engagement farming, pt. 15
Another week1 has passed and that means it is once again time for Engagement Farming, our ongoing playthrough of Fire Emblem Engage. Last week we made landfall in the evil kingdom; this week we push through to the evil castle! Let's begin.
If you're still here after fifteen entries of this, you have probably anticipated that this week I did a paralogue and then I did a main story chapter. This week's paralogue was Corrin's, and I sure remember this map from Fates! This is the chapter called "The Path Is Yours", and it's the one where you choose which path to take in that weird one game that is bundled as three games game.
The gimmick here is that you're at a fork in the river and the bridge to the west is broken. The trap is that Corrin has a Dragon Vein that will dry up the river and let the people on the west pass, which she uses after a few turns, and if you've committed your army to the east you might suddenly have some jerks on your flank. There are reasons to commit units to that side anyway: you can ford the river (albeit slowly) even though the bridge is up, so the units on the west move up anyway; but if you sent squishier units to harass them you'd probably have a hard time when the river suddenly stopped being an obstacle. Fortunately, one of my long-range harriers is Panette, so it was easy enough to switch from longbow to axe and get to chopping heads.
Ultimately this map ended up playing pretty straightforward. I was able to unite the army after our little detour to the west and beat up Corrin, who was pretty nonthreatening as a boss. In fairness, she's a support Emblem; she's the one that summons terrain. Unfortunately, her allies were no match for my broken units. I get why they picked this particular map from a thematic standpoint but it wasn't one of the more tactically interesting options from Fates, you know?
Then it's on to the next story chapter. We've arrived in Elusia Castle, only to find it eerily empty. We find out via more cutscenes that Zephia of the Four Recurring Bosses has broken her promise to Mauvier and cast the evil mind control magic that will make Lady Veyle permanently evil before he got back; she also tortures Mauvier and Marni unconscious for the whole "losing two Emblem Rings" thing from last time. Then she orders Griss, the weird masochist one of the Four Recurring Bosses, to go find out if we're actually the child of the Fell Dragon, and it turns out we are! I'm as shocked as you are.
The revelation didn't play out quite like I expected. First, I was expecting to find out that the Fell & Divine Dragons had somehow had a child together, but it appears we're only a Divine Dragon by adoption. This is on some level less interesting: there's no interesting backstory here; but it's also more interesting, for reasons which we'll get into shortly.
Griss tells us we're the Fell Dragon after he gives us the Ring when we beat him and very suspiciously is like "c'mon aren't you going to summon her?", then when he sees us summon her he says "aha, Fell Dragons summon Emblems by using invocations, like you do; Divine Dragons would instead prey; you are therefore a Fell Dragon", or something to that effect. Then he disappears.. Our protagonist has a little crisis of faith: oh no, I'm actually evil, how can any of you trust me, etc.; and everyone else is very chill about it, with reactions ranging from "that dude is obviously lying" to "you're my friend, I don't care if your dad was evil". Not shocking but it is nice that literally no one seems bothered by the fact that we've got evil blood.
Emblem Sigurd helpfully confirms that what Griss is saying is true, but he points out that the Fell Dragon can't summon Emblems who talk, and tells us that we have literally inherited the power of the Divine Dragon despite not having a blood relation. Our Colgate color scheme confirms it, he tells us. And that's interesting! We're not special even for a dragon because we were born special; we're special even for a dragon because we chose to stop being evil. That's a cool moment.
After the battle is over, Mauvier shows up and asks us to save Lady Veyle, because she will surely stop being permanently evil if she realizes we're the sibling she's been looking for. Looking forward to him joining the army!
Anyway. The map is another dark map, but the gimmick is that Griss is teleporting around (using Emblem Celica's magic, natch) and hiding in the shadows to ambush us as we approach. While for me this mainly meant that he unerringly found and ambushed Yunaka, my best scout, this is actually a pretty fun use of the darkness gimmick; if you find him and are ready to move I think you could potentially end this map early by getting the jump on him. And to keep things interesting there's some thieves looting chests at the top of the map, so you want to keep moving so you can murder them and steal the stuff they stole.
I liked this one. It wasn't amazing but it managed to do something clever with a gimmick I'm not usually particularly fond of. It probably would have been less interesting if I had realized it was a dark map going in and prepared for it instead of hastily raiding the convoy after the map started, but eh. I had fun.
And that's all I got for this week. Stay tuned for more Engage content! I
Or two, I guess.↩