engagement farming, pt. 10
Welcome back, beloved readers, to Engagement Farming, our ongoing playthrough of Fire Emblem Engage! I decided to take last week off and then I played some chapters for this week but forgot to actually write them up. So we're doing that now! Let's begin.
This was another "one story chapter, one paralogue" week. The story is that the secret haunted ruins where the Queendom of Solm has hidden its secret bonus Emblem Ring is being attacked by monsters, and also there's a Dancer there (capital D because it's Fire Emblem and they let your units go a second time! Neat!). We have to save him! We do get to meet with Veyle again, and she's back in her Nice Veyle persona and she is very distraught over how we're mad at her for being evil actually (because these personae appear to not be aware of each other). Then she meets one of her evil handlers and he's like "They probably are just imagining that you did evil things, you would definitely remember" and she's like "Okay that makes sense" and decides to stop worrying about it. This doesn't seem sustainable, for an evil dragon lady.
Anyway. The story map had a new gimmick: miasma! This gives your units -20 to Defense and Resistance and enemy units +20 to the same stats; this is a gimmick that you can deal with with careful positioning but you're meant to use the new Emblem's ability to create terrain that overwrites other terrain instead.
We'll start with the problem: when equipped on a Dancer (or other Qi Adept unit), which it is (you don't have a choice about this), Corrin's Dragon Vein ability creates ice barriers as obstacles; these will break at the start of your next turn, or you can spend some of your units' actions breaking the obstacles you just made. It also discourages you from playing with the Dancer's core ability, dancing. Other unit types generate passable types of terrain which would make this a lot more usable, but in this one you are choosing between doing something right now and clearing the terrain.
But I do like this gimmick. It forces you to deal with it; even your most powerful units will be dealing almost no damage against warded enemies; you can probably deal some damage to them if you end up with imprecise positioning but it takes a commitment of resources. But it doesn't get in your way: the miasma doesn't slow you down. So it rewards careful positioning--you can't just brute force your way through the gimmick--but you can afford a few mistakes--you can probably dedicate some resources to beating up an enemy that ends up in the miasma squares, it just might cost you. Then there are some reinforcements who spawn behind you with very high stats, so you're encouraged to push forward rather than dealing with them. It's a fun map; I would have liked it more if the intended use of the provided Emblem didn't feel a little self-sabotaging, but it still worked. (It is, indeed, entirely possible that that would have been too good and made the gimmick feel ignorable. Who knows!)
Our other map was Ike's paralogue. As with all the others, this one was a kill-the-boss map; it starts out looking like a fairly standard rout map, but regular reinforcements and Ike deciding to aggro after a few turns (I don't remember on which turn) made this turn into a defend map pretty quickly. Ike hits hard, so I found myself having to retreat into a safer area to the south to deal with him, and in order to do that I had to kill all those guys quickly.
Once he was in range of my army it was a fairly simply matter to clean him up, but I was not in a good position to absorb his initial attacks; a little bit of luck and a little bit of experimentation got me there in the end, but it felt like I had to work for it. It didn't help that I made some bad choices on army configuration in this; there were a lot of enemies that wanted me to use mages and I decided to bench one of my mages and field an archer in her stead, so I had to make some suboptimal choices to get through bits of this map. There weren't even any fliers.
This is the sort of map I enjoy the most: feeling outnumbered and surrounded and like I have to really use every tool in my kit in order to get out of it. So far I've been finding the paralogue maps pretty enjoyable, which makes sense because I'm pretty sure most of them are popular maps from the games the characters come from.
Anyway. That's what I got for you this week. We should be back on Monday, probably! Until then, friends, take care of yourselves.