I finally finished Fire Emblem Engage. My final playtime was about 80 hours. Like I said when I got the game, I planned to play all the way through it with Japanese text, and I stuck with it. It took a while, was of course struggling at the start, took some long breaks, but eventually I reached the point where reading the game wasn’t that difficult anymore. It was the first long game I played through in Japanese without the help of an automatic machine translator (I did that for Kuro no Kiseki 2) or having played the game before (Ys Oath in Felghana, also a short game anyway).
I enjoyed seeing some things that are not possible with English text. For example in this scene [late game spoiler] Past Alear is speaking with hiragana only. I thought that really helped with making her seem like she is speaking “soullessly”. Made it difficult to parse what she was saying though, thankfully the devs must have knew that because other characters often repeated what she said but with kanji lol.
There is also Panette who speaks in an absurdly polite way. In this image, almost the entire second line is not actually even words, but are politeness modifiers (an amount you’d never actually see for real lol)
Anyway, as for the game, it was a lot of fun. My first Fire Emblem game. It was cool to see all those characters I only know from Smash Bros lol. There are optional stages where you fight against them to strengthen your bonds, you learn a little about the games they were from in them. I should check those out someday.
I also can’t compliment the graphics/artstyle enough. Such a good looking game, they used the Unity engine well. The pre-rendered cutscenes are also just stunning to look at.
Story was okay, had some great moments near the end. Villains were whatever though.
I don’t know how the gameplay compares to other FE games but I liked it. I was playing on Normal with no Permadeath though lol. Still, there’s very deep customization and the combat animations are very impressive. I also did a lot of the minigames and stuff you can do at your home base, so there’s some variety in there.
I’d say this game is an 8/10. Anyway, with this out of the way, now I can get back to Zelda, lol.