Fire Emblem series

[Kier]

I see very little Engage defending from the community at large. FEU will shoot down any attempts to be negative about anything at all, but that's just how they roll over there. I see a lot of people occasionally chime in to say that the gameplay is good if you give it a chance, almost on a similar level that people used to say about Conquest back in the day.

It might seem a tiny bit off topic, but I ask because I think it's directly related to all of us really not liking Engage. For everyone in the thread, what is your opinion on Anime these days?

I've really strongly drifted away from it in the last decade between the time I got into FE and today. I don't think it really has to do with some profound drop in quality, just that my interests have gone elsewhere and I use my very limited free time differently. More cynically but also equally true, certain things that were funny when I was sixteen, become more uncomfortable as time goes on. I doubt id have the same tolerance for, say, Nowii, if my first time seeing Nowii was not when I was an early teen myself. Id probably have the same disgust that some of our older friends here have for her, and that I now have towards some of Engages cast, if I was older.

Conversely, what do you think about 80s-90s anime in general. Stuff from classic Gundam, Fist of the North Star, Cowboy Bebop, Evangelion etc; Basically all of the classic FE Archetypes are 90s anime archetypes, from the Camus types, frequent Char clones.

I think Engage discourse really is as simple as" you're going to like the FE games that came out alongside anime that you liked". I'd like to see if there's an FE fan that's also a modern anime fan who likes Vtubers that doesn't like Engage. Every time we talk about it here, and I have the same conversation with my real-life friends too, is that the stuff we don't like about Engage comes down to "man I don't like anime anymore".

I'd love to know how Engage landed amongst the people who are actually in the demographic they were trying to get. They probably did think they were appealing to me / us / the core audience but missed that I /we fell off the anime wagon very hard in-between the release of Fates to Three Houses and left entirely by Engage.

 

[Berrakh]

Engage bashing is fun but sort of unsporting. There really is no risk of IS trying it again.

…I hope.

 

[George Lucas]

How did it do that? I rarely go on the reddit side of things

The largest complaint is the art.

I actually like the art, and I like how it was fairly different. It’s good to shake things up once in a while. It’s unfortunate we live in a histrionic world where a possible one-off thing is presumed to plague the series in all perpetuity. Anyone who has been playing games for long enough should know better. It makes me think of Street Fighter III, best game in the series by a large margin, but people passed it off because it only had four (originally just two) returning characters.

 

[NerdShamer]

For everyone in the thread, what is your opinion on Anime these days?

Modern anime is cancer. The older stuff, it's not as bad; but it also feels kind of stale in it's own way

 

[Sneak 'n' Snore]

It might seem a tiny bit off topic, but I ask because I think it's directly related to all of us really not liking Engage. For everyone in the thread, what is your opinion on Anime these days?

Conversely, what do you think about 80s-90s anime in general. Stuff from classic Gundam, Fist of the North Star, Cowboy Bebop, Evangelion etc; Basically all of the classic FE Archetypes are 90s anime archetypes, from the Camus types, frequent Char clones.

I think I've always been fairly entry level when it comes to the anime I watch(ed) and how opinionated I am on the genre but I don't think its doing too badly. I do think the Genshin design aesthetic is an eyesore but there are all sorts of different looking anime out there, many of which are still fairly grounded in how their characters look. Call it cheating because its an adaption of a manga and didn't come up with the designs on its own, but Chainsaw Man is recent and was a booming hit and its characters mostly are just dressed like office workers.
I will always hold a special reverence for the 80s-90s era though. Nostalgia be damned, it used to be better.

I think Engage discourse really is as simple as" you're going to like the FE games that came out alongside anime that you liked". I'd like to see if there's an FE fan that's also a modern anime fan who likes Vtubers that doesn't like Engage.

I can see this being the case actually. I think one other factor that kills the Engage designs is the context they're used in; its not a whacky slice of life story and you're not watching them playing video games either.
Engage defenders like to say the story is "cartoony" or "self aware" (while rarely ever being able to explain how so, curiously) but when you actually sit/suffer through it, the plot is simultaneously really boring and hollow, yet also weirdly melodramatic with some of the worst death scenes I have ever seen in any piece of media. All while having these stupid looking characters.
For as much as Engage gets torn apart by jaded FE fans, I think they're also the only audience it has.
I just can't think of of a non-FE fan looking at Alear's design in whats supposed to be a war seeting and going "I need to play this!".

 

[Tony2Timez]

I guess I can chip in as one of the few who actually likes Engage; not intending to shill or change anyone's mind or anything, just to offer a perspective for anyone baffled by how it could appeal to anybody lol

To give a bit of insight on my relevant tastes: my favorite FEs are probably 5, 6, 7 & 9 in no particular order. I do not watch anime and am very much averse to Vtubers; I also have not played games like Genshin Impact but have played/like some "anime-inspired/styled" stuff like some of the older SMT & Persona games, Valkyria Chronicles, some visual novels, etc., for what it's worth.

Spoiler: Preface/"Gameplay matters" sperging everyone has heard before

The main problems people seem to focus on when it comes to Engage are the characters and story, so I guess I'll mainly zone in on why I wasn't really turned off by those, but I'll preface that by saying that the main reason I have enjoyed FE17 is because I think it's fun to play: I love a lot of these maps, mechanically it's really cool to experiment around with, I think a lot of new additions like Break & Rings were well-implemented, Maddening is close to the perfect difficulty... I can go more in-depth but generally a game being fun to actually play (really, to replay, in the case of single player games like FE) is what I personally value.

With that being said, though, I really did not mind Engage's characters or story, or really even feel super strongly about those aspects of the game one way or the other. I didn't connect with the cast as strongly as I did FE7's or FE8's, and the story and setting seemed divorced from the game overall compared to something like FE5, but neither aspect was nearly poor enough to make me disengage () from the game entirely. But keep in mind this is from the POV of someone who is ultimately a gameplayfag.

Spoiler: Char Designs

As far as Engage's characters go, I actually like quite a few, both in terms of design and their actual personality/motivation, but I'll focus on designs first... Firene and Brodia have characters that, for the most part, feel grounded and not out-of-place in FE, design-wise. Diamant looks cool and is probably the design I like the most, I really like Céline and all the flourishes she has going on, and all of the retainer characters out of these two countries were never unappealing to me - Etie maybe being the exception to this. Solm is a bit more hit or miss, but I think Seadall is a pretty good go at a male dancer (that isn't a Heron), I like what they did with Merrin, and I think people make a much bigger deal out of Timerra and Fogado than is really necessary - I get that the nog pandering in games in general is irritating but they're desert people so I didn't think it was out of place lol. The only designs I found particularly tacky were Hortensia and Rosado; I think they kind of lost the plot with them. The Alears, and Nel & Rafal from the DLC, are kind of goofy-looking too but they're dragons and dragons always have some eccentricities going on so I was able to suspend my disbelief a little bit more, if that makes sense.

With the aforementioned exceptions in mind, I never really got the feeling or impression that any of these characters were so out of place that someone wouldn't be able to tell that they were from FE - they're certainly more exaggerated overall than, say, the Awakening cast, to use a recent example, but I never really got the Vtuber dichotomy that gets brought up. Granted, like I said, I don't watch Vtubers so I'll admit I don't really have a solid point of comparison aside from osmosis via Null talking about that community during his streams. Aren't they generally animal-based/have the animal ears going on, though? They remind me more of Laguz or the beastkin from Fates. Literal catgirls like Lethe and Lyre never personally struck me as being particularly preposterous or out of place in the FE universe, so I guess I came at Engage with a similar kind of understanding that it was a standard dev. more fantastical than the baseline (which would probably be something like the Archanea games).

I will say I didn't like how modern-looking a lot of the lounge outfits in the hub world were though - I thought some characters having hoodies, sunglasses and apparel like that was kind of dumb, but it wasn't anything I got hung up on. I also think people would be a lot less turned off by how the characters looked if they all had official, illustrated portraits and character art - I think the character models look really good, but I think if they had kept the drawn portraits during dialogue that all the other recent games have it would bring out these characters much more. Having clear, drawn facial expressions that overlay conversations as characters talked - as opposed to flashes of emotion on models that, while good, are still not quite fluid enough yet to really convey what a character is feeling in the moment - would've probably helped these characters stick with people more. The official renders we did get looked pretty cool, so they should have just went all out!

Spoiler: Chars in General

I really didn't feel anything out of the ordinary with Engage's cast personality/motivation/character-wise either. Everyone can be kinda tropey but that's 90% of FE characters. Most of the supports were fine - some characters actually have some interesting stuff going on: Céline has a lot weighing on her as royalty that gives her a bit more depth than 'dainty, tea-loving princess', I really ended up liking Pandreo and Pannette's relationship despite not really being attached to either character, Kagetsu is pretty entertaining, a lot of what Veyle has going on is really sweet... That's just off the top of my head, but the only character I can think of that had supports that were actually irritating to me was Clanne (pickles). I really pick up on anything particularly terrible as far as supports went. There's nothing groundbreaking in Engage's cast, but how is it not par for the course for this series at this point? Most characters are kind of one-note on the surface but have traits/motivations that are extrapolated on a bit when talking to their peers - welcome to basically every FE game with support convos. Every character had a voice, writing-wise; I think you can apply a lot of the bad-faith interpretations of character writing being plastic to any game in this series - there is really not a lot to most FE characters. This isn't Disco Elysium nigga

All that being said, though, I do wish characters that aren't Alear, Veyle, the main royals, and Vander had more involvement in the actual story. I don't really like it when characters are introduced in one chapter and proceed to just disappear from the narrative for the rest of the game. As I'm thinking about it, this isn't a problem unique to Engage, but Awakening (which is not a game/story I am particularly high on fwiw) was cool because even randos like Virion sometimes had relevance after their join chapter. Emblem Rings exacerbate this issue in Engage, because having as much screentime as they do kind of takes away from the actual characters - I generally don't mind the Emblems but I feel like it would have been a lot cooler if they were silent (think the Amiibo ghosts in Echoes) and were mainly focused on when it came to the gameplay instead of them playing an active role in the narrative. But, again, it's not like every character disappeared as a unit - you're still using a solid mix of these units throughout the game; it's not like the royals are the only usable units or anything.

I also wish the antagonists were stronger. Sombron I didn't really mind: he's an evil dragon that wants to take over the world, which is basically every Fire Emblem villain, so, par for the course there, whatever. I wish the Four Hounds were implemented better though. Their alternate versions from the DLC were better and helped flesh them out a little bit but I don't know why they were as prominent as they were in the story. They're obviously a bit derivative of the Four Fangs/Black Fang from FE7, but Lloyd, Linus, etc. were so much more interesting yet had less screentime in that game, it felt like.

Spoiler: Story sperging

Since I've kind of been touching on the story itself, I'll elaborate a bit more... I thought it was fine. Definitely the weakest part of the game but to discard the game itself entirely has always seemed like an overreaction to me. It was basic and cookie cutter conceptually, which I don't think inherently makes it irredeemable. Tonally a bit inconsistent at times but never thought it was particularly egregious. Lumera was kind of mishandled but I didn't find that as jarring as everyone else seems to, and I thought it was interesting seeing ripples of the impact she had on Elyos and Alear personally as you make your way through the continent. There's some political intrigue, like the perpetual conflict between Brodia and Elusia; it's underdeveloped but I honestly don't think expanding more on shit like Firene's pacifism/neutrality or doing something like having Solm have different dukes that are infighting like Grandbell in FE4 or whatever would have been anything more than superficial considering the tone this is going for overall. Thematically it kind of retreads what Awakening did with "your bloodline doesn't determine your destiny" which is very tropey but fine for what the game is going for. I guess my biggest problem with it is that it doesn't allow anything to sink in - it just keeps moving along, never able to stay in one spot for too long. People shit on FE7's story but the best parts of that narrative are when things are allowed to sink in (think certain character deaths), and Engage doesn't really stops to let itself breathe, and thus, not many of the heavier moments feel particularly earned, if that makes sense. Some moments really landed for me though: losing your Emblem rings and having to, ostensibly, start over/go on without these game-changing items in Chapter 11 I thought was really great, and was what really hooked me in the first time I played (it helps that I love escape chapters).

It's nothing special but I've never understood people claiming it's the worst story in the series when Fates exists. I don't hate Fates because, again, it can be pretty fun to play, and that tends to be what I prioritize, but it was genuinely shocking experiencing that story for the first time coming off of every other game in the series being relatively consistent/streamlined. I guess I'm coming at it from the POV of someone who did not go into this expecting it to be the same tonally as something like 3H.

So, basically, a lot of words to say that a weaker-than-average story and more exaggerated characters don't automatically invalidate a game that at its core is very sound IMO. I don't blame anyone for not reading all of that shit but hopefully that's a bit of insight that takes you inside the mind of someone who was not really all that upset at what IS did with Engage. This was all off the dome; it might be a fun idea to make a YT video or something actually scripted comparing the strengths & weaknesses of FE17 with other FEs, but I feel like that would ultimately just boil down to the "gameplay vs. narrative" discussion that has been done to death in this thread and everywhere else that FE is discussed.

Again, not trying to convince anyone that Engage is ackshually a misunderstood gem, just a POV to kind of break away some of the catastrophizing going on lol. Also, anecdotally, basically every person that I know that skipped Engage was because they heard there was no romance/shipping; I'm not really against that aspect of these games, but I thought that was kind of an interesting insight into where a decent chunk of the FE community's priorities might be.

 

[NerdShamer]

Etie maybe being the exception to this

Obligatory warning that the last time that I'd pointed this out it had traumatized someone into schizoposting.

But you aren't entirely wrong on how most of the initial set of characters were somewhat grounded up until you see the ones from the other two major countries. Otherwise, it's like 60% "somewhat reasonable for FE," 40% of it being overdesigned.

 

[The Great Ape Escape]

I try like 1 anime a year. I really don't watch a lot of shows. Older anime art styles are nicer to look at but they usually have their own problems. I got a friend who watches a lot of anime and played Genshin for a long time and he liked Engage for the gameplay only. But if the game was a big success with people who really enjoy modern anime you'd probably see a lot more fan art and sales for the gacha banners.

Forgot where I heard this analogy but there's "anime" games in the sense that they have a japanese art style because they're made by japanese people, and then there is capital A "Anime" which is that + all the really awesome tropes that you would associate with anime. Stuff like Tellius is the former and stuff like Engage or Xenoblade 2 is the latter. Not to say older fire emblem games had zero anime tropes, they did. Maybe voice acting just makes it less tolerable.

 

[Scarlett Johansson]

Engage nailed the graphics and gameplay. Its literally everything else from the horrible character designs (Ingrid and Bernie's fuckass hair in both 3H post timeskip games is better than....whatever the fuck they were smoking here) to the story but most importantly the nothingburger supports and characterization. Its supposed to be a celebration of FE why the fuck are you not loaded with shout outs and references to previous games? Yes they exist but they are bland. How exciting it was to hear Edelgard mention Bernadetta......only for the conversation to go nowhere. No describing her, no meaningful dialogue with any of the characters.

It literally felt like this:

Character A: Wow! I love your sword!
Character B: Right? Isn't it great!
*end support*

At fucking least Houses and Hopes had in depth supports (and Hopes had Marianne attacking with Dorte the horse so automatic win by default)

I did like at the end of each battle you could run around the map and talk to your companions or villagers. They'd usually say something story related but not always.

Those two fucking twins needed to be killed off though. UUUU DIVINE ONEEEEE. Each character was a literal cliche and it did not work to their favor. And yes I am aware that Raphael, Petra, Lorenz, Ashe, Lindhart, Leonie, and company exist. But they had their rare moments of actual character growth.

 

[NerdShamer]

And yes I am aware that Raphael, Petra, Lorenz, Ashe, Lindhart, Leonie, and company exist

Out of all of these, at least Petra had an excuse for being weird. The rest is just exists for diversity points, imo

 

[Kier]

A lot of interesting things

Thanks for chiming in! I definitely liked the starting town cast a lot more than the other nations, and Brodia had some stand outs.

Alfred’s and Celine’s dynamic was pretty cool actually, with learning that he’s Terminally ill and the pressure that puts on his sister. Chloe and armordude were solid as well.

Diamant was awesome, and Amber was really cool. I can’t say I have any other memories of that group other than citrine and lapis both died in my run but I remember thinking she’s aight. The timid prince and brash brother thing was tired but it worked ok enough, and I liked the Ivy and Diamant supports (until Diamant died because Lyn fucking shot him in the face in her prologue). It says a lot that Brodia is the only name I remember. I liked all of them well enough.

It’s Evil hill zone that I start not liking it much. Hortensia is just awful to have on screen, and she joins too late as a unit for me to want to use her to to learn why she’s better than her garish design. I really, really hate the mix of clown plus Lolita fashion and the whole spiraling pink hair, just way, way too much going on. I admit I never even tried to like her so that’s on me. The less said about Rosado and Goldmary the better. I sent rosado right into the red zone with no weapons to kill him the moment he joined.

I have better things to say about Ivy as a charecter and design. I liked her class, her retainers were pretty neat, and I liked her supports with the other lords. I didn’t like how she worships Alear in their supports though, I’d have rather we learn more about the other religion. Even more circlejerking wasn’t my thing at all. Her dynamic with Zelkov was actually really cool. It’s fun to see them just not like each other at first but business is business.

The pandero and pannette support was good, but I can’t remember a single thing of interest about anyone else from Sand Hill Zone. Having a second bow lord didn’t help them get roster spots, and I tried using Timmera a bit just for supports and can’t remember a damn thing. Merrin was neat mechanically but unmemborable otherwise.

Even the bad FE games have their moments, we’re just all starved for things to talk about around here, thanks for balancing things out!

 

[Computer God Autism]

This shit really started bleeding in with Awakening's quirk factor,

I'll go to bat for Awakening in this case in that I think this is one of the things it gets totally underserved flak for. I don't think the writing of its characters is any more quirky than most previous FE games. Boyd's defining personality trait is as much of being a skirt-chaser as Virion (minus any of the character depth Virion has) while Kellam existing a background joke character is somehow more egregious than Aimee or L'Arachel. Now, this is writing, so that can be easily litigated, but I think it's a lot more clear-cut with designs:



While the art style is different from Tellius and the GBA games, the aesthetics are more or less the same and I think you'd be hard pressed to say any of them are quirky or even that flashy. They all have relatively uncomplex color schemes, natural expressions and poses and aren't loaded up with accessories. Even Tharja, who was obviously designed as waifu-bait, is not really exceptional by Fire Emblem female dark mage standards; you don't even see her bust in her portrait art, and she's wearing less makeup than Sonia.

I think the only Awakening designs that can compare to Engage in terms of flashiness are Nowi (granted Engage's designs are also much more modest) and Aversa.

Comparatively I think Fates designs do break with FE's general aesthetics in favor of quirk. Even setting aside stuff like Camilla going into battle wearing only panties and a corset, you have Corrin and Azura going around barefoot for no good reason, Mitama having literal stars in her eyes, Percy's sidekick getup, Peri's cotton candy hair, Iago's half-face mask and halo, etc. Most of the character designs aren't egregious, but if anything Three Houses pulled back from the direction Fates was heading, which was Engage but less Vtumor, more sexualized.

Whoever designed these actually used AI to generate these designs.

The designer was an artist for Vtubers who was given no insight into their personalities, which is a big part of why they look the way they do.

For everyone in the thread, what is your opinion on Anime these days?

I think Engage discourse really is as simple as" you're going to like the FE games that came out alongside anime that you liked".

I was never deep into anime - I would watch what CN would get on Toonami and put in its Saturday morning block as a kid and that was about it - and my most recent interaction with the medium was enjoying Frieren and SpyxFamily with some old friends last year, so I'll give my opinion as a dilettante.

FE takes some aesthetic influence from contemporary trends in anime - or, at the very least, its artists do. Juggdral characters wouldn't look out of place in Record of Lodoss War, mullets and shoulderpads of doom and all. That said, I think FE has taken aesthetic inspiration from more than just anime - a lot of the armor in the Tellius games reminds me of Jackson's Lord of the Rings, for example, nevermind the Herons using a script that looks suspiciously like Quenya - and it has always had a clear aesthetic style prior to Engage. Even Three Houses, with Dorothea's stupid hat and Bernadetta's hoodie and the Persona-inspired portraits still looked distinctively FE once things got to the war phase.

When Awakening came out, SAO was at the peak of its popularity, and even someone with only a passing knowledge of anime knows how influential it was on the general aesthetic trends of the medium going forwards. Despite that Awakening never struck me as a game trying to ride on the popularity of SAO, nor did Fates. The first FE game that, to me, felt like it was directly trying to appeal to current cultural phenomena was Three Houses with the 2019 Game of Thrones hype (lul) and a dash of Harry Potter nostalgia.

Watching Frieren and SpyxFamily last year, I didn't get the impression that these incredibly popular and entry-level animes were designed specifically to appeal to the sort of people obsessed with VTubers that IS was clearly chasing. Maybe I don't watch enough anime, but I don't think the medium, its aesthetics or its tropes have radically changed because of Vtubers or some other malaise (maybe the consistent quality has degraded since the 90s, but again I wouldn't know - I'm willing to bet the 90s had plenty of bad and mediocre anime people just forgot about, that's usually how media works).

I think the issue is instead the emergence of Gacha games, which use an anime stylization almost by default. Genshin Impact's success and its consequences have been a disaster for gaming. Gacha games in general killed the viability of a separate handheld market, and Genshin's aesthetic style heavily influenced both vtubers (since many became famous streaming it) and other Gacha games. IS considers FE a handheld property and also knows they have had problems getting people to move from Heroes into the main games, so they figure they can kill two birds with one stone by making a mainline game designed to visually attract the lowest common-denominator mobile crowd.

I'm not really against that aspect of these games, but I thought that was kind of an interesting insight into where a decent chunk of the FE community's priorities might be.

Thank you for putting so much effort into a writeup on why you like Engage. Even if I still disagree with a lot of your assessments it's always nice to have a civilized look into why people like different things. As for shipping, I think it's unironically because a large portion of FE's online fanbase is women.

I don't know if there are any official polls/surveys done that have a full breakdown of the FE playerbase by the sexes, but anecdotally my experience has been that of all the strategy games/genres I've been into, FE has been the only one where I've not had trouble finding women who say they play. I remember reading back in an interview years ago that IS said they designed Awakening, in part, to appeal more to women (hence the confession scenes for Robin s-ranks) but even before that I'd say there was still a sizeable portion of the fanbase that were women (I'm willing to be a good portion of the people most obsessed with Ike and Soren being gay in the late aughts were women).

 

[Berrakh]

I guess we can debate if Edelgard did anything wrong or not.

My position is she did but so did Napoleon and Great Man Theory says that’s fine actually.

I really hope people don’t get actually mad at that.

 

[George Lucas]

I guess we can debate if Edelgard did anything wrong or not.

My position is she did but so did Napoleon and Great Man Theory says that’s fine actually.

I really hope people don’t get actually mad at that.

I think Edelgard is a sneaky, no-good bitch. I despise practitioners of black magic (fuck mages, they're all dickheads). And Petra's an annoying hole.

 

[Computer God Autism]

I guess we can debate if Edelgard did anything wrong or not.

My position is she did but so did Napoleon and Great Man Theory says that’s fine actually.

I really hope people don’t get actually mad at that.

Great man and useful idiot are mutually exclusive.

 

[Tri-Tachyon'sClown]

Thought this might interest some of you. Also, lots of fun write-ups on this page, didn't expect that and I'm glad I saw this thread recently.

 

[GoodWinSon]

I guess we can debate if Edelgard did anything wrong or not.

My position is she did but so did Napoleon and Great Man Theory says that’s fine actually.

I really hope people don’t get actually mad at that.

Edelgard could have pulled an Iberian wedding with Dmitri. Claude would fold, the church would bend over or be curbstomped and the Agarthans could be fed to Dmitri.

Easiest win ever, but she had to make things complicated.

 

[Berrakh]

Admittedly this isn’t that great without a more stereotypical pro-Edelgard person to claim she did nothing wrong at all in the slightest.

Great man and useful idiot are mutually exclusive.

If the Agarthans can be knocked out on accident then I doubt they’d matter.

Edelgard could have pulled an Iberian wedding with Dmitri. Claude would fold, the church would bend over or be curbstomped and the Agarthans could be fed to Dmitri.

Easiest win ever, but she had to make things complicated.

This is true. Had to girlboss it up I guess.

I think Edelgard is a sneaky, no-good bitch. I despise practitioners of black magic (fuck mages, they're all dickheads). And Petra's an annoying hole.

Glad we have a peasant to give his thoughts on the unwholesomeness of politics and magic.

 

[Kier]

My issue with Edelgard is my biggest issue with three houses in general, is that Crimson Flower is very unfinished.

My gripe is that we never get to see how she would have handled Agartha. I can accept and enjoy a 'the ends justify the means' protagonist, especially in my 'political intrigue' story. I'm fine that she had a alliance with the Agarthans, they could have used that for interesting dynamics or just to LARP USA and USSR if they wanted to be lame. There is a lot of narrative space between the family intrigue with her and TWSITD and political assassinations and such, if they wanted to explore that. There are the implications of having Fodlan Jesus and Dubstep Devil on sort of the same team at times, with TWSITD having killed Jeralt, Edelgard's actions as the Flame Emperor are hardly looked at with any scrutiny. I'm ok with that in my historical fiction, but i'm not ok with that in my character driven narrative.

Instead, what we get is that Jeritza just sorta.... cleans it up for free offscreen. This removes the agency of dealing with the consequences of her own revolution from her, and that really denies her the chance to shine. She makes a deal with The Dubstep Devil, who then uses fantasy approved nukes, and all consequences of this are completely hand waved away because she defeated mother eugenics. It's a downright crime that she gets more characterization in the routes where she is the antagonist than the route where she is the main lord. I'm not asking for Sans Undertale to come judge my actions or anything, but please, anything.

 

[Computer God Autism]

If the Agarthans can be knocked out on accident then I doubt they’d matter.

They don't? In any route. In Blue Lions you coincidentally decapitate their leadership because they have so thoroughly infiltrated the command structure of the Empire that there ceases to be a meaningful difference between them by the late game, but unlike the Empire their base of operations remains untouched and undiscovered by the end of it and it outright states they'll be planning their next move. Silver Snow and Verdant Wind both feature deliberate strikes against that base to prevent that, while they magically get resolved offscreen, postgame in Crimson Flower.

Edelgard could have pulled an Iberian wedding with Dmitri. Claude would fold, the church would bend over or be curbstomped and the Agarthans could be fed to Dmitri.

Easiest win ever, but she had to make things complicated.

But would Edelgard enjoy getting hatefucked?

It did annoy me that she never made an effort to try to enlist or sway Dimitri. Even setting aside that she does clearly have some minor affection for him (which is more than can be said for anyone outside of the Empire and most of her own classmates) it's just stupid that someone willing to go to any length to see their goal succeed doesn't start by first by trying to persuade or psychologically compromise their already traumatized main opposition.

Thought this might interest some of you. Also, lots of fun write-ups on this page, didn't expect that and I'm glad I saw this thread recently.

I think Mangs is being far to generous with IS in saying that he thinks they just lacked confidence in Engage with direction, refused to market it and that's why it failed. The people at IS were the ones who settled on the quirky vtuber look for one, they didn't have to go for it and they could have stepped in and course corrected at any point and didn't (he might just be trying to not burn bridges here since he acknowledges that Engage looks awful later as not being a reason it's appealing).

I also think it ignores that IS has traditionally been bad at marketing and releases in general. Only three FE games have had major advertising campaigns in the West; Awakening, Fates and 3H (with Awakening and 3H enjoying very good release slots), and unsurprisingly those were the ones to have the largest impacts outside of the hardcore FE fanbase (contentious as it is I'd say Awakening's was also larger than 3H's).