Fire Emblem Engage

          (I haven’t put this out already? Yikes, it’s been sitting here for a while now.) Ouuuuu Fire Emblem is really pissing me off. I’m probably doing something wrong, cause I always do but the game itself is just being more difficult then it needs to be, as far as I’m concerned.

            When I start a mission I look at what the enemy has and I go from there. They have flying things okay one archer should do, got some armor boys I’ll have a magic person, swords, lances, axes, yep I’ve got those two, let’s go! Then the mission starts and I’m slowly chipping away at their army and oh would you look at that, some more flying things are coming from the back and oh what do we have here? Troops coming out of all these forts that I’m around, fantastic. I already put the game on normal after a few missions because I was not looking to do the same mission over and over because I was loosing troops so I figured normal/casual would be a breeze and once I got a better handle on the game I’d try it again but harder. Nope. I will get through this, I will finish this game even if I have to brute force my way to the boss of the level and loose all my units in the process. I would like to start over and pair certain people up with different emblem rings but that seems like way too much work right now. I feel like in this game they scale difficulty by you taking more damage, you’re units dodge more and do less damage to the enemies. I think in Awakening the difficulties had differences. I could check, my 3DS is just over there but I don’t want to. I think the easier difficulty had fewer enemies and they were in different places but when I changed difficulties in Engage there seem to be the same amount of enemies. 

            This whole, “more units show up whenever the fuck we want” thing also annoys me because it just makes the missions that much longer. I feel like the missions shouldn’t take all that long but they can take forever. If you’re going to bring in more troops then I should be able to get new troops or get fallen troops at forts or something. The whole weapon triangle thing barely works also. Like, it works but at the same time there are other nuances that are in play as well. This guy has an axe, okay so I’ll use a sword, it didn’t work, oh he’s armored so it doesn’t work… I also don’t understand how “backup” units work. I assume if you attack with them next to the unit they’ll help out but sometimes they don’t and sometimes Alear comes from halfway across the map to take a swing.

            All the extra things after the mission are ridiculous too. After a mission you first can run around the area you were in and collect things and talk to people and they might give you stuff, adopt animals then leave. Once you go back to base there’s a whole plethora of crap you can do; Cooking, fishing, play in the orchard, play with the horses, play in the pool, talk to everyone, see everyone bonding, fly around and break targets and sleep? Then someone comes and wakes you up? Why? Not only that but there’s all sorts of upgrading weapons, going into the ring room and makes bond rings, inherit skills, cleaning rings and probably more junk then I can remember.

            A few random things; At one point during the story you lose the rings you’ve collected and Alear cries about it and I jokingly used the Tony Stark quote “If you’re nothing without the [rings] then you shouldn’t have [them].” The immediate missions after and I’m like “oh my God I need these rings! They were more helpful then I realized!” You can’t change anything about the playable character but you can change your name, I don’t see why when they gave the character a name already. It’s the same with the older Zelda games, we know his name is Link, why change it? But if they’re going to let you change the name they could at least try to do what Blue Archive does and have the characters actually say your name, as long as it’s a real word/name. I thought it would be funny too if the main character just changed gender from shot to shot. They do that during the intro video (pretty sure) so I thought it’d be funny for it to happen the whole game. It’s kind of like whoever is talking to Alear they see whatever they want to, male, female… lizard person. The other thing I noticed was in a conversation with Alear and Lucina Alear says something about “in [Lucina’s] world.” Why “world?” Wouldn’t it be “in the past” or “during your time?” And not only that but Veyle also says something about not wanting to destroy “this world.” It could just be that she’s just calling this land a “world” but I find it odd.

            Anyways, I think I’ve just been spoiled from 40k Mechanicus but honestly they have some good mechanics in that game. Hitting units that pass by your units, a unit being able to use more than one action in a turn, those are good things that Fire Emblem should look to adopt. Okay, I’ve had enough of this, bye bye. (As I said at the beginning, it's been a bit since I've wrote this and I haven't finished Engage yet. Metroid Prime and Wild Hearts just came out so I'm fiddling with those along with Apex again. Maybe some day I'll finish Engage and Pokemon Scarlet and whatever else I'm still sitting on. Miles Morales.)

     @AztecSauce