engagement farming, pt. 8
Welcome back, friends and enemies, to Engagement Farming, our ongoing series where we play through Fire Emblem Engage. Last week we hung out with a princess; this time we save the queen! Let's begin.
This week I played through Chapter 14, Lucina's paralogue, and Lyn's paralogue. The paralogue levels narratively (so far, anyway) are pretty much empty, as you'd probably expect: the Emblems are reminded of their home, they challenge us to a battle. The map is borrowed from the game they come from. I don't think we should expect much more from paralogues about the Emblems; by virtue of their premise, their story is already done, y'know?
Chapter 14 features Hortensia, the other Princess of Elusia, invading the palace of Solm to try to get the Emblem Rings back. Turns out this was an unauthorized invasion and three of the Four Guys We'll Have To Kill Later come to bring her back; she decides to join our army (in a scene with some pretty solid character moments actually) but then gets mind-controlled back to the bad guys' team. We also get a scene of Veyle apparently "going back to sleep" and reverting to being the normal friendly Veyle we knew from before. Not sure what's going on there but we'll figure it out together!
I feel like it's worth noting at this point that the characters at this stage in the game feel a lot more interesting than the early set. Fire Emblem character writing tends to operate on formulas, as you'd expect: you have a character who seems to be X but is actually Y. While this is usually a pretty good way to create the sensation of depth in a game with a cast of twenty to thirty playable characters, the first set were, like . . . "a character who seems to be a normal knight but actually really likes street food" or "a character who seems like a nobleman but actually is very obsessed with being muscular". The secret is they are actually more shallow than they appear. Later on you can get a twist where you introduce a reason they have this trait, but . . . the early characters in Engage didn't really stick the landing. But these later characters, on average, feel a little bit more interesting; it feels like there's at least a story to their hidden traits. I still don't think this game's winning any awards for character writing but it's nice that the early game was anomalously bad. Genuinely, some of the reason I bounced off this the last time is I'd gotten several chapters in and had encountered almost no characters I found even a little bit endearing.
Map design wise, Chapter 14 is one of the classic formats: storm the castle and fight the boss. There's a room full of chests on both sides of the map, so you're incentivized to split your army--one side has a thief who is rushing to loot them and the other side you can either break down the door or just bring your own thief, by which I mean Yunaka. She is the solution to every problem. So the enemy thief gives you a bit of time pressure on that side, and the other side is pretty free.
Prior to entering the final room there are some heal tiles and a bunch of tiles that recharge your Emblems, so they are really expecting this to be a big fight, and they are right. Four bosses, plus some normal guys, and while each boss is counterable, if you don't counter them (or don't have the counter) you're in for a rough time. And all of them will move to attack you (I think? Hortensia might just hang out in the back), so you have a harder time fighting on your terms. Solid map, I enjoyed it.
Each of the Emblems (probably except the DLC ones, maybe?) has a paralogue map which unlocks the higher levels of their cool powers; Lucina's is the first one and it's pretty straightforward. There's a small number of guys who hit pretty hard on the map, and then some reinforcements spawn. Map is small, your army is small, and I was able to beat it in, like, five turns? It's quick but it didn't feel free. (That said I think the terrain was basically just "an open map with dudes on it", so it was maybe not the most interesting map of all time.)
So I did a third map! Three chapters in one night! Lyn's paralogue starts your army in three corners of the map and gives you the goal of killing Lyn in the fourth corner. The map is covered with tents, each manned by a fairly beefy stationary enemy; if, when you reach Lyn, there are any of them left alive, those tents will start spawning more enemies, and Lyn will start moving, so the intended strat is to hurry up and kill all of those guys before taking on Lyn.
Lyn is obscenely fast, so she doubled my entire army; she also has her Emblem ability where she can fire five arrows at range 10, so all of my fliers were extremely vulnerable once she activated, which made a good chunk of my army extremely vulnerable to instantly dying in the final fight. (I think I have three fliers now?) The first chunk wasn't particularly difficult but finding a way to clear out the reinforcements while also being in position to clear Lyn before she can cause problems while also making sure my fliers don't die instantly was a challenge that took me a fair number of rewind charges to figure out. I won in nine turns, but it took about as much time as fifteen or twenty turn run. I had to make use of my tools to solve it, and that always feels nice.
You can see in all of these the basic bits of pressure to make the challenge interesting: go fast, split the army. Obviously there's more going on than these broad strokes--enemy placement and terrain shape the flow--but it helps to understand the overall goal before looking at those finer details.
Anyway, that's what I got for you this week. Probably on to the next chapter next week but I might try some more paralogues. (I do wonder if the reason they took most of our emblems away isn't so we don't get overwhelmed with a huge number of paralogues all at once, but that's a question for another day.) Until then, friends, take care of yourselves.