engagement farming, pt. 16
Welcome back once again, beloved readers, to Engagement Farming, our ongoing playthrough of Fire Emblem Engage. Last time we learned about the plot twist we all saw coming from the beginning of the game; this time, because the next couple story chapters are force-linked, we're just doing some paralogues! Let's begin.
No story progress tonight, just two paralogue chapters: Eirika and Micaiah. Eirika's paralogue is a pretty straightforward "fight your way to the boss" map. There's some thieves going to loot some chests to give you some focus, and a couple scary monsters that pierce defenses to slow you down, but otherwise no real gimmicks. Eirika herself was a decently threatening opponent, but there wasn't a whole lot to comment on with this one.
Micaiah's map was a pseudo-defense map with lots of ballistas and a fire cannon; a lot of reinforcements spawned with some regularity, and subsequently broke themselves trying to defeat Panette and Yunaka, my unstoppable juggernauts of death and destruction. I was able to mostly ignore the gimmick and just charge forward, cutting a swath through the enemy army on the way down, but I did need to do a little reshuffling at the final engagement at the bottom in order to not get any of my units got by the small mob of dudes in the south. (This one is apparently easier than most to just use Lyn's Astral Storm ability to lure Micaiah to her death, but I didn't feel the need.)
This does raise something of an interesting point: our units can die in these friendly trials to unlock our bonds. The Emblems are summoning soldiers that actually attempt to do us harm. That would be interesting narratively but I suspect it's mainly mechanical: a map where it doesn't matter if you lose your units is much easier, since you no longer have to care about keeping your army safe. But it's fun to imagine a world where this is a narrative choice, adding a bit of darkness to the Emblems (perhaps being immortal heroes from other realms it's hard for them to care about the lives of individual soldiers?).
Much ink has been spilt talking about Fire Emblem's relationship to permadeath; most people, as far as I'm aware, have pretty much always played as though losing a unit was a fail state and simply resetting the battle when it happened. I know some people regard that as a weakness--people at least keep saying that permadeath is a hallmark of the franchise but nobody ever lets their units die--but I maintain that it's working as intended: battles are harder because you are working your hardest to keep your units alive. But instead of the game giving you a GAME OVER every time someone dies, it's a choice you're making, and it feels better to reset because you want to than because the game is forcing you to. And it opens up the possibility of playing various challenge modes where you actually do let your units die, which adds some replayability. I like it.
Of course, since Shadows of Valentia introduced the ability to turn back time1, it's become much easier to avoid ever losing any of your units, and for several games now the option has been there to play on Casual mode where you don't have permadeath, but I still think the point stands: the games are more interesting for having permadeath in them, even if most people don't actually let anyone die.
Anyway, that's all I got for you for now. Next week we'll have two story chapters, I think!
In SoV and Three Houses charges of our Rewind Time ability (Mila's Turnwheel and Divine Pulse, respectively; the one in Engage is called the Draconic Time Crystal) felt much more limited; I think both of those games started you with three charges, and in Echoes you get ten (on Hard and higher, at least; apparently it's unlimited on Normal). Ten is quite a lot! I have occasionally come close to running out but for the most part I have enough that I don't mind just fucking around and finding out because I've always got an undo button handy. I am grateful for having all these extra charges since the intention/aggro lines aren't very useful in Engage but I do think on the aggregate it would be a more interesting challenge to give us fewer chances to undo.↩