TheHBK

Enjoyed it quite a bit. Replaying it now, trying some weird stuff. Trying to do a round-up: Story is trash (characters are ok though). Battles are great. Visuals are amazing. I love the look of the game. Music is very much FE-tier, good but nothing omgwtfbbq-amazing. Some tracks are a banger. Some are meh-to-bleh. It’s all the gameplay that’s around the battles which is so weird… Somniel is both a nice and enjoyable place yet many of the progression and boost mechanics feel superfluous. Some complexity can be good but here it feels like they tried to combine theme-park mini-games with party optimization mechanics and it’s just a chore all things considered. It’s really too bad because on paper why not but in practice it’s just a big mess of UI/UX issues in service of dubious mechanics. Oh well, skipping cutscenes and skipping most of those mechanics make for a fun game with some added « self-imposed » difficulty. Won’t comment on DLC because lol Fell Xenologue lol

Awakening and Fates definitely tried. Awakening was kind of a FE best-of made with ... let's just say minimal talent. But that's it. It had a minimal amount of talent so that it would feel mildly competent if nothing great. And Fates. Yeah, Fates kinda is nice-intentions-gone-awfully-wrong. But they tried. The whole idea of "let's split the three act basic storytelling layout over three different games which tell three different versions of a somewhat similar story so that the three narratives form a whole story" did fail miserably, but that was definitely a tentative. Engage feels like it was supposed to be an anniversary title with a silly narrative to back it up (a la FE Muso 1), but somewhere along the way they decided it needed to have some super dramatic cutscenes because Fire Emblem is known for its character deaths right? (spoiler alert, it's much more complicated than that, between Casual modes and players resetting on character losses) It's like they weren't going to try, yet decided along the way they'd try, yet wouldn't bother trying properly. As I already said, it makes no sense.

It's kinda weird to see some of the complaints. Characters are mostly fine. And the dialogue is okay is nothing stellar. It's just the whole story which makes no sense at any internal or meta-textual standpoint. I mean the story doesn't have like a ton of gigantic plot holes other then the usual stuff of "you can rewind time in gameplay, but not in cutscenes" and some other usual nonsense (villains turnaround, etc). It's just that you can tell in the cutscenes and voice acting that they were taking everything very seriously and dramatically which 1/ is nonsensical if this is supposed to be a lighthearted celebration of sorts, 2/ is unearned at best when the story makes absolutely zero efforts in building any kind of setup with a very honorable mention of the most "I'm gonna die in the next chapter" character introductions I've even seen. They wanna make every character death super dramatic except it's either a character we just met a chapter ago, so we don't care, or a character which gets its character development at the time of their death, which is just, like, yeah, whatever, you had a life, I guess 😑 But the dialog itself and the characters are fine. They're not the issue. The issue is the insane amount of plot contrivances and overuse of cheap tropes like mind-control... But then again it's weird because the story has some super-dark undertones with ton of efforts put into cutscenes, yet they never built any plot element bar one or two tops (with some twists you could see from 300 parsecs away) so it all falls flat when it happens, and yet they were seemingly going for a lighter "anniversary mood" with chill designs and a deluxe resort with the Somniel, so all this overplayed drama feels out-of-place and fake as hell. It's like they had no direction for the story and just wrote stuff which would somewhat justify the battles planned by the mission design team with the least amount of effort possible. It's like it was written at the last minute which can't be true given all the voice acting there is. It's legit one of the worst story I've ever experienced because you can never tell if they tried to be serious and failed, or tried to be tongue-in-cheek and failed, or didn't try yet put a ton of budget into it because the previous games were successful and let's burn some money. None of it makes sense. When even Fates made more sense, you know you screwed up.

I have no idea when the next waves will hit, but rumors have it the game was finished about a year ago and was "delayed" in accordance to Nintendo Schedule(tm), so I wouldn't be surprised it the DLC waves release earlier than what one would expect. But we'll see.

The problem is that due to the game structure, NG+ could easily break the game. There are arguments which could be made about keeping supports or even SP levels/unlocks. Bit then that would be one very limited NG+ option… And depending on how they do it, that could still be seriously gamebreaking.

One of the most baffling aspects of the plot is how disregarded the rings are compared to how powerful they’re supposed to be (and how useful you can witness them to be in gameplay). They just keep changing owners like no one ever watches over them. Like, I get that they wanted a desperate situation of losing the rings and all. Even if the justification is the lamest shit ever, it can somehow be advocated to be the villains being super powerful yadda yadda. But then the villains themselves lose their rings left and right lmao Like how am I supposed to take this story seriously when such important trinkets are disregarded by every side so that they can be moved around freely for gameplay purposes? I mean even with the stupid justification for losing them, getting them back doesn’t feel good when it should have! It’s just « yeah, lame-ass explanation from the writers so that you can get one ring back 😑 »

Weird to see people surprised by the 3H choice. It's the first mission which diverges based on your house choice (all previous missions are the exact same even if there is a slight variation at Gronder 1.0, or the training mission if you wanna be pedantic). It's the same as with Fates logic. It may not be the most memorable mission (debatable), but it's where the story actually diverges. Makes sense to use it. Edit: IIRC Gronder 2.0 is only present in half the routes. It wouldn't make sense to use it.

On paper, what's happening isn't that bad. There are some good ideas. Not overly original ideas. But good ideas nonetheless. The problem lies in the execution. There's no buildup. Almost every problem is resolved mere moments after they're introduced. Some of the story justifications are just silly. And not the fun kind. I mean the gameplay element of chapter 11 is good. But the whole "haha I stole your ring while you weren't paying attention, aren't you dumb hihihi!" I mean come on, put some semi decent justification like some big explosion or something. Not "I'm the writer and I can't even be bothered to justify what must happen in the gameplay as specified by the battle designers". I can deal with the usual silliness of letting the villains go after they're defeated even if they abuse this trope way too much here. I can deal with mono-dimensional stereotypical characters. I can deal with the avatar being lawful-good. I can even deal with the over-the-top avatar worship. It's just the cumulation of all that plus total absence of story construction plus abuse of cheap tropes like revealing the sob story of the villain at the very moment of their death which is makes it a very, very, very bad story, or at the very least a badly written one to the point I can't help but state it wasn't even written. They just pieced plot points together and called it a day. It's a shame because it's otherwise the FE with the best presentation to date. Lots of cutscenes. Quite well done ones at that. They just tell a story which is actually painful to follow, and not for the reasons some stories could be purposely painful.

If you're a minmaxer (and actually play that way), then hard is the way to go. You'll have to commit to a few units though, as the game won't let you feed lower level units (or at least not in a reasonable manner) due to how skirmishes work now, and while Hard isn't super duper hard, you need to have good army composition (and a few spares, as deployment slots can vary wildly, and some maps may require more of some unit types, like archers or tanks). I need to push through a proper Normal mode, but I think if you do some unit rotation (rotating all available units), and mostly skip skirmishes, it should still pose a non-negligible challenge, even it's very lenient. I'm personally very annoyed by the way skirmishes work in this game. The way they follow your level (or internal level or however it works) means that 1/ skirmishes can become WAY harder than the main campaign, 2/ you'll end up way overleveled for the main missions if you do them a tad too much, 3/ you can't really use them to feed less used units as you just can't spare a slot for a weak unit, let alone three. I enjoyed on the previous games how skirmishes were a way to gain a few levels if you wanted some leeway, but wouldn't allow you to level up near indefinitely, all while allowing you to feed lower level units. But it seems now they're just a way to provide some extra challenge ... at the cost of trivializing the campaign. Edit: I'm talking Classic "no death allowed" of course. And it seems to me that while Normal is far from being hard, it's not as braindead easy as 3H was. Even on Normal, you WILL lose units if you rollface.

Started on Hard Classic, but dropped to Normal Classic as the game won’t let you drop from Classic to Casual. The first like 7 missions were amazing with great balancing, but after a point skirmishes became unbelievably hard whereas the main missions became way too easy (skirmishes are fun), so I dropped the difficulty to be able to use all my previously benched units instead (even on Normal, if you’re underleveled, it’s not easy). From what I can tell, even if you beeline the campaign after chapter 11, the balancing is all over the place between the paralogues and the main missions. Which is too bad because it started great. From my own subjective impressions, I’d say that bar potential grinding, Normal sits between 3H Normal and Hard modes, and Hard sits between 3H Hard and Maddening mode. In other words, Normal can still be seen as the Easy mode, but isn’t as braindead as in 3H, and Hard, while arguably the Normal mode for veterans, actually puts up a good deal of challenge (if you don’t do skirmishes) even if some missions are weirdly easier.

I enjoy hard mode on the main campaign but I hate how it’s now basically impossible to keep all your units up to speed due to how skirmishes follow your level (however that exactly works) and how BRUTAL they are. They can quickly become way, WAY harder than anything the campaign can provide so far (nearing chapter 20 or something). I like skirmishes being hard, I just wish there was a way to avoid needing to bench a ton of units. And I’m not a fan of being stuck between a rock and a hard place where skirmishes become so insanely hard, and if you do them a tad too much (cause they’re fun), you outlevel the main campaign to the point it becomes a joke. So now I have a choice between near Lunatic-level skirmishes and Normal-level main missions. Such a weird design decision.

Yes. In Hopes, the war will last an undetermined time. What we see is shorter than in Houses. But there's the big unknown of the follow up.

What’s shown in 3H is arguably better. Shorter war. Less mandatory deaths. That being said, all routes end with some form of "the war will still rage on for years", so there’s that.

While the church isn’t the big bad of this world, part 1 of 3H makes it pretty clear they are, at best, SHADY AS FUCK. Almost half of part one is literally being the church’s death squad. With child soldiers. TWISTED is worse of course. They have no redeeming quality whereas the Church can be seen as a pillar of stability and is doing good deeds with stuff like orphanages etc. But it’s no surprise someone as Claude, which is arguably presented as someone with a progressive mind, would at list try to limit the Church’s influence, if not outright dismantle it, or at least strip it from all power.