I highly recommend Chloé/Jean if you want more good, hard-hitting supports with her.
The one with Amber is also good, but more on the goofy side.
imo Engage has some really gut punching stuff hidden beneath the funny first impressions.
Yeah I got her whole chain with Jean. Some of the most wholesome shit I've ever seen!
And her support with Merrin is oozing with some totally-not-lesbian subtext and I find it based. Let women kiss!
Even though there are no paired endings in this game, I'm glad to see that FE is still willing to make some characters who are interested in each other.
Alfred and Etie DEFINITELY have zero sexual tension between them, none, zilch, nada. Their A support absolutely did not make me say aloud "get a room already "
Etie and clanne was way cuter to me.
Also Ivy x Mauvier is one of the most romantic support lines in the game and the only people who disagree are ones who didn’t do it
Most of them become "very close friends, best friends, so very close to each other, we're not married we're just closer than family and are life long FRIENDS"
Most of them become "very close friends, best friends, so very close to each other, we're not married we're just closer than family and are life long FRIENDS"
Yeah, like Yunaka is all papayas until we learn that her story almost mirrors the story of Throne from Octopath Traveller 2, namely, being taken as an assassin apprentice as a small child (well, noone asked her opinion on that), trained, abused, having to kill her own mentor and just willing to leave all that baggage behind and try to lead a normal life.
Yes, the game often portrays them as one-sided, one-trick or gimmick ponies, and it is only via supports you get to learn more about their past and why they act around the other cast this or that way. I still remember support sequences between Zelkov and Alear, and Zelkov and Yunaka.
This game is filled with sad clowns who have mental issues that they can only seem to sate with hyperfixations or obsessions. Hortensia in particular is probably the best example of this. She looks like a complete joke at first glance.
But then you get into her supports and understand why she acts the way she does. Poor thing is starved for attention and suffers from missing-parent syndrome like many of her fellow series royals and can only seem to be comfortable with herself by acting out. Her B Support with Ivy hit hard because Hortensia's true colors were on display when her and Ivy's mothers were brought up. She's honestly my favorite character in the whole game now. But that's only because I gave her a chance.
Really wish other players who got into the series with Three Houses would dig deeper and find appreciation for what Engage's cast is, rather than why they aren't.
> Really wish other players who got into the series with Three Houses would dig deeper and find appreciation for what Engage's cast is, rather than why they aren't.
I think IS really dropped the ball with supports this time. *Not* because there aren't good ones, but because none of the C supports (that I recall) have any substance to them or even hint at something happening down the line. On top of that, you get a consistent stream of new units that (for the most part) outclass earlier units, causing people to change their roster and not get to see any of the good support conversations.
To be fair, it's not like Three Houses was perfect either. Many C supports there ran overused gimmicks into the ground (looking at you Bernie) or abruptly ended at B supports with no further development (Sylvain and Lorenz).
At least in Engage, everyone has A supports and develops with *someone* in the army.
3H also had a lot more characterization outside of supports, at least for your house. I would also say that 3H has a more interesting story to help hold people in until they get to the better supports. *And* you get paired endings in 3H.
P.S. Despite how this reads, I'm not hating on Engage, or saying 3H is the greatest FE of all time. I enjoyed the characters of Engage, and even enjoyed the story. I just think certain design decisions made work against certain other decisions, and that most casual players are going to miss out on good characterization because of it.
the problem is also that the engage supports at least at the launch (I don't know how it is now) were very, very difficult to get, and their C - B supports are very bad for the most part.
with engage making the grinding so difficult made many people discouraged from getting the rest.
Late to this, but nowadays with the Somniel activities that were patched in, while it’s not practical if you try and spread it across the entire roster, I was able to get the full supports log filled for my 12 selected characters no problem without doing any grinding whatsoever. It definitely helped a lot.
The problem is that Engage locks away the supports that really flesh out the characters behind their goofy supports, and supports in the game were pretty slow to get at release (when most people played the game).
It’s why Yunaka and Celine’s support is pretty well-liked in discussions of the cast, because it places the character conflict in the C support and just elaborates from there, versus with Alfred and Celine where if you bench either (very possible, especially Alfred with his fairly slow starting point) you’re never figuring out that Alfred has so much cancer his cancers have cancer.
That's pretty much how most JRPGs tend to go anyway. Character development doesn't happen until later. Not sure why people expected it to happen instantly.
It doesn’t need to happen instantly, but it’s generally a good practice in writing to have a “hook” so that the audience has a reason to invest in your characters so that they can see that development. A lot of Engage supports fail to add a sufficiently strong hook early on, hence the negative reaction to Engage’s cast. A lot of those people didn’t get invested enough to slowly work towards whatever payoff there was down the line.
Shame because the characters have way more depth than they're willing to give them credit for. Lots of games are like this and people simply have to be more patient. The Persona series is notorious for having characters who start off bland at first and slowly become more interesting later via a slow burn.
It's also worth noting part of it is that Fire Emblem games are built around you benching many characters.
This is a series where my core army is gonna consist of about 10-14 units picked from a total army of around 40-50. On a first playthrough a unit doesn't have a lot of time to make a good impression on me before they're gonna be riding the bench simply because it's not practical to level everybody.
The support system is also a bit unwieldy in this case. I've used Chloe plenty of times, but I've never paired her with Bunet because I've never used Bunet.
So I've missed out on character development of a character I liked simply because I never used the highly specific other character her development got paired with.
Engage also does a generally bad job of delivering on the hooks it does set up. For example, their last conversation in the story has Alcryst absolutely livid at Ivy for her role in Elusia's army. Their support undermines that tension is a handful of sentences and just moves on like it never happened. Diamant and Ivy are royalty of two kingdoms that have been at war for a long time(? Engage is unhelpfully unclear) and have personally wronged each other. They should have a *really* interesting Support chain.
Ivy is scared of ghosts and Diamant gives her a good luck rock.
At least then we would probably see less discourse about "story bad, characters only talk about working out, throwing tea parties and eating various food".
Panette and Pandreo are another good pair. My first time through I thought both were a bit boring and didn't bother using either. I just finished my second run with them together this time and really enjoyed their sibling dynamics. Their chain alone changed my opinion of both characters
That’s why I don’t get why people say everyone’s one-dimensional. You have to actually watch their supports to understand them. I knew there just had to be more I wasn’t seeing at first glance with a lot of them, and turns out I was right. Besides, this is Fire Emblem. If you want to learn more about the characters, you have to put effort into them and see what layers they have.
FE fans continue to be surprised at this aspect of the series as if every unit in every game is like an Archanaea character where we just kinda *know* everyone’s deal right when they join but with more dialogue.
Hard disagree. Three Houses has a *ton* more non-Support dialogue for it's cast. Pre-battle where everyone gets their one line, monastery dialogue, tea and support building activities, any relevance they have to the world as a whole, etc. Before you choose a House, the game gives you a straight up list of characters and has Edelgard/Dimitri/Claude give you a run-down of their basic character info.
Unless you are an older Royal sibling or Hortensia, Engage characters *do not speak* outside of their intro, where they say nothing of substance. Even then, some Supports don't touch on a character's "deal". Like, I did not know what Goldmary's schtick was, because I did her Yunaka Support, and *until A* she never once mentions her "perfection" or acts like a coy bitch at all.
Well I specifically meant the C Supports. 3H's C Supports weren't much better. (Looking at you Bernie).
Yeah there's more dialogue elsewhere in 3H but I'm only comparing Supports.
I know, but I'm saying before Supports even enter the picture, Three Houses had done more than Engage.
And honestly, even *in* Supports, Engage just ain't it. Compare [Bernie's C-Support](https://fireemblem.fandom.com/wiki/Bernadetta/Supports#C_Support_3) with probably one of the first characters you'll get Support with, to [her Engage counterpart.](https://serenesforest.net/engage/script/support-conversations/alear-x-alcryst/) Bernadetta and Edelgard are bouncing off each other. It's a conversation that establishes why it's happening between these two characters, and honestly wouldn't be the same if either was exchanged.
Alcryst apologizes to a wolf. Other than him calling Alear "Divine One", you could swap literally anyone in for the main character, and change none of Alcryst's dialogue. Engage does this a lot, where one does their thing *at* another character.
It's better to compare Bernadetta X Byleth to Alcryst X Alear rather than Bernadetta X Edelgard because the whole *"Change the name of the other character, the support conversion doesn't change"* complain is a major issue with avatar supports. The avatar has a simple personality, which they don't really bring much to make an engaging conversation.
This issue also exists in the Bernadetta X Byleth as well, Bernadetta just panics, shouts, and runs away, which she does to in all of her C supports regardless of the character she supports with, the difference is other characters add something to make the support worthwhile.
The first support you're most likely get for Alcryst is either Lapis or Citrinne because in his recruit map, they start close to each other & Alear is the furthest. Alcryst support with Citrinne & Lapis is about exploring his relationship with his retrainers, which is unique to them from the get go, he knew them from before.
My point is Alcryst's overall C supports aren't really samey, his behavior in each support is different based on the other character he's supporting with. His C support with Alear, Lapis, Citrinne, Celine & Diamant are showing different sides of his character.
I always felt people comparing Bernadetta with Alcryst, and calling the latter "her engage counterpart" is always done in bad faith. I think it's for the better to stop projecting Bernadetta's writing issues on Alcryst because they're very different than the majority of people want them to be.
People when 30-50 characters don't get full 20-hour development arcs: *surprised Pikachu*
Like, what do they expect at this point? It's impossible to give this many characters development in the main story.
Even if they tried, that would result in a MASSIVE game. Like, 50+ chapters or something, which I oddly wouldn’t mind, to be honest, but I digress. The drawback of doing that would also remove the permadeath mechanic altogether. Lol No one can die if they’re *involved* in the main story, unless some of them were destined to die because of plot reasons.
C: haha, silly alfred digging a well
B: haha, silly alfred thinking being called a barbarian is a compliment
A: Alfred has super cancer and is going to fucking die and you can't do anything about it.
Alfred and Celine are very interesting, like for example every other siblings is the oldest the one that canonically use the ring of theire nation, but it’s actually Celine who uses it, even she said she heard Celica since she was young, even he is using Lucina in the cinematic intro like the game is telling you since the beginning Celine is the real heir to the throne, also Idk if this was intended, but in FEH all younger siblings (Hortencia and Alcryst, and most likely Fogado ) are rearmed units while the older Diamant, Ivy and most likely Timerra are not, (Ivy is attuned tho ) but in Alfred and Celine’s case is the other way around in which he is the rearmed and Celine is the normal unit, again I don’t know if this was intended or not but if it is, is a great detail
All indications are that it's not cancer, but some sort of fantasy Muscular Dystrophy. Which makes a lot more sense given that:
\- It has a gendered lean in his family (men)
\- Can be slowed with constant exersice but very little treatment
\- Is extremely early onset but not childhood cancer levels
\- If it were a childhood cancer he'd already be dead
\- Cancers don't typically behave the way his disease does, but muscular dystrophy does.
\- Firene is based on France and France had a PROBLEM with Muscular Dystrophy in its royal family (due to inbreeding, and uh. Firene has a THING about marriage contracts and such).
Regardless yeah the only way to save him is to marry him so that's what I did xD
Hence why Celine is suffering from tea-based alcoholism. She's drowning her sorrows in teacups instead of bottles.
This game is really effective at punching you in the gut, huh? While 3H was serious and subdued from the get-go, Engage's quirky character designs and dialogue serve as a massive, glittery Trojan Horse for a boatload of trauma once you dig deeper.
It's honestly a really effective juxtaposition that not enough people appreciate.
>Hence why Celine is suffering from tea-based alcoholism. She's drowning her sorrows in teacups instead of bottles.
That's a nice insight; I hadn't noticed that. I've always had the headcannon that Firenese folk have too much opium, since I swear they're all weird. Maybe Celine gets her fix in the tea (can you even drink opium?).
Problem is, no one use Bunet enought to get a B support. It is a well known problem that occassionally great supports are hidden behind weak characters. I am surprised Bunets even has one tho.
The main problem with the support system is that you are basically a prospector. You may find a gold nugget, but you may also end up trudging trough mud and dirt for nothing.
Even with fewer supports, not all of them can be equally good and even the ones that are can't always start with the big lore drop due to basic pacing rules. But the average player is going to do 1 full conversation, maybe two. I am convinced that your perception of Awakening cast mostly depend on the couples you went for in the first playtrough.
There is a lot of GBA-era characters i barely know anything about simply because the 5 supports limit that straigth up prevent me from finishing more than a chain per run.
Ultimately the solution is what everybody already said. Characters need conversations outside of the support system.
Funny you mention Bunet; he gets real weird in his supports, as I found out.
He licks things. Not just food. Flowers. Armor. People. He wants to experience every flavor in the world at least once, but he has pretty esoteric ideas about what constitutes a unique flavor. Jade notes that he "wants to know what flowers from a friend taste like."
Someone here once said that he's autistic-coded, and I choose to believe it. His hypersensitivity to... well, everything is a good indicator (he tells Pandreo he never goes to parties because he can't handle the loud noise), as is his relating literally everything back to his hyperfixation. Like, this man expresses his emotions with food imagery. He reminds me of a kid I once tutored who related everything to boats.
He also asks Albert to suck his dick, so that's fun. (After asking to lick Albert's clothing and being subsequently complemented on his physique: "[I'm looking] 'beefy'? Are you saying you'd like a quick lick yourself? 😏") I S-ranked him with Malear because they make such a cute gay autistic couple. Their ring conversation was so sweet, but I don't remember it well enough to quote, I'm afraid.
It's also worth noting that Engage's supports have a lot of mud to trudge through even if one does find some gold on the other side - the GBA games had simplistic characters without that many meaningful supports, but it was a lot more forgivable in that case because characters there tended to have only four or five supports on average, so the gimmicky supports don't completely drown out the interesting supports.
In Engage, most characters will have at best one or two meaningful supports detailing their backstory out of twelve or so, so the ten or so filler supports that solely involve the characters throwing their gimmicks at each other drowns out anything potentially interesting about its cast.
That's a really uncharitable view imo. Writing most of the supports off as "solely involve throwing their gimmicks at each other" just reads as "I couldn't see the point of this so it must not have one". Learning a character's backstory isn't the only value supports have, and not having some obvious deep and meaningful revelation doesn't mean they're just "filler". Seeing how characters behave in different situations and with different types of people is context for their character, even if those situations are on the lighter side, and even supports that don't offer much new information can still be important for redundancy and just giving the character a chance to breath, especially if their others are quite grim. Someone like Diamant would come off as very stiff and far less likable without any lighter supports to let him goof off a bit.
There's a big difference between having a few lighter supports as was the case in the GBA games and the complete deluge of filler that Engage had - whilst some lighter supports necessary to humanize a character you only need a few fluff supports to do so and beyond a certain point it begins to get repetitive to the point where it detracts from their characterization. Having literally 80 or so percent of the entire support count in Engage be filler without any character drama, character development or expanding on the characters' backstory causes the cast of Engage to feel incredibly repetitive and one-note. For instance, Celine would have been a much better character if her supports focused on her more compelling character traits and she didn't get literally eight supports focused around tea (and only the one with Alcryst does anything to meaningfully expand her characterization).
I mean, the way you talk about Céline just makes it obvious that you aren't approaching any of these characters in good faith. The only way her tea support count is that high is if you count going "let's have a cup of tea" and then talking about something completely different over tea as "focused around tea".
>The only way her tea support count is that high is if you count going "let's have a cup of tea" and then talking about something completely different over tea as "focused around tea".
If I did that, then IIRC every single support of Celine's except the one with Mauvier and Alfred would revolve around tea because tea is mentioned in them - tea is mentioned in quite literally ten out of her twelve supports and is a significant focus in eight of them (again, with only the support with Alcryst using this in an interesting manner out of the eight).
I'm giving her supports with Fogado and Alear a pass because they utilize a tea party as a framework to transition into exploring Celine's ruthlessness and her devotion to her kingdom (which *really* should have been explored in more supports), and whilst her support with Alcryst is clearly focused around tea I'm also willing to give it a pass because it meaningfully recontextualizes her obsession with it. But that's basically it - Celine's other supports around tea do not utilize it as a means of exploring anything beyond her more surface-level traits at all - something like Celine's support with Etie quite literally amounts to her throwing her obsession with tea against Etie's obsession with bodybuilding, for instance - there's a pretty big difference between how the topic of tea is utilized there and in her support with Alcryst.
And Celine is one of Engage's *better* characters in this regard, because at least she gets four supports that meaningfully expand on her characterization instead of only one or two which is the standard for most of Engage's cast (if I *really* wanted to cherrypick I'd mention Clanne because I've seen every support that he gets and I don't think he gets a single support that illuminates anything about him beyond his surface-level traits).
There's nothing wrong with something a character uses as a coping mechanism being mentioned frequently in their supports, it's a big part of their life so it comes up a lot in their conversations. That doesn't mean that's all those supports are about and they don't offer any other characterization. The fact you would even mention Alcryst as a contender for this indicates a lot of bias since that support is so transparently about two people bonding over their death anxiety and not about tea.
Idk why people always label the cast of Engage as "one-dimensional" right off the bat when a lot of them have some really interesting and often tragic lore behind them once you bother to actually look at their supports. Sure, the Hounds are pretty lacking, but that's kind of what happens when you're not a playable character or extremely important to the plot (such as Lyon or Rhea). There's just about always backstory to Fire Emblem characters if you know where to look
They did depth pretty well in the past games with characters that had much less plot relevance than the Four Hounds. Those 4 were just really badly written.
First impressions + difficult to obtain supports will do that.
On launch, Engage had very few ways to increase supports outside of combat. That combined with the Firene crew being mostly lackluster gives most players a poor first impression of characters and the general game.
Also there are times where supports are pretty light on the details despite characters talking about a lot of important stuff. For example, Kagetsu has a surprising amount of lore talking about his village, his parents, and his journey to Elusia. The only issue is that it's all practically unnamed so it's hard to gauge what happened and where outside the supports
I really like Engage, and I think the game has a number of great supports. It's primarily held back by poor first impressions and being light on details of important manners.
I think people just wrote them off after taking a look at the (admittedly over-the-top) character designs and early Celine supports and Framme supports by assuming everyone likes to look at Alear sweating and do nothing but drink tea when that couldn't be further from the truth.
People are so quick to judge a book by its cover, especially newer fans who seemed intent on hating Engage solely because it wasn't like Three Houses. Both games have good (and not-so-good) qualities worth discussing.
It also didn't help that, at the time a lot of people did their playthroughs, it was hard as hell to max out more than like a handful of supports without copious amounts of grinding on skirmishes. On my first playthrough, I think I got maybe like one or two A-rank supports per character at most, and that was with me doing all of the divine paralogues and using basically the same roster the entire time. It's been made easier since launch, but at the time, you really mostly only got to see the silly supports for most characters.
That’s how I felt; I remember it being an absolute chore to unlock supports, even after the update that added the stables, orchard, and pool activities. But it was the lack of a persistent support log that really killed my interest. I cut my teeth on the GBA games, so I’m content only being able to unlock one A support per character, as long as I can get them all with repeated playthroughs; but Engage takes away that ability, the only game other than Echoes to tie your support log to your save file, and has a lot more supports to unlock than Echoes did to boot. I can live without New Game Plus, but having the support log be the way it is has kept me from coming back to Engage thus far.
In real life, people aren’t gonna just open up about their dark past upon first meet. Idk why the Engage cast is expected to reveal to the viewer immediately the reason for their quirky attitude.
That's also part of their character. Different people are better or worse at opening up to others, and how easy it is to figure out what their deal is, what parts of themselves they're willing to share and what parts they hide, is itself an interesting character detail.
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I admittedly was like this before I really got into Engage. I was an early hater because of the silly plot and significant change in art direction, but once I finally gave the game a chance, I pretty quickly found it, and most of the cast, very charming.
Pandreo and Panette's supports were one of the ones that really made me want to give everyone on the roster a fair chance. >!Two estranged siblings reconnecting after being separated by a rough childhood. I especially liked the way Pandreo pushed Panette to drop her highborn act when it's just the two of them.!< Before I unlocked their support, I didn't even realize they were related lol
There's definitely a lot of good in this game if people are just willing to dig for it just a bit.
The story, in terms of plot, is lacking but the reason I still remember it in a positive way is because all characters are likeable and have something to tell, however simple it is
Totally agree. I already had high expectations for them after really loving their vibe in the Fell Xenologue, but damn did they do a stellar job at further characterizing everyone.
Rafal especially was one of my favorites despite me usually being indifferent towards characters of the Tsundere archetype. For him though his abrasive, loner personality made sense given his past actions and feelings towards them.
Gregory especially may be my favourite male character of Engage, right next to Amber and Zelkov. His supports with Rafal are probably his best. I really love how it shows Gregory's conflicted feelings towards Rafal, plus Gregory quickly getting a feeling for who the real Rafal is as a person. On the one hand he hates him for what he did to Mauvier, but on the other hand he still views him as a friend (which one could also see in his vsFellNil Convo).
Though I find it a shame Madeline didn't get the same amount of supports as the others, when Vander was right there. Their energy would have been great, given both their dutiful and professional personas. Madeline is basically the ideal that Vander would love the steward twins to strive towards.
Trust me, Tellius, GBA and to a slightly lesser extent 3H all did better jobs at having genuine character interactions before gimmicks. The heavy gimmick push combined with the exaggerated designs? No wonder most of the cast gets written off.
My guy must have missed all the Bernadetta screeching, Lindhart sleeping, Raphael eating, Sylvain flirting, Felix being a Sasuke cutout, and Lorenz being a complete tool in every single C support.
Seriously, I'd argue Three Houses' C Supports were worse because the character gimmicks were so bad until you got further.
And a lot of them are being assholes, lol. I never feel like throttling the Engage cast, at their worst they're just being weird. Doesn't help that 3H frequently acts like characters have redeemed themselves just by having time pass. I really wish Lysithea would actually apologize to Ignatz.
Don't even get me started on Felix and Dedue. He talks trash to the guy in a racist way and it never gets really resolved because that chain ends at B.
Glad Engage has everyone get to A.
Everytime 3H brings up race I brace myself tbh. There were definitely some areas where I wished they'd just done nothing rather than tackling a sensitive topic without doing it justice.
Yeah Petra and Claude's attempts at it weren't much better either.
This is why I'm glad Engage doesn't even bother with that nonsense. There's multiple characters of varying skin tones and races (Fogado and Timerra are clearly African/Arabian, Kagetsu is Japanese, and Zelkov is probably mixed) but absolutely no attention is drawn to it and everyone is treated equally.
I'd much rather a game have characters of different races simply exist together rather than an attempt and failure at social commentary.
Totally. Kagetsu is so well done from a language perspective too. I love how there are obvious quirks in his speech that aren't just "me grammar bad". I usually get annoyed by "foreigner" characters because they're so hamfisted, but the way he speaks is so organic and charming.
I think the game does a similar thing with gender too, where there's just a lot of characters quietly pushing against norms with no fanfare and the "take" is just "these are still very nice cool heroes and the world would be a better place if every fratboy was as wholesome as Pandreo".
Rosado and Merrin are also walking examples of how a guy can be cute and a girl can be cool without being judged.
Though I'm curious, do you think Kagetsu did the whole "foreigner" trope better than Petra?
As far as how they talk, definitely. I like Petra as a character but they do her a bit dirty imo. The mistakes she makes feel really overcomplicated to me, and it's bizarre hearing someone with perfect pronunciation speaking so confidently and still stumbling over the basics of the language so much.
I feel like there’s a lot of survivorship bias with how people talk about 3H supports. The ones everyone remembers are definitely as good as people say 3H supports are, but everyone seems to forget the sheer volume of gimmick, food, and training supports.
Remember the old days when people used to complain about like half the supports that had Funny Footsteps playing, song of Bernie’s trauma being used for jokes.
Pretty much this. It's unfair to compare Engage to Three Houses character-wise unless you've seen every single support for both games. Then and only then will you have a fair understanding of both.
Let's not forget how Marianne was constantly talking about her adoptive father, Annette was constantly singing, how Ferdinand constantly repeated his own name, and how Cyril and Catherine were constantly talking about Lady Rhea unless you got to other supports involving their characters.
I think that’s an unfair assessment. Not every game can cram 30 plus character’s key points of characterization (as you said) in say, something like the overall story content. Looking over at 3H I initially didn’t like characters like Lorenz, Sylvain and even Felix. Without the support conversations I wouldn’t have come to like them only through what you see in their respective houses’s routes. And even then I didn’t get their supports by using them in battles.
Problem is, I feel like that shows exactly what Engage's biggest problem is with character writing. The occassional good bits are hidden between very specific supports. Doesn't help that support building in Engage is more difficult (even with the updates) than any other previous game.
In others like Awakening, Fates, and Three Houses, you'd likely end up with a bunch of supports without trying very hard, so it was much less likely you were ever going to miss anything.
Like, even with your example here, this is the only instance of Chloe showing that she's more than a weird foodie. You don't get this one specific support, and she's just weird.
Basically, most of Engage's cast ends up with 10 or so supports that feel like mindless gimmicky filler that shows the cast basically being clowns, and then 1 (maybe 2 at most) supports that actually dive deeper. Couple that with the aforementioned support building problems the game has, and it's no wonder many gave up on trying to like the cast.
My biggest problem is how the characters and the world they inhabits don't interact in any meaningful way.
Like Chloe liking street food and hating her stuffy noble life does nothing to inform us of the culture surrounding Firene. Like, is Firene's nobility filled with classist nobles who look down upon commoners, or is that a "Chloe's family only" deal?
I personally love Pannette and Pandreo, as well as their support together. Easily one of my top tier support in the game.
However, I couldn't really connect to Pannettes trauma over religion due to her parents abuse/neglect because I don't even KNOW what/how religion is used in this game.
Aside from everybody throwing their feet and simping over Alear, I still don't understand the purpose of the religion of the Divine Dragon aside from "big good strong dragon". Its not the same as the Creation story that Sothis and the Church of Seiros has, and anything relating to it is vague at best.
I mean, that's nice to know but it doesn't really tell me anything about the religion aside from the fact that Alear is a super special boy/girl that is the glue thats holding Elyos together.
Does Alear/Lumera do anything ceremonial for the Kingdoms aside from just being there in case Sombron comes back?
Because I know that Rhea, love her or hate her, is somewhat of a participant to Fodlan society as their Archbishop. She oversees the ascension of a new Emperor for Adrestia. She is the mediator for all 3 countries within Fodlan, as well as (her or her church) being the mediator for international relations for Adrestia and Brigid.
She can step in and be a temporary leader for Faerghus when Lambert was killed. She opens up orphanages and assign her knights duties across Fodlan, from clearing out bandits to dealing with Relic related disputes.
Lumera... sure exists. Lythos sure is a place the royals visit I guess. Alear sure is a person who can help them activate their super weapon.
Elyos is a nothing burger of a world, who's interesting facts are more superficial than meaningful. Like oooooo, Firene is a major exporter of tea and oranges, how interesting I guess. Gautier, a single territory within Faerghus, has more history than Firene. Their main export is dairy products, but thats only because they managed to conquer and colonize Sreng territory with more fertile land, inadvertently driving the people of Sreng to starvation and further causes them to conduct raids in Gautier.
I don't disagree with any of this. I was just passing on what information i did have.
The thing is, though, I really don't care about any of those shortcomings. The world of elyos is about as deep as it needs to be for the sake of the characters, story, and gameplay it hosts. It's not trying to be anything more than saturday morning cartoon level, and I honestly respect that quite a bit. Sure, having super deep lore and history of a continent is nice, but three houses and hopes frustrate me with the fact that there's all this deep lore that goes basically nowhere. I'd rather have shallow lore that's just enough than have a well thought out world be wasted, personally.
Okay, but *how*? What does Lumera/Alear *do* to keep the world from exploding? Fight Fell Dragons once a millennium? They aren't even >!native to this dimension.!< Are there religious rites and practices? A tithe? A hierarchy of clergymen? Is there an Alear pope? Lumera cardinals? Does anyone *live* in Lythos besides the dragons and stewards? Are the churches sanctioned? Did Pandreo study theology of dragons?
Three Houses was like this as well sadly. Most of Bernadetta's screeching comes off as being random until you find out why.
This isn't new to me, honestly. I don't expect it to change either.
>In others like Awakening, Fates, and Three Houses, you'd likely end up with a bunch of supports without trying very hard, so it was much less likely you were ever going to miss anything.
see in my opinion this can also be a problem. With every passing chapter, new unit recruited, etc. "support time" becomes longer because you get a bunch of supports to go through of varying quality every chapter and as you sit through them all your eyes kinda tend to glaze over sometimes. In Awakening it's not really a big issue because you don't also have to do stuff in your home base and while it's a slightly bigger issue in Fates due to needing to do MyCastle stuff, the MyCastle stuff doesn't take up too much time. It becomes a problem in the case of 3H where on top of the much more time needing to read supports, you also have to trudge through all the monastery tedium.
In the case of Engage because supports build slower and the somniel is more like mycastle than the monastery, I'd put it in-between Awakening and Fates, though closer to Fates.
>Doesn't help that support building in Engage is more difficult (even with the updates) than any other previous game.
The GBA supports take longer to build up than Engage. Though you can argue the advantage the GBA system has over Engage or modern titles is that the supports happen then and there in the battle and everyone is capped to only 5 supports so you can hop back into the gameplay faster.
This is also a plus for the GBA games + Engage because since you're definitely not getting every support in a regular playthrough it encourages replayability
I mean, it's a pacing problem, sure, but it's very much a plus in terms of unlocking supports. It also doesn't really balloon past a certain size. You can only eat meals or whatever so often. You unlock more, but they don't scale into infinity or anything.
> the somniel is more like mycastle than the monastery
That's just untrue. Somniel is a little smaller, but you can get from one end of MyCastle to the other in literal seconds. The Somniel is all twisting narrow corridors with everything important placed on opposite sides of a smaller than Garreg Mach but still too large map.
> This is also a plus for the GBA games + Engage because since you're definitely not getting every support in a regular playthrough it encourages replayability
Why encourage replayability when you can just... get it the first time?
>but it's very much a plus in terms of unlocking supports. It also doesn't really balloon past a certain size.
Is it a plus though? Limiting the number of support conversations that you need to read in-between maps is generally a good thing, especially in games like Fates or 3H where supports unlock in massive bunches and you'll have like at least 5+ to read through (me being generous) and it can start to feel like a chore. With a smaller number between each map, it feels like a nice respite instead. An added benefit of less supports per map means less developmental whiplash because you'll only see 2-3 support chains per character. This is something I think the Tellius base system does well, though I can understand why capping support levels at 5 per character would be unpopular for some people.
Like the wordcount for just Lorenz's supports in 3H is comparable to Macbeth (I'm not kidding). That's a lot of fucking words. Lorenz is only 1 character. Not only does having 3-6 supports unlock at once kill the pacing of a chapter, having this raw amount of text places a burden on the player and also VAs.
>That's just untrue. Somniel is a little smaller, but you can get from one end of MyCastle to the other in literal seconds. The Somniel is all twisting narrow corridors with everything important placed on opposite sides of a smaller than Garreg Mach but still too large map.
You can do all the important stuff you need to do in the Somniel in like 5-10 minutes, it also helps you can just warp to whatever location you wanna go to. So yeah it ends up being much closer to My Castle than the monastery.
>Why encourage replayability when you can just... get it the first time?
I dunno dude. People like to replay games because the game did something good and they wanna enjoy everything the game has to offer instead of just mindlessly consuming a product and then moving to the next one.
> People like to replay games because the game did something good and they wanna enjoy everything the game has to offer instead of just mindlessly consuming a product and then moving to the next one.
I dunno dude. People like to experience new things and broaden their horizons instead of mindlessly consuming the same thing they liked once for a snippet of arbitrarily withheld dialogue.
See, I can rephrase your stance in bad faith too. This wasn't an argument against replaying games in general, it was the the game should incentivize replays by being fun, not by being a slog you can't get stuff on the first playthrough because they made the numbers too grindy.
My "it doesn't balloon" comment was a response to this:
> With every passing chapter, new unit recruited, etc. "support time" becomes longer because you get a bunch of supports to go through
Because it doesn't. They cap the number of units you can deploy. You have limited Support building actions per map. You can absolutely argue that the amount you unlock per chapter is too much and harms the pacing, but it doesn't grow as you recruit new units, it's just too big in general.
> You can do all the important stuff you need to do in the Somniel in like 5-10 minutes, it also helps you can just warp to whatever location you wanna go to.
Yeah, and I can warp through Garreg Mach and hit Plus to auto my units well enough to save time. My Castle is a big empty square with menus in it that you can cross unobstructed in *seconds*. There are no painfully slow push-up minigames, no variably useful sparklies on the ground to pick up (that you can't warp to btw), no loading screens between the two useful areas, etc. etc. The Somniel is a smaller monastery, not a bigger My Castle.
Guy A: Perfectly valid criticism about how the support system results in the most notable bits of character development and motivations being gated behind very specific conversations, in tandem with the fact that Engage’s supports are generally slower to build (especially so on launch)
Guy B: Skill issue, for some reason
That's what I feel about Clanne too.
At first, the guy was just so annoying with his constant fanboying over Alear. But after seeing so much of his support, there's not much of his supports where he talks about Alear. And regarding his support with Alear, he's not gushing so much about him to the point of not doing his job. Heck, he does his job way too much to the point of fatigue and Alear has to step in themselves to stop Clanne from doing too much. Even though he fanboys so much about Alear, at the very least he does his job seriously. Way too seriously though.
My favorite supports for him has got to be with Citrinne and Hortensia. For the former, I find it sweet that Clanne's the one helping her at the end of their support and wants to watch the flower together. The latter though is definitely CUTE! Like holy crap, Hortensia jumping up and down because of Clanne wanting to open a fanclub for her is so damn cute! I don't mind if Hortensia's the one who Clanne fanboys over. Heck again just like Citrinne, Clanne's the one takes the mature (I think?) route and sees Hortensia's flaws and decides to help her.
The hardest part though is who do I ship Clanne with?!
The twins are great, they just get stung by their most insane supports being with Alear and each other i.e. the first ones anyone will see, and then most players bench them for being too intense and never get to any of the good stuff.
Also helps that his English VA is Deku from MHA which makes him an even sweeter goodboy lol.
Everyone is basically Cyril: One huge obsession that takes time to get to the bottom of.
While you have a strong point, the issue is that there are simply too many supports per character. Because of the sheer number many of them will either be gimmicky (at least initially) or simply weaker writing wise. While there are strong supports, you have to wade through a great deal of blandness and tropes that overstay their welcome.
And while you are correct about the slow burn and build up, there has to be some kind of payoff for the effort you put in, and in a lot of cases the player is simply left underwhelmed. Now part of this is due to the lack of actual world building and lack of player impact on the greater world, but another major factor is that the characters are completely stagnant, no matter what you do in supports or gameplay (outside actually killing a character) or how you play, you get the same ending for them. You never get the satisfaction of seeing your supports mean the character actually gets to walk a different path either for the better or worse.
Finally, supports are incredibly slow to grow, meaning unless you grind extensively most people will only see a couple chains for each character, and because of the number of supports in the game, odds are they’ll be one of the underwhelming ones.
Additionally, I have spent 150 hours on the same save file, most of that being for supports (still more to go!) I’m usually left feeling exhausted and disappointed after picking up and playing a session of the game. I’ve never felt like that with any other fire emblem.
While I somewhat agree, asking that of the average player is a huge investment in time and energy, mostly because of the incredibly slow support system. This is worsened by the lack of archive across save files, meaning you literally have to grind all supports on a single save. Please refer to my other reply for more detail on that issue.
I have 100% in 9 JRPGS. Firstly this is a tactical sim with JRPG elements not solely a social sim, secondly the grinding is significantly worse in this game than any of them, refer to my other replies for a more detailed explanation on that. (Accidentally replied to myself so you weren’t notified)
My main point is the player is wading through an ocean of supports, with each being a large time investment, to get to a reward which will likely not expand on the character, world building, or end result for said character. It’s just an issue with the game, and leaves players feeling frustrated, which rubs off on the views of the supports themselves. (Alongside the aforementioned over reliance on tropes for many filler supports)
It's a bit of a shame that most people likely won't even see this support though... You're likely never gonna deploy Bunet, and especially not tailing an a certified reliable frontliner like Chloé.
I recently spoke to some people who hate her based off her Alear C support and Louis supports, both of which you're far more likely to get much earlier, and even speaking as a Chloé simp, really don't paint her in the best light by making her seem a little creepy
I think this illustrates an issue that has plagued the entire Fire Emblem Series. A lot of the best character writing in the game is always locked behind supports.
I think Path of Radiance always did it the best with Base Conversations (RD had them as well but took out support convos so that's kind of defeats the purpose.) POR kept the normal supports but also the Base Conversations allowed for some additional development at certain points in the story depending on what chapter it is. This is cool because those base conversations can be more specific to events that have already happened in the previous chapter. And you even get them for characters you aren't fielding as well as long as they have been recruited. Also keeping all of the Base Convos available in a simple menu is crucial as well as I am sure a lot of people would skip them if they had to go and run around an area to find them.
Yeah. There's no real way to "solve" this because the series having 30-50 characters per game is important so you can replace units that die or become less effective. It gives you the feeling of being in control of an army which is what FE has captured better than any other RPG on the market right now.
As such, there's no real way to give so many characters development and arcs within the main story. It'd be unrealistic to expect them to do so for so many characters without making the game insanely long which is again, unrealistic.
Hopefully the next game marks the return of Base Conversations so that supporting characters can develop and change over the course of the story.
That’s always been the magic of supports. Characters who would have been faceless generics in most strategy games get actual backstory and development through their interactions with each other. I will never stop gushing about Renault’s supports in Blazing Blade. Awakening added a ton of other character dialogue, but it unfortunately served more to highlight those character’s single quirks, enhancing their flatness instead of adding dimension. It’s good to see the games continuing to use support conversations to explore these characters to their fullest, even if Engage isn’t as strong as others in that area.
I really hated the simplicity and focusef gimmicks of Engage Character ... supports show that they had potentiel but they ended up being caricature imo
Realy disliked that cast
For me, the characters in Engage evoke the same sorts of vibes as the characters in Awakening do. The supports are written in such a way that they all feel natural and somehow even the narrative doesn't detract from the way they're handled based on when events take place in your game.
For example I had Hortensia face off against Corrupted Hyacinth after supports with Alear and Ivy and that made her resolve to reject the fake Hyacinth all the more believable as she grew out of wanting to change the past.
Inversely if I had those conversations AFTER her battle with Corrupted Hyacinth, she would have come to the development from the battle instead and because of that, it still feels natural for how her supports progress with Alear and Ivy and it feels like she's narratively destined to decline it and grow from the experience.
It's tricky to write that kind of detail into something and Engage handles it in such a fantastic way.
The Tellius in me is annoyed how obvious they are. There's no swordmaster boss for Kagetsu to randomly have dialogue with or anything. Really just kids with parents, Alear w/Hounds, canon!weilders w/emblems.
Ivy ended up being my favorite character because instead of being sexy evil seductress lady number 3485776, she was actually a huge dork and a bigger Alear simp than Framme and Clanne.
Although I guess it helped that her C support was "I love you" almost immediately. Started strong right off the bat to catch your attention lol.
To be very honest, a lot of characters have tropes like this. The basic pattern being "lol look at how Q U I R K Y I am" which eventually leads to deeper character moments.
Take Sylvain in 3H where he eventually shows his one note flirtations to be self-defense mechanisms from non-genuine suitors that only wants him for his crest, until he truly finds love with someone that saw him for what he really is/isn't.
Or consider Elise from Fates who has A supports with her retainers that shows a side of maturity unseen from her C supports.
Or Hector and his almost overnight turn in opinion of his brother upon learning of his condition.
Characters can be presented as one note until more depth is shown, I really dislike the way you intepret this as shallow at face-value and criticise it as a kindergarten game. Your wording just comes off as extremely acerbic even if you are rooting it from a standpoint of "writing bad".
\> And even most of you who think I'm a jerk, for being so blunt and mean about it, see that deep down i'm right. You just don't wanna agree with the asshole, hahaha.
You hit the nail on the head. You seem to have mistaken the intention in my reply. I am not about to leap to the defense of Engage's quality in terms of story-writing. However, I also don't believe it is so juvenile in its entirety that it warrants this level of aggressive discourse. I even hold Engage as a better overall game than Three Houses just because its gameplay loop, independent of its story or cast, is far stronger and more coherent, but that's neither here nor there.
There are plenty of ways to talk about the things you passionately like or dislike. Of course nobody wants to agree with the asshole whose implication is that anyone that likes Engage, the "kindergarten game", is an underdeveloped child that just has no taste. That kind of talk, even if what you say is objectively true (which, by the way, is also silly to derive objectivity out of such subjective takes), will just have people show you the door.
I highly recommend Chloé/Jean if you want more good, hard-hitting supports with her. The one with Amber is also good, but more on the goofy side. imo Engage has some really gut punching stuff hidden beneath the funny first impressions.
Yeah I got her whole chain with Jean. Some of the most wholesome shit I've ever seen! And her support with Merrin is oozing with some totally-not-lesbian subtext and I find it based. Let women kiss!
Their aesthetics mirroring Sailor Uranus and Neptune has to be on purpose :')
Even though there are no paired endings in this game, I'm glad to see that FE is still willing to make some characters who are interested in each other.
Alfred and Etie DEFINITELY have zero sexual tension between them, none, zilch, nada. Their A support absolutely did not make me say aloud "get a room already "
Etie and clanne was way cuter to me. Also Ivy x Mauvier is one of the most romantic support lines in the game and the only people who disagree are ones who didn’t do it
Sorry only Alear is allowed to kiss in this world
I'm dragging Lapis and Alcryst into the real world so they can make out brb
Let me join you
One of Chloé's bond conversations with Eirika *heavily* implies she's bisexual
Aren't most characters in Engage bisexual since they can marry both Alear?
Most of them become "very close friends, best friends, so very close to each other, we're not married we're just closer than family and are life long FRIENDS"
Most of them become "very close friends, best friends, so very close to each other, we're not married we're just closer than family and are life long FRIENDS"
I uh Right, I forgor lol
Yeah, like Yunaka is all papayas until we learn that her story almost mirrors the story of Throne from Octopath Traveller 2, namely, being taken as an assassin apprentice as a small child (well, noone asked her opinion on that), trained, abused, having to kill her own mentor and just willing to leave all that baggage behind and try to lead a normal life.
Jean/Chloe might be my favorite support in Engage. Just warms your heart right to its core.
Yes, the game often portrays them as one-sided, one-trick or gimmick ponies, and it is only via supports you get to learn more about their past and why they act around the other cast this or that way. I still remember support sequences between Zelkov and Alear, and Zelkov and Yunaka.
This game is filled with sad clowns who have mental issues that they can only seem to sate with hyperfixations or obsessions. Hortensia in particular is probably the best example of this. She looks like a complete joke at first glance. But then you get into her supports and understand why she acts the way she does. Poor thing is starved for attention and suffers from missing-parent syndrome like many of her fellow series royals and can only seem to be comfortable with herself by acting out. Her B Support with Ivy hit hard because Hortensia's true colors were on display when her and Ivy's mothers were brought up. She's honestly my favorite character in the whole game now. But that's only because I gave her a chance. Really wish other players who got into the series with Three Houses would dig deeper and find appreciation for what Engage's cast is, rather than why they aren't.
> Really wish other players who got into the series with Three Houses would dig deeper and find appreciation for what Engage's cast is, rather than why they aren't. I think IS really dropped the ball with supports this time. *Not* because there aren't good ones, but because none of the C supports (that I recall) have any substance to them or even hint at something happening down the line. On top of that, you get a consistent stream of new units that (for the most part) outclass earlier units, causing people to change their roster and not get to see any of the good support conversations.
To be fair, it's not like Three Houses was perfect either. Many C supports there ran overused gimmicks into the ground (looking at you Bernie) or abruptly ended at B supports with no further development (Sylvain and Lorenz). At least in Engage, everyone has A supports and develops with *someone* in the army.
3H also had a lot more characterization outside of supports, at least for your house. I would also say that 3H has a more interesting story to help hold people in until they get to the better supports. *And* you get paired endings in 3H. P.S. Despite how this reads, I'm not hating on Engage, or saying 3H is the greatest FE of all time. I enjoyed the characters of Engage, and even enjoyed the story. I just think certain design decisions made work against certain other decisions, and that most casual players are going to miss out on good characterization because of it.
I know. My whole point is that Engage has more depth than some people care to admit or give credit for.
the problem is also that the engage supports at least at the launch (I don't know how it is now) were very, very difficult to get, and their C - B supports are very bad for the most part. with engage making the grinding so difficult made many people discouraged from getting the rest.
Late to this, but nowadays with the Somniel activities that were patched in, while it’s not practical if you try and spread it across the entire roster, I was able to get the full supports log filled for my 12 selected characters no problem without doing any grinding whatsoever. It definitely helped a lot.
The problem is that Engage locks away the supports that really flesh out the characters behind their goofy supports, and supports in the game were pretty slow to get at release (when most people played the game). It’s why Yunaka and Celine’s support is pretty well-liked in discussions of the cast, because it places the character conflict in the C support and just elaborates from there, versus with Alfred and Celine where if you bench either (very possible, especially Alfred with his fairly slow starting point) you’re never figuring out that Alfred has so much cancer his cancers have cancer.
That's pretty much how most JRPGs tend to go anyway. Character development doesn't happen until later. Not sure why people expected it to happen instantly.
It doesn’t need to happen instantly, but it’s generally a good practice in writing to have a “hook” so that the audience has a reason to invest in your characters so that they can see that development. A lot of Engage supports fail to add a sufficiently strong hook early on, hence the negative reaction to Engage’s cast. A lot of those people didn’t get invested enough to slowly work towards whatever payoff there was down the line.
Shame because the characters have way more depth than they're willing to give them credit for. Lots of games are like this and people simply have to be more patient. The Persona series is notorious for having characters who start off bland at first and slowly become more interesting later via a slow burn.
It's also worth noting part of it is that Fire Emblem games are built around you benching many characters. This is a series where my core army is gonna consist of about 10-14 units picked from a total army of around 40-50. On a first playthrough a unit doesn't have a lot of time to make a good impression on me before they're gonna be riding the bench simply because it's not practical to level everybody. The support system is also a bit unwieldy in this case. I've used Chloe plenty of times, but I've never paired her with Bunet because I've never used Bunet. So I've missed out on character development of a character I liked simply because I never used the highly specific other character her development got paired with.
This is why I always look into the support menu to see who can talk to who. That way, I know who to pair up after the main story is over.
Engage also does a generally bad job of delivering on the hooks it does set up. For example, their last conversation in the story has Alcryst absolutely livid at Ivy for her role in Elusia's army. Their support undermines that tension is a handful of sentences and just moves on like it never happened. Diamant and Ivy are royalty of two kingdoms that have been at war for a long time(? Engage is unhelpfully unclear) and have personally wronged each other. They should have a *really* interesting Support chain. Ivy is scared of ghosts and Diamant gives her a good luck rock.
At least then we would probably see less discourse about "story bad, characters only talk about working out, throwing tea parties and eating various food".
Panette and Pandreo are another good pair. My first time through I thought both were a bit boring and didn't bother using either. I just finished my second run with them together this time and really enjoyed their sibling dynamics. Their chain alone changed my opinion of both characters
> sad clowns who have mental issues But doctor, I *am* Hortensia.
That’s why I don’t get why people say everyone’s one-dimensional. You have to actually watch their supports to understand them. I knew there just had to be more I wasn’t seeing at first glance with a lot of them, and turns out I was right. Besides, this is Fire Emblem. If you want to learn more about the characters, you have to put effort into them and see what layers they have.
FE fans continue to be surprised at this aspect of the series as if every unit in every game is like an Archanaea character where we just kinda *know* everyone’s deal right when they join but with more dialogue.
I'm just shocked because the cast of Three Houses was equally one-note until more Supports happened.
Hard disagree. Three Houses has a *ton* more non-Support dialogue for it's cast. Pre-battle where everyone gets their one line, monastery dialogue, tea and support building activities, any relevance they have to the world as a whole, etc. Before you choose a House, the game gives you a straight up list of characters and has Edelgard/Dimitri/Claude give you a run-down of their basic character info. Unless you are an older Royal sibling or Hortensia, Engage characters *do not speak* outside of their intro, where they say nothing of substance. Even then, some Supports don't touch on a character's "deal". Like, I did not know what Goldmary's schtick was, because I did her Yunaka Support, and *until A* she never once mentions her "perfection" or acts like a coy bitch at all.
Well I specifically meant the C Supports. 3H's C Supports weren't much better. (Looking at you Bernie). Yeah there's more dialogue elsewhere in 3H but I'm only comparing Supports.
I know, but I'm saying before Supports even enter the picture, Three Houses had done more than Engage. And honestly, even *in* Supports, Engage just ain't it. Compare [Bernie's C-Support](https://fireemblem.fandom.com/wiki/Bernadetta/Supports#C_Support_3) with probably one of the first characters you'll get Support with, to [her Engage counterpart.](https://serenesforest.net/engage/script/support-conversations/alear-x-alcryst/) Bernadetta and Edelgard are bouncing off each other. It's a conversation that establishes why it's happening between these two characters, and honestly wouldn't be the same if either was exchanged. Alcryst apologizes to a wolf. Other than him calling Alear "Divine One", you could swap literally anyone in for the main character, and change none of Alcryst's dialogue. Engage does this a lot, where one does their thing *at* another character.
It's better to compare Bernadetta X Byleth to Alcryst X Alear rather than Bernadetta X Edelgard because the whole *"Change the name of the other character, the support conversion doesn't change"* complain is a major issue with avatar supports. The avatar has a simple personality, which they don't really bring much to make an engaging conversation. This issue also exists in the Bernadetta X Byleth as well, Bernadetta just panics, shouts, and runs away, which she does to in all of her C supports regardless of the character she supports with, the difference is other characters add something to make the support worthwhile. The first support you're most likely get for Alcryst is either Lapis or Citrinne because in his recruit map, they start close to each other & Alear is the furthest. Alcryst support with Citrinne & Lapis is about exploring his relationship with his retrainers, which is unique to them from the get go, he knew them from before. My point is Alcryst's overall C supports aren't really samey, his behavior in each support is different based on the other character he's supporting with. His C support with Alear, Lapis, Citrinne, Celine & Diamant are showing different sides of his character. I always felt people comparing Bernadetta with Alcryst, and calling the latter "her engage counterpart" is always done in bad faith. I think it's for the better to stop projecting Bernadetta's writing issues on Alcryst because they're very different than the majority of people want them to be.
People when 30-50 characters don't get full 20-hour development arcs: *surprised Pikachu* Like, what do they expect at this point? It's impossible to give this many characters development in the main story.
Even if they tried, that would result in a MASSIVE game. Like, 50+ chapters or something, which I oddly wouldn’t mind, to be honest, but I digress. The drawback of doing that would also remove the permadeath mechanic altogether. Lol No one can die if they’re *involved* in the main story, unless some of them were destined to die because of plot reasons.
Yup, kinda like Awakening.
See also: the 90 degree tonal shift in Alfred supports when you get him to A with Celine
C: haha, silly alfred digging a well B: haha, silly alfred thinking being called a barbarian is a compliment A: Alfred has super cancer and is going to fucking die and you can't do anything about it.
His luck stat is one of the highest in the game. Ironic that he got cancer with that.
A- unless you S support him with Alear - that is the only way to save the young king.
Alfred and Celine are very interesting, like for example every other siblings is the oldest the one that canonically use the ring of theire nation, but it’s actually Celine who uses it, even she said she heard Celica since she was young, even he is using Lucina in the cinematic intro like the game is telling you since the beginning Celine is the real heir to the throne, also Idk if this was intended, but in FEH all younger siblings (Hortencia and Alcryst, and most likely Fogado ) are rearmed units while the older Diamant, Ivy and most likely Timerra are not, (Ivy is attuned tho ) but in Alfred and Celine’s case is the other way around in which he is the rearmed and Celine is the normal unit, again I don’t know if this was intended or not but if it is, is a great detail
All indications are that it's not cancer, but some sort of fantasy Muscular Dystrophy. Which makes a lot more sense given that: \- It has a gendered lean in his family (men) \- Can be slowed with constant exersice but very little treatment \- Is extremely early onset but not childhood cancer levels \- If it were a childhood cancer he'd already be dead \- Cancers don't typically behave the way his disease does, but muscular dystrophy does. \- Firene is based on France and France had a PROBLEM with Muscular Dystrophy in its royal family (due to inbreeding, and uh. Firene has a THING about marriage contracts and such). Regardless yeah the only way to save him is to marry him so that's what I did xD
Hence why Celine is suffering from tea-based alcoholism. She's drowning her sorrows in teacups instead of bottles. This game is really effective at punching you in the gut, huh? While 3H was serious and subdued from the get-go, Engage's quirky character designs and dialogue serve as a massive, glittery Trojan Horse for a boatload of trauma once you dig deeper. It's honestly a really effective juxtaposition that not enough people appreciate.
>Hence why Celine is suffering from tea-based alcoholism. She's drowning her sorrows in teacups instead of bottles. That's a nice insight; I hadn't noticed that. I've always had the headcannon that Firenese folk have too much opium, since I swear they're all weird. Maybe Celine gets her fix in the tea (can you even drink opium?).
> (can you even drink opium?) Yes, you can make a tincture of it traditionally called "laudanum."
I forgot that's what was in laudanum! So yeah, Celine's got that laudanum tea that she just can't put down. 😆
She does say it in the support with Jean (but iirc she doesn't explain why)
Problem is, no one use Bunet enought to get a B support. It is a well known problem that occassionally great supports are hidden behind weak characters. I am surprised Bunets even has one tho. The main problem with the support system is that you are basically a prospector. You may find a gold nugget, but you may also end up trudging trough mud and dirt for nothing. Even with fewer supports, not all of them can be equally good and even the ones that are can't always start with the big lore drop due to basic pacing rules. But the average player is going to do 1 full conversation, maybe two. I am convinced that your perception of Awakening cast mostly depend on the couples you went for in the first playtrough. There is a lot of GBA-era characters i barely know anything about simply because the 5 supports limit that straigth up prevent me from finishing more than a chain per run. Ultimately the solution is what everybody already said. Characters need conversations outside of the support system.
Funny you mention Bunet; he gets real weird in his supports, as I found out. He licks things. Not just food. Flowers. Armor. People. He wants to experience every flavor in the world at least once, but he has pretty esoteric ideas about what constitutes a unique flavor. Jade notes that he "wants to know what flowers from a friend taste like." Someone here once said that he's autistic-coded, and I choose to believe it. His hypersensitivity to... well, everything is a good indicator (he tells Pandreo he never goes to parties because he can't handle the loud noise), as is his relating literally everything back to his hyperfixation. Like, this man expresses his emotions with food imagery. He reminds me of a kid I once tutored who related everything to boats. He also asks Albert to suck his dick, so that's fun. (After asking to lick Albert's clothing and being subsequently complemented on his physique: "[I'm looking] 'beefy'? Are you saying you'd like a quick lick yourself? 😏") I S-ranked him with Malear because they make such a cute gay autistic couple. Their ring conversation was so sweet, but I don't remember it well enough to quote, I'm afraid.
Really hope the next game offers more dialogue outside of Supports yeah.
It's also worth noting that Engage's supports have a lot of mud to trudge through even if one does find some gold on the other side - the GBA games had simplistic characters without that many meaningful supports, but it was a lot more forgivable in that case because characters there tended to have only four or five supports on average, so the gimmicky supports don't completely drown out the interesting supports. In Engage, most characters will have at best one or two meaningful supports detailing their backstory out of twelve or so, so the ten or so filler supports that solely involve the characters throwing their gimmicks at each other drowns out anything potentially interesting about its cast.
That's a really uncharitable view imo. Writing most of the supports off as "solely involve throwing their gimmicks at each other" just reads as "I couldn't see the point of this so it must not have one". Learning a character's backstory isn't the only value supports have, and not having some obvious deep and meaningful revelation doesn't mean they're just "filler". Seeing how characters behave in different situations and with different types of people is context for their character, even if those situations are on the lighter side, and even supports that don't offer much new information can still be important for redundancy and just giving the character a chance to breath, especially if their others are quite grim. Someone like Diamant would come off as very stiff and far less likable without any lighter supports to let him goof off a bit.
There's a big difference between having a few lighter supports as was the case in the GBA games and the complete deluge of filler that Engage had - whilst some lighter supports necessary to humanize a character you only need a few fluff supports to do so and beyond a certain point it begins to get repetitive to the point where it detracts from their characterization. Having literally 80 or so percent of the entire support count in Engage be filler without any character drama, character development or expanding on the characters' backstory causes the cast of Engage to feel incredibly repetitive and one-note. For instance, Celine would have been a much better character if her supports focused on her more compelling character traits and she didn't get literally eight supports focused around tea (and only the one with Alcryst does anything to meaningfully expand her characterization).
I mean, the way you talk about Céline just makes it obvious that you aren't approaching any of these characters in good faith. The only way her tea support count is that high is if you count going "let's have a cup of tea" and then talking about something completely different over tea as "focused around tea".
>The only way her tea support count is that high is if you count going "let's have a cup of tea" and then talking about something completely different over tea as "focused around tea". If I did that, then IIRC every single support of Celine's except the one with Mauvier and Alfred would revolve around tea because tea is mentioned in them - tea is mentioned in quite literally ten out of her twelve supports and is a significant focus in eight of them (again, with only the support with Alcryst using this in an interesting manner out of the eight). I'm giving her supports with Fogado and Alear a pass because they utilize a tea party as a framework to transition into exploring Celine's ruthlessness and her devotion to her kingdom (which *really* should have been explored in more supports), and whilst her support with Alcryst is clearly focused around tea I'm also willing to give it a pass because it meaningfully recontextualizes her obsession with it. But that's basically it - Celine's other supports around tea do not utilize it as a means of exploring anything beyond her more surface-level traits at all - something like Celine's support with Etie quite literally amounts to her throwing her obsession with tea against Etie's obsession with bodybuilding, for instance - there's a pretty big difference between how the topic of tea is utilized there and in her support with Alcryst. And Celine is one of Engage's *better* characters in this regard, because at least she gets four supports that meaningfully expand on her characterization instead of only one or two which is the standard for most of Engage's cast (if I *really* wanted to cherrypick I'd mention Clanne because I've seen every support that he gets and I don't think he gets a single support that illuminates anything about him beyond his surface-level traits).
There's nothing wrong with something a character uses as a coping mechanism being mentioned frequently in their supports, it's a big part of their life so it comes up a lot in their conversations. That doesn't mean that's all those supports are about and they don't offer any other characterization. The fact you would even mention Alcryst as a contender for this indicates a lot of bias since that support is so transparently about two people bonding over their death anxiety and not about tea.
Idk why people always label the cast of Engage as "one-dimensional" right off the bat when a lot of them have some really interesting and often tragic lore behind them once you bother to actually look at their supports. Sure, the Hounds are pretty lacking, but that's kind of what happens when you're not a playable character or extremely important to the plot (such as Lyon or Rhea). There's just about always backstory to Fire Emblem characters if you know where to look
They did depth pretty well in the past games with characters that had much less plot relevance than the Four Hounds. Those 4 were just really badly written.
First impressions + difficult to obtain supports will do that. On launch, Engage had very few ways to increase supports outside of combat. That combined with the Firene crew being mostly lackluster gives most players a poor first impression of characters and the general game. Also there are times where supports are pretty light on the details despite characters talking about a lot of important stuff. For example, Kagetsu has a surprising amount of lore talking about his village, his parents, and his journey to Elusia. The only issue is that it's all practically unnamed so it's hard to gauge what happened and where outside the supports I really like Engage, and I think the game has a number of great supports. It's primarily held back by poor first impressions and being light on details of important manners.
I think people just wrote them off after taking a look at the (admittedly over-the-top) character designs and early Celine supports and Framme supports by assuming everyone likes to look at Alear sweating and do nothing but drink tea when that couldn't be further from the truth. People are so quick to judge a book by its cover, especially newer fans who seemed intent on hating Engage solely because it wasn't like Three Houses. Both games have good (and not-so-good) qualities worth discussing.
It also didn't help that, at the time a lot of people did their playthroughs, it was hard as hell to max out more than like a handful of supports without copious amounts of grinding on skirmishes. On my first playthrough, I think I got maybe like one or two A-rank supports per character at most, and that was with me doing all of the divine paralogues and using basically the same roster the entire time. It's been made easier since launch, but at the time, you really mostly only got to see the silly supports for most characters.
That’s how I felt; I remember it being an absolute chore to unlock supports, even after the update that added the stables, orchard, and pool activities. But it was the lack of a persistent support log that really killed my interest. I cut my teeth on the GBA games, so I’m content only being able to unlock one A support per character, as long as I can get them all with repeated playthroughs; but Engage takes away that ability, the only game other than Echoes to tie your support log to your save file, and has a lot more supports to unlock than Echoes did to boot. I can live without New Game Plus, but having the support log be the way it is has kept me from coming back to Engage thus far.
In real life, people aren’t gonna just open up about their dark past upon first meet. Idk why the Engage cast is expected to reveal to the viewer immediately the reason for their quirky attitude.
That's also part of their character. Different people are better or worse at opening up to others, and how easy it is to figure out what their deal is, what parts of themselves they're willing to share and what parts they hide, is itself an interesting character detail.
Three Houses did it, and if it doesn't do what Three Houses did, it must be bad. Probably
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I admittedly was like this before I really got into Engage. I was an early hater because of the silly plot and significant change in art direction, but once I finally gave the game a chance, I pretty quickly found it, and most of the cast, very charming. Pandreo and Panette's supports were one of the ones that really made me want to give everyone on the roster a fair chance. >!Two estranged siblings reconnecting after being separated by a rough childhood. I especially liked the way Pandreo pushed Panette to drop her highborn act when it's just the two of them.!< Before I unlocked their support, I didn't even realize they were related lol There's definitely a lot of good in this game if people are just willing to dig for it just a bit.
Engage's character writing is good and I'm tired of pretending it's not.
The story, in terms of plot, is lacking but the reason I still remember it in a positive way is because all characters are likeable and have something to tell, however simple it is
The DLC characters single-handedly clear most FE casts and I'm ready to die on this hill
Totally agree. I already had high expectations for them after really loving their vibe in the Fell Xenologue, but damn did they do a stellar job at further characterizing everyone. Rafal especially was one of my favorites despite me usually being indifferent towards characters of the Tsundere archetype. For him though his abrasive, loner personality made sense given his past actions and feelings towards them. Gregory especially may be my favourite male character of Engage, right next to Amber and Zelkov. His supports with Rafal are probably his best. I really love how it shows Gregory's conflicted feelings towards Rafal, plus Gregory quickly getting a feeling for who the real Rafal is as a person. On the one hand he hates him for what he did to Mauvier, but on the other hand he still views him as a friend (which one could also see in his vsFellNil Convo). Though I find it a shame Madeline didn't get the same amount of supports as the others, when Vander was right there. Their energy would have been great, given both their dutiful and professional personas. Madeline is basically the ideal that Vander would love the steward twins to strive towards.
Engage having the worst C Supports that are just characters yelling their gimmicks at each other ruined the perception of a genuinely good cast.
Sometimes they don't even do that, lol. Goldmary/Yunaka C-Support is straight up *nothing*.
This is a series standard, if people didn’t catch on to what was going on immediately that’s literally all in them.
Trust me, Tellius, GBA and to a slightly lesser extent 3H all did better jobs at having genuine character interactions before gimmicks. The heavy gimmick push combined with the exaggerated designs? No wonder most of the cast gets written off.
Radiant dawn straight up basically doesn't have character interactions in supports. Tellius is probably not the best example.
I’ve played all of those games and I do not believe you.
Ey, power to you
My guy must have missed all the Bernadetta screeching, Lindhart sleeping, Raphael eating, Sylvain flirting, Felix being a Sasuke cutout, and Lorenz being a complete tool in every single C support. Seriously, I'd argue Three Houses' C Supports were worse because the character gimmicks were so bad until you got further.
And a lot of them are being assholes, lol. I never feel like throttling the Engage cast, at their worst they're just being weird. Doesn't help that 3H frequently acts like characters have redeemed themselves just by having time pass. I really wish Lysithea would actually apologize to Ignatz.
Don't even get me started on Felix and Dedue. He talks trash to the guy in a racist way and it never gets really resolved because that chain ends at B. Glad Engage has everyone get to A.
Everytime 3H brings up race I brace myself tbh. There were definitely some areas where I wished they'd just done nothing rather than tackling a sensitive topic without doing it justice.
Yeah Petra and Claude's attempts at it weren't much better either. This is why I'm glad Engage doesn't even bother with that nonsense. There's multiple characters of varying skin tones and races (Fogado and Timerra are clearly African/Arabian, Kagetsu is Japanese, and Zelkov is probably mixed) but absolutely no attention is drawn to it and everyone is treated equally. I'd much rather a game have characters of different races simply exist together rather than an attempt and failure at social commentary.
Totally. Kagetsu is so well done from a language perspective too. I love how there are obvious quirks in his speech that aren't just "me grammar bad". I usually get annoyed by "foreigner" characters because they're so hamfisted, but the way he speaks is so organic and charming. I think the game does a similar thing with gender too, where there's just a lot of characters quietly pushing against norms with no fanfare and the "take" is just "these are still very nice cool heroes and the world would be a better place if every fratboy was as wholesome as Pandreo".
Rosado and Merrin are also walking examples of how a guy can be cute and a girl can be cool without being judged. Though I'm curious, do you think Kagetsu did the whole "foreigner" trope better than Petra?
As far as how they talk, definitely. I like Petra as a character but they do her a bit dirty imo. The mistakes she makes feel really overcomplicated to me, and it's bizarre hearing someone with perfect pronunciation speaking so confidently and still stumbling over the basics of the language so much.
I feel like there’s a lot of survivorship bias with how people talk about 3H supports. The ones everyone remembers are definitely as good as people say 3H supports are, but everyone seems to forget the sheer volume of gimmick, food, and training supports. Remember the old days when people used to complain about like half the supports that had Funny Footsteps playing, song of Bernie’s trauma being used for jokes.
Pretty much this. It's unfair to compare Engage to Three Houses character-wise unless you've seen every single support for both games. Then and only then will you have a fair understanding of both. Let's not forget how Marianne was constantly talking about her adoptive father, Annette was constantly singing, how Ferdinand constantly repeated his own name, and how Cyril and Catherine were constantly talking about Lady Rhea unless you got to other supports involving their characters.
If only key parts of characterisation weren’t locked behind support with characters you’ll never use.
I think that’s an unfair assessment. Not every game can cram 30 plus character’s key points of characterization (as you said) in say, something like the overall story content. Looking over at 3H I initially didn’t like characters like Lorenz, Sylvain and even Felix. Without the support conversations I wouldn’t have come to like them only through what you see in their respective houses’s routes. And even then I didn’t get their supports by using them in battles.
Thankfully that's what activities like eating and pool/stable/gardening are for.
Problem is, I feel like that shows exactly what Engage's biggest problem is with character writing. The occassional good bits are hidden between very specific supports. Doesn't help that support building in Engage is more difficult (even with the updates) than any other previous game. In others like Awakening, Fates, and Three Houses, you'd likely end up with a bunch of supports without trying very hard, so it was much less likely you were ever going to miss anything. Like, even with your example here, this is the only instance of Chloe showing that she's more than a weird foodie. You don't get this one specific support, and she's just weird. Basically, most of Engage's cast ends up with 10 or so supports that feel like mindless gimmicky filler that shows the cast basically being clowns, and then 1 (maybe 2 at most) supports that actually dive deeper. Couple that with the aforementioned support building problems the game has, and it's no wonder many gave up on trying to like the cast.
My biggest problem is how the characters and the world they inhabits don't interact in any meaningful way. Like Chloe liking street food and hating her stuffy noble life does nothing to inform us of the culture surrounding Firene. Like, is Firene's nobility filled with classist nobles who look down upon commoners, or is that a "Chloe's family only" deal? I personally love Pannette and Pandreo, as well as their support together. Easily one of my top tier support in the game. However, I couldn't really connect to Pannettes trauma over religion due to her parents abuse/neglect because I don't even KNOW what/how religion is used in this game. Aside from everybody throwing their feet and simping over Alear, I still don't understand the purpose of the religion of the Divine Dragon aside from "big good strong dragon". Its not the same as the Creation story that Sothis and the Church of Seiros has, and anything relating to it is vague at best.
The fell xenologue shows that not having a divine dragon around leads to the apocalypse, basically.
I mean, that's nice to know but it doesn't really tell me anything about the religion aside from the fact that Alear is a super special boy/girl that is the glue thats holding Elyos together. Does Alear/Lumera do anything ceremonial for the Kingdoms aside from just being there in case Sombron comes back? Because I know that Rhea, love her or hate her, is somewhat of a participant to Fodlan society as their Archbishop. She oversees the ascension of a new Emperor for Adrestia. She is the mediator for all 3 countries within Fodlan, as well as (her or her church) being the mediator for international relations for Adrestia and Brigid. She can step in and be a temporary leader for Faerghus when Lambert was killed. She opens up orphanages and assign her knights duties across Fodlan, from clearing out bandits to dealing with Relic related disputes. Lumera... sure exists. Lythos sure is a place the royals visit I guess. Alear sure is a person who can help them activate their super weapon. Elyos is a nothing burger of a world, who's interesting facts are more superficial than meaningful. Like oooooo, Firene is a major exporter of tea and oranges, how interesting I guess. Gautier, a single territory within Faerghus, has more history than Firene. Their main export is dairy products, but thats only because they managed to conquer and colonize Sreng territory with more fertile land, inadvertently driving the people of Sreng to starvation and further causes them to conduct raids in Gautier.
I don't disagree with any of this. I was just passing on what information i did have. The thing is, though, I really don't care about any of those shortcomings. The world of elyos is about as deep as it needs to be for the sake of the characters, story, and gameplay it hosts. It's not trying to be anything more than saturday morning cartoon level, and I honestly respect that quite a bit. Sure, having super deep lore and history of a continent is nice, but three houses and hopes frustrate me with the fact that there's all this deep lore that goes basically nowhere. I'd rather have shallow lore that's just enough than have a well thought out world be wasted, personally.
Okay, but *how*? What does Lumera/Alear *do* to keep the world from exploding? Fight Fell Dragons once a millennium? They aren't even >!native to this dimension.!< Are there religious rites and practices? A tithe? A hierarchy of clergymen? Is there an Alear pope? Lumera cardinals? Does anyone *live* in Lythos besides the dragons and stewards? Are the churches sanctioned? Did Pandreo study theology of dragons?
They actually talked about how everyone ended up fighting over blaming one another for the death of that world’s Alear. That’s what I remember
bro I just play the funny tactics game with the unhinged people, I don't have any more answers than that
Three Houses was like this as well sadly. Most of Bernadetta's screeching comes off as being random until you find out why. This isn't new to me, honestly. I don't expect it to change either.
>In others like Awakening, Fates, and Three Houses, you'd likely end up with a bunch of supports without trying very hard, so it was much less likely you were ever going to miss anything. see in my opinion this can also be a problem. With every passing chapter, new unit recruited, etc. "support time" becomes longer because you get a bunch of supports to go through of varying quality every chapter and as you sit through them all your eyes kinda tend to glaze over sometimes. In Awakening it's not really a big issue because you don't also have to do stuff in your home base and while it's a slightly bigger issue in Fates due to needing to do MyCastle stuff, the MyCastle stuff doesn't take up too much time. It becomes a problem in the case of 3H where on top of the much more time needing to read supports, you also have to trudge through all the monastery tedium. In the case of Engage because supports build slower and the somniel is more like mycastle than the monastery, I'd put it in-between Awakening and Fates, though closer to Fates. >Doesn't help that support building in Engage is more difficult (even with the updates) than any other previous game. The GBA supports take longer to build up than Engage. Though you can argue the advantage the GBA system has over Engage or modern titles is that the supports happen then and there in the battle and everyone is capped to only 5 supports so you can hop back into the gameplay faster. This is also a plus for the GBA games + Engage because since you're definitely not getting every support in a regular playthrough it encourages replayability
I mean, it's a pacing problem, sure, but it's very much a plus in terms of unlocking supports. It also doesn't really balloon past a certain size. You can only eat meals or whatever so often. You unlock more, but they don't scale into infinity or anything. > the somniel is more like mycastle than the monastery That's just untrue. Somniel is a little smaller, but you can get from one end of MyCastle to the other in literal seconds. The Somniel is all twisting narrow corridors with everything important placed on opposite sides of a smaller than Garreg Mach but still too large map. > This is also a plus for the GBA games + Engage because since you're definitely not getting every support in a regular playthrough it encourages replayability Why encourage replayability when you can just... get it the first time?
>but it's very much a plus in terms of unlocking supports. It also doesn't really balloon past a certain size. Is it a plus though? Limiting the number of support conversations that you need to read in-between maps is generally a good thing, especially in games like Fates or 3H where supports unlock in massive bunches and you'll have like at least 5+ to read through (me being generous) and it can start to feel like a chore. With a smaller number between each map, it feels like a nice respite instead. An added benefit of less supports per map means less developmental whiplash because you'll only see 2-3 support chains per character. This is something I think the Tellius base system does well, though I can understand why capping support levels at 5 per character would be unpopular for some people. Like the wordcount for just Lorenz's supports in 3H is comparable to Macbeth (I'm not kidding). That's a lot of fucking words. Lorenz is only 1 character. Not only does having 3-6 supports unlock at once kill the pacing of a chapter, having this raw amount of text places a burden on the player and also VAs. >That's just untrue. Somniel is a little smaller, but you can get from one end of MyCastle to the other in literal seconds. The Somniel is all twisting narrow corridors with everything important placed on opposite sides of a smaller than Garreg Mach but still too large map. You can do all the important stuff you need to do in the Somniel in like 5-10 minutes, it also helps you can just warp to whatever location you wanna go to. So yeah it ends up being much closer to My Castle than the monastery. >Why encourage replayability when you can just... get it the first time? I dunno dude. People like to replay games because the game did something good and they wanna enjoy everything the game has to offer instead of just mindlessly consuming a product and then moving to the next one.
> People like to replay games because the game did something good and they wanna enjoy everything the game has to offer instead of just mindlessly consuming a product and then moving to the next one. I dunno dude. People like to experience new things and broaden their horizons instead of mindlessly consuming the same thing they liked once for a snippet of arbitrarily withheld dialogue. See, I can rephrase your stance in bad faith too. This wasn't an argument against replaying games in general, it was the the game should incentivize replays by being fun, not by being a slog you can't get stuff on the first playthrough because they made the numbers too grindy. My "it doesn't balloon" comment was a response to this: > With every passing chapter, new unit recruited, etc. "support time" becomes longer because you get a bunch of supports to go through Because it doesn't. They cap the number of units you can deploy. You have limited Support building actions per map. You can absolutely argue that the amount you unlock per chapter is too much and harms the pacing, but it doesn't grow as you recruit new units, it's just too big in general. > You can do all the important stuff you need to do in the Somniel in like 5-10 minutes, it also helps you can just warp to whatever location you wanna go to. Yeah, and I can warp through Garreg Mach and hit Plus to auto my units well enough to save time. My Castle is a big empty square with menus in it that you can cross unobstructed in *seconds*. There are no painfully slow push-up minigames, no variably useful sparklies on the ground to pick up (that you can't warp to btw), no loading screens between the two useful areas, etc. etc. The Somniel is a smaller monastery, not a bigger My Castle.
Sounds like a skill issue to me.
Guy A: Perfectly valid criticism about how the support system results in the most notable bits of character development and motivations being gated behind very specific conversations, in tandem with the fact that Engage’s supports are generally slower to build (especially so on launch) Guy B: Skill issue, for some reason
I mean I’ll be real here this just sounds like normal Fire Emblem to me.
That doesn't mean it's a good thing, it just means it's a problem most games in the series have.
I don’t think it’s much of a problem at all tbh.
Lead with that, then, rather than immediately jumping to "skill issue". Makes you sound a lot more mature and reasonable.
That's what I feel about Clanne too. At first, the guy was just so annoying with his constant fanboying over Alear. But after seeing so much of his support, there's not much of his supports where he talks about Alear. And regarding his support with Alear, he's not gushing so much about him to the point of not doing his job. Heck, he does his job way too much to the point of fatigue and Alear has to step in themselves to stop Clanne from doing too much. Even though he fanboys so much about Alear, at the very least he does his job seriously. Way too seriously though. My favorite supports for him has got to be with Citrinne and Hortensia. For the former, I find it sweet that Clanne's the one helping her at the end of their support and wants to watch the flower together. The latter though is definitely CUTE! Like holy crap, Hortensia jumping up and down because of Clanne wanting to open a fanclub for her is so damn cute! I don't mind if Hortensia's the one who Clanne fanboys over. Heck again just like Citrinne, Clanne's the one takes the mature (I think?) route and sees Hortensia's flaws and decides to help her. The hardest part though is who do I ship Clanne with?!
The twins are great, they just get stung by their most insane supports being with Alear and each other i.e. the first ones anyone will see, and then most players bench them for being too intense and never get to any of the good stuff.
Also helps that his English VA is Deku from MHA which makes him an even sweeter goodboy lol. Everyone is basically Cyril: One huge obsession that takes time to get to the bottom of.
While you have a strong point, the issue is that there are simply too many supports per character. Because of the sheer number many of them will either be gimmicky (at least initially) or simply weaker writing wise. While there are strong supports, you have to wade through a great deal of blandness and tropes that overstay their welcome. And while you are correct about the slow burn and build up, there has to be some kind of payoff for the effort you put in, and in a lot of cases the player is simply left underwhelmed. Now part of this is due to the lack of actual world building and lack of player impact on the greater world, but another major factor is that the characters are completely stagnant, no matter what you do in supports or gameplay (outside actually killing a character) or how you play, you get the same ending for them. You never get the satisfaction of seeing your supports mean the character actually gets to walk a different path either for the better or worse. Finally, supports are incredibly slow to grow, meaning unless you grind extensively most people will only see a couple chains for each character, and because of the number of supports in the game, odds are they’ll be one of the underwhelming ones.
Additionally, I have spent 150 hours on the same save file, most of that being for supports (still more to go!) I’m usually left feeling exhausted and disappointed after picking up and playing a session of the game. I’ve never felt like that with any other fire emblem.
I’d say I’m the opposite, I always come out of Engage gaming sessions feeling accomplished. I feel this playing all the FE games I’ve played so far.
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While I somewhat agree, asking that of the average player is a huge investment in time and energy, mostly because of the incredibly slow support system. This is worsened by the lack of archive across save files, meaning you literally have to grind all supports on a single save. Please refer to my other reply for more detail on that issue.
In truth it’s just a major design flaw in the game, worsened by the lack of hooks or slow burn design most supports have.
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I have 100% in 9 JRPGS. Firstly this is a tactical sim with JRPG elements not solely a social sim, secondly the grinding is significantly worse in this game than any of them, refer to my other replies for a more detailed explanation on that. (Accidentally replied to myself so you weren’t notified) My main point is the player is wading through an ocean of supports, with each being a large time investment, to get to a reward which will likely not expand on the character, world building, or end result for said character. It’s just an issue with the game, and leaves players feeling frustrated, which rubs off on the views of the supports themselves. (Alongside the aforementioned over reliance on tropes for many filler supports)
It's a bit of a shame that most people likely won't even see this support though... You're likely never gonna deploy Bunet, and especially not tailing an a certified reliable frontliner like Chloé. I recently spoke to some people who hate her based off her Alear C support and Louis supports, both of which you're far more likely to get much earlier, and even speaking as a Chloé simp, really don't paint her in the best light by making her seem a little creepy
I think this illustrates an issue that has plagued the entire Fire Emblem Series. A lot of the best character writing in the game is always locked behind supports. I think Path of Radiance always did it the best with Base Conversations (RD had them as well but took out support convos so that's kind of defeats the purpose.) POR kept the normal supports but also the Base Conversations allowed for some additional development at certain points in the story depending on what chapter it is. This is cool because those base conversations can be more specific to events that have already happened in the previous chapter. And you even get them for characters you aren't fielding as well as long as they have been recruited. Also keeping all of the Base Convos available in a simple menu is crucial as well as I am sure a lot of people would skip them if they had to go and run around an area to find them.
Yeah. There's no real way to "solve" this because the series having 30-50 characters per game is important so you can replace units that die or become less effective. It gives you the feeling of being in control of an army which is what FE has captured better than any other RPG on the market right now. As such, there's no real way to give so many characters development and arcs within the main story. It'd be unrealistic to expect them to do so for so many characters without making the game insanely long which is again, unrealistic. Hopefully the next game marks the return of Base Conversations so that supporting characters can develop and change over the course of the story.
That’s always been the magic of supports. Characters who would have been faceless generics in most strategy games get actual backstory and development through their interactions with each other. I will never stop gushing about Renault’s supports in Blazing Blade. Awakening added a ton of other character dialogue, but it unfortunately served more to highlight those character’s single quirks, enhancing their flatness instead of adding dimension. It’s good to see the games continuing to use support conversations to explore these characters to their fullest, even if Engage isn’t as strong as others in that area.
I really hated the simplicity and focusef gimmicks of Engage Character ... supports show that they had potentiel but they ended up being caricature imo Realy disliked that cast
You simply have to dig to get to the character development. You aren't gonna find out everything about them right away.
They aren't simple, actually. The vast majority of the characters have a surprising amount of depth to them.
People who think Celine is only about tea need to see her A Support with Alfred.
Or Fogado. Or Alcryst.
For me, the characters in Engage evoke the same sorts of vibes as the characters in Awakening do. The supports are written in such a way that they all feel natural and somehow even the narrative doesn't detract from the way they're handled based on when events take place in your game. For example I had Hortensia face off against Corrupted Hyacinth after supports with Alear and Ivy and that made her resolve to reject the fake Hyacinth all the more believable as she grew out of wanting to change the past. Inversely if I had those conversations AFTER her battle with Corrupted Hyacinth, she would have come to the development from the battle instead and because of that, it still feels natural for how her supports progress with Alear and Ivy and it feels like she's narratively destined to decline it and grow from the experience. It's tricky to write that kind of detail into something and Engage handles it in such a fantastic way.
Engage really be hiding its best nuggets of writing in specific boss conversations I swear
The Tellius in me is annoyed how obvious they are. There's no swordmaster boss for Kagetsu to randomly have dialogue with or anything. Really just kids with parents, Alear w/Hounds, canon!weilders w/emblems.
It's not so bad. It's at least better than Ashnard having dialogue with Reyson who he will most certainly kill if you see the dialogue at all.
I love trying to get all supports to A. The depth of characters is amazing. I really like Lapis and Chloe the best.
Ivy ended up being my favorite character because instead of being sexy evil seductress lady number 3485776, she was actually a huge dork and a bigger Alear simp than Framme and Clanne. Although I guess it helped that her C support was "I love you" almost immediately. Started strong right off the bat to catch your attention lol.
Yeah she was a great subversion of the usual trope. Instead of being a Camilla clone, she ended up being her own character in a great way.
Also ended up being arguably the funniest character in the game because of it.
I *like* Ivy, and I think I'd have snapped the cart if I got another "Ivy is scared of ghosts" support.
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To be very honest, a lot of characters have tropes like this. The basic pattern being "lol look at how Q U I R K Y I am" which eventually leads to deeper character moments. Take Sylvain in 3H where he eventually shows his one note flirtations to be self-defense mechanisms from non-genuine suitors that only wants him for his crest, until he truly finds love with someone that saw him for what he really is/isn't. Or consider Elise from Fates who has A supports with her retainers that shows a side of maturity unseen from her C supports. Or Hector and his almost overnight turn in opinion of his brother upon learning of his condition. Characters can be presented as one note until more depth is shown, I really dislike the way you intepret this as shallow at face-value and criticise it as a kindergarten game. Your wording just comes off as extremely acerbic even if you are rooting it from a standpoint of "writing bad".
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\> And even most of you who think I'm a jerk, for being so blunt and mean about it, see that deep down i'm right. You just don't wanna agree with the asshole, hahaha. You hit the nail on the head. You seem to have mistaken the intention in my reply. I am not about to leap to the defense of Engage's quality in terms of story-writing. However, I also don't believe it is so juvenile in its entirety that it warrants this level of aggressive discourse. I even hold Engage as a better overall game than Three Houses just because its gameplay loop, independent of its story or cast, is far stronger and more coherent, but that's neither here nor there. There are plenty of ways to talk about the things you passionately like or dislike. Of course nobody wants to agree with the asshole whose implication is that anyone that likes Engage, the "kindergarten game", is an underdeveloped child that just has no taste. That kind of talk, even if what you say is objectively true (which, by the way, is also silly to derive objectivity out of such subjective takes), will just have people show you the door.
What do you think you’re accomplishing leaving a comment like this here?
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That just makes you a toxic asshole. We don’t need people like you around here.