknowledge I’m pulling the stick in the right direction. Also, for the love of god, someone tell the people at IS about RSI. This repeatedly-mashing-the-same-button thing is ridiculous. So glad I found a mod on GameBanana to skip this. Thank you SpookyPix!

  • Why fish though? Well you get bond fragments, up to 10k every time the Somniel resets, after you’ve completed Ch20. Ok, but why farm bond fragments? Some people do it for the S-rank bond rings, which are mostly outclassed by Emblem Rings and Bracelets, which I already had most of by Ch20, so that didn’t interest me. However, Bond fragments can be used to increase Engage weapon’s capacity which allow you to upgrade various stats of theirs, such as Mt., Hit and even Spd. However, I reckon most people don’t bother with this as it requires ridiculous amounts of grinding in Tempest Trials (or relay trials if you’ve got NSO). This is where Chrom!Sevy’s save editor came to the rescue. Ty circles, for bringing this up. If it weren’t for this though, I’d have completely ignored Engage weapon augmenting. The grinding is seriously far too ridiculous. Especially for a game mode like Maddening which tries to hinder grinding wherever it can. I’ve noticed, whenever Bond fragments are mentioned in this thread, nobody brings up using them to augment engage weapons. Goes to show I suppose.

  • Another example of “What is RSI?” Sit-ups for HP-boost. This is seriously garbage; Get this stuff out of your game. Timing-based stuff like Push-ups and Squats is fine though.

  • Donations seem very unfeasible. You just don’t get a steady stream of income to really justify spending that much money. Money is also used for weapons, weapon upgrading, staves, seals, tonics. It just hardly makes sense. Brodia especially, as you only spent like three? chapters in there in the early game, without ever returning save for two paralogues. Also what’s +30/40/50% skirmishes if a skirmish appears like once every ten chapters?

  • Speaking of skirmishes, can I PLEASE change the currently playing song for non-skirmishes stages? I don’t need to listen to the same song for on average two and a half hours (that’s how long these stages take me on maddening, according to the summary displaying at the end).

  • Weapon Break. Really cool in theory. Like, if unit A breaks enemy E, then unit B safely attacks E without having to worry about getting countered. However unit B will have to kill E in their follow-up for this to make sense. If B kills E in their first attack, there’s no point to E being broken. Alternatively, E is still alive after both unit A and B attacked it, at which point (unless something is going very wrong) E must be a boss. Here’s the rub, bosses all have Veteran+, meaning they can’t be broken.

Other things.

  • Absolutely love the look of engaged units. Hovering above the ground, feet pointing downward, makes them really look superior. Crits giving us a close-up (not a cut-in!) really come off amazingly, not to mention the choreography being absolutely stellar. Rule of Cool and all. So. So. Sooooo satisfying.

  • The secret Engage+ attacks are awesome. I first discovered that Emblem Bracelet Engage attacks get additional effects when adjacent to someone wearing an Emblem Ring of the same origin with Houses Unite+, which is also the best Engage+ attack already. Suddenly, a totally different animation plays. My mind went “Oh, of COURSE!”. Aha-Erlebnis. That feeling, sooooo good.

  • Céline, Ivy and Hortensia. They’re all wearing these dresses that don’t really make sense. Timerra too. Rule of Cute, I suppose? I’m kinda conflicted, because despite their impracticality, they do look nice. Zephia/Zelestia though… I mean, please. This is the reason why it’s hard to tell people about my hobbies. It’s just really, really embarrassing.

Glad to get that off my chest.

4 Likes