engagement farming, pt. 14
Welcome back, friends, to Engagement Farming, that thing I do where I play Fire Emblem Engage and then write about it. I shan't leave you waiting any longer; let's begin.
We did Sigurd's paralogue this week and the next story chapter. I quite liked Sigurd's paralogue. It happens in two phases: first, we have a boss wizard at a fortress we have to kill1 in order to lower the bridge which will then trigger Sigurd and his army to advance on us. But also, in the other corner, there's two very beefy boss mages who have cash for us to loot. I didn't notice these guys until Sigurd's army started its advance; I suspect I could have just avoided the boss wizard and fought them much more safely, but instead I had to deal with a large mass of mages on the north and these two jerks on the south. Sigurd's army was just slow enough that I was able to kill the southern guys before I ran out of safe places to stand.
You may recall that Sigurd is the "what if you had all the mobility" Emblem; he stayed behind his advance forces rather than charging headlong into battle (though I'm pretty sure if I had attacked him or moved into his range he would have attacked). This is smart scripting; if you can isolate a boss it's pretty easy to bully them to death. I had forgotten that he has an attack which lets him stab multiple people in a line and deal damage to all of them, so I had to get a little creative, but not that creative. I have too many broken units at this point.
The next story mission is, as you might have predicted from me saying that's what it would be, our landfall in Elusia. Two of the Four Hounds (they're the four recurring bosses who work for Veyle/The Fell Dragon) have been sent to the coast to deal with our landing, and the little one stole some Emblem Rings because she wants to be praised so she wants to win extra hard over us. Mauvier, the big one, who has always been the only one in the bunch who didn't seem overtly evil, has revealed that he's actually mainly loyal to the real Lady Veyle and not the evil version, so he's definitely going to join our team at some point. Otherwise, the big narrative here is that the Fell Dragon is apparently killing the people of Elusia, this town is now full of zombies and covered in Miasma, etc.
They had a fun gimmick to deal with the miasma: we start with three cannons, and if you apply one type of special terrain to the map it overwrites any existing ones, so we can just blast away the miasma to make a beachhead and also damage the bad guys. There's also two visitable houses which summon more bad guys which drop stuff, to make things a little more interesting than just "go to the middle and fight the jerks."
Mauvier has Warp and Rescue, which he uses to send dudes past the flames to cause problems, and then to summon Marni to help fight once he's run out of dudes. They're both pretty sturdy (though Marni has a notable weakness to magic) but they do just kind of come to you, so it's not too hard to deal with them.
Still, a neat concept. Cannons are fun, and if you want to push deeper into bad guy territory, well, we have an Emblem who can deal with that. After the map we get back Emblems Micaiah and Roy, the former of whom has a perk which lets you do AOE Warping, the latter of which makes the wielder harder to kill. I think that's 10 of 12 now? Victory is near!
Yes, warp shenanigans are possible to skip this one. And yes, I did just get the Emblem that makes that strategy a lot more powerful. Unfortunately I still like playing through the entire map, even though I'm pretty sure I could warp Panette and Yunaka into enemy territory and win, like, a lot of maps.↩