engagement farming, pt. 12
Welcome back once again to Engagement Farming, our ongoing series in which I play through Fire Emblem Engage. We did two chapters tonight, including one big confrontation with the bad guys! Let's begin, shall we?
Our first chapter was Byleth's paralogue, which features a bunch of bad guys who are trying very hard to blow up some crystals around the map. Our goal, as ever, is to defeat the Emblem in question (i.e., Byleth, in this instance), but this creates an extra "go fast and stop them from blowing up the crystals so you can get some more rewards" incentive. The main complication, though, is that Byleth has the Goddess Dance skill, so his teammates get to go again; he also has some priests with Warp nearby, which could have been pretty nasty but the enemies seem to prioritize the crystals very heavily if they are able to reach them, so he didn't use this to teleport anyone behind my lines to kill my weaker units. This one was overall fairly straightforward.
Then we did the next story chapter, where we go to intercept the Elusian fleet as it invades Firene and burns down a village for the joy of it. Veyle is here along with all four of her badass generals, and also she has resurrected the old King of Elusia for good measure for a good old fashioned brawl, six Emblem Rings versus six Emblem Rings. We get to find out (in character, even!) that Evil Veyle is the result of her chief retainer's evil mind control magic helping her be a more proper evil daughter of the Fell Dragon, so the Good Veyle is the real Veyle and we can now make rescuing her one of our goals. I'm sure that mind control magic will subsequently be used on us and we'll break through it with the redemptive power of friendship or whatever, but that hasn't happened yet, I'm just calling my shot here.
This battle was actually really cool. No real gimmick, just six bosses, each with two health bars and an Emblem. Some of them have some powerful mobility options, most of them don't wait for you to get into range to start moving. The map is covered in fiery terrain and has plenty of forests to hide out in, so there's interesting moment-to-moment tactical choices to be made. The fact that the enemies will start moving in before you lure them in means you might not have as much time as you'd like to prepare for the fights as they come, but you are mostly allowed to play how you'd like: move forward slowly and take the most advantageous fights.
I actually ended up resetting this map because I picked a very bad route forward and found myself squaring off with multiple bosses, each of whom could pretty reliably kill one of my units if they wanted, on multiple fronts. Each individual group of units felt like it required me to make use of all my resources; in particular I found myself making extensive use of the Backup units' chain attacks to whittle down bosses, which is something I had previously mainly only done incidentally.
As much as I enjoy a map with a clever gimmick or some other thing to try to disrupt you from Doing What I Want To Do, maps like this one, where it's just an all-out brawl and the challenge really is just executing on your strategy as cleanly as you can, feel really good. Narratively I think this map is meant to reflect a turning of the tide: we're now in possession of more Emblem Rings than the bad guys, we met their army head on and overcame, and the no frills nature of the map makes it feel like that. You met the enemy on equal footing and you prevailed. Now it's time to take the fight to them.
You're supposed to say something like "and they'll have home field advantage" or whatever at this point and I'm sure that's where the design is taking us but also they just gave us back Emblem Leif, who has the skills I need to make Panette into a truly terrifying force on the battlefield. Also, too, additionally, they gave us back Emblem Sigurd, whose gimmick of Enormous Mobility really solved a lot of problems for us earlier in the campaign. Which is to say: anywhere there's heads to chop with axes, I think I'll feel right at home.
I'll see you next week, friends.