[Game Journal] Bay's Gaming Journal

Yeah, so we're starting off with FE Engage! So funny story first. When I signed up for the PC Gaming Challenge I more or less thought what games I wanted to play. I intended to either do Persona 5 Royal or finish up getting Spiritomb in Pokemon Legends Arceus to finally battle Arceus for my first game of the year. Then most of January I got distracted filling out the pokedex in Pokemon Scarlet. By the time I got done with that, FE Engage launched and, well, got a copy of the game lol. Now I intended to do semi-regular updates with my progress of FE Engage, but then I just kept going and going and going and...

So what I'll do is summarize what's been going with my progress so far. I might try to do one or two more updates as follow ups of my progress. Okay, let's do this!

Alright, so FE Engage is the latest installment of the Fire Emblem franchise. You play as Alear who wakes up from a thousand year slumber. They are then tasked of finding the 12 Emblem rings (based on past FE characters) in order to save the world from the main Big Bad.

So far I've played a very good chunk of the game up to Chapter 22 last night. Overall the story is much more lighthearted than Three Houses with the plot focusing on good vs. evil. For those that prefer Three Houses' more political and moral depth might be slightly disappointed on that front. I don't mind that however! There are some intense moments that I enjoyed like in Chapters 10 and 11, Chapter 17, and Chapters 21 and 22. While the plot twist in the later game folks might already guess, it's moreso the domino effect that happens after that had me on the edge of my seat!

I also enjoy some of the characters, too. I still kinda prefer the Three Houses cast, but that's because I've been with the Houses kiddos for three years and they still live in my mind rent free lol. Engage meanwhile I benched several characters that I haven't gotten to know them through supports yet. I'm sure though once I watch some supports on Youtube I'll like a lot of them too. So far Alfred, Yunaka, Merrin, and Diamante are my favorites!


(Semi-related to both characters and plot, it's actually nice to see the royal characters Alfred, Diamante, Ivy, and Timmera work together. While I like the FE House lords a lot, me thinking how they could've worked together always made my heart ache and also tired of the discourse over Dimitri or Edelgard is better and this is saying from a Dimitri stan LMAO. )

Some folks might be surprised to find out that this is actually my second FE game with FE Three Houses being my first. I did watch a playthrough of FE Awakening a while back, so I'm aware of Awakening's lore too. I also read up some of FE Fates, Corrin's, and FE 4's, Sigurd's plot. Otherwise I don't know too much of the other games/world. Despite that, I still appreciate the different emblem's backstories when doing the paralogues.


Gameplay so far is fun, maybe moreso than Three Houses. The break/smash system added to the weapons triangle is fun, and the Engage system even moreso. I ended up doing a quite a few skimishes to grind my units, so they're a bit overlevled now haha. The skimishes are a bit harder than the main story units though as the skimishes scaled according to the average levels of your units, making trying to get lower-leveled units catch up harder.

Some fun gaming moments in my playthrough:

-At one point in Chapter Nine a whole bunch of armored enemies ganged up on Diamant. I had him equiped Armorslayer and he pretty much took them out Dimitri style lol.
-Lucina's paralogue at first I thought won't be too hard because not too many enemies. Near the end I had Alear go against Lucina. Lucina did a critical on me, thus defeating me. Luckily the game let me use the dragon crystal to go back and redo the turn lol.
-Sigurd's paralogue at first wasn't too bad until I had my units preparing to cross the bridge. Before I was able to do that my next turn, though, he came with a freaking battalion lol. When it was Sigurd's turn, he attempted to attack Alfred but missed and Alfred (with Lyn as his Emblem) defeated him.
-Chapter 20 is where I want to strangle Griss. That particular map some areas are dark unless you bring some torches, which I did by buying some behorehand. Despite that, Griss used Warp Ragnarok a couple times, including at Alear. A few enemies then rushed at Alear, defeating them LMAO.
-Actually, the majority of the boss fights can be summed up in this tweet I just saw on my timeline haha. I've been informed that also happens in 3 Houses maddening mode, which nope I'm too scared to do maddening haha.


My current team and their classes (under spoilers because of two late-game recruits I snagged ):


I think that's all I wanted to say about my progress on Engage so far! Next time I'll be doing some paralogues, try to S-rank Alfred, and get through endgame!

Hello, and welcome to my second post of my Fire Emblem Engage playthrough! I finished the game a couple weeks ago and meant to post this sooner, but I got very sick and things got delayed oops. One advantage though is I get a bit more time to stew in my thoughts. For this entry I'll be talking about the final few chapters/paralogues and overall thoughts of my experience.

So after finishing Chapter 22, I did a bunch of paralogues I skipped. The biggest reason I did that was to use those to train up my final two recruits. Glad I did as I also get some mileage out of them. I heard from friends and others that Leif's paralogue was bonkers and boy howdy they were right. Poor Yunaka kept getting hit with ballistas, she needed to be healed several times lol.

There's one paralogue where you get the pact ring to be used to S-Rank a character. When I started that paralogue and got the pact-ring quickly I thought, "oh that's it?" Only to then get bombarded with Corrupted enemies and had to defeat them all. There were so many haha, but I managed and then used the pact-ring to S-rank Alfred!


Oh yeah, so on Wednesday, Feb 8, after the Nintendo Direct the game updated with the recreation feature. (I also know the second wave of DLC came also, but I didn't purchase the DLC at this time lol). I was very close to the ending of the main story, so I used as much of that feature as I can to get Alfred and his sister Celine's supports. And ahhhh let's just say I want to hug Alfred, poor him. =<

After finishing off the last of the paralogues, I went and did the final few chapters. There were some fun gameplay moments during endgame, highlights being:



Some final thoughts on characters and story:

So far I've played a very good chunk of the game up to Chapter 22 last night. Overall the story is much more lighthearted than Three Houses with the plot focusing on good vs. evil. For those that prefer Three Houses' more political and moral depth might be slightly disappointed on that front. I don't mind that however! There are some intense moments that I enjoyed like in Chapters 10 and 11, Chapter 17, and Chapters 21 and 22. While the plot twist in the later game folks might already guess, it's moreso the domino effect that happens after that had me on the edge of my seat!

I also enjoy some of the characters, too. I still kinda prefer the Three Houses cast, but that's because I've been with the Houses kiddos for three years and they still live in my mind rent free lol. Engage meanwhile I benched several characters that I haven't gotten to know them through supports yet. I'm sure though once I watch some supports on Youtube I'll like a lot of them too. So far Alfred, Yunaka, Merrin, and Diamante are my favorites!

Click to expand...

So this is what I mentioned in my last log, and my feelings are still more or less the same! I will add it was a little disappointing The Hounds backstories get crammed near endgame as they do seem like interesting enemies overall. Mauvier gets hits with this the least as he has supports with the other characters, but even then that's near endgame. I guess if I were to put The Hounds backtories more naturally, maybe during the Solem arc and after as that's when we went against them a whole bunch of times lol. A part of me also wished the Recreation feature came sooner so that I can do more supports lol. Maybe next playthrough!


Overall enjoyed this game more than I expected! This made me want to try a few other older FE games eventually. I think next I'll finish up some stuff in Pokemon Legends Arceus and then finally Persona 5 Royal!