Lack of End Game

[BloodRonin]

After beating the game twice on maddening (almost done a 3rd)  I am honestly bored of engage now. These houses kept me invested so much longer I suppose due to all the branching stories. 

Hopefully the dlc story will be released sooner than later.

[Azz]

Yeah I agree. I do think a NG+ would've been much appreciated or at least smth special post-game rather than just 'do skirmishes!'.

I kinda wish the recall battle thing that you can do in the DLC paralogues was an option in all the battles, I think it would've been fun. I also would've loved a creature campaign ala SS. The four royals, the four hounds and Sombron are right there and would've been great rewards for doing certain challenges. 

I do think if grinding were easier to do, the postgame would be more fun. But with how restricted grinding is, you can't even get weaker units up to par easily so post game you're stuck with the few units you used during your playthrough and unable to experiment with other units.

The achievements are also not enough imo. I'm trying to complete them all rn and most of them are super tedious and grindy to get which aren't fun. 

Overall, compared to Three Houses which was really fun to try and 100%, Engage hasn't been as Engaging in the long run.

[BloodRonin]

On 2/23/2023 at 3:33 PM, Azz said:

Engage hasn't been as Engaging in the long run.

Agreed 100%

[Alexmender]

I get the feeling IS intended for the AR-like mode to be the endgame of Engage. Grind the Tempest Trials/Relay Trials to max out your characters and get SP books to give them optimal builds, then create a challenging map and fight on challenging maps made by other players. 

For me that's irrelevant because I can do that in FEH and it's a lot easier to get your units going there. In Heroes it takes like 10 minutes or less to give a unit enough SP to completely deck them out, and despite all the complaints the powercreep help keep things kinda fresh as you won't find a perfect setup that will last until the servers go down which gives you a reason to keep playing (excluding gacha stuff and character collection, of course). 

Engage has the issue that you're probably going to want to play in Normal/Casual if you want to put the early game units in your AR map and rather than advance the story you're going to spend most of your time grinding skirmishes to max out every unit so the game. Then you have to farm TT to max out the Engage weapons to make them as threatening as possible, and that'll take a while because you need strong units to farm in TT level 50 with all the maxed out fliers and stuff. And to top it off, you need NSO to even make all that effort worthwhile (this depends on who you ask but I'm not going to pay for a subscription when I can get a better experience for free on my phone). That in and of itself makes the game an afterthought and doesn't sound very fun. 

So yeah, Engage does have an endgame but it's not one that's particularly, well, engaging. 

[CompteSecours]

The gameplay is so fun compared to TH, I'm 100% sure I will have more hours in Engage than in TH.

[Technoweirdo]

16 hours ago, CompteSecours said:

The gameplay is so fun compared to TH, I'm 100% sure I will have more hours in Engage than in TH.

I know I did. Oh, I *definitely* did -- but that doesn't excuse Engage's post game being a really slow grind that can be pretty awful on Maddening. Looking at you, fog-of-war skirmish at Ch. 11's map with units spread aaaaallll the way down the valley. And don't think I forgot you, still miasma-filled Ch. 19 map except you're nowhere near the flame cannons.

Even ignoring difficulty, the speed is an issue when something like obtaining the last few S-rank weapons requires amassing 360,000 gold, yet so far I've seen at most 4,000 at a time. Then there's forging which has its own gold costs (hopefully the gold grind to 360k gave you most of the ore). There's also forging Engage weapons which has its own, separate grind. And of course there's building all the units you had to neglect over the course of your playthrough. At least they fixed the support grind.

Like, I beat the game. Why does it feel so hostile?

[CompteSecours]

I know that some players love to grind endgame but it is just not the point of this game.

Isn't skimirshes and the Tower of Trial enough ? I remember grinding was very long in Awakening too. Or maybe they expect the player to grind in online mode ?

Edited February 26, 2023 by CompteSecours

[Taho]

19 hours ago, CompteSecours said:

The gameplay is so fun compared to TH, I'm 100% sure I will have more hours in Engage than in TH.

With 500+ hours on TH, I don't think Engage's going to keep me going that long. Or even half as much. I've just cleared the game in Hard/Classic (about 82hours), and I'm going to do a second run to try the characters I haven't tried, then I might go for a maddening run and that's probably going to be it. But I know TH still has possibilities I'd like to try (a second Noble/Commoner run with another house, for instance), whereas Engage really doesn't. At least, now that I've cleared it once, I can just skip-spam chapter convos and have fun on my second playthrough by focusing on the gameplay- which is top tier, no argument there.

Whe, I cleared the game, I spent the 120k they gave me to max out Brodia, and bring all others to lv 4, but I'm probably never going to open that save again, except to compare endgame teams. The lack of NG+ didn't bother me so much.

[Armchair General]

4 hours ago, CompteSecours said:

I remember grinding was very long in Awakening too. Or maybe they expect the player to grind in online mode ?

The thing with Awakening is that there was an bit of an limit to how powerful the Risen were and the stakes weren't as high as they are in Engage. Plus, it was kind of profitable if you only took on the timed spawns