My first Fire Emblem game was FE9, Path of Radiance.
I want to start by saying that I think there's a distinction between story and writing. To me, story is the narrative of the game, the specific events that occur and the character motivations that carry this narrative through to the end. Writing is the specific words put down on the screen, the dialogue and narration.
Engage is a game with terrible writing. I was laughing my ass off, sending my brother the emoji sequence 🔥🔥🔥✍️ probably 30 times in the first hour of the game just from all the goofy lines that the characters drop. That said, I actually think the story itself was fine, even pretty good. I think all the necessary story beats were there - if you were to read a summary of the events that happened in the game, it's certainly no worse than Fates or the GBA FE games. It was a journey of self-discovery, a coming of age type of adventure for our main character and it had some nice twists and turns throughout. The worldbuilding wasn't the most in-depth, but enough details about Elyos and its nations were presented to make the world mostly believable. So while it's not Tellius or Jugdral levels of narrative depth, I was genuinely gripped by the story, always looking forward to finding out each chapter what happens next. The problem is the actual writing failed to bring this narrative
The gameplay of Engage is in my mind, simply brilliant. Right from the first few maps, I felt that there were interesting gimmicks to each map, and interesting tools provided to the player to work through these gimmicks.
Not all the gameplay was perfect, though. Looking back, the bond ring system (not Engage rings but the "small" rings that don't provide the special effects) felt like a terribly underutilized system. This is partly because I played with the DLC so I had access to the 6 extra Bracelets in the midgame maps), but also partly because it was a randomized system with a very steep cost in the early game. Futhermore, only some S rank bond rings have special skill effects on them, which puts this system further to the wayside. I think if I were to redo this system, I would have either allowed for a bond ring to be equipped in addition to an Engage ring to further expand build options, or at least put skills on every S rank ring and made them more accessible and targetable in the early-midgame to make the system more interesting. (On the flip-side, this game is so full of systems that maybe it's better that this one could just be ignored)
I played on hard mode, and did all the DLC and paralogues. Towards the end, I was a little overleveled, so I look forward to doing a maddening mode playthrough where I can really test my mettle against some of the more complex maps.
I also want to give some attention to the voice acting. I generally dislike dubbing in anime and anime-adjacent works, because I feel that the characters always give off this theatrical, melodromatic line deliveries. They often make weird noises at the end of character lines, and the pacing of speech is often off (presumably to match the line cadence from the source material). I did notice quite a lot of this in Engage, but there were some stand-out performances. Yunaka's VA did a brilliant job with the character, having two different personas with different voices as well as doing incredible impressions of the other voice actors in the story and in Yunaka's supports. I also really want to highlight fAlear's voice actress, who I truly believe delivered the best dub performance I've ever heard (that is admittedly not a high bar, but she flew past it). Every line was delivered in such a natural way, that made the character sound really earnest and endearing. I'm sure it helps that the character was mostly played straight and serious in supports with all these other characters who act like theatre kids, so the juxtaposition of some character's grandiose voice acting with these very real, human-conversation sounding line deliveries from fAlear's VA