This video is a summary of the most some of the more interesting points mentioned in the recent Fire Emblem Engage Developer interview released over the course of the week. The interview covered the story, world and art direction, as well as gameplay answers.
https://www.nintendo.com/whatsnew/ask-the-developer-vol-8-fire-emblem-engage-part-1/
https://www.nintendo.com/whatsnew/ask-the-developer-vol-8-fire-emblem-engage-part-2/
https://www.nintendo.com/whatsnew/ask-the-developer-vol-8-fire-emblem-engage-part-3/
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Timestamps:
Intro: 0:00
Change in Direction 1:17
Alear’s Personality 3:01
Characters 4:06
Emblem Mechanic 4:42
Art Direction 7:45
Combat Animations 9:36
Closing Thoughts 10:30
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Gameplay Footage by Nintendo Life: https://youtu.be/F8o1OwPpvyY
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In a war against the Fell Dragon, four kingdoms worked together with heroes from other worlds to seal away this great evil. One-thousand years later, this seal has weakened and the Fell Dragon is about to reawaken. As a Divine Dragon, use rich strategies and robust customization to meet your destiny—to collect Emblem Rings and bring peace back to the Continent of Elyos.
Team up with iconic heroes from past Fire Emblem games
Summon valiant heroes like Marth and Celica with the power of Emblem Rings and add their power to yours in this brand-new Fire Emblem story. Aside from merging appearances, Engaging lets you inherit weapons, skills, and more from these battle-tested legends. The turn-based, tactical battle system returns with a fresh cast of characters you can customize and Engage to carefully craft your strategy.
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#FireEmblemEngage, #fireemblem, #FE17
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I'm so tired… I'm going to get a good night sleep and tomorrow I'll be streaming Engage! I personally found this interview pretty fascinating for both hopeful and concerning reasons. Will be quite a day tomorrow! What do you think of the developer interview? Anything stick out to you?
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"The engage feature makes the game easier to play" does not give me high hopes for the game tbh. I was already not loving the art style and was at least hoping for something with some bite to it
If I still had any delusional long shot hopes for the story left, things like "keeping it simple" and "appealing to a broader audience" certainly have completely crushed that. Now I fully expect this to be Fates 2.0 levels of bad.
Hopefully at least the characters will still be good and able to carry the non-gameplay elements of it.
I am so fucking hyped
If you want to make it easier for newcomers, the way to go is a very low difficulty option, aswell as many small portion interactive tutorials, not by designing the whole game around it.
Three houses did a good job with having an easy mode, but failed at the tutorial front, by not only not covering everything, but also by just bombarding the player with walls of text very early on, before a mechanic was even in play sometimes, for the stuff they did cover.
I personally like engage more then other fire emblem games to be honest.
I do like how many people here are recoiling at "appeal to a wider audience". That is the correct response. Also shows that people have been paying attention.
So that's why almost all of the girls look like 10 year olds
neat
So the weak and predictable story was a deliberate decision. Good to note.
For me, the story of three houses was the 'one more battle' moment, what will happen next? But when you can predict the end after chapter 3 its like, 'ehhh what's the point?' At chapter 3 of Three Houses, you couldn't predict how it would end. There was mystery, there was a reason to play the next mission. I had prepared to stay up all night from midnight and play it. By 2am, it was like, 'this story isn't engaging. I am going to sleep'
Art direction? I am fine with. Gameplay? Great. The Emblems? Not as bad and nostalgia baity as I thought. But the story? Nope. That pulls the game down significantly.
I'll still keep playing, because I want to see the character development, but the story is really holding back my desire to play.
I hate celebrities. I hope that aspect isn't over done.
I can stand the stupid art style i probably gonna skip this game
The appeal of a broader audiance is very interesting since FE3H did it (but since they were already developping Engage they didn't know yet).
In a way this could explain the drastic difference between the games, to see which one of style and etc is more appealing.
Personnally I'm happy about it, since it means that IS is enough brave to try different style.
Neat
I mean I do kind of always find it worrisome when devs try to widen the audience. Like sure its good for business, but people often make silly mistakes when they have nebulous understanding of what is trendy or accidentally alienate their audience.(its also something risky when people try to streamline genre perceived as complex by making things simpler rather than making it more intuitive to play or such) Or better yet, make choices based on biases 😀 (I'm liking Alear's personality in game so far, but geez thankfully Nintendo prevented them being too much of scaredy cat? Either way, I don't think blanket statements like "brave heroes don't appeal nowadays anymore" is really the case, its more of when execution of them is just cliche and one note)
Their's one is missing the developers didn't add theirs no voice lines while leveling up those characters compared to other series
This makes me more excited to play! Glad they did this interview (And that you covered it)
Did you just described Three Houses as an epic historical drama? LMAO
I personally never met an adult even remotely interested in heroic fantasy nor a kid remotely interested in SRPGs.. if they took the decision of going kid-friendly I am sure they had figures to base that decision on. Nonetheless the reason we are all excited for this game is Mika Pikazo's art direction let's be honest: it is impressive. In terms of story… Fire Emblem never had great stories to tell. Unfortunately.
One of the things I've notice is how similar this game feels to a gacha. The core concept and the core of the plot could certantly be the ones for a, Say, FE Heroes 2. As (If I remember correctly) Faerghast pointed out in another video, the artstyle (and how it interacts with the world aesthetics) are very similar to something like Genshin Impact. And I don't think that's a mere coincidence, but rather, a conscious choice to appeal to the kind of audince that makes those games thrive. And that's, mostly at least, fine. I get the same feel I had back when Awakening released that "these characters don't feel like FE characters" (aesthetically speaking, of course) but on the other hand it would be pretty boring if everthing stayed with the aesthetical style of, say, Tellius series. However that doesn't make it feel less weird and uninterestinng to me.
The other point I wanna ramble about is the simplification of the story. I don't feel like "broadening the appeal to new players" is the reason for a poor story and script. Rather, I have the feeling this has been a videogame with a very límited budget. Gameplay is something that resonates with a lot of people more than story does but this gameplay, while not as complicated as, say, FFT or LUCT, is probably not enough to catch a lot of people. While it keeps the same bases as, well, every FE since 4, it's main gimmick mechanic revolves around a ensamble of characters that are simple fanservice. And while fanservice is not inherently bad, it's, well, fan-service. We may be excited to equip Sigurd or Lyn to a character but how can that excite new players? Of course, it may inspire them to look at the older games of the franchise but they would see a certantly different art style that may not resonate with them. A friend of mine, for instance, loved Awakening and Fates but she could not play older games no matter how much she tried to because those didn't have the features and art style that she liked from the games that initially drew her to the series. Furthermore, and this is completely anecdotical evidence, but I saw a big influx of new players excited for the series when Three Houses released. And they were drawn to the story, debating (rather toxically in many cases) about it's characters and narrative.
Ultimately I feel like this game had a limited budget and was pushed by a board to appeal to the maximum amount of people. After Awakening and Heroes, FE became the premier non-pokemon rpg of nintendo's share of the market and while the series has never been this popular, that may not be enough for the financial deparments of Nintendo or Intelligent Systems.
Nintendo: We want you to feel connected to our characters.
Kills Alear’s mom in the first 30 mins of the game
I… AM… SO… HYPED!
LET'S GOOOO!!!!!!!!
I didn’t know that the artist was a FE fan herself. Good for her. While yes I don’t like certain designs and to me they seem out of place in FE the artist is definitely talented and I would love to see more of her work.
FE being what it is i would’ve preferred the epic war story but I will give this game a chance for sure
Great video. Buy I wonder, do you have any other interest besides Fire Emblem. I know you are not an anime fan and more. I just want to know. But for Engage, I hope this has a Warriors spin off because I could see it really being great.
i dont like how these characters look. most of them look like clowns where are those ok fate and awakening armor at? im sick and tired of these clown plot armor allies fighting these enemies that actually look like their dress for war. i cant love a character if he’s dress like a clown and not suit up for war. im very disappointed of these japanese developers if this game was released instead of AWAKENING this franchise would be DEAD
Two directors…oh dear.
Like many other I'm not a fan of the art style. It just looks off to me. Echoes of valentia or the tellius games to me were vastly superior to anything this game has to show. This art style would probably work well for a SMT or personal game. Fire emblem not so much, for me. That said, best of luck to the artist, got nothing against her jsut not a fan of her art
Definitely like the character art other than the protagonist, that one is a failure and one they should have adjusted. It looks significantly better than 3 houses! And 3 houses looked quite good as well
The bit about celebrities being relatable makes it sound like they're on crack
@3:01: Don't let yourself be influenced by woke Hollywood, that purposely tries to destroy values like heroism.
All of this "modern audience" stuff are MAJOR red flags. It makes me assume the game is going to feel completely bizarre, and push evil ideals.
Yeah like I don’t hate the art style, but I’m just not a fan of the older character’s designs and how some of the male characters look. Like how are these men actually older when they got the face of a 17 seven year old boy but with a full beard? Or that one knight character with a tiny head but covered in giant heavy armor; it just looks so oddly proportioned, but that might not be the actual artist’s fault so I can let that one kinda slide. But at least everything is so colorful which is something I do like. Lol.
i’ve played the first couple hours and where is this cowardly alear you speak of? i thought he was so easily down with his mission after just waking up that it was comical
This interview was really interesting, thanks for covering it in this video!
Engage is practically the Awakening of the Switch generation of games (while Three Houses is the counterpart to Fates in this sense) and I believe it has the potential to appeal to both "hardcore" fans and "casual" ones, plus being a good introduction to Fire Emblem for newcomers. We'll have to play the game to see if that's the case, but I'm quite optimistic!
well after watching this and reading the article myself i have some serious concerns lol and i already had concerns. I think the mainline games are just going in a direction now, im not a huge fan.
Please god just let Koei Tecmo make the games from now on these Awakening devs are so fucking out of touch.
As far as the art goes, the artist is definitely skilled, but the design for the characters is awful. They took a big steamy dump on them. Overdesigned to the point of being outright ugly. I don't think fire emblem fans were really behind this title given the stated motivations behind the decisions they've made
Who could possibly not be lured by toothpaste chan
I’m worried about the words modernisation and real world be a we all know what that means and it does not give me confidence in the games story or characters but it’s to late now I’ve got my copy of the game so 🤞
Honestly I don’t really get the art problem I personally think this game’s art style is better looking then three houses and the like
People say that it doesn’t fit fire emblem’s art-style but they do realize the game might fit the art style better as I said I like this style better then three houses but three houses art style fit three houses as a hole it’s kinda how feel of this game this game might just fit the more Colourful art style
It reminds of how back in the day people didn’t like wind water because it was cartoony looking compared to more realistic zelda games but wind walker’s art style fit that game more then if they uses twilight princess
At least that’s how I feel about the art of engage
Do they really need to have a particular gimmick for each game?
been watching since your echoes videos when the game was announced, and just saw this in my inbox! so hyped for new engage content keep it up !!!
Getting rid of the multiple story paths was definitely a good call. They haven't been able to properly execute that idea as the multiple paths just end up drawing attention and refinement away from each other. It is better to have one good storyline than to have multiple mediocre ones. The art style however is casting the net too wide. At the very least fix the protagonist's hair. It doesn't look all that good.
Really great and interesting video! Thanks a lot for making it.
I had to rewatch this cause of how bad the devs are…but I still can't believe the level of stupid it takes to think a hero with bravery or integrity doesn't resonate with people. This game really was made by people that hate fire emblem
Knowing that the artist struggles drawing older characters and/or non-cute designs, it shows. That's makes a lot of since now. Her style isn't bad, but for this game, I still think some of the character art decisions could've been better.
the blue red colored hair/eyes is such a bizarre unnecessary design choice. they look like someone’s custom character on an mmo
So basically,
Fire Emblem: Open Marriage
Good to know why story is so bad
Whoever made the gameplay can stay, everyone else has gotta go