engagement farming, pt. 7
Good evening, friends and enemies, and welcome back to Engagement Farming, that thing I do where I write about my ongoing playthrough of Fire Emblem Engage! Short one this week because I am incredibly tired, so let's begin.
We made it to Solm, the desert kingdom! I ended our last post on the high note of "gosh wow they made me care about the plot finally" and in the next chapter we're lost in the desert, but in a fun sitcom way, not in a dramatic man-against-nature way. Fortunately we meet a charming flirty horse archer named Fogado, Captain of the Sentinels, who forgets to tell us he's also the Prince of Solm, and he agrees to take us to the palace, but then is like "oh right whoops I'm actually out here to kill monsters, can you guys chill for a sec while I do that?" and we're like "wait but WE can kill monsters". We do get a cutscene of Veyle saying "excellent, they are going to get more Emblem Rings, we can wait for them to do that and then attack them again," and then halfway through her monologue she almost collapses and says she has to go back to sleep. I'm sure that won't come up again. Then we get to the palace and all the prim and proper nobles are weirded out at the way the Solm royals appear to just not care about being royalty at all and act super casual and chill all the time
This has the exact vibe of a season-ending cliffhanger followed up with "okay but we have to spend some time just chilling out to build up suspense again", and it makes sense--we're moving onto the next act of the game, blah blah--but man is it funny how silly this chapter is right after the sucker punch of "we stole all your Emblems!"
This map is way more clever than I thought it was at first. At first blush it's your standard desert map--lots of quicksand to slow you down (it looks like it only slows you down if you end your turn in there, something which I didn't parse immediately and which caused me some problems; it also means that the "clear the way" ability I have on Chloe doesn't work to bypass it). It's a rout map where your army starts a little dispersed, and you have to get someone into the southwest corner of the map to save some villagers (or at least, you do if you want the items they will give you for saving them1), but there's only one guy threatening them and he's pretty weak, so . . . the inclination is to spread your party out a bit.
Then some reinforcements show up, and if you've scattered your party trying to chase them down, you might find yourself in a situation where one of your units is vulnerable to, for instance, two wolf knights and a wizard showing up and murdering him, and if you haven't been careful of the quicksand you might not be able to move him out of the range of these highly mobile units. It's not the most difficult map of all time, but it's a route map that gives you a reason to split up your army, and makes it difficult to reunite them, and then spawns some reinforcements which could cause some problems if you were incautious about it.
Anyway. More next week; I'll see you then, friends. Take care.
Seasoned players of video games may ask why we don't just take the items off them after they're dead, but honestly? It's nice to see video games where we aren't just constantly looting corpses. (We do occasionally loot an enemy's corpse but only when their item name is green. That seems fair.)↩