Zoran's thoughts on FE17

[AnonymousSpeed]

Spoiler

Fire Emblem Engage

Earlier today we got our first trailer for the seventeenth mainline Fire Emblem game, Fire Emblem Engage. There's only a couple minutes of footage, but based on what we've seen, this is what I think so far.

Gameplay Mechanics
* The playable roster
    * First off, it looks like your party at the beginning of the game is your classic sword lord, a mage, a healer, and an axe-wielding paladin called Vander.
        * I'm glad to have an early pre-promoted unit again; those make the early game a lot more dynamic.
        * Usually, because the main character almost always wields swords and the designers want to help that character survive early on so you don't get a quick Game Over, they make the early enemies wield axes. Giving Vander an axe of his own, rather than the lance that is typical for his kind of unit, probably makes him extra-useful in the early game.
    * It's hard to glean much else about the roster from the footage we've seen, not knowing recruitment order or anything like that. But it looks like we do get an archer, an armored knight, a flier, and a horse unit early on.
* Weapons and combat
    * There's no weapon durability to be seen.
        * I'm glad for that. Weapon durability has never been much more than busywork. All it usually does is make you spend some extra time and money restocking, repairing, and re-forging the same mainstay weapons as always. You might think the money cost could make for interesting decisions, but in practice the designers always have to give you tons of extra money to allow for weapon replacements in case you use your weapons very inefficiently, so the resource issues are moot.
        * Mostly, weapon durability tends to make players hoard their items needlessly for fear that they might need them later, and that's a negative outcome that is just caused by bad design.
        * There are more interesting ways to limit the strongest weapons so that you don't just use the same thing in every battle. It looks like one way they're doing that in this game might be by tying special weapons like Mercurius to super-attacks that you have to charge up or earn somehow.
        * The last game that had the usual style of inventory but didn't have durability was Fates. I don't think Intelligent Systems got the weapon balance exactly right in that game, because some of the higher-tier weapons were too difficult to access and E-rank weapons were a little too powerful, but it was a pretty good effort. I hope to see something similar with only a handful of minor adjustments.
    * There don't seem to be any combat arts this time, at least not as we knew them in Shadows of Valentia or Three Houses. I think the concept of extra-powerful attacks with limited uses is integrated into the new Emblem system, which we'll talk about in just a bit.
    * The Build stat, sometimes previously known as Constitution, is back, and presumably so is weapon weight.
        * I think I prefer this system to the version where Strength mitigates weight. It opens up more design space, because for example you can have a mage with tons of Build who can carry heavy equipment without also being good at physical combat.
    * Hand-to-hand weapons return. I'm happy to see that.
        * They still have the innate brave effect: the damage from Framme's Iron-Body Art weapon is displayed as 6x2, whereas follow-up attacks are shown with the two damage values from the first and second hits side-by-side, not multiplied by two.
    * The weapon triangle returns, but it seems to be only the classic one between axes, swords, and lances.
        * We see icons for axes in green, swords in red, and lances in blue, while I believe bows and tomes are both neutral. As for hand-to-hand weapons, we see that Framme's is neutral against swords, at the very least.
    * I'm guessing equippable weapon types are largely unlimited again, just like in Three Houses. I'm basing this on a couple of observations.
        * Number one: Etie, a playable archer, shoots down an enemy pegasus knight (or maybe a dark flier) who is wielding a sword. Chloé is a playable pegasus knight, and she uses a lance, not a sword. Side note: Chloé has only 24 HP, so presumably she's fairly low-level, and yet she uses a Slim Lance to hit an axe-wielding enemy for 42 damage, and she gets 100 displayed Hit. What? Did they turn on the debugging cheats to get their footage?
        * Number two: an enemy knight is shown using an axe, whereas the playable knight Louis uses a lance.
        * I could be wrong about this; maybe Knights and Pegasus Knights can now use two weapon types, just like Cavaliers traditionally could.
        * It's also possible that weapon types are defined for individual characters. There's not a ton to go on, but I don't think any of the inventories we have been shown included multiple types of weapons. I don't expect this, but it could be interesting, and it would help maintain a character's unique identity if there is a class-changing mechanic: sure, your mage might become a paladin, but they would be a paladin who uses tomes.
    * In battle, we see our units sometimes inflicting a "Break" effect.
        * That is almost certainly some kind of debuff mechanic. I hope it's more meaningful than the "Seal" abilities we got in Three Houses. Those were all hugely nerfed compared to their Fates incarnations, and even back then they weren't especially good in the hands of the player.
        * The Break effect is apparently granted by Marth, who has an ability called "Break Defenses."
* Movement
    * Flying, mounted, armored, and standard infantry units are all back, but there has been an overall reduction in the movement stat: it's down to 4 for basic infantry, 5 for unpromoted cavalry (seen in Alfred's "Noble" class), and 6 for promoted cavalry.
        * I'm optimistic about this. I think Fire Emblem gameplay tends to be worse if you give too many movement options to the player, especially if your usual map objective is "Kill Boss" (as in the latter half of Three Houses) or even Seize.
            * If you have too much movement at your disposal, then instead of dealing with a map's obstacles "honestly," you can simply avoid them all, skipping most enemy encounters entirely. That makes for boring gameplay. "Skip" strategies are seldom fun or interesting after the first time.
        * That said, extensive movement options are not categorically bad. I really enjoy the mobility generated by the Pair Up mechanic in Awakening and Fates, even though that can allow a unit to cross dozens of tiles in a single turn. The difference is that to pull off something like that, you need foresight and careful positioning, you have to spread out your army a lot, and it costs you several of your player-phase actions. Mechanics like Warp and Stride don't have anywhere near the same costs.
        * There is a danger in shrinking the overall scale of the movement stat. It might exaggerate the power of mounted units rather than curtailing it, or it might make the gameplay a lot slower for no real benefit. But that all depends on the scale and layout of the maps, so it's hard to judge that right now.
        * I can't imagine armored units getting less than 4 movement because that would feel awful—with only 3, they wouldn't even be able to run around an enemy standing right in front of them. If I'm correct, that might be good news for Knights and Generals. They may finally be on par with other infantry.
    * It doesn't look like the Rescue/Shelter mechanic has returned. I feel totally neutral about that. It makes for cool movement tech, but it also tends to make fliers even more useful, and god knows they don't need the help.
    * One of the special moves we see from Céline and Celica was something called "Warp Ragnarok." As part of that move, they could seemingly warp themselves next to any enemy on the map before attacking. It looks awesome, but it gives me some concern. I hope it's not something you can do multiple times per battle, at least, and not something you can do on early turns.
        * However, if they're giving this move the "Warp" moniker, then maybe that signals that the Warp staff will not return. To that I say: good riddance.
    * On the topic of ridiculously strong movement abilities from previous games: has Canto been limited?
        * We see "Canter" and "Gallop" as abilities given by Sigurd. I hope that means Canto is not something that's native to all mounted units anymore. That seems to be the case, if "Momentum" indicates the activation of the Canto effect. Attacking by himself, Vander does not trigger Momentum.
        * As an aside: "Canter" and "Gallop" make way more sense as names for a movement ability on horse units than "Canto." They both refer to running gaits of horses, with the gallop being the faster one.
            * "Gallop" is a type bonus given when Sigurd is attached to Alfred, who is himself a cavalry unit; maybe Gallop is Super Canto, the version of Canto that works after attacking, and you only get it when both partners are mounted.
    * We saw another after-battle movement effect called Override. This looks similar to the Lunge skill from Fates: the user ends up on the far side of the enemy after combat. That's pretty neat. I hope Lunge is back, too.
* Classes and Abilities
    * Abilities are back. Each unit has 3 ability slots, but they can get additional abilities from Emblems.
        * Three slots seems like a reasonable amount. We only see ability slot filled. To me, the names of the abilities in the first slot suggest that they are personal ones. Alear's is called "Divinely Inspiring," and that doesn't sound like the kind of thing that could be learned by just anyone.
        * I would guess each characters earns a second ability at a certain level in their base class and a third in their promoted class.
        * Given that there are only three ability slots and one of them is probably a personal ability, I doubt that you can make anyone be any class as in Three Houses; or if you can, I wouldn't expect to be able to transfer skills between classes.
    * There's actually no evidence of a class-changing mechanic so far. I'd be very surprised if it's gone completely. My preference would be to have something like the Friendship/Partner Seal system from Fates, where you can get just one or two new classes, but you have to earn them over time by having particular characters battle alongside each other, and they're mutually exclusive with other options.
        * That system generates emergent narratives, and it feels like a significant reward for engaging with the support system, much more than 15 extra hit and 3 damage or whatever.
    * We also don't know how promotions work. I would like to have branched promotions again.
* The Emblem System
    * The big new mechanic in this game is the Emblem system, where characters summon the spirits of former Fire Emblem protagonists by putting on Emblem Rings. In Three Houses terms, Emblem Rings seem to be a hybrid of battalions and adjutants. They're equippable, but it's unclear whether or not they can be transferred or changed during a mission.
    * Unlike battalions, Emblems provide their bonuses directly to a unit's raw stats, like Strength or Movement, and not the derived stats, such as Physical Attack or Hit. In this respect, Emblems act more like the Pair Up system from Awakening and Fates.
    * We know that Emblems and their users can perform special fusion attacks together.
        * For example, we see Alear and Marth fusing into a kind of dragon-man wielding Mercurius. 
            * Marth's standard weapon is the Rapier, not Mercurius, so it's possible that the legendary weapons may only be available during these special attacks.
    * Emblems provide up to four abilities on top of the lead character's three.
        * When Alear wears Marth's Emblem Ring, two of Marth's abilities are labeled "Type Bonus!"; presumably, you have to match something between the hero and the ring bearer to get those bonuses.
        * Sigurd only gives three abilities to Alfred, with only one type bonus.
    * Dual strikes are back. This time, they are performed by the Emblems. It looks like these attacks are once again completely consistent, as in Fates, rather than happening based on a random chance as in Awakening or Three Houses. If I'm right about that, I'm very glad to see it. Attack Adjutants in Three Houses were a big step backwards.
    * It's interesting to see that some old heroes apparently have had their weapons changed. For example, Lucina wields a bow. That's presumably derived from the Archer class she's guaranteed to inherit from Chrom in Awakening, but her natural Lord and Great Lord classes cannot use bows—they only get swords and lances. A lot of former protagonists use swords, and it's good that they've taken steps to shake that up.
        * Weapon type might be one of the factors that determines whether you qualify for Type Bonuses or not, in which case it would be pretty important for the Emblems to have a reasonable amount of weapon diversity.
    * It appears that part of the main quest in this game is to find all the Emblem Rings, so presumably the Emblems are locked behind story progression, but I wouldn't be surprised if some are acquired in optional paralogues instead.
    * We also don't know whether every character on the roster can use every Emblem as soon as you get them. It's possible that specific characters may have affinity for specific Emblems and will be able to use those immediately, while other characters with less affinity might have to wait longer to unlock them. However, given the existence of permadeath in this series, I think that's unlikely. More realistically, some characters might just start with a higher Bond level with specific Emblem Rings. We don't yet know what Bond level does.
* Map Design
    * Looking at the stages shown in the trailer, we can see that villages are making their return after being absent since Fates. I would like to see even more kinds of map events and side objectives, elaborating on some of the mechanisms in Three Houses and the Dragon Veins in Fates.
    * You can see some of the map layouts and enemy placements in the minimaps shown on-screen when units are moving around. We have probably only seen the earliest maps, including some of the basic tutorial stages, so I wouldn't read too much into these things. What we've seen is probably not a representative sample.
* The New Home Base
    * The last major gameplay element I want to cover is the new home base, the successor to the monastery from Three Houses. The monastery got very tiresome, but I'm sure that a lot of lessons were learned from that game, so I'm optimistic about this iteration. I expect this experience to be faster, smoother, and less repetitive. It looks more compact, at least.
    * We see a clothing and accessories menu. Playing dress-up is fun, so I'm glad they've expanded on that feature.
    * There might be some kind of ranching or farming mechanic with the animals. If so, I hope it's not a huge time sink, or at least that it's way more engaging than stuff like fishing was.
    * Otherwise, I don't have a lot to say about this right now. I'm sure we'll find out more as we get closer to release.

Graphics & UI
* Graphically, Fire Emblem Engage looks a lot cleaner than its predecessor, and it seems to run better too.
* I like the bright color palette.
* Maps and environments look nicely detailed, and the transition from the map view to the battle scenes is way smoother than in Three Houses.
* Battle scenes seem to account for terrain and elevation, which is neat—for example, we see an archer who shoots down an enemy pegasus knight from atop a tower, and the engagement is actually animated that way, without teleporting the enemy to the top of the tower or the archer down to the ground or anything like that.
* Character stats have been rearranged, and now Luck is last, after Defense and Resistance. This isn't necessarily a problem, but I know it'll take me a little while to get used to that. Defense and Resistance are really important, and their positions right at the end of the list made it easier to find them at a glance, but that's been addressed in this game by making them visible in a bar at the bottom of the screen even without bringing up a unit's details.
* The Protection and Resilience stats are gone. Those were derived from raw Defense and Resistance by adding in the effects of battalions and equipment. Because they've been removed, I suspect that equippable items (other than the Emblem Rings) are gone too.
* In the battle forecast, the attack sequence is shown in order, with one side's attack, then the counterattack, and then any follow-up attack if applicable. I like that.

Character Design
* On the subject of character designs: I don't like the look of the main character, Alear, because it's ridiculous. But I expect that I'll get used to it.
    * An advantage here is that it's something you're going to look at all the time, so eventually it will become normal. It would probably be worse if the minor characters had the crazy designs; think of Xenoblade 2, where almost all of the rare blades and several of the antagonists were drawn by different artists whose styles were not aligned with that of the primary character designer. Some of the guest artists' characters look ridiculously out of place, and you never really get used to them.
* Overall, I like the style of the other new characters in "Engage," but no one really stands out to me yet.
* The classic Fire Emblem protagonists do look very spiffy, and I enjoy the cobra-like design of the evil dragon. It's cool!

Story
Speaking of the evil dragon, let's talk about the story as we know it so far.
* In any Fire Emblem game, you can always expect a handful of standard story beats. You will face a misguided enemy ruler and their evil vizier; the big bad will be an ancient fell dragon or a worshipper of the same; and your side will probably be aided by a divine dragon who has been locked in conflict with the fell dragon for ages. "Engage" appears to be playing all of those elements perfectly straight. There's nothing very new or exciting about the plot as shown so far, with the only wrinkle being that the plot coupons are rings that summon the spirits of old protagonists. 
* However, I'm suspending judgment on the story. Even if this is all we get, it's possible to execute a basic story very well. I'd honestly rather the writing team aim for that than try something that's way beyond their reach, the way they did for the last two original games. Sure, the writing for Three Houses was much better than for Fates, but there's an entire route and a quarter of the playable cast that gets almost no specific focus because they ran out of time and resources to make anything special for the Golden Deer. The two Black Eagles routes also felt undercooked.
* As story elements, I have no idea how well the returning heroes will land. Characters like Marth and Sigurd have a lot of fanservice value, but only to a relatively small part of the player base. I hope those characters don't take a lot of the focus away from the new ones.
* I do find it very amusing that Alear is basically Sleeping Beauty. And I hope that this time around, the writers actually do something, anything, with the fact that the lord is a Manakete. If not, I'll be very disappointed.

Overall Thoughts
* Overall, I feel good about FE17. The parts of the game that I immediately dislike are things that I don't expect to be very important in the long run. What will get me to play a new Fire Emblem game for a thousand hours or more is the gameplay. From what we can tell so far, there are a bunch of interesting gameplay ideas coming in Fire Emblem Engage. Will they all be good ones, in the end? We'll find out. But in the meantime, I'm cautiously optimistic.
 

From a community post. Thought I'd share.

[Azz]

Probably one of my favourite FE youtubers. Am hoping Engage does have great gameplay solely to see how he would completely over analyse the mechanics and create the most frustrating and mind boogling but highly interesting ways to micromanage and optimise the game like he has done for TH Maddening and Conquest

[AnonymousSpeed]

Yeah, Zoran is pretty great. While I doubt Engage will give him quite as much room for magic-making as Conquest, I still hope to see some inspiring takes from him.

As for the takes he's already posted-

48 minutes ago, AnonymousSpeed said:

* The classic Fire Emblem protagonists do look very spiffy, and I enjoy the cobra-like design of the evil dragon. It's cool!

I really didn't like the cobra design at first, but I've warmed up to it pretty quickly. I wouldn't say it's because it's cool, but rather because it's cartoony and exaggerated, which fits the overall aesthetic we've seen so far. He's a big silly dragon in a big silly world, whereas Grima, Rhea, or Medeus are too grizzled and scaly in their dragon forms for the world they inhabit.

[Alastor15243]

3 minutes ago, AnonymousSpeed said:

He's a big silly dragon in a big silly world

Honestly the nicest thing I feel confident in saying about Engage so far is this, that the game isn't even trying to convince me it's going to have the capacity to make me cry. Both Fates and 3H had trailers that, at least to me, drastically oversold how cool their story was actually going to be and I wound up incredibly disappointed. Here I know it's going to be a clown show from the start, and I've lost all capacity to be disappointed in that. If it's dumb, it'll be fun to laugh at.

[Zapp Branniglenn]

So he's a 3DS FE kind of guy? Kind of strange then that he has no opinion on Emblems being Pair Up Stat Backpacks and whether that ought to be cause for concern. I'm a lifetime away from my playthrough of Awakening, but at least I could appreciate the drawback of giving up an entire unit slot to make one of them better. Engage doesn't seem to present even that level of drawback in using it. Especially if he is correctly guessing that there are no other accessories that can be equipped in place of an Emblem Ring (though I'm not sure why he's drawing that conclusion so early)

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The Build stat, sometimes previously known as Constitution, is back, and presumably so is weapon weight.
        * I think I prefer this system to the version where Strength mitigates weight. It opens up more design space, because for example you can have a mage with tons of Build who can carry heavy equipment without also being good at physical combat.

Not sure I can agree with this comment. Especially when we have no idea if the stat will level up, or be manipulatable in any way. And how do you know mages can use regular physical weapons like in Three Houses? Feels like a moot point if not. Mages having a use for the strength stat is really interesting and helps differentiate them, even in a game with no reclassing. Like, Soren is right on the cusp of getting doubles on Hard mode FE9, but not with higher tiers of wind magic. 

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An advantage here is that it's something you're going to look at all the time, so eventually it will become normal. It would probably be worse if the minor characters had the crazy designs; think of Xenoblade 2, where almost all of the rare blades and several of the antagonists were drawn by different artists whose styles were not aligned with that of the primary character designer. Some of the guest artists' characters look ridiculously out of place, and you never really get used to them.

I'm seeing this specific comparison parroted a lot just about everywhere: "At least it's better than XC2". Why is that the bar, and not previous Fire Emblem games? Or even the latest Xenoblade game if we MUST compare to anime guff? In Three Houses you get this dialogue-less cutscene upon reaching the Monastery that shows all of the students, plus the two other teachers. And before they say a word you've got a correct impression of every single one of them just based on their clothes, their expressions, and what you see them doing. Something like that ought to be the bar for Distinctive Character Design. 

Edited September 16, 2022 by Zapp Branniglenn