New Trailer

[Florete]

Story seems generic as can be. At least they're not getting our hopes up.

[Sidereal Wraith]

Man I miss Three Houses, and I haven’t even beaten it yet. Engage is going to be either really good or really bad. I just can’t believe how corny some of the character designs are, especially the villains.

Edited November 16, 2022 by Sidereal Wraith

[Armchair General]

3 hours ago, DefyingFates said:

It makes you wonder if we'll get an equivalent of the "time skip reveal" trailer of FE3H that went completely off-the-rails with drumming up the conflict and hype

I'm half-convinced that this is probably the big preview trailer that we were waiting for. If we're going by the number of characters that were already revealed and assume that each of the other two kingdoms provide an similar amount of retainers, it'll be pretty close to the 36 that Vincent has predicted.

Of course, we haven't gotten an in-depth look at the gameplay; so who knows what will happen in December?

[Azz]

I imagine for anything to come in the future, we might get one more glimpse of gameplay late December/early January pre release but I have a feeling everything else we get will be relegated to twitter and on coming magazine articles.

[ciphertul]

I don't know, one of my most hated tropes is the enemy has the same power but opposite as you. Further more the clown girl seems to be psycho great now we got Peri fused with Henry that is pretty lame... had high hopes for her. The one girl looks ripped straight out of Pokemon Sun/Moon she for real looks Alolan. Not feeling any of the characters so far.

[Fabulously Olivier]

22 minutes ago, Sidereal Wraith said:

Man I miss Three Houses, and I haven’t even beaten it yet. Engage is going to be either really good or really bad. I just can’t believe how corny some of the character designs are, especially the villains.

The villains really do look like circus clowns. And yet somehow aren't scary in the least. How do you even manage that? Half of us are scared of clowns.

[Sidereal Wraith]

1 minute ago, Fabulously Olivier said:

The villains really do look like circus clowns. And yet somehow aren't scary in the least. How do you even manage that? Half of us are scared of clowns.

Less of the Tales of series and more of The Ten Who Were Taken please.

[Fabulously Olivier]

2 minutes ago, Sidereal Wraith said:

Less of the Tales of series and more of The Ten Who Were Taken please.

That's an unwarranted insult to the Tales series. This doesn't look like an A-list JRPG series. It looks like a C-list mobile game.

[Metal Flash]

Still pretty mixed on the designs. I don`t find any of them awful, but ones like the pink haired girl are a bit over the top for my liking. I`d say that the dudes are more to my taste.

Hope the villains can at least be entertaining, maybe have some surprising depth. Not expecting anything special, but it would be nice.

[Sidereal Wraith]

1 minute ago, Fabulously Olivier said:

That's an unwarranted insult to the Tales series. This doesn't look like an A-list JRPG series. It looks like a C-list mobile game.

The Tales of series is a A-list JRPG series?

[Fabulously Olivier]

3 minutes ago, Sidereal Wraith said:

The Tales of series is a A-list JRPG series?

A or B list. I mean, it is one of the largest JRPGs not owned by Square, and its last entry did Xenoblade numbers. So that has to count for something. It also maintains its own annual fan convention.

 

It's certainly not an actual C-list RPG series, like modern day Shining or something.

[Etrurian emperor]

The character designs are all gaudy and in your face but in a good way. So far the designs are charming and convey a lot of personality. I also like the extra representation in the desert kingdom. They're all middle eastern looking which FE typically avoided doing with their desert characters before Claude came along. The villains might be your typical eeevil cultists but their designs are pretty personable so far which is a step up from the previous rogue galleries. 

The Avater potentially having some baggage seems like an interesting spin. Robin, Corrin and Byleth were all as milktoast as possible so a shady Avatar is very welcome.

Its a shame the world building comes off pretty poorly in the trailer. A ''kingdom of might'' like Ferox and an cultist kingdom like Plegia make it seem like all the uninspired and boring world building tropes of Awakening will be making their return.

[DefyingFates]

46 minutes ago, Etrurian emperor said:

Robin, Corrin and Byleth were all as milktoast as possible so a shady Avatar is very welcome.

I wouldn't put Byleth in that group due to the Crest stuff, but I'm with you in being excited to see what comes of Alear. We got an anti-hero (at best) in Edelgard so hopefully we can see that same treatment applied to an Avatar this time around.

47 minutes ago, Etrurian emperor said:

Its a shame the world building comes off pretty poorly in the trailer. A ''kingdom of might'' like Ferox and an cultist kingdom like Plegia make it seem like all the uninspired and boring world building tropes of Awakening will be making their return.

Yeah, Engage is missing the groundedness/ nuance of 3H, but tropes aren't necessarily a bad thing if they're executed well or experimented with. Koei Tecmo is helping with this I think, so I think there's some hope to be had.

[DaveCozy]

6 hours ago, CompteSecours said:

Why 12 rings when we only have 10 fingers ?

Well... Lord of the Rings got away with 20.

---

I dunno how I feel about the whole "blue" vs "red" theme they clearly got going on. Feels really predictable and cliche.

Trailer was cool though and its fun seeing more FE characters getting to show bad sides as well. I think that's what piqued my interest the most.

[vanguard333]

1 hour ago, DaveCozy said:

Well... Lord of the Rings got away with 20.

---

I dunno how I feel about the whole "blue" vs "red" theme they clearly got going on. Feels really predictable and cliche.

Trailer was cool though and its fun seeing more FE characters getting to show bad sides as well. I think that's what piqued my interest the most.

Lord of the Rings got away with 20 because the rings were all meant to be given to different people. That could also be the case here; the rings are not meant to be worn by the same person; they're each meant to be worn by a different person. I'm certain that will be the case in the gameplay for balancing purposes, but I wouldn't be surprised if that's also the case in the story.

 

I don't know how to feel either. On the one hand, blue = player-controlled units and red = enemy units is a staple of FE, so having it appear in-story makes sense for a game like Engage. On the other hand, as I am a redhead, I find the idea of characters turning into redheads when corrupted by some form of evil magic to be a bit uncomfortable. I'm sure that wasn't intentional on IS's part, but it still feels weird.

Edited November 16, 2022 by vanguard333

[Hawkwing]

The trailer was alright. No new gameplay was shown, though to be fair, I expect that to be its own video. Especially for a strategy game, where you need to sit down and explain what the mechanics are and how they interact, which isn't that engaging unless you're already interested in the game.

 

Anyway, a bunch of new characters were shown off, and I... don't hate the designs, but I'm not a fan of them either. I do appreciate how bright and colorful the costumes are, and everyone's outfit looks distinct. At the same time, I dearly hope the tone is lighthearted and goofy because I cannot take these designs seriously at all. There's so much needless stuff on them that I'm wondering what the heck the mornings routines of these characters are in order for them to find time to put all these trinkets on, and only a handful of characters look ready for a fight. I don't think the outfits are bad so much as I think it's a weird direction to take for a medieval fantasy series with a heavy focus on battles.

I do feel I would tear into this aspect a lot more if they didn't already reveal that alternative costumes will be a thing. Chances are, if I'm not a fan of a characters current outfit, I can replace it with something I do like. Besides, Fire Emblem is no stranger to weird armor designs, and as odd as Engages outfits can be, I don't think they reach the lows of Awakening and Fates "characters literally fight without pants" (even if I also think that Awakening and especially Fates had stronger armor designs at their peak). At the end of the day, I'd say I'm more perplexed than anything regarding Engages art direction.

 

Being limited to 12 rings of just the protagonists with no villains or side characters is disappointing, if unsurprising. Fire Emblem Heroes has been out for 5 years now, and that game is still missing some notable characters, and Three Hopes managed to fill in the roster of a Warriors title by reusing most of the cast from Three Houses. As cool as having several villains and side characters from past games would be, I can easily see how the workload to do so would add up quickly and that's alongside creating an entirely new cast from scratch. On the gameplay front, we haven't seen the full extend of how Engaging works yet, so perhaps anything more than 12 characters started to cause issues of some kind, either from being overcomplicated or unbalanced or some characters were too similar to each other or whatever. The decision didn't come out of nowhere, is what I'm getting at.

 

As for the story, I'm sticking with my assessment when the game was revealed that Engage will either be extremely formulaic and have a ton of fun with its tropes and cliches, or there will be some major twist(s) that turn the entire game on its head. The setup in the trailer was so straightforwardly generic that I can't imagine it going any other way.

Anyway, the trailer didn't do much for me personally. I still plan on picking the game up eventually, even though it's not a day 1 buy for me as I'd like to see some reviews and fan feedback first. Still, the next few days should be interesting as the trailer is analyzed and dissected and more details come out.

[Ziegenpeter]

I assume this is what it looked like when they designed some of these characters:

 

 

Anyway, I said more than enough about the character design and the general tone of the story, so I won't repeat myself here*.

What I want to say is that I assume this trailer is the Engage equivalent of 3H's timeskip trailer from E3 2019. The 3H trailer was extremely exciting and hyped me for the game. Admittedly, one of the reasons why my excitement was so high was because the trailer basically confirmed the thanibomb-leaks.But still, great trailer.

Now when I watched the Engage story trailer, all I felt was fremdschämen. At this point, the gameplay has to do most of the heavy lifting. Luckily, gameplay-wise it looks pretty compelling so far.

 

*Believe me, it was really hard to not go on a rant about the villains, like wtf is this goofy-ass circus...

 

[Azz]

I watched the JPN trailer and I'm pretty sure red-haired bro from brodius introduced himself as Dimante (?) which we of course didn't know before. Nice to have a name for him

[Ivy Wife Supremacy]

50 minutes ago, Azz said:

I watched the JPN trailer and I'm pretty sure red-haired bro from brodius introduced himself as Dimante (?) which we of course didn't know before. Nice to have a name for him

It was in the Leaks he was already confirmed as Diamanté there just people stopped following them.

Edited November 16, 2022 by Chloé Waifu Supremacy

[zuibangde]

3 hours ago, Fabulously Olivier said:

The villains really do look like circus clowns. And yet somehow aren't scary in the least. How do you even manage that? Half of us are scared of clowns.

I have a feeling that they’re not villains and are playable characters.
 

Throughout the trailer we see multiple people being against us and we can safely assume that that the malig knight and pink haired jester will be playable characters since they’re featured with other playable characters on the box art/opening montage.

[Ivy Wife Supremacy]

4 minutes ago, zuibangde said:

I have a feeling that they’re not villains and are playable characters.
 

Throughout the trailer we see multiple people being against us and we can safely assume that that the malig knight and pink haired jester will be playable characters since they’re featured with other playable characters on the box art/opening montage.

Probably mini antags but not truely evil probably reasons plus Malig Knight woman is heavily featured with the other fellow lords so yeah I guess Jester girl is  probably another lord with a group.

Edited November 17, 2022 by Chloé Waifu Supremacy

[Seazas]

In a franchise with about a thousand different Fire Emblem characters + designs. I'll give Engage credit for being bold enough to stand out like this and they definitely do stand out. In the broader FE scale, it won't be difficult to recognize who's who thanks to the wildly different costumes.

Edited November 17, 2022 by Seazas

[Sentinel07]

5 hours ago, Florete said:

Story seems generic as can be. At least they're not getting our hopes up.

Story seems like a point for point copy of Awakening with a little bit of Fates thrown in.

Talk about bare minimum effort.

[Ivy Wife Supremacy]

I’m happy for that Awakening is one of my favorite games so taking any bit from it is a W for me plus a bit from Fates hopefully improving what they tried to do with Corrin!

[Mysterique Sign]

The Spanish trailer has subtitles
The Fell Dragon is Sombron and the other three countries are Brodia, Elusia, and Solm

Edited November 17, 2022 by Mysterique Sign