engagement farming, pt. 4
Welcome back, friends and enemies, to Engagement Farming, in which we play Fire Emblem Engage. Last week we made some new friends; this week we'll make some new friends! Let's begin.
I told a minor lie last time, by which I mean I misremembered: I had played one more map, and it was the paralogue where we recruit this game's incarnation of Anna. It's very standard--she was doing crimes at a bandit hideout, got caught, we arrive and murder all the bandits and save her and she joins the party.
Slightly more interesting, though no more surprising, narratively is our Chapter 7 map. We cross the border into Brodia, the kingdom of strong warriors and mountainous terrain where everyone has rock names, and find out that the castle is being besieged by Elusia, the wizard kingdom; also the bridge that we need to cross to get there is held by the Elusians.1 So far, so expected; we run into one of the Princesses of Elusia, who is holding the bridge and trying to steal our precious Emblem Rings, and find out (1) she has an Emblem, too! it's a Dark Emblem animated by evil magic! and (2) Brodia apparently likes invading Elusia to "keep their barbaric kingdom in check", so Elusia pretty understandably regards Brodia as the evil kingdom. I'm not expecting a lot of nuanced perspectives on geopolitics here but, like . . . this is, at least, the first thing that anyone has said in this story that has piqued my interest.2
Map design-wise, Anna's paralogue is an example of a "your dudes don't all start together" map: half start on one side, half on the other. If you don't care about getting the optional loot, this one's pretty straightforward, and you can just work your way through it, but we've once again got some thieves stealing things and trying to leave. I ended up letting one of them go (didn't really care about the item and I was too slow in my deployment on the left side of the map); you have to be pretty quick to get the first one, and that is harder when your army is divided like this. So that was neat! It was an example of a "kill the boss" map where the boss would not move or attack us, which means if you want to you can just slowly pick off their friends and really take your time dealing with them.
Chapter 7 itself is . . . I guess re-introducing opponents with Emblems? It's fairly straightforward. It introduced a new type of weapon (great weapons; they always go last and can't follow up but apparently they knock opponents back and will break them if they are knocked back into an enemy or obstacle; I didn't use the one they gave us at all)3 but was otherwise a pretty straightforward map. Nothing to stop us from taking our time; there's more fliers than usual but we got our second archer here so that's fine. The boss has Emblem Lucina, who lets everyone nearby get a chain attack (instead of just Backup units who are in range), and her retainers are both relatively nasty to deal with (though one of them is a flier and still very vulnerable to bows).
Speaking of fliers, one of the things that Three Houses introduced is the ability to dismount, which removes the weakness to bows; so you ended up with a highly mobile unit with basically no drawbacks. That's gone in Engage, so fliers, while they're still very good, still have a pretty significant drawback. So that should make for more interesting army compositions than "what if we just put everyone on a pegasus".
And I think we are finally at the point that we've gotten enough units that we can start making some meaningful choices about our army's composition, and are also probably at the point that it's worth looking at distributing Emblems to people who didn't start with them. Class upgrades and class changes are on the table . . . game's opening up. I'm excited to see where that goes.
But that's a problem and/or bonus for future me to deal with. Until that time comes, thanks once again for reading, and I will see you next week. Take care of yourselves, friends.
Yes, Brodia is supposed to be a kingdom with a strong warrior tradition and highly defensible terrain. No, I have no idea how Elusia was apparently able to basically take over instantly.↩
Though the support conversations so far have mostly been cloying "oh, this tea is so lovely" dialogue, there have been one or two "oh, that's interesting" moments. One of them resolved as a profound disappointment; but while it's very obvious that Yunaka used to be a professional assassin, possibly in the employ of some state or other, I am at least intrigued to see what exactly her deal is that has her constantly worried she might talk about her past to someone.↩
I do actually really like the idea here; it lets us play with positioning and the Break mechanic. I didn't find a use for it in this map, but it seems like a very useful option to have on hand.↩