Now that Nintendo has unveiled the Nintendo Switch 2, I have started to think about upcoming Nintendo games, including the future of the Fire Emblem series.

I have been a Fire Emblem fan ever since I played Fire Emblem Awakening, and ever since I have played the GBA Fire Emblem games, the Ike games, and all the 3DS games. So when they announced Fire Emblem Three Houses at E3 2018, I was interested. I wasn’t really too excited with the initial reveals; however, the E3 2019 trailer sold me, revealing that there was a time skip and seeing punished Dimitri made me hop on, and I preordered the game. Ever since then, I played the game 7 times because there are 4 story routes in the game, and also I wanted to experiment with different team rosters and class setups, and I played the game even more when the DLC came out. I do love the characters of the game, and planning strategies is fun, but honestly, I feel like building my team was more fun than playing the game most of the time. The game suffers from how open the class system is, making the level design of the maps boring because the developers did not know what your team roster would look like. I actually prefer the DLC levels for this reason because the DLC restricted your classes like older games, but the DLC was pretty short. Many maps also had the objective be defeating the boss, which isn’t uncommon in Fire Emblem, but Three Houses had characters that can use the warp spell every map, allowing you to skip the level by sending a guy to the boss and just killing them. I much prefer previous Fire Emblem games where powerful spells like warp would be a limited resource instead of regenerating every map, because there was a decision to be made about when you would warp or not. I played three houses a lot on hard mode, and I felt like the game was pretty easy on hard. I also played the game on Maddening, and the game was brutally difficult and not fun. There wasn’t any sense of balance or interesting level design for me to enjoy the game, and I would always start new playthroughs of Three Houses because I love the idea of playing the game, only to drop it midway because I would get bored.

So, this is where Fire Emblem Engage comes swooping in. I followed the leaks for the game thinking that it was fake, only to jumpscared in a Nintendo direct with the colgate/pepsi ass protagonist being real. I was so shocked that the game was real and didn’t know if I should play it or not, but I did, and I’m so glad that I did. This is the most mechanically interesting Fire Emblem that has been released in a while, and it released me from my Three Houses prison. This game managed to fix one of the problems Fire Emblem always had, that mounted units are so much better than infantry units. In previous Fire Emblem games, the utility of a character having a lot more movement made them a lot better than a unit that has low movement. High-movement characters can finish objectives quickly, and low-movement characters would often trail behind high-movement characters, causing the player to play a lot slower if they choose to use them. Three houses attempted to nerf this by giving horse characters lower combat speed, however, they didn’t give this nerf to flying units, which just results in flying units dominating, especially when fliers can dismount whenever in order to lose their weakness to bows.

In Engage, infantry units were divided into different categories that all had unique abilities, and high-movement units did not receive any new abilities because their ability was their high movement. These abilities of infantry units were interesting enough for me to plan strategies around them, such as a unit type called qi adept being able to shield other units from attacks or a unit type called backup being able to assist other units in their attack with something called a chain attack. Lower movement characters also had more movement options made available because of the emblem abilities, such as Sigurd or Celica. Unlike Three Houses, however, Engage feels more balanced around the player having these powerful options available to them when comparing emblem abilities to the warp spell from Three houses. I also had fun strategizing and creating builds, and unlike Three Houses, playing the maps felt fun.

Of course, Fire Emblem Engage comes with its own set of problems. The story is uh…….I don’t even remember 💀. I’ve played Fire Emblem games with average or bad stories before, so I don’t mind ignoring most of it, but I do wish the story were better or at least bad in an entertaining way, like the story of Fates. I do like some of the characters of Engage. A lot of them are funny, and some of them do have interesting backstories, but whatever happens in the main plot is just not very interesting. It’s funny sometimes, but the funny moments are not common enough. I also don’t really like that the emblems are just Fire Emblem characters from other games. It makes Engage feel like Fire Emblem Heroes on a console. The DLC of the game is also terrible. You have to play the DLC content every playthrough in order to unlock the new content, unlike Three Houses, where you could play the DLC once and have access to the new classes and characters on every subsequent playthrough.

The meme of Fire Emblem Three Houses having a good story but bad gameplay and Engage having a bad story but good gameplay is an oversimplification of exactly what I feel about the games, but it gets the idea across. I do wonder what they will do for their next game that isn’t a remake or remaster. I personally hope the game looks good. I don’t like the style of Switch Fire Emblem games and prefer 3DS games, especially Shadows of Valentia, which features gorgeous artwork by Hidari Akio Shimada. I also hope that the game could have an interesting, human conflict-driven political story with great characters. I liked this aspect of Three Houses, but I still had issues with the game’s story, and I think they could make something even better. I hope they also iterate on ideas from Engage. I think emblems should return, but they should not be Fire Emblem characters from previous games. They should just be an in-universe phenomenon like gods, and maybe if they keep adding emblems to future games, they could work like Final Fantasy summons. Even if emblems don’t return, I just hope the game’s mechanics and level design are interesting for someone like me to strategize and plan around, but also enjoy.

Well, anyway, regardless, I will go into debt to buy a Switch 2 at some point and play the next Fire Emblem, and I will probably end up complaining about it.