#there's spoilers under the cut but you're not missing anything getting spoiled on this game

[itsbenedict]

okay fine i played Fire Emblem Engage

That's where I've been for the past, like, week. It wasn't a great decision. I would call it a purchase made in a moment of weakness.

The conventional wisdom I've heard is "yeah the story and characters are Bad and Nothing, but the gameplay is really good", and that was kind of accurate to my experience. But it was... weirdly not as bad as I was expecting? It had some redeeming qualities, narratively! I enjoyed it more than, say, Fates by a mile.

It was still extremely stupid, though. Wow. It's not as actively infuriating as some recent FE has been, but it's certainly a completely braindead narrative.

You can open this readmore if you want to hear all about that.

So the plot of the game: there's an evil dragon man who wants to take over the world. He got sealed away a thousand years ago but now he's back and wants to take over the world. You Have To Stop Him. (There are epicycles to this, but all of them are dumb and very few of them matter.)

Toothpaste Lord, Alear, is the [son/daughter, in my game daughter] of the Divine Dragon, a very nice queen lady who the people of [setting] worship as a goddess. A thousand years ago she got mortally wounded sealing away the evil dragon man, and went to sleep for a thousand years to recover. Fast forward to now, and she wakes up, except she has amnesia and doesn't remember jack shit including her mother. This is concealing one (1) twist, which doesn't really affect anything, and mainly the amnesia is so that there's a reason for people to be constantly introducing concepts to her. Standard fare.

So she wakes up, and almost immediately, evil dragon man's zombie army is inexplicably invading the palace. He kills Divine Dragon queen mom in a very tragic scene where Healing Doesn't Work (at least they bother having the healer try, so points there) and she dies in your arms and there's like five solid minutes of poorly-paced anguish and angst over this character you've known for all of five minutes.

I want to stop and note- this is a beat this game fucking loves. The scene where a loved one dies tragically in someone's arms while delivering some inspiring last words happens- if my count is right- eight times in this god damn game, sometimes for the same character twice. They do it constantly, for characters that do not matter and you do not have any investment in. I'm halfway to thinking this is someone's fetish somehow- but more realistically it's just hack writing.

After that, the Prince of Somewhere shows up to save you, and you escape the palace and go on a journey to recruit allies and stop the evil dragon man. The journey involves traveling across four continents, each of which has a kingdom in it, which have two princes/princesses apiece, each of which have two loyal retainers apiece. Add the player and their own three loyal retainers for a total of 28 playable characters who are just there because they're On Your Side and otherwise have no investment in the conflict besides not wanting to get killed by zombie armies. There's eight other playable characters that have any other motivation at all, and most of them are bad.

(Actually that's not true. Two of the princesses have other motivations- they're princesses of Evil Cultistopia, which starts the game on evil dragon man's side, and they have a sort of journey to a face turn that would be kind of interesting if either of them were good characters. Evil Cultistopia's state religion is the worship of evil dragon man, except it's been a thousand years since he was sealed away so they're sort of just a normal country with a normal religion now. The idea of a country suddenly face-to-face with their god, who's asking them to wage war on the entire world with zombie armies, and it being politically impossible to not do that despite no one really wanting to do that? Cool idea! If only they fucking used or explored it in the slightest.)

Anyway, the big bad's evil plan is to gather the 12 Emblem Rings, macguffins that if collected together will grant INFINITE POWER. Again, standard stuff. But the rings in question are the central mechanical gimmick of the game, and the focus of the plot in and of themselves, and I have to talk about them because they're so dumb.

Each ring has the spirit of a protagonist of a previous Fire Emblem game in it!

Why? What are they doing here? How did they end up in magic rings? Do Not Ask Questions. They're here for fanservice reasons and we will be exploring precisely zero of the implications of their existence.

None of them are characters even slightly. They're there, they follow people around as stando powerghosts, they can talk and stuff- but like... Fire Emblem protagonists struggle with having personalities even at the best of times, and this is not the best of times. Every single one of them is reduced to vapid friendship speeches, even the ones that weren't already just a human collection of friendship speeches.

Most of the plot, such as it is, concerns the collection of these rings, and occasional dramatic turnabouts when the bad guys take the rings from you. Oh, shit!

Oh no! They took Marth! Y'know, Marth! That character, who had traits and stuff! Aren't you horrified that the bad guys have Marth now? Isn't it so sad that his hair is red? Please buy it when Alear is so, so crying about Marth getting kidnapped! They had such a close friendship, which you can tell from how the only thing they ever talked about was how close their friendship was!

(Also, every single one of these twelve non-characters has their own Paralogue chapter, where they encounter a random ancient ruin or fort or something on the map, and they're like "whoa! this random location looks weirdly like a fan-favorite plot-important map from my game! Let me spend eight seconds recapping its plot, and then challenge you to a duel here to Strengthen Our Bonds somehow!". They're all exactly the same and drag out the game way longer than it needs to be.)

It's all very stupid! I hate it terribly.

Which is why it's a shame that the Emblem Rings are the coolest fucking mechanic that's ever been in Fire Emblem.

You equip a ring to a unit- any unit- and they confer fucking busted abilities, like teleporting halfway across the map and nuking something, or making seven consecutive attacks, or getting tons of extra movement and movement actions so you can be anywhere when you need to be there.

One lets you do the "give four adjacent allies an extra turn" thing that Reyson let you do in FE9/10, except you can put it on anyone and not just a frail bird-man you have to keep out of danger. And since there's another actual Dancer in the game, you can bust the action economy wide open.

Here's this overpowered tanky flier who can't just divebomb enemy back ranks because she dies in one hit to arrows or wind magic! Oh, but she has the ring equipped that makes sure she survives attacks that would kill her unless her health is already low! Bye, giant wall of enemy mages!

Here's my armor knight who's an unstoppable brick wall! He's balanced by being so slow that you can't get him in position to use him reliably, but- oh, hey, here's the ring that just puts him on a fucking horse!

One just lets the unit equip healing staves even if they weren't magic at all before. You can staple utility roles that are normally balanced by making the unit itself shitty and fragile... to units that already kick ass normally. My assassin can heal people now! I am become the master of both life and death!

It's so goofy and lets you have so much fun with it. You can also inherit skills from Emblems to keep them after you swap the ring from someone else- so if you want someone to get the mounted unit post-combat reposition thing, just have 'em hang out with Sigurd a bit!

It's also, like... an effective bit of fanservice, because they put an inordinate amount of work into fleshing out the system. Every character gets a unique insane magic superhero outfit and color scheme and combat voice lines for when they merge with each of the twelve emblems. You can make anyone say "I fight for my friends" and "You'll get no sympathy from me!" by equipping Ike. It's bizarrely high-effort.

That's the good part, mechanically. The bad part, mechanically, is this thing called the Somniel- a magical floating island in the sky you can fast-travel to, which is just Garreg Mach again.

Run around the same too-big 3D environment doing pointless bullshit between every map! Don't you want to go to every glowing spot on the minimap to collect the free items that spawned there? You might miss out on some Rare Fruit, which you can add as an extra ingredient in the fucking cooking system to increase the odds the dish will be higher-rarity! Surely you want to collect random wildlife from maps after you beat them so they can hang out in a pasture and generate random drops for you to collect between maps! Do the fishing minigame, which has two more steps than last time for no reason, in order to get Minced Fish and Bond Fragments! Spend the Bond Fragments to pull from the Bond Rings gachapon, to get jpegs of old-ass art assets of Sir Not-Appearing-In-This-Game that you can equip for incredibly marginal stat bonuses! Watch your horribly-designed anime soldiers in their swimsuits going back and forth in the pool for extra support progress! Cram your inventory with literal horseshit because it looks exactly the same sparkling on the ground as the stuff you want! Play a rail shooter! Do some push-ups! Feed this stupid-looking dog thing to max out its affection meter for no benefit whatsoever! I hate you! I HATE you! I HATE YOU! 𝐈 𝐇𝐀𝐓𝐄 𝐘𝐎𝐔! DON'T DESIGN YOUR VIDEOGAME THIS WAY!! IT'S BORING AND SUCKS SHIT!!! I'LL PUNCH OFF YOUR LEGS!!!!!!!!!

...haaaaah. I need to calm down. It's just- it's so bad. It's so much extra development effort to create all these extraneous systems that you could've just not had and it would've been better. So many wasted manhours of effort put into building and polishing unfun time-wasting garbage because some suit thought "more features = more sales". I feel sorry for the devs that were forced to work on that!

...

Okay. Okay I think that's the end of the review. What else is there to say that I didn't say?

No, wait, right. I said the plot had redeeming qualities. I said it didn't piss me off as much as Fates. Okay. What are those redeeming qualities?

Well... first off, while the plot is braindead and tropey and nothing, it at the very least passes the bare minimum bar of the characters' actions making sense. It's not hard for their actions to make sense, since it's a dead simple goodguys-versus-badguys situation where the main villain is an evil dragon man with a zombie army, but so many things fail to clear this bar. The characters are almost never interesting, but rarely do they make me go "what the fuck are you talking about? why would you make that decision?", and after Fates and Three Houses that is a breath of fresh air.

Secondly: they're kind of smart about their antagonists. Evil dragon man is so obviously not a compelling character, just a force in the plot, that they don't bother putting him onscreen more than necessary. We mostly follow his Four Elite Generals that Fire Emblem big bads always have, except instead of elite generals they're just a bunch of fuckin' weirdos who've been tasked with babysitting his split-personality daughter. They get up to some infighting and have approximately believable motives and you get to kind of care about what's going on with them! The writer gave at least half a shit about what motivates the villains as people, despite the overarching villain being a stock evil demon king guy.

(In particular, there's this one really good death scene after you beat a couple of them- one of them has a heel face turn when they're dying, complete with yet another tragic dying-in-your-arms inspiring speech... and then after the heroes leave and pledge to always remember them, you get a scene where another one, who also got fatally wounded in the same battle, goes "so what was that all about. that sappy stuff was obviously bullshit. what gives, why betray the boss right at the end?" And they're like "yeah, no, i mainly did that to say fuck you to the boss for sending me on this suicide mission instead of rewarding me for my loyal service. but i figured if i was doing that i'd make up something more noble-sounding so they remember me fondly instead of as a petty asshole." Then they have a truly fucked-up conversation about their mommy issues before dying. It's a good scene!)

Thirdly, they do this really fun thing in the big climax before the final gauntlet, where... I mean, a lot of it is nonsense, but they're doing a fairly standard fakeout bit where the protagonist gets killed by the big bad but some kind of deus ex machina brings them back to life, right? But the way they do that, specifically, is... there's this character who did the zombie-army raising who eventually turns good and joins you, and while the protagonist is dying, she's like "hey, I have an idea- how about use your dark magics to bind my soul to my corpse as a zombie, and then just don't suborn my will?" And then they do that, and it works and it's kind of fucked up and makes everyone uncomfortable! A very cool moment. (Then a different deus ex machina brings you back as a ghost instead of a zombie and your hair turns completely blue, which I was hyped about purely for color scheme reasons since it's otherwise pretty stupid.)

I should probably also say something about the characters? They're usually a pretty big draw for Fire Emblem, and this game does go whole hog on having a large cast with lots and lots of support conversations. But, uh... they're mostly bad. The character designs are over-the-top and anime in a way that doesn't convey anything useful about them, and they tend to just be "character trait A meets incongruous character trait B and we will do the bare minimum to reconcile this". Pretty bad voice direction and dialogue pacing sucks a lot of the charm out of it, too. The fact that most characters are just there to Be A Character You Get and don't organically get involved in your quest doesn't help.

(There are a few that are functional- Yunaka's a good one, as one of the few that isn't just some prince's retainer and has a motive to be with the party. I like her "dark superassassin past but embarrassed about it" shtick, and her VA manages to make her cutesy catchphrases not annoying somehow. I don't know that anyone in the cast is above like a B-tier character, though.)

So... that's Engage. It wasn't ambitious, but it basically worked. It's not a game that has anything to say beyond "it is virtuous to be a really big fan of Fire Emblem, please go whale in the gacha", and it didn't have two brain cells to rub together- but it was pretty and fun and mostly didn't piss me off.

[lutiaslayton]

Hey so, aside from that time I shared an excerpt from chapter VI a few weeks ago, I haven't posted anything related to SLS in quite a while. Earlier today I finally took the time to clean up my desk for the first time in forever, and I happened to find amongst many other things a few wandering sticky notes with SLS stuff on them! They're like. Many, many months old by now. As you can see in the one above, they date back to the times when I still thought I could fit everything into a four-part chapter IV (which explains why some chapter banners are missing, notably the one for chapter V.2). They're even old enough to date back to the times when I was still referring to the games as "PL1-6" instead of acronyms, wow.

Also hey, what's that? Seems like you get a free teaser for the upcoming chapter's banner 👀 I don't think it counts as spoilers, since just reading chapter V.2 (+ the excerpt I shared a few weeks ago) should be a big enough hint to make quite clear what chapter VI will be about.

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Also, what's that thing on the right? Very good question. I'll let you guess :P It's completely unrelated to SLS, but it is Layton-related. I have zero idea what this thing is doing here though, past me was doing something in a context that present me has no remembrance of. But hey, that makes for a fun little puzzle if you want to try to figure out what these scribbles correspond to!

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There's another interesting sticky note under the cut, but I'd rather keep it hidden so that people who are interested in the fanfic but haven't caught up to chapter V.2 yet (n° 011 in AO3 numbering) won't get spoiled. If you have read up to chapter V.2, you might have an idea as to what this means regarding its contents.

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Boom. There it goes:

So, here it is! A sketch of what exactly was hiding inside Clay's pouch, as well as (as you likely all figured out by now) what Dimitri found in the lab amongst the debris of the time machine.

Regarding this specific sketch, I had actually planned to make a fully coloured version and share it in the end notes of chapter V.2, but alas, I was not able to finish that drawing in time, and it is still unfinished to this day. And now that the best opportunity to share it is behind us, I admittedly am unsure how to reveal it on AO3. I guess I'll make an announcement such as "btw I updated the author's notes at the end of chapter 011-V.2 with a drawing of what Clay's pouch contains, go check it out if you're interested" in the starting/end notes of a future chapter...? Either that or I'll wait for another opportunity, but that would be a shame.

I'll still let you take a look at the current state of the unfinished digital version, since I feel like this is still something you should have been allowed to see all the way back to April 1st:

If you read chapter V.2 carefully, you will notice that the part about the QWERTY keyboard is partially incorrect -- there's also a section with four arrows and a center "OK"-like button. So you basically need even tinier fingers to use that thing.

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Aside from that, I do have more sticky notes, but they're all filled with spoilers -- so I obviously won't share them here. I hope that what I did share here was fun enough to satiate your curiosity a bit!

[lilyblackdrawside]

can you chat about void stranger a bit? ive only barely heard of it but what i have heard has been positive

Gladly!

First up, I'm keeping this spoiler free, except for a small bit at the end which is under a readmore.

So, it's a puzzle game. You move tile based, cardinal directions and have a staff with which you can store the tile in front of you and then put it into another gap. That's the main mechanic of the game and then it builds onto it. At first you just have to build your way to the exit stairs, but it doesn't take long for enemies to show up. Those just kill you on contact, nothing you can do about it. And like that you go through a lot of floors until the end while the puzzles keep getting harder. There are a lot of floors. You can kinda separate the game into a bunch of areas that each focus on a mechanic. In between areas you get a bit of story. You play as Void Stranger Gray, or Lady Gray as she's adressed as in the story segments. She's the attendant of an unruly, young princess who she has to keep under control but also play to her whims in equal measure. I haven't read up on anything regarding the deeper parts of the game, so I don't nearly know everything there is yet either. I have to be a bit picky with my words to not spoil anything, because even beyond the puzzle solutions there's a lot of stuff to spoil (and even me saying that feels like I'm revealing too much.)

Basically, the game rewards you for looking deeper and trying to get what you want, even if it seems to break stuff. It also rewards taking notes. I have several text documents with notes at this point and a whole bunch of screenshots.

The game is also quite peculiar. It kinda has a personality, if you will. For example, at the points where you get the story segments there's always a tree where you're asked if you want to take a break, since you've been traveling for a while now after all. If you agree, the game just closes after a short fadeout. When you hold Escape, a bar at the bottom quickly fills up that says "End it all". This also just quits the game. For a good while I was afraid this would reset your progress, but it doesn't. You can also quit from the menu you access with Enter, which is why I was wary of it. When you die either by falling into a pit or from colliding with an enemy, you will meet a little winged fella who offers you a fruit that will let you keep going. If you refuse, they ask you if you're sure and if you refuse again the game closes and resets you back to the start.

If you do eat the fruit, you become VOID. From there, the only thing that happens when you die is that the floor is reset. Really nothing to lose anymore. You also find Locust Idols in chest on most floors and these are extra lives, so while you have those you won't meet the little winged fella if you die. There's something to be had from reaching the end while not VOID, but both for your own sanity and other reasons I find it a better idea to not worry about that and clear your first time while VOID.

It's a very expansive game, even if you don't delve into its secrets. I haven't, as far as I can tell. I've just been taking notes on stuff I want to investigate, but the game just keeps going and going so I haven't gone back to check up on that stuff yet. I've been having a lot of fun with it, even though I took a month long break from it when I got super stuck on a floor and there's still a ton to go.

From here I'll make a cut. What I bring up below is something you can find out roughly within the first 50 floors, so pretty much the start of the game, but still something you can miss.

There are some floors, very few at first, where the open space lets you build a bridge towards the interface at the bottom. You can then step onto the interface and mess with it. You can grab the empty tiles from it to use in regular puzzle solving, you can grab the tile that has the icon for your staff, which crashes the game, you can grab the tiles that have the VOID letters, which crashes the game, if you're not VOID you can take out your health value and swap it with something else, like the floor number or your locust amount. This does pretty much nothing, since everything hits you for 999 anyway. But if you insert different numbers into the last two digits of the floor number you can change which floor you're on. You can swap yourself back to floor 1 like that if that is what you desire. You can also slot the floor number into your locusts if it's higher than what you carry and if you then die, you'll respawn with that minus the one you lost. Since you can access the interface at any rest area, these also act as Locust refreshers. However, if you grab the tile with the B and first digit, you get sent into some kinda void. You can walk around there and maybe find something. I've found some stuff, but nothing of relevance so far. It's probably important.

That's actually kinda it. Really just the interface meddling. I haven't really found anything to do with it that's important, but being able to mess with my Locusts is already quite handy.