engagement farming, pt. 11

23 Jun, 2026

We are back once again with Engagement Farming, our ongoing playthrough of Fire Emblem Engage! It's hot here and work has been kind of a mess this week¹, so I'm taking it easy with just one chapter. Let's begin!

Elusia has raised up an invasion fleet to burn Firene to the ground, apparently (I assume the goal is to get us to show up and defend so they can steal our Emblem Rings from us) and Hortensia's retainers have abandoned ship to give her an Emblem Ring, for . . . reasons? They didn't seem to know that she had joined Team Divine Dragon so I'm not sure what the goal was, but whatever. Now we have all of the ones that haven't been stolen, so if we want any more of them (and we do, that's our goal) we have to go steal them back. Not-Evil Veyle has a conversation with her obviously evil retainers about how her long lost sister is definitely real and still alive, and her retainers find this alarming, and they do the "Wait, that means--no, it can't be" style of cliffhanger where it's clear the character in question has made a revelation but we're meant to be in suspense, but . . . c'mon. We're half evil on our dad's side. We're blue and red, the colors of good and evil. Come on.

Anyway. This map was a gimmick map with the goal of "kill the two bosses"; the gimmick was a rapidly changing tide which would render most of the map into a movement-hindering high tide area which also gives a large Avoid penalty to units caught standing in it. The movement penalty essentially meant that anyone who wasn't a flier was not going anywhere until the tide receded; this effectively meant that if the tide came up and you had a unit isolated, that unit was in trouble. Also, at several points when the tide receded, more dudes showed up to fight. And there was a house in the far corner that I think was destined to be attacked by a dude who spawned up top to chase it down, but I murdered that guy before he could get there so we'll never know. It's a classic setup and no one in-game commented on it but I think at this point I'm just expected to notice, which is fair.

The tide gimmick was . . . fine? It never caused me serious problems; it was easy enough to visually distinguish which areas of the map would flood and which ones would be fine, and I usually try to position my units close enough to each other to help anyway. The reinforcements following low tide caused me problems a few times (mainly archers, because my fliers were obviously some of the most useful units on a map like this). My initial thought was that this gimmick didn't seem to work but I did have to plan around it. The fact that my plans work didn't mean that they weren't present.

The bosses did not pose much of a threat. Or, let me put it this way: I had Yunaka use her Emblem's ability to summon illusory doubles, in the hopes of stalling the first boss out while he moved into range; due to the fact that he was using one of the "go last, hit hard, push the enemy" weapons, every time he attacked one of the doubles they got to fight back. And he had a pretty low hit chance on them so he missed a lot, so he actually ended up killing himself on doubles while Yunaka herself went up to deal with the other boss. The other boss was the "high defense, extremely low res" lady you may remember from a few chapters ago, but she was just as vulnerable to chain attacks and poison as anyone, and also had an absurdly low hit rate against Yunaka's absolutely jacked speed stat, so Yunaka basically soloed that fight, as well. (That boss was also using a "always go last" weapon; she did, as her final action, initiate a combat that deleted her first health bar entirely before she could attack.)

I'm not convinced this means these bosses were weak, though. I think that doing Paralogues has put my party level a little ahead of the curve; I think my Yunaka has had very good stat growths; I invested in crafting her weapons early on; her Emblem gives her speed every time she kills someone when she initiates combat, so her already-high speed becomes silly high. And these bosses were both meant to be tanky guys who hit hard but have poor accuracy, so . . .

I dunno. The actual dominant strategy in Fire Emblem is to make one unit overpowered and just win all your fights that way. I try not to lean too hard on that--I really did want Yunaka to just soften up the bosses for the rest of the crew--but then the tide came in and some reinforcements from behind made everyone else have to turn around and deal with those, and there she was, soloing one boss while my tank distracted the other.

I think the new units we got this chapter (Hortensia's retainers) are . . . well, I know they're not the last, but they're among the last units we're getting, and I believe there's maybe ten chapters left at most. This, and the announcement of a release date for Fortune's Weave has me thinking about how the Three Houses method makes the mixing-and-matching and customizing that I enjoy a lot easier; you get most of your army early on, so you can get a pretty good idea of the full picture of what you want to accomplish, and plan it out accordingly; anyone else you recruit, you do so deliberately. With units being recruited this late in the game there's a lot less time to work towards giving them the setup you dream of. (We can expend some resources on it, of course, but those aren't limitless. (Unless you grind, I guess?))

That said, the Emblems, for all that they are extremely silly narratively, are very cool ways to customize your characters. An Emblem, especially when paired with the right character, opens up a lot of options, gives you another tool to solve problems creatively, and since many of the best options are locked behind Engaging, you have to decide when to use them. It feels good.

It feels, in fact, a lot like Battalions and Gambits, which I really enjoyed in Three Houses. The array of possible effects is a bit wider with Emblems, but at the end of the day it's the same thing: equip this for a passive bonus to stats; a few times a battle, activate this for a powerful effect that can get you out of a tight spot or give you some extra momentum.

In any case, that's all I got for you this week. I will see you next time for more, and until then, take care of yourselves.

#engagement farming #fire emblem