#i’ll be back when our beloved iron18 aka jugdral remake comes out but in the meantime im struggling in the club

[lewlthea]

I think I’ve never seen a Fire Emblem game where the characters feel like set dressing instead of an important part of the story like they do in Engage.

While they all have different character traits and designs, most of them have the same dynamics with almost every other character and theres just. A lack of flair there that I cannot understand. Because half of the cast are nobles, and because for some reason the game itself hides important character backstories from the player unless they go into supports (e.g citrinne and diamant being childhood friends, panette and pandreo being siblings), they all feel flat- they’re either retainers or nobles and theres no interesting dynamic outside of that. For example, you’ll never see a support like fe7’s priscilla/lucius in this game because while these two share the same roles as most characters in engage (noble and retainer), their dynamic is hostile and uncomfortable to each party because of their connection to other people and their past, which we already know of because to recruit lucius, priscilla must reveal to raven that she is his long lost sister - and because of that even though their conversations are very stinging to one another and it gets interesting fast because it brings to the table yet another character’s intentions and feelings, they manage to sort it out. Literally close to none of the Engage characters have any of that because almost none of them are allowed to have a shared history to anyone other than the lords theyre bound to serve or the retainers that protect them.

So far to me very few supports stand out in my mind, the most clear being alcryst/ivy (which actually uses the game’s threadbare story and ivy’s actions as a former enemy unit as a jumping point, i wish the c support did not resolve their animosity so fast but i do appreciate how the character whose entire personality trait is to apologize for everything he does actively refuses to do so when consumed in anger, thats character depth baby!), pandreo/panette (which i do enjoy but i can confess that i havent finished yet bc i do not use pandreo) and lapis/rosado (just has general good vibes and uses past chapters for reference in a clever way, plus this is the support that rosado explicitly confirms that theres no concept of gender in their hometown and i did not ever imagine a fire emblem saying the word gender in a positive way in my entire life). Overall, so far not much has impressed me in terms of characters in this game- the most I’m doing is hyping up Alcryst to myself at all times to at least get attached to something so I can bring myself to continue the game - and I’m already at the doorstep to chapter 25, at this point im only grinding for supports - and the last time I’ve had to do this sort of thing was to complete PERSONA 4 (aka hatecrime the videogame) so yeah engage is. Bad.