Historically, game development studios did not work with actual writers. Many of the classics had stories written in-house by the programmers, artists, and game devs, all of whom would typically be a mega nerds playing D&D or reading science fiction and fantasy novels. Game devs could easily throw together a simple story to contextualize their games by lifting story elements from these other sources, but that would be the extent of it; it took a long time for games to develop to the point that narratives became an actually important element. Fire Emblem as a series was one of the earlier series to embrace writing and story as a critical element of the game: as early as Genealogy, the story and gameplay were closely integrated and the story told was both grand and epic (in the traditional sense) while also being quite sensible and grounded. Later, in PoR/RD and 3H, IntSys even hired dedicated writing teams to develop the stories and write some genuinely good fantasy tales. These games are known even beyond the Fire Emblem fandom for their quality of writing (probably because FE fans can't stop evangelizing about these games specifically, being fan-favorites among those of us who want story focused FE experiences).
Engage, on the flip-side, is a game with terrible writing. I was laughing my ass off, sending my brother the emoji sequence 🔥🔥🔥✍️ probably 30 times in the first few hours of the game just from all the goofy lines that the characters drop. The characters are charicatures of charicatures, the supports repeat themselves over and over and over, so much of the story is strung along by characters making bad decisions or through anime "teleports behind you" type logic. Characters that don't talk to each other and don't listen, plenty of deus ex machinas, reveals of a character's new powers or items solely to act as a plot point during a chapter, this game has all the terrible anime writing tropes and more.
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. 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 carry this narrative in any satisfactory way. I've seen people suggest that Engage is just meant to be campy, that it's as much a parody of as it is a love letter to the franchise. But I don't agree, there's no indication anywhere in the game that you aren't supposed to take it seriously. And regardless, I think the best campy stories are ones where there's some genuinely sincere moments and not purely comic relief, which this was.
I may at a later date (during/after my next playthrough) actually sit down and analyze the story for all the issues I think it has. The story had some faint elements pointing towards being about the nature of family and relations, clear by the focus on the playable royal characters and their families, on Veyle and her adopted family, and of course on Alear and the truth of her own family and parentage. The story just doesn't say anything particularly novel or interesting about the subject, nor does it present this in a way that makes me actually care about the message.
Many FE fans will excuse bad writing if the gameplay is good, which I personally won't - but I do think in this case the gameplay is indeed excellent, among the best in the series. Right from the first few chapters there were interesting gimmicks to each map, and interesting tools provided to the player to work through these gimmicks. There was a soft difficulty curve with plenty of exp and training methods available (on hard mode, anyway) that the player doesn't need to play "spreadsheet emblem" to plan out the entire playthrough at the start. The first few engage rings provided simple yet powerful effects, like the increased movement of Sigurd or the full map heal of Micaiah, which rarely felt required to beat any of the maps but also felt very useful in case you ever needed a backup plan. And then in Chapter 11, the rings are taken from you, and I think they absolutely nailed this moment. After being used to the massive power-up from the rings, to suddenly lose them all and have to do a challenging map without being able to account for them, and in fact having to account for the enemies having them, was a great moment. This then leads into the latter half of the game, where this power is built back up, ultimately obtaining all the rings and also unlocking Alear's 13th emblem effect. This player power curve is perfect and I think they did exactly what they needed to do with it.
Some of the ring effects were quite weak however. I mainly used Leif and Sigurd for their passive/noncombat effects, for example. Others were hilariously overpowered, like using Edelgard (admittedly a DLC bracelet so sort of expected to be OP) for a free galeforce.
I also really liked the new class trait system was very interesting to work with. My only "complaint" with it is that it's yet another feature tied to a character's class. But it was still something extra to be considered beyond just a character's stats and weapons. Speaking of weapons, I also LOVED the new weapon triangle system. This is probably my favorite "new" mechanic in the series, and was supremely interesting. Harder enemies are normally fought with more than one player unit anyway, so making strategically sound choices of disarming enemies to e.g. reduce incoming damage was quite satisfying. I hope they keep and expand this system in the next new FE game.
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 extra systems that maybe it's better that this one could just be ignored.
I also continue to think that completely free class systems are a net-negative for the franchise. It kills unit identity and closes up a lot of (imo) interesting design space. For example, think about Anna in this game - she starts in the fighter class, but magic is her highest growth. In a game with restricted reclassing, she would have to be a user of magic weapons, or would be powerful because of skills like PoR Imbue that have an effect based on the character's magic stat. But in Engage, the correct play is to just... reclass her into a mage. Then, she's just straight up better than Clanne as a mage and occupies a pretty standard spot in a loadout as a magic damage dealer. I tried in my playthrough to mostly keep characters in their base classes (or the direct promotions from those classes), which I think helped maintain a lot of this kind of thing, what I want out of a FE game.
Lastly, the Somniel bored me. It barely plays differently each time you visit, and new features are unlocked at a snail's pace. The minigames were fun at most once (other than wyvern riding, which I enjoyed the whole way through), but they granted combat-enhancing effects that made them hard to ignore. If I could redesign the game I would have added a means to access e.g. the shop and the various class/ring/inheritance systems from a menu separate from the Somniel, maybe making it easier to not even have to load into it so it can be completely ignored. However, Sommie was cute enough to make it worthwhile.
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 still need to do the fel xenologue maps.
I want to write a little bit about the characters, too, but it's hard to decide what to say. They were all painfully trope-y, even the ones that I liked like Yunaka. I think overall what I can say is that they all suffered from the same issues of poor writing that the rest of the game suffered from. They weren't even stock characters, they were like concepts of what a stock character could be. A more creative take on the narrative archetypes that these characters are meant to fill would have been much appreciated. Like with Yunaka, it was pretty obvious what her schtick was, and while it made her crit lines entertaining the character backstory ultimately goes nowhere. Compare to an actually well written FE party member like FE9 Jill who has a number of supports that flesh out different aspects of her character, and while she is also a sort of stock/archetypical character these different aspects make her much more full. I wanted to like Engage's characters, but I just couldn't with most of them. Some of the designs were fun, at least.
One last thing 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 overly theatrical, melodromatic line deliveries. They often make weird breathy noises at the end of character lines, and the pacing of speech is often off (presumably to match the line cadence from the original dub, if the dubbers can't reanimate the scenes). 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 made her lines sound that much better by comparison.
Overall I'd say that Engage is a fun game that's worth playing, but points to a worrying potential for the future of the series. I think Intelligent Systems needs to consider hiring real writers going forward,