Parts of 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Fire Emblem Engage feel like they were created by people who don’t understand what goes through a player’s mind when playing a strategy RPG. We read ahead, look up skills and weapons, we try to ‘recruit ‘em all’, and plan out meticulous builds that turn our beloved units into killing꧋ machines. There’s something so compelling about being handed a bunch of options and having the freedom to experiment with them, fine-tuning everything until the battlefield sings with the cries of your enemies and the triumphant fanfares of victory.
Fire Emblem Engage dangles these options in fro💙nt of you in the form of inheritable skills - palpable, unit-altering boosts that you can revolve entire builds around. It waves them just under your nose before cruelly snatching them away, never quite letting you play with them as you’d want, like a mean older brother knowing that your greatest desire is almost just out of reach.
The single biggest limiting factor is skill points, which are used to purchase these skills from your Emblems. Skill points are obtained at the same rate as experience, but only if you have an Emblem Ring equipped. Bond Rings also work, but reduce how many s🧸kill points you get as a result. The be-all and end-all of this is that because the best skills cost so much, you’ll go the majority of the game without half your army learning a single one. Chapter after chapter will go by as your skill points slowly rack up towards your goal - one of the standout skills, surely, like Sigurd’s Canter or Marth’s Break Defences.
Al👍l the while, each visit to the Ring Chamber taunts you with the skills that you’re passing up - such as the cheaper, albeit less useful traps. Sure, they’d be handy in the short run, a little boost to your Magic here, a situational advantage there, but you want the big one, and if you want to have any hope of using it for more than two chaꦦpters, you have to ignore the booby prizes. This feels like a major misstep in game design.
One of the highlights of previous games in the series, Awakening and Fates, was getting to mess around with unit classes, acquire new skills easily, and toy with builds to your heart’s content. In Three Houses, things were a bit more limited, but Ne🐲w Game Plus let you bring any and all of your previous skills back in a new run, encouraging broken and enjoyable buil𒈔d-making. In Engage, we have neither the flexibility nor a New Game Plus option, and the skill system implemented feels perfectly suited to either if done right.
The grind is slow. Even if you simply want to slot a unit into a new class, you’ll be spending a substantial amount of time acquiring weapon proficiencies through Emblem Rings, which itself takes many battles and stops other units from using said ring𓆏s. Add to this Engage’s borderline-unfair random battles that seem to discourage grinding, totally misunderstanding the idea that they should be breezy ways to level up those units lagging behind and test out new plans, and you have a game with all the intended flexibility of the previous titles with none of the design choices that allow those systems to flourish in the first place.
Disappointingly, the game’s expansion pass appeared to indicate that this was, if not an intentional flaw meant to be solved through dipping into your pockets, an obvious issue that the devs knew about. The first wave of DLC includes items that give you instant, large skill point boosts. This will speed up the acquisition of a few key skills, but it doesn’t so much as solve a problem as stave it off, applying a tourniquet to a wound that will never close. There are too many units, too many skills, and not enough oppo꧙rtunities to realistically acquire skill points.
I appreciate the shortcuts toward turning Boucheron into the one-man army that he deserves to be, but it’s not enough to make the game functionally replayable. Engage reeks of missed opportunity for the theory crafters and the build twiddlers, and unless future DLC takes steps toward addressing the skill point drought (and class change accessibility, for that matter), subsequent playthroughs will forever feel stale in comparison to those o꧅f past Fire Emblems.