![]() ![]() There's the odd cute encounter here, make no mistake, we do enjoy heading down to the pens to pet all of our adopted sheep, pigs, and cats - and giving people a surprise gift of horse manure never really grows old - but we'd take the option to do all our levelling up, purchasing, ring polishing and weapon upgrading from a menu on the world map in a heartbeat if it was offered. In quite short order it becomes little more than a series of menus and hoops that you jump through in order to get your stat increases and new gear. Forget about Three Houses-style dialogue choices or meaningful back and forths here tête-à-têtes in Fire Emblem Engage are rarely more than a few lines long and they deal almost entirely in banalities, with no meaningful attempt to dig very deep beneath the surface of the characters involved.Īnd so it goes for the duration of the game as far as the social side of things is concerned, with the Somniel quite quickly becoming a place we almost avoided going back to if we're completely honest. Take those support and bonding conversations as an example. It may give you plenty of side activities to engage in, with QTE training games, meals to cook, pets to adopt, an arena to train in, and, yes, endless support and bonding conversations to have with your teammates, but this time around all of the deep relationship stuff has been stripped back and streamlined to a minimum in order to get you back into the action quick smart. *flutters eyelashes*Īs it turns out, the Somniel, as big as it is and as wonderful as it looks, actually acts as little more than a base of operations from which to recharge, reload, and respec between combat sorties. The stage was set for lots of OTT drama, we'd been introduced to the new Somniel hub area - which seemed like the kinda place a couple of fellow fighters might do a little bit of the old romancin' - and we were fully expecting to divide our time equally between smashing Corrupted on the battlefield and chilling out at the Somniel's quaint little café as we got to know our favoured party members a little better. Yes, when we previewed Intelligent Systems' latest, it seemed as though everything was primed for more of what we were dished up in Three Houses. ![]() ![]() Its focus is set firmly on combat, with everything else taking a firm backseat. ![]() Well, excuse you for being wrong, because this latest Fire Emblem escapade is side-stepping all of that in favour of a different flavour of adventure that harks backs to earlier entries in the franchise. Here was a game that deepened the relationship and social sim aspects and captured the hearts of gamers who revelled in three separate campaign paths packed full of interactive melodrama that sat perfectly alongside the series' signature strategic action.įast forward to 2023 and you'd be forgiven for expecting Fire Emblem Engage to follow closely in the footsteps of its all-conquering predecessor whilst refining combat, smoothing rough edges, and adding even more relationships, more romance, and just generally more of all the aspects that so many people readily connected with last time around. It's been almost four years since the hugely successful Fire Emblem: Three Houses stormed onto Switch and reignited our passion for Intelligent Systems' long-running tactical RPG franchise. ![]()
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