#aaagh I'm sorry I'm just a little hater I know

[shuppityduppity]

People are sort of dunking on Engage for sort of having Isekai Plot Writing (trademark) but it's like... at least it has a story, you know?

When there's four campaigns in a game and two of them are basically identical and the third is a throwaway "evil ending" that doesn't even resolve the main plot, and NONE of the campaigns manage to tell the complete story of the characters or the world, it really feels like the story has been chopped up into big chunks for no reason beyond a storytelling gimmick that's been done better before. I love the 3H characters and their designs and the idea of the time skip but just cramming a bunch of sort of interesting people into a church and having them fight some evil dudes doesn't constitute a story, I'm sorry. I've gotten much more meaty story content from the 3H fandom making fanart than I ever have from the source material's actual text and that really says something about the substance of the game, I think.

Not to fire emblem on main but I think that playing Engage has really set in just how much I didn't like 3H. I think that game was missing a "core" to give it an identity apart from the rest of the franchise beyond the branching paths thing (hello FE: Fates). The mechanics were so limp that fighting battles was an "eh, whatever" sort of affair that absolutely does not fly in Engage whatsoever. The little battalion/gambit mechanic and the big monster enemies absolutely do not hold a candle to Emblem Rings and the weapon triangle in terms of strategy gameplay.

In 3H I always had this feeling that I was focusing all of my time on the Monastery to the point where battles were an afterthought. By the midpoint of the first route, the "management sim" boosts to stats and abilities were enough to carry me all the way to the end of the game basically without any thought or tactical decision making. It really felt like a dating sim/time management game with a tactics game sort of loosely attached to it.