hello viewer! Hope you enjoyed my review of the Fell Xenologue and understood where I was coming from with my feedback! Please don't forget to leave a like and comment down below. And if you'd like to support the channel, you can become a Member!!!
I would say in incredibly easy way to fix the mode is to not allow skill inheritance and set every unit to have either bond level 1,5, or 10. In exchange for this loss of stats and abilities they should make the enemies weaker on hard and especially maddening. This is such a simple fix that i wouldn't be surprised if it just was patch in as an update. Oh and just add an armory that sells lighter weapons and give the unit like 5k gold
Like seriously, this is a constant for Fire Emblem games. Almost none of the games in the series managed to handle both the things right at the same time, and with Engage this is more ridiculous as somehow they managed to do both the cases (I mean either good gameplay, bad story, or good story, bad gameplay) at the same time in the same freaking game... the only game in the series that managed to do them both the things right is Path of Radiance.
@@elpoppliogameralons0839 It was horrendous and the map design was absolute trash. The story is the only thing that made me keep playing. Maps felt like a chore because they actually weren't fun and instead repetitive. Playable units are poorly balanced and the recruitment in 3H only makes it worse. 3H was one of the worst gameplay experiences I've had in my life. And I played games like Breath of Fire and Balan Wonderworld.
One thing that frustrates me story-wise is that Alear is the only character from the main timeline to (canonically) be in Fell Ellyos but there's no explanation as to why their army can show up in battle. Even if it was just something as simple as "Alear can summon illusions of their friends to help" I'd be satisfied.
If you consider all the minor mid-battle dialogues between the retainer units and the enemy lords to be canonical then your army does canonically go to the other world. Still no explanation on how they do that, but the dialogues do confirm that your army is actually in the other world and aware that they are in a different world.
@@topgun4695 Even if we do consider them canonical, they're never explained nor even hinted at in the cinematics, which essentially makes them feel like they don't belong. There really should have been at least some recognition of the 'forces Alear brought along' or something.
@@jessiehogue. The cinematics are the worst part of Engage's story telling method - characters show up out of nowhere to say their lines then vanish for the rest of the cutscene (Hortencia was not present before her father was killed, but her line of dialogue implies she was there all along, then after she shoves Veyle she vanishes from the scene never to be seen again), remain in place doing absolutely nothing while the villains do their thing (nobody tried to remove Veyle's horn accessory despite knowing it was being used to brainwashed her, nobody tried to heal the MC after they tried to block the attack that would have killed Veyle, enemies show up for a surprise attack and the characters just stand there talking for minutes about how doomed they are, etc.), and just let enemy generals escape without giving chase or making any type of attempt at stopping them (Alear let Ivy get away after her defeat within the castle walls, then again in the snowfield despite being more than capable of -and obligated to - taking her as a prisoner)! Engage is a first draft given budget and a VTuber artist who had no idea what he would be working on!
@@TwilightWolf032 It's really unfortunate, too. You'd think that after Three Houses, they'd have a better idea of how to do a lot of those things. Three Houses really made me feel like I had an army alongside me with their troops mechanics whatchamacallit. It felt badass.
> For reference on how easy Normal is, for me the first four chapters were just Louis and Jade sweeping the map by themselves and taking no damage EVER. > You forgot to mention the lack of scaling for the OCs when they join in the base game: They will always join as Prepromoted/ Level 20 Unpromoted no matter what. If you recruit them too early, their high level will over-inflate the difficulty of the skirmishes and Divine Paralogues. If, like me, you recruit them near the end of the game, you now have five underlevelled units you have to waste time babying up to the current level of your roster. In Three Houses, the Wolves would always scale with the progress of the story by the time you recruited them, just like students from other houses when they transferred over to your class.
For further evidence, I got to chapter 5 with only Alear and was only halted because it's mechanically impossible to solo that map with Nel before Alear gets killed
And if you recruit them when they would be on par with the rest of your squad at around level 20, you're going to be underequipped to deal with the Xenologue due to lacking most of the emblems at that point in the game. Not fun.
One thing positive i gotta say; the lines with the respective retainers can be heartwrenching. I had Pandreo attack Fogado and he sounded so.. dead inside, it almost made me tear up. Ivy and Zelkov had a really loaded conversation as well. That out of the way, i was really saddened on how it was handled in terms of difficulty, or rather lck of balancing. Mauvier would just tear through everything (thank god i guess) while the four (three) winds had to be constantly babysat, not to mentuion Nel and Nil.
@@AkameGaKillfan777 I'd imagine that his retainers dying was exactly why FX Alcryst became the way he was, while FX Diamant became a coward for similar reasons.
@@SatoKure He's not exactly the same though, because he states that he would be the one to become King, not Diamant. Also the cadences in their voices are different.
7:55 The funny thing about that is, that that's extremely unlikely to be a programming accident, because that restricting equipment function doesn't exist anywhere else. Which means somebody actively decided that was a good idea and ordered it to be programmed in.
Not quite. They're basically the equivalent to the "Royal+Retainer" auto recruits at the start of every chapter. It's just that for some reason, they refresh every chapter. Except that you are allowed to give them Emblems. So you're right that it's a new programming feature. It's just that the new programming feature was to give fresh recruits Emblems, not to remove existing characters from the Inventory menu.
@@Sines314 It's still very odd that you can give them Emblems and not items. I'd prefer we couldn't give them anything to be honest as that at least would make more sense.
@@Sines314 "It's just that for some reason, they refresh every chapter." Wich make them NOT like the auto recruits at the start of every chapter , incredible how you contradicted your own statement with TWO phrases " It's just that the new programming feature was to give fresh recruits Emblems, not to remove existing characters from the Inventory menu." again wich means is somebody actually WANTED it to be this way So basically you tried to correct the dude but both of your statements just prove him further right and dont add anything to YOUR point lol
I would also just love it if I could recruit the new characters without having to do the Fell Xenologue every single time. Mostly because I think they could be fun units. I just wish I did not have to do it every time and maybe not have them at Lv. 20.
That's the worst part honestly. After the initial playthrough of the Xenologue I really never want to go through it again. Three Houses' DLC story wasn't that great either, but at least they only made you do it once.
@@GoldenSon18 I'd say the 3H-story was still way better. Maybe not because of the story itself but because you could actually level the guys you used which felt alot better than to be just handed a bunch of garbage units (in the FX) with fixed stats.
@@GoldenSon18 This doesn't make up for it all but you can just auto battle, and skip turn on normal difficulty fell xenologue.(Since the fell difficulty is seperate from the main story difficulty) The ai is decent enough to do most of it by themselves while only occasionally making you do minor and quick changes with the time crystal. Still sucks that they join at way too high of a level though.
outside of FX, i personally found the four winds to be really powerful and really helpful units. honestly one of the only things that really annoys me about FX is the fact that you have to complete it from start to finish every playthrough
@@steveters8187 I found the gameplay in Three Houses perfectly fine as well. Nothing spectacular but fine for me. Add the incredibly interesting story and lore. the great cast of characters and the insane replayability and you have a Fire Emblem package that blows away Engage on almost every level. Engage is 6/10, 3H easily 9/10.
I played this on Hard and it was the hardest FE has been for me. The final map got me to say screw this I'm going to normal (at least 9 hours were spent on that map) and I was blown away by how easy it was. It soured my experience because I felt like I cheated and beating all the other stages on hard was so damn satisfying. Like this isn't Normal Hard and Maddening. It's easy, maddening and Maddening+.
Wit the final map i just decided to eff the bottem right corner and go straight up to smack Diamant and the Firene-siblings. Nil went to chill in the south and i had enough time to mop up the north. And if i spent 2-3 turns more wittling down the extra live, didn't really make a difference anymore anyway.
@rockowlgamer631 5 characters - 3 of which are boring opposites of the bland AF villians of the main story? Ok. And going through this pain of an experience on top of ruining the design of the main campaign AND chapter 11, the best one in the game? Yeah no thanks. 30 bucks isn't worth it for that. And the new classes aren't that interesting either.
I seriously recommend everyone who just wants to try the new OCs in the main game to beat the Fell Xenologue on Normal and as early as possible (Chapter 9-10 is the best spot for it imo) and then make a separate save where the sidestory's done for subsequent play-troughs.
Wait. Don't you have to play the xenologue everytime for each playthrough? If I want to play maddening I cannot use another save file to make the characters appear in the somniel. This Is not Cindered Shadows
@@stefanoandreani2562 If the maddening file is new then yeah, you should have to play the sidestory again sadly. Thankfully, you can change the xenologue's difficulty without affecting the main plot so there's that at least.
If you're going to do that, might I recommend cheesing a Deirdre S ring while you're at it? Giving that thing to Framme is amazing for the early game. It's actually pretty darn good into the mid-game too, depending on her HP growths. It scales especially well if you're not using the bracelets and need to use Bond Rings during Solm.
You'll want to keep in mind, though, that the other Xenologues' difficulty scales to the level of your army. So, once you complete the Fell Xenologue and 5 Level 20 characters at once, any remaining Xenologues will get much harder.
@@Mercurius19 You could always bench them and only use them AFTER you reach the point where you can use them and NOT be badly effected by the boost to the increase in the Divine Paralogue's (or just do them before completing Fell Xeno and getting them. The only other effect they cause is boosting the Skirmishes, and really minus Gold ones, I really stop caring about those by Chapter 10/11 anyway) But yeah, unless I want to challenge myself on purpose! I'm happy Normal is "easy mode" and won't effect my "Hard-Classic" (and occasional Maddening) playthroughs negatively (I tend to leave beating the Fell Xen about around when I get Timerra, Co & Ike or around when I get Hortensia & Byleth! I usually only do the divine Paralogues based on IF I have the ring connected to that character at that point! Meaning Tiki while I still have Marth, Veronica is done after Tiki simply because she doesn't have a connecting ring" and well you get the idea! Found I balance the game this way and avoid BADLY over leveling, and properly RESETS the Sominel so my "adopted" (READ: Kidnapped) Doggo's get me Silver Ingots (And I avoid Arena Abuse, only really use it for ironing out levels mostly). I don't know whatever to be mad they messed up bad with balancing, or glad cause I had fun finding ways to "fix it for them for my own amusement and challenge" LOL
One little thing you didn't touch upon is the fixed promotions. They follow a very strict formula. Axe Fighters ALWAYS promote to Berserker, for example. The problem is, several characters obviously do not have this as their cannon promotion. Clanne starts off with a Sword Talent without having to train him in it, and it matches up with his decent Strength growth, making it clear that the intention was for him to go for Mage Knight and be a mixed attacker. He's a Sage, instead. I don't think there are ANY Mage Knights in FX. What's worse, Anna has not just an innate Bow talent, but it's her BOON talent. Which means the game rewards you for using it. She gets B-Bows as a Warrior, and Warrior is the only good way to make use of her good Magic stat, through the Radiant Bow. She gets to be a Berserker, and thus be terrible. I can forgive Chloe not promoting into a Sword Griffon and getting Levin Sword. I can forgive Anna not being made into a Sage or Mage Knight. But I cannot forgive Berserker Anna.
Doesn't Chloe still have a magic option with Flame Lance? I mean, I know it's heavier than Levin Sword but at least it would fit with the fact she specializes in lances.
I believe that fx is genuinely impossible on the highest difficulty as soon as you get access to it. The fact that late game units are just better due to higher bases and lower growths meaning even when leveled down they are significantly stronger for most of fx, early on your skill inheritance will likely only be small things like avoid+10 or canter unlike the spd taker and vantage wrath settups you wont have axcess too until much later. And on top of all that, you won't have the emblem rings to equip everyone unless you get the dlc rings or complete most of the original campaign. Also, the units levels, when recruited to your main party, are stagnant and dont change no matter when you complete fx on a run. Do it super early and you will have monsters capable of destroying the first 2-3rds of the game but if you recruit them around the time you have all your rings, their bond levels and poor stats for that time will make them almost as useless as they are in the campaign of fx. Awful design
The thing about warp staves only becoming available in chapter 6 is because of story reasons I can't talk about in relation to what happened in the previous chapter, which is hilarious gameplay to story integration.
@@Darkluster3 I watched the story spoilers for Fell Xenologue just now... I really am not getting why people are saying this story is better than Engage. I found it boring at first, then depressing. It was no less contrived than Engage, just a different set of arbitrary rules.
@@Darkluster3 On the other hand you can just warp-ragnarok Nel out of the chamber... As for any threats to alear.. Soren can help alot with that. The big issue was more the hall with the wolves, who somehow reduced max-hp despite not dealing damage.
@@aninymouse1651 Because of the darker tone, adding an interesting new angle for our side characters, the stellar new characters (the winds singlehandedly made the 4 Hounds more interesting/have more impact), and the fact that this is easily the darkest FE ending. Even Thracia includes lots of themes of hope and Leif overcoming his dark circumstances.
I had to switch to normal for that last map, it was just hours of failed attempts and pure frustration. I feel validated that I’m not alone in these feelings about the dlc
I'm with you. I played every map on hard, but I just couldn't beat the last map on Hard, because Nel & the winds were just too big of a liability since we couldn't alter em.
i swithed directly after chapter 5 and looking at the 6 map no hard, additionally in chap 5 i lost all dieable units and had to kill nil with nel it was auwful
I did the same thing here because of the stupid miasma wyverns constantly spawning at the top after trying to take some out. Three of them at the top was already enough, no point in spawning more of them repeatedly and I'm only getting even more frustrated. On Normal was when I started to enjoy the whole Chapter 6 battle, all that stress gone.
@@Spore9996 I learned this. Go straight to where Timerra is as fast as possible and deal with her first. Then get someone who can Astra Storm Ivy, equip someone with the Three Houses bracelet. Take one or two out, it depends on how near Ivy is and those miasma wyverns, but you really want to use the engage attacks on her to end the chapter. Drop it down to Normal, because you're not getting out of Chapter 5 if you were to finish Chapter 4. It's even worse.
First map I loved a lot. Same as the last one with nil as a dragon. The rest I could do without. I hate how engage has infinite enemy waves coming to force you to rush. I'm fine with 1-3 waves and then it stopping but it's not fun. Units were worth it as they are cool
I’ve done 5/6 chapters on maddening and I can confirm that reinforcements are not infinite on any of those maps… except chapter 4, I think that map has infinite reinforcements. I can confirm because I did turtle strats for all of them (except chapter 4).
I think going the route of Fate's "Heirs of Fate" maps would have been fine giving you set characters for each maps with each map being its own puzzle to solve. The Cindered Shadows route would have been best in my eyes to agree though. I was excited to see maps designed around using the Braclets also assuming we would unlock them as the maps went on...
I've actually beaten Heirs of Fate 5 and End: Lost in the Waves for Speedtaker and Point Blank so many times that I've memorized how they do it. The only annoying parts are Sumeragi's ridiculous amount of avo and the fathers that spawn after you get rid of Anankos's arms, but there are tricks to both which reduces the amount of RNG you need to get lucky with. Did you know that using Master Seals in HoF 5 affects the same unit in the next battle?
@@mihaimercenarul7467 zelestia as a usable unit is enough to make me cry with joy. Nel and Nil are really likeable units too, so even if Nel falls off and Nil is garbage during FX, Nil is good after you finish it and Nel is still cute.
My issue is that you only get the 4 dragon stones that are held by the twins when they are recruited. I know you can’t get any more for canonical reasons, but considering that you have several possibilities for how they exist(forge or whatever it’s called changes them) and that the twins are meant to be deployed together, it’s just annoying to get only four
@@utlukka950 magicstone uses physical stat it says so on the description That also makes nel’s magic growth entirely useless unless she’s using an engage weapon that uses magic. However, I do wonder if you can give her veyle’s dark tome and reclass her as a mage knight since the requirements for the tome is that the user has to be a fell dragon
Fun fact the OCs are NOT scaled when you beat it, they will always be level 20 and level 1 promoted Even if you’re almost done with the game Man if only the game could read your average level or something That would be crazy
I mean, you can do the xenologues as early as Chapter 6. So at least they'll be super good units around early. They just need a little extra investment for middle-late game.
Yeah, Engage doesn't make it easy for units to "catch up." I don't understand why Fell Xenologue is so rigid given that all other DLC chapters (and skirmishes in the main game) do scale.
It would also be crazy if the game had a way to exclude certain units from your party level calculations, so the level the game "thinks" you are at isn't wildly inaccurate because of an outlier unit
Honestly, the FX show exactly what's been a general issue I've had with Engage; it's overreliance on the various OP-ish gimmicks. Engage gives the player a giant list of rather OP gimmicks, with emblance, reclassing, crafted weapons, etc. To "balance" this, the AI gets an obscene amount of reinforcements, often ends up bumrushing you with a large amount of units at once, and AI units are on the powerfull end, often more than capable of one or two-shotting your units, and "tanks" really only seem to work reliably in perfect matchups (without engaging at least), only to be murdered if a bad matchup shows up (e.g. I had a random Mook with an armourslayer literally oneshot Jade. Sure he has an armourslayer, but is oneshotting really necesary?). FX then takes a lot of the player power away, forces you to use a bunch of fairly bad units. And if you're not at end-game, you won't really be able to cover for those losses with the more powerfull inherited skills/emblems. At the same time, the AI stays relativly powerfull, aggresive, and with loads of reinforcments. Which ends up showing just how reliant the design in Engage is on the various OP gimmicks. And honestly. I wish Engage hadn't go so hard on the gimmicks. It ends up undercutting the core gameplay, and it becomes increadibly noticeable whenever you're forced to work without (some) of the gimmicks.
I feel like this kind of balancing was done with the Maddening/Lunatic playing crowd in mind. They wanted to make it uber hard for no good reason in some weird attempt to please the crowd that wants FE to be some extremely difficult puzzle for them to crack by figuring out what's most OP and abusing it so they can go to some forum and brag about how ezpz it was for them. It's just not fun to play for everyone.
I enjoyed the Fell Xenologues, mostly because of the story. However, I really wanted to add some of the OCs to my main team, so I did the FX around chapter 12, meaning I had barely any bond levels with my main team which was really frustrating. As someone who normally plays on hard/maddening, I ended up playing on normal just because it was so impossible to keep Nil alive
It terrifies me that I'll have to go through this all over again every new file. Cindered Shadows rocked for letting you keep your clear bonuses, but Fell Xenologue is even more of a slog thanks to Emblems and skills not being pre-built on your pre-built units. Demon Twink Nil's pretty groovy though. It also hurts that Gregory and Madeline weren't the appetizer for Enchanter and Mage Cannoneer.
I made a mistake on playing through it all on Maddening so your experience with FX is literally how I felt, ESPECIALLY when I got into chapter 3 and so on. It took me 64 turns with no usage on the time crystal and even then I barely beat the boss before the reinforcements cornered Nil and Nel.
I get it why Nil is super weak and it makes sense because of [spoilers]. But having Nel and the winds be super underwhelming was so annoying and got in the way of my attachment to these characters
I'm not ashamed to say that it took me all of 2-3 maps to drop from maddening to normal. Trying to keep Nil alive was forcing me to play in the least fun way possible, and on top of that I quickly realized Nel would also need to babysat because despite turning into a giant fell dragon, her damage is okay at best and she needs to get her hair out of her eyes so she can actually hit something. I genuinely feel like they intentionally made FX miserable. Either it's an effortless stomp on normal or it's an infuriating babysitting adventure on hard and maddening.
I suspect some working condition problems at IS. Alot of these things should have been noticed with proper testing, but weren't. It's likely that this thing was rushed out. Which is a shame. Alot of it seems pretty easily and quickly fixable by just changing some configurations.
I mentioned when the Xenologue first came out that it truly is the opposite of the base game. Base game has fantastic gameplay, but only ok story Xenologue has fantastic story and characters, but meh/bad gameplay It's just so weird that they dropped the ball this hard with the Xenologue
The only positive thing, is that at the very least the base game and the DLC have separated difficulty levels, so you can play the Base game at the highest difficulty, and the DLC at the lowest one, enjoy the story of the latter and get its characters in the main story without having any repercussions on the base game's progress. I'm going to do that myself in my future playthrought, because despite the messed up gameplay, I really love the story and most especially the characters of it, and I don't want to leave them behind in my playthrought just because bad game design.
Nah, base game stroy was actual terrible garbage, let's be honest here. The mother was so incredibly clearly going to die with all the forced bonding, but it happened on DAY MOTHERFCKING ONE. NOBODY CARES. Then it's all the generic fire emblem goop with maybe an interesting dynamic here and there
I'm happy to see I'm not alone on thinking this DLC was mishandled. At first when I saw you can bring your units over from the main game I ws excited because it meant the units I'd raised can be put to more use so when I saw that tutorial pop telling me everything was preset I just sighed so hard that I thought a monster would appear. And I think what makes this worse is how well-handled the main game was, they clearly play-tested the main game as unlike FE:TH Maddening, that mode actually feels properly made. But then you get to this and it's like....what happened? How did they mess this up so much? The good thing is a lot of the issues can be fixed via patches so hopefully Nintendo will acknowledge our criticism and address them.
@@BreadBup 8 more months later and still not fixed. But they've already stopped printing physical copies of the game since no one bought it a little longer after the DLC.
Still hate it that the new classes are not given to Gregory being a enchanter and Madeline as a Magic Canonneer. Because in Cindershadows it let you get a great understanding of the classes strength and weaknesses are so you can understand which builds would be the best for your main campaign units. Plus I feel like Madeline having a more mature personality she would found it more reasonable to attack from afar. While Gregory being a more reasonable timed person would rather support plus I can see the wings let him have knifes because he isn't gonna cut himself with it. plus the other OCs have new classes or classes that are not playable in base game.
I agree they should let us to try the new classes in fx campaign. In cindered shadow it was fun to play around with trickster foul play combat art. Instead of that they just showcase the new classes from enemies... I guess IS probably wanted to commit the mirror concept so they kept gregory and madeline in the same class as their counterpart.
@@renren5660 Especially since they showcased them in annoying manners. The enchanter could put some really obnoxious buffs on boss units that are already tough to kill and the mage cannoneers on floating islands that could only be reached with fliers was really dumb especially since they have an archer guarding them so you have to rely on 3 range or canter on your flier to safely take them out
I loved it when bonded shield 'just happened' to not proc on Nil and only Nil on Maddening, leading to a game over. Then the enemy phase lands two crits in a row on my units.
That last map was a nightmare, it would have probably gone a lot smoother if had realized earlier that won't outright attack your units so putting them in his danger zone would have been fine, but otherwise it took me WAY too long and the only way I could finish him had to be with draconic hex, and even that took me quite a while
Hello! Nine months into the future here where we have discovered new Rafal cheese tech: Give Alear Edelgard and re roll until he starts on Claude, then we engage to forcefully keep him on Claude and attack Rafal with poison gambit Liberation. Then use Veronica’s contract skill to force him into another poison gambit rush. This can also be made easier by giving him a revival stone through tiki’s divine blessing and buffing his stats through chrom’s rally.
How Fell Xenologue should have worked: - No relation to your ongoing main campaign playthrough at all - Most importantly/related to the above, no bringing over any Emblems that you haven't earned within the FX campaign -> you got a bracelet in the campaign? Wow, it actually matters! - Related to that, auto-set bond level to (whatever) for all characters (you could also let them build bond level within the campaign but eh) - Fixed roster of OCs plus maybe a handful of handpicked units that came with Alear for whatever reason (similar to Cindered Shadows) - YOU CAN F***ING TRADE WITH THE OCS IN PREPS OMG
I was able to do most of the maps on Hard difficulty until that last one. I restarted the map twice on Hard difficulty until I gave up and just completed it on Normal because I was wanting to be done.
The restore staff that Nil can’t use in chapter one is a great example of the general confusing and sloppy experience of FX. I think the idea is that you either give him micaiah (which you might not even have) or have him trade it to a staff unit, but the game doesn’t poorly explain that until after you start the map and he can’t access the convoy prior to starting. It’s so poorly conveyed that everyone I’ve seen play that chapter for the first time has been confused at why he has that staff he can’t use lol.
When he said he had a staff, I didn't use it at all on the first map because I was playing Normal and didn't need it, then on the next chapter I went to have him go heal someone, saw that he didn't have the staff anymore, and then saw his class doesn't even allow him to use staffs and it genuinely made me close the game for the day. Probably a skill issue for not paying more attention but I've always been a "Throw my units at the enemy without micromanaging everything and somehow still winning" kind of player. Probably a side effect of Awakening being my first FE, where that was genuinely the meta because of Pair Up.
How was it confusing? In the map itself, he says he has it and that it should be given to someone who can use it. The flaw there is you might not have deployed someone who could use it. Which isn't poor explanation, just bad design.
@@OrderOTCB Exactly, why would he have it and why would he bring it up if he couldn't use it, why not just give it to the staff units by default, since the entire DLC has fixed inventories anyway. "How was it confusing? They literally (Explains why it was confusing)" Dude.
I would've appreciated more variety in the preset classes, like being able to use a Mage Knight or High Priest instead of just Sages and Martial Masters
My biggest gripe for FX was not being able to access inventory in the prep menu for the new OCs. This made it unnecessarily cumbersome and a waste of time. I played FX on hard and after beating the campaign, I didn’t want to immediately replay FX and felt no need to touch FX ever again. This was the opposite reaction for me when I played cindered shadows from 3H for the first time: I wanted to replay it to optimize my run.
Yeah. It's at least more "enjoyable" using endgame units, but then the three characters you unlock are pointless. It seems like everyone will just play it on normal to unlock the units earlier. This could all be fixed with a New Game Plus mode.
Its completely unacceptable you’re forced to replay it to get the units in a new game, i just beat it on a completed save with intent to use the units during a new game, and now i’ll have to replay this entire slog if i want to do that. Great.
Ngl I’ve never ended up playing this dlc because I was hoping for a similar situation as you since I had already beat the game by the time this last wave dropped. I figured whenever I sat down for a 2nd play through I’d do it then and….i still haven’t replayed Engage lol
Story spoilers below. I'm sure others have stated something to this effect, but I agree with the slight caveat that Nil being a liability is deliberate, and honestly some of the most interesting gameplay and story integration I've seen from FE in a while. Carrying him is part of the challenge, he is a complete pain in the ass who will rarely if ever see combat, and yet Wounded Pride procs over and over regardless. The result is that you viscerally feel his conflict as a "failure." I actually really, really like this, and I played on Maddening. It took less than two chapters for me to feel more invested in the implications here than literally anything in the main story. Nel and the Winds being almost just as bad, however, is insanely stupid and I could not agree with you more. You know there's a problem when the Winds "die" in chapter 5 and my immediate reaction is "oh thank god I won't have to use them again." Followed shortly thereafter by a frustrated string of curses when they're totally fine and get forced into my roster in the final battle. I think a lot of your proposed fixes would go a long way in mitigating the issue, but I maintain that you fundamentally alter, and IMO worsen, the overall experience by making Nil anything other than a borderline deadweight. (Also, I, too, am devastated they all give NPC type support boosts in the main story ☹)
Completely agree with everything you said! The reinforcement spam is what really got to me-but in chapter 5 not chapter 6. I Warp Ragnorok’d Nel out of her box in the first turn, which made Nil, Fogado and Hortensia advance earlier, with Fogado continually summoning reinforcements. It got to the point where reinforcements were 5 deep in that narrow corridor so I just had to give up and it made me want to give up on the whole DLC. Great video mate!
Thank you for talking about this Faer. I loved engage enough to spend $30 on the dlc just for FX. FX borderline made me hate all fire emblem. I wanted a refund but of course you can’t refund DLC. You hit almost everything on the head, but I feel like you missed a few things. First, while yes the story is compelling, there are some problems. It’s never made very clear why Nel killed the corrupted royals outside of “she’s edgy”. Fell Alfred in particular is a great example of how even in FX, when you get corrupted the way Veyle corrupts people, you basically just become alive again and being corrupted is pretty much irrelevant. I also feel like the story is kinda pointless. We don’t know what “Sombron’s goals” are, and so Nil becoming a dragon when he wishes to grant him what Sombron wanted feels forced to me. The other, more egregious, problem is the state of the OCs once you recruit them to Engage. They’re so unbalanced I actually found it to be malicious on the part of the developers. FX is supposed to be this hardcore mode you can only really reasonably beat in the postgame, but then they give you unusable internal level 20 characters as a reward. They might as well not be recruitable if they don’t join with levels scaled to your progression in the game (which ironically scaling was their problem in FX as well). If I’m paying half the cost of the base game for this DLC, I had better feel rewarded after I actually complete the DLC, and this almost felt like being spat at in the face.
Though I feel that the fell Xenologue is a mixed bag for me, overall I like it. The story with Nel and Nil was good and I really like the four winds and how they are almost polar opposites of the four hounds, well except for Mauvier of course. And right now I am enjoying them as units when you get them. Some things to note: The fell Xenologue hits so much harder when you figure out that the people you fight are actually corrupted, yes corrupted as in they already died corrupted. And somehow you can figure it out already, before the big reveal, when you play the second map when fighting alternate Alfred and Celine. How I figured it out was when I had Celine engage with Celica and used Seraphim against them and the corrupted symbol popped on a unit I was fighting. However when I said mixed bag at least to me was the difficulty to finish the Xenologue. I definitely agree with you on the gameplay portion so for me, First off, Nil is a walking losing condition as he has abysmal stats and will get two shot by enemies. At least because he is a dragon he gets the emblem benefits of the dragon so I stuck him Veronica though Micaiah is also good too. I see your point with the OC's stat spread with auto battle. Wolves, I hate the status condition it gives that if you don't heal it your base hp stat itself lowers by 5. So have a very good tank with Hector equipped. Mage Cannoneers constantly attacking you. Deal with them quickly chapter 3😮😮😮 Emblem Veronica, just Emblem Veronica, not the one we have, the one the enemy gets. Spawns too much reinforcements. Chapter 5 in a nutshell and due to story reasons the condition that you have to through with this map sucks but I am glad that you ended up liking it, I don't like it Final Chapter if you decide to play on higher difficulty mainly due to the constant reinforcements. I just said screw it at that point and wanted the characters so played it on normal to get over and done with. And it just becomes easier, way too easy. But if you do decide to play this map have a healer with Micaiah equipped on the ready, you will need her specifically.
I actually thought the Winds were great units in my playthrough. Madeline was a tank, Gregory was powerful magic user, and Zelestia was a great sword flyer. I also really enjoyed the Ivy and Timerra chapter because we never got a Rival faction on any base-game maps.
Yes yes… but consider the following: Madeline and Zelestia are best girls so it was all worth it. 10/10 would look up a guide for chapters 5 and 6 again. Chapter 3 was honestly fine for me, felt challenging enough where I had to think but not outright bullshit. Chapter 4 I guess I got lucky on cause I surprisingly didn’t have too hard a time with it. Chapters 5 and 6 like I hinted at were bullshit though. Literally had to reset multiple times for Chapter 5 and just gave up and looked up a 1 turn guide for chapter 6.
Chapter 4 is literal childs play if you just go the intended route east. Timerra will usually run with her squad at the Elsuians in the west and get smoked by Ivy's wyverns while running with your own group northeast away from the wyverns will make Ivy overtake them and make for an easy target.
@@hoshueyeplopper4465 I just waited for the enemy to pick each other off until I realized Ivy summoned wyverns and was heading in my direction and the made w B-line to Timerra and baited Ivy into killing range and then took out Timerra.
@@hoshueyeplopper4465 I unintentionally made ch 4 harder by thinking I had to go to the northwest, Soren Veyle nuked the Elusians. but man doing that really makes you realize without alacrity++ those corrupted Wyverns are actual hell to deal with and you're forced to boss rush both ivy and timerra. at least Timerra comes to you doing this but then you'd be forced to rush ivy down. I only made it out cuz Merrin wrath and vantage++ Edelgaurd crit Ivy. at least in FX6 Panette with max ike emblem can to one shot all the corrupted wyverns on hard.
@@hoshueyeplopper4465 I just flier rushed her before she called reinforcements. A quick Lyn Astra on top of Soren and Celica Warp took care of her before the dragons rushed in, so I just turtled in the back.
19:50 Uh, Ghast. You know if you're worried about spoilers in this review, you should probably remove that "Fell XXX" labeled character scene here aswell as a bit earlier with the fat dragon who also shows his label a few times. (around 15:00-15:40)
Honestly I’m glad we got the winds and the twins but I expected right away Nil was evil or I should say rafal. I loved the story and different characters too.
I have to say, having the retainers of the main lords and ladies in the alternate universe be killed off was a massive missed opportunity, or even other supporting characters like Yunaka not being mentioned at all. I would have found it interesting how psychotic they could've made her, especially if the more murder hungry part of her character was the main personality.
It's so unfortunate how I get a semi-version of my endgame team. My team just got the new bracelets, has the classes and skills I want, but there's no more content to actually use them to their fullest potential outside a tempest trial. They balanced the bracelet DLC maps totally fine with scaling difficulty. They could have just done the same here and let you use your main team. Even let them gain Exp and bound levels like any other paralogue. And then give Nil and Nel bond level 10 or 20 with all rings depending on your team's highest bond level.
Honestly, what screwed the FX over (and all of Engage), is that the game was finished... and then shelved for 2 years... then released... but the original team was gone by now, so we can't get any new updates to the game. If the DLC and updates were released soon after the game was completed, all of these issues would have most likely been fixed. This also applies to updates that people wanted (like a new game + or using the somniel clothes in battle). At the very least... this game is a case study for why Modern Games need post game support. Because some features and fixes will naturally be missed by the developers. This was acceptable back during the SNES and the N64 era, but now in 2023.
The fact its not like CS and you have to do it more than once is my biggest gripe. Those 6 levels are an absolute grind that had my eyes rolling into the back of my head at some points then wondering how its even meant to be possible on higher difficulty at others and now you have to do them every single time you want to use any of the characters in a playthrough. Like, just make it optional to replay for those masochists that actually wanna go back to it and put themselves through that again.
I feel people forget in addition to fell xenologue, we got maps for each bracelet. I agree that the restrictive gameplay mechanics for difficulty sake sucked, but that doesn't make the dlc as a whole a hot mess. Being able to recruit and see supports from the 4 hounds/winds was actually something I really wanted in the base game. So I kinda like this dlc despite how frustrating the Fell Xenologue felt. Also I just want to say, this dlc is the exact reason why the time crystals and mid battle saves are necessary. The amount of times I got screwed over by a miss or enemy crits would of had me quit the game entirely.
That the only problems is the restriction other then that the dlc was awesome after beating the last level on first try LUCKY I got all the 5 characters and my girl Madeline so it was worth it for me lmao
Honestly kinda surprised you liked the story and characters! Personally, while I love the supports, I thought the writing of the characters and story was genuinely awful lol. Just the worst. But I'm glad to hear you liked that part! I'm interested in watching your video and seeing your thoughts on it!!
Yeah I agree, it kind of felt like the entire cast had to bend over backwards to offer Nil an unearned sense of understanding and forgiveness just to justify him being invited to the somniel at the end of the story. Like, Veyle, the little girl who was under mind control, got completely chewed out compared to Nil who was given nothing but compassion and pity even when outright explaining that he has been purposefully deceiving everyone from day one, does not feel remorse, and would actively do it again They needed a twist villain but didn't have enough time to give him a real redemption arc so that requires the cast to be unnaturally forgiving towards Nil because otherwise making him playable in the main campaign wouldn't work. That's the same reason Nel dies and then gets brought back to life like five minutes later. They wanted a cool story beat, but still needed her playable at the end of the day, so they do the whole dramatic death that is going to be undone as soon as the credits finish rolling. Story and gameplay need to connect even when they are both going different places and as a result story and characterization gets sacrificed
I didn't like the execution of the story and I disliked that the trailer spoiled a lot of the good lines which is my fault. My biggest issue with the story is that it was told to fool the player and not done more organically where the twists could have hit harder.
Yeah, I really don't like how it just felt like an edgy version of the regular world. Also don't like how Nel's sacrifice means nothing a minute later. Sure, some people would say Rafal reviving Nel is consistent with Lumera doing the same, but Lumera suffered the immediate consequence of not surviving against Veyle while Rafal is just fine. By the end I didn't even want Rafal to be on my team because of everything he's done.
Agreed, the story felt like it could’ve worked conceptually, but just overall ends up feeling very rushed and unsatisfying. They throw so many twists at you without any time to properly develop any of them, Nil just randomly becomes cartoonishly evil and then just gets a rushed redemption at the end, and it also turns out that he wasn’t Nel’s brother after all but just some random dude. It’s a shame too since I really dig the concept of this mirrored version of Lythos where the characters have different personalities, but they handled it in the worst way possible.
I totally agree with your thoughts on this DLC. It's so sad because it fixed most of the problems (story) from the main game while taking MASSIVE steps back with player experience. I can't see myself playing this more than one or two times to say I did it. Which is different from the main story where I'm on playthrough 3.
I... didn't realize you could change the difficulty until watching this. I pushed through hard with gritted teeth, taking six hours of play time just to beat the last map.
If anyone's interested, a RUclipsr named TeeGee did a video on how to beat each DLC Map on Maddening without taking damage. It's obviously reliant on RNG and Endgame builds, but it is possible. Mewn also did a couple of videos on how to 1-turn Chapters 5 & 6. Edit: several other people have managed to LTC each map on Maddening. Basically just search for the videos and you'll find them. Where there's a will, there's a way.
I'd have way fewer complaints if I only had to play it once to get the items and characters on every playthrough after, like everyone else has said. They did this with cindered shadows and I'm absolutely baffled why they didn't do that with this game. I hope enough complaints will get them to patch "once and done" in somehow.
Chapter 1: I sure hope there aren't MORE wolves on Hard/Mad. Chapter 2: Good thing Zelestia has an Elthunder tome, so the Enchanters can ruin their own prospects. Chapter 3: I sure am glad Gregory is _just_ good enough to handle the units here-- oh shoot, I'm on Normal. Chapter 4: Kamikaze-bombing Hortensia into Ivy is goated. I've heard that Maddening removes effective weapon damage, and I do not like the thought of that. Chapter 5: The slight lag from fighting the wolves in that one chamber nearly killed me. Chapter 6: Just rush to the last island with fliers; Fell Nil heads to the furthest-up island with three people at it.
One particular aspect of FX6 that I found really weird was that Hard difficulty specifically was the only difficulty that DIDN’T give you the S-Rank Weapons as obtainable items. I can understand Normal giving you them, considering that it was designed to be the easiest difficulty, but why does Maddening give you them? And why does Hard not give you them? You would think that it would be the other way around, with Maddening taking away such high might weapons as added difficulty. As someone who played through FX on Hard, I’m confused as to why IS decided to restrict only those who played on the middle difficulty in this way.
I have been trying to get through the fell xenologue on maddening mode and I have been stuck on the brodia map because half my team are complete liabilities. LOOKING AT YOU NIL, NEL, AND GREGORY!
I thought gregory was the most competent out of the bunch. :D Madeline couldn't hit the earth itself if she fell down face-first. Zelestia was a second Ivy with equally horrid hitrates (all hail Byleth i guess) and Nel was the biggest wet paper-dragon, i've ever seen in all of fire emblem. Gregory at least could tank some magic quite well.
If you want some help, the reinforcements are not infinite and are zone based so you can take it slower than you realize, but at the same time that makes just as annoying since they are punishing you for moving fast.
It's interesting because I do see a lot of people praise the DLC's story and characters and I just can't agree at all. "What if the same characters but OPPOSITE!!" is such an amateur writing idea. It's a fanfiction I wrote when I was 10. Nil and Nel were fine and the twist with Nil was interesting. Everything else about it was really bad including the cheap way they tried to pull at my emotions and then the cop out they hastily added to make us feel okay about killing familiar characters. Anyway, nice analysis of the gameplay! It was well worded.
The other really bad thing is, if tou wait till you have all the emblems to havw more flexibility for doing this...all the dlc units are completely unusable without heavy grinding because they join at a set level. 20 for Nel Rafal and Zelestia, and 1 for Gregory and Madeline, whereas all your units by that point would be wither max level, close to it, or evwn reset to level one of their class to gain more stats Meanwhile if you do them as early as possible you have 5 hilariously op units that will erase all the challenge for a good while. Even if 3 of them recruit wirhout any weapons
I think you hit the nail on the head. I played through Hard, started but did not clear Ch. 6, and I think I might just cave and drop the difficulty. You mentioned Anna's reclassing specifically. Funny thing, you don't need to make her a mage, her natural class change to Warrior makes her a terror with a Radiant Bow. But FX makes her a Berserker instead, ugh... Ch. 3 was grueling. I actually did run out of time stone charges and would have been up the creek if not for the fact that I had a mid-battle save. The reinforcements coupled with the low hit rates threaten to be overwhelming very easily; you need to get unintuitively aggressive and snipe the boss units, all while praying for good RNG. Ch. 5 being so good by comparison makes Ch. 6 feel like a real letdown. In Ch. 5, Nel actually can beat Nil alone if you equip her with Tiki's Fog Breath, which bypasses the need to fight the other bosses. Ch.6 doesn't do a good job of actually explaining its unique mechanics, either. You're just told to flee in a general direction, and the significance of FNil killing a Bracelet holder as opposed to a normal enemy is not explained.
I had a completely different experience when going in hard from chapter 9 save file. I had most of the OCs do equally as well as my units since I had low bond levels and no abilities. Being able to double with levin sword was extremely useful for Zelestia and Nel worked as a decent finisher for most battles. Nil was meant to be useless and I can’t say much about Gregory and Madeline as Gregory was my decoy applier for my dodge tank and I barely played with Madeline.
Even though it nearly drove me mad at times, I was determined to beat FX on maddening, and I almost did. But the final map completely broke my spirit. I did the unthinkable and dropped from maddening to normal since I was completely burnt out and just wanted to be done with it
FX 6 suffers from bad communication. When you're on the second platform you can either take the north route straight to the final sigil into reinforcement hell, or stick to the boss by diving the center. However, on the first run you don't exactly know that the top-left platform is the last on the route, and if you pull the Elusian air force and end up pushing north by mistake, then you're stuck with that choice as the map collapses behind you. Going along the "intended" route, I actually ended up routing the map on Hard, though I did need to abuse battle saves because Diamant and the boss together create a lot of pressure when moving to the top right. And Zelestia was pulling her own weight with her marginal speed advantage over Ivy, letting her actually one-round axe wyverns with Excalibur. Her main issue was that she came with garbage default gear, as lightning is absolutely not the type of tome she should be using with her Spd. Nel was also serviceable with dragonstone attacks, though hardly a star of the show. Madeline and Gregory were really bad though, and with the singular exception of Zelestia the performance of the new units in FX gave me no indication of how they would work in the main campaign, nor could I assess the value of the new classes when they were only shown among the enemies. To go back to the CS comparison, each Wolf came in one of the DLC classes, so you could tell what you were getting when picking those up for the main game. Here you instead only experience Enchanters and Cannoneers as highly scripted enemies, leaving you with very little idea of how valuable such utility would be in your own team.
But maaaaan, do I love the recurring theme of everyone disagreeing with this video going out out of their way to be pretentious hipsters and narcissistic as humanly possible. Some of my favorite comments are: "Funny how the actual hard maps filtered the noobs of this franchise," like that's actually supposed to be a positive thing for the franchise, and: "Name me a game in the series that would be fun to replay after playing engage. I'll tell you, it's none. 0." It never ceases to amaze me how contrarians have their heads up their asses so incredibly far.
I honestly can't follow their thought process. What is the point of gatekeeping fans while demanding more and more difficulty, past the point that even series veterans consider it to be blatantly unreasonable? Step 1: Fire Emblem's difficulty cranks up to disgusting levels, requiring either massive RNG grinds or specific party / unit builds, limiting creativity and replayability while also making it inaccessible for anyone who isn't highly skilled at strategy games. Step 2: Hard core masochists (a tiny minority by most accounts) flock to the series... Meanwhile all casual and mid-skilled players bail from it, unable to beat the difficulty surge, as do many veteran players, frustrated by the lack of viable options and elitist design practices. Step 3: Sales for the series drop through the floor as its target audience shrinks massively. Step 4: Future Fire Emblem games either get way less funding and their quality drops in all aspects, or the series is entirely discontinued. Step 5: Everyone who ever liked Fire Emblem, contrarians and otherwise, gets to be unhappy? Yay? Mission success? Step 6: Profit...?!?
@@DuMaMayDewLay No one's 'scared' of you kiddo, we pity you. Go tell your parents about how proud you are for figuring out how to lie on the internet...and while you're at it, ask them about how to do it convincingly.
It’s funny how people will continually fight to create walls and segregate the playerbase regardless of if they are an old guard, new age hipster, or no life tryhard like the guy above.
Upon having a terrible experience with the Broadia map, I spent A LOT of time grinding my Emblem inherited skills to create a team that would pull me through the final map. The big stars were: 1) Chloe with inherited Alacrity++ and Spd/Dex +5, while equipped with Sigurd, max bond. This allowed her to move across the entire map, kill units without retaliation, and then retreat. Perfect for hit and runs. 2) Alcryst, with Canter+ and Str/Dex +5 and max bond Lyn. He would never miss, have the strength to kill an enemy in one round (w/out retaliation, thanks to Lyn), move back from the front lines, and constantly proc Luna. 3) Merrin with canter+, draconic hex and max bond Edelgard. She could hit and run while weakening enemies, and/or use Claude's bow to attack from three range, inflicting the hex w/out risk of counter. 4) Timerra with +5 Def, +5 Str/Dex and max Emblem Hector. She proved to be a tank that could take any and all things, and killed most things in enemy phase. With support bonuses with Merrin, she constantly proc'd sandstorm. During the fight with the final boss, every time she attacked sandstorm + Armads hit, doing over 50 damage. She was a killer. 5) Seadall with Dual support (Lucina's skill) and Canter +, paired with maxed out Emblem Corrin. He played a support roll, though when paired with Chloe and Alcryst, could get my two strongest heavy hitters to wipe the field. Later when reinforcements came from Corrupted Diamant, he could halt the entirety of them into one place, where they were picked off without issue. 6) Hortensia, Canter + and momentum +, Byleth max bond. Basically she became a magical Sigurd, though with the Byleth Divine +, would never miss. She came in clutch for healing and killing stragglers. 7) Ivy Mag/Dex + 5 and Momentum+, max bond with Soren. She could strike most enemies across the map, and her Rexcalibur meant that she could deal with all of the corrupted wyverns, one shotting them w/out issue. She saw less use than I expected, though that was mainly due to Chloe and Alcryst being too powerful. She also was helpful physic-ing when necessary. I ultimately completed it on hard, though with luck this team could transfer over to Lunatic. In any case, the OCs were all but useless. I agree with what Ghast says.
It pisses me off Intelligent Systems dropped the ball big time implementing the Fell Xenologue. The Four Winds and the Fell Twins are a delight as characters and units, so it's very annoying that they're not only locked behind the new sidestory, but that they were also very poorly implemented in it gameplay-wise. The base game is so solid man. What happened here?
@kollie79 If you don't mind missing on grinding for a few maps, then doing the sidestory before Chapter 10 is like the sweet spot for it, and you can start using the DLC dudes around Ch13 without having them feel overpowered.
It's optional content. You don't _have_ to get Nel/Nil/Winds every save. Story-wise, Nil only drops his act because you can get him Edelgard and let him become a dragon, so it's not like the five are effed in runs where you don't do it.
@kollie79 that's a bit debatable. Clearing the Fell Xenologue also gives you a pile of loot, and guaranteed Gold Skirmishes that have much more Gold than those in the main campaign. Some of them are scaled to your lower-level characters, allowing you to catch up faster. I don't know how it's implemented in Maddening, but it seems neat.
@kollie79on paper, DLC should naturally become part of playing the game every time. You shoukd want to do that even if there was no rewards. There is no inherent problem of lockibg DLC content behind doing the DLC, the problem ia not making a DLC people would want to play every run.
I was wondering if I was the only one to find such big issues with the Xenologues, glad I'm, not alone... And honestly, it seems like an oversight the Winds and Fell Twins have both unused SP and can't raise their bond levels, even giving them all 2-3 Bond 5 options would go a long way to helping them out
The way I see it, the different difficulties work best if you see them like a scaling difficulty based on your main story progress. Maddening is going to be awful if you play it early because you have so little to bring with you, and normal is going to be dead easy late game because you have access to your *entire* bag of tools so to speak.
Y’know, I would be so inclined to agree IF the units you get rewarded with scale in levels. It kinda sucks to go through all that and get units you can’t even use, without babying them for hours on end.
7:50 The UI design in Engage is awful in general, so that's very fitting. 3H was already somewhat bad with things like using stat boosters, which could have been done in 1 button press needing several more instead via that small context menu and some other things. Engage managed to regress even from that point, still having that clumsy context menu instead of directly assigning each function to a button and then other nonsense on top, like not even stacking items. Go try buying tonics for your entire army and then using it on all of them for one fo the most awful UI experiences in a long time. The UI designers of this game need to be fired before they can ruin another project.
PSA to all who are going to do the DLC for their first playthrough. Please do all the Divine Paralogue maps before finishing the FX if you're planning on getting the characters around chapter 6-10! If you finish the FX as early as chapter 6 on Normal, you'll inadvertently make the DLC paralogues and skirmishes harder as they scale to your highest members level. The 5 characters you get are set at level 20 and lvl 1 promoted respectively regardless on where you are. So, all the divine paralogue challenges will scale the enemies to that level and with additional skills. I really don't know what IS was thinking when they made this DLC in regards to the balance of the game. I felt the devs had the expectation of players to do the final 2 chapters on mid to end game at least on Hard, and definitely end game for Maddening. But by that point all the DLC characters would be next to useless since you've already had an army built for the occasion, and are beating the end of the main game by the time you beat the DLC. However, if you decide to do early normal at about chapter 6 just for the characters, then you're overkilling your army, snatching previous xp for earlier characters, and making the following skirmishes and DLC paralogues harder. If you want my personal (appropriate) order to get the characters on FX Normal for a standard Hard/Classic playthrough then it'd be: - Play until chapter 9 so that you have as many rings to use for the other paralogues. - Do the Tiki Paralogue. - Finish the rest of the Divine Paralogue maps (Chrom is imo the hardest so you could save that for later) - Finish FX before or around chapter 10 -13 so that the DLC units are on par to where you are in the game. This is just a suggestion and ya don't have to listen to me. Just have fun and enjoy what we can outta this mess of a DLC! PS: I'm now in a conundrum on who to marry lol.
Because the dlc was annoying. I actually prepare an exclusive save file so I don't need to replay fx again even in normal mode. I played the dlc paralogues on chapter 9 before finished fx. However not all since my units would be overleveled. I just pick tiki, veronica and chrom. The rest I prefer to do it later in part 2.
I just made my own video about Engage and my thoughts on the Fell Xenologue, but to summarize: I think the story and the new characters it added were great additions. Not only are the characters fun and interesting in the story itself, but the new support conversations they bring are all top notch. I also think the villain of the xenologue is much better of a villain than Sombron, though I guess that it isn't saying a whole lot since I think Sombron is a pretty basic bad guy. What I take issue with is the gameplay. While I didn't have much issue playing through the first four maps, the last two maps were a massive increase in difficulty, even for me who was playing it on normal. It also sucks that the xenologue is tied to your save file instead of having its own save file like Cindered Shadows. If I ever want to replay Engage and use the xenologue units, I have to replay the whole xenologue again on the new playthrough.
Literally just finished the Fx and what can I say? You have encapsulated my every grievance with the gameplay. I started out with hard, but nearly immediately changed to normal. I was really disappointed with how easy it was on normal difficulty. I hoped it was like how normal was for CS. It’s a shame cause the story was great, and the characters were also great. It presented some of the depth the main game was missing. It’s wonder how they fumbled the gameplay when the main game’s gameplay is so stellar. I hope they patch it in the future. There was a lot of good there, but the balancing was non existent.
I agree 100%. I only played Cindered Shadows once, because I just hated the last boss THAT much. It was my most hated map in all of Fire Emblem for a time - though Engage did Tie it with seemingly infinite reinforcements in such huge numbers that you literally cannot defeat them all each turn. But I only NEEDED to play it once. I still got all the rewards for every subsequent playthrough, and didn't need to replay CS just to use Yuri, Hapi, Balthus, and Constance, or their new classes. I could use the Ashen Wolves as early as I could enter Abyss (so after the first mock battle but before the Red Canyon), and their classes as soon as I could reach Level 20. It was great! It was worth suffering through Cindered Shadows' final boss at least once for that! But Fell Xenologue? I need to do it EVERY time? I did it on a postgame file first because it was my "main" file, and imagine my disappointment when all the new characters joined at level 1 promoted, and completely unuseable because of how late it was. I also missed my chance to try fielding the Winds against the Hounds, which really interested me. Lastly, I'd already given the pact ring and I was especially curious to see how Nel reacted, considering her past with Alt-Alear, so yet another missed opportunity. Soooo... I need to... start a new file, get to a far enough chapter, play through the DLC again but with weaker units, less rings, and a more limited roster, and THEN I can check all this out? I struggled enough as is WITH all those extras, and I even lowered the difficulty to Normal for the DLC because it was just pissing me off and not worth the effort. Why can't I just... get the rewards because I already beat it, like with Cindered Shadows!? It wouldn't be so bad if it was JUST the new characters locked behind the DLC - I can live with not using them every file since you only have so many deployment slots. But I've been eagerly awaiting the new classes - The Enchanter and Mage Cannoneer - and was super excited when I spotted them as enemies in the Bracelet DLC Maps, because I knew they were hinting at things to come. I want to run at least one of each on new playthroughs from now on. But they're also locked behind clearing the Fell Xenologue on a playthrough. Freaking heck! If I only needed to play the Fell Xenologue once, I'd love it. But honestly, the maps are tediously annoying, and needing to complete it early if you want to explore all the content it has to offer in the main game makes it even worse since you can't rely on useful lategame units like Veyle or useful lategame rings like Corrin or Eirika. It gets worse and worse the earlier you try to play it, but the rewards get worse and worse the longer you put it off. You just can't win! What were they thinking?
something i heard is that the autolevels are based only on personal growths and after some testing, it seems to be true. i have no idea why IS did that cuz it just absolutely guts some units, like jean. the earlygame units just have worse stats than they otherwise would at every fixed level because...reasons????? plus there's also the weird quirk of your prepromotes having their class skills for the first 3 xenologues, losing them in fx4 and 5, then getting them back in 6.
I bought the 3H DLC soon after buying the game because I wanted to support what I felt was an overall great entry to FE and game. However, when I finally got around to CS, I have to admit I felt a bit burned. The DLS was just very mid, compared to the rest of the game. The economics of how much you pay for the dlc vs the base game just did not make sense to me. Because of this, I decided to skip on the DLC for Engage until it was all released. I am glad I waited, I think the economics still make little sense, especially as I am finding Engage base to be highly replayable, which is not something I expected.
hello viewer! Hope you enjoyed my review of the Fell Xenologue and understood where I was coming from with my feedback! Please don't forget to leave a like and comment down below. And if you'd like to support the channel, you can become a Member!!!
I would say in incredibly easy way to fix the mode is to not allow skill inheritance and set every unit to have either bond level 1,5, or 10. In exchange for this loss of stats and abilities they should make the enemies weaker on hard and especially maddening. This is such a simple fix that i wouldn't be surprised if it just was patch in as an update. Oh and just add an armory that sells lighter weapons and give the unit like 5k gold
@Faerghast
They should have added fire to this game & the DLC, and fire. That would have made this the ultimate anime game.
"Pick one of these:
a) Good gameplay
b) Good story"
- Intelligent Systems, apparently
Three Houses' gameplay wasn't THAAAAT bad tho, I feel like people tend to exagerate a bit.
Like seriously, this is a constant for Fire Emblem games. Almost none of the games in the series managed to handle both the things right at the same time, and with Engage this is more ridiculous as somehow they managed to do both the cases (I mean either good gameplay, bad story, or good story, bad gameplay) at the same time in the same freaking game... the only game in the series that managed to do them both the things right is Path of Radiance.
I mean awakening and echoes was fun both ways but that might be the nostalgia overshadowing my judgement
@@elpoppliogameralons0839 It was horrendous and the map design was absolute trash. The story is the only thing that made me keep playing. Maps felt like a chore because they actually weren't fun and instead repetitive. Playable units are poorly balanced and the recruitment in 3H only makes it worse.
3H was one of the worst gameplay experiences I've had in my life. And I played games like Breath of Fire and Balan Wonderworld.
But from software and Sony stanta monica finds the middle ground with there games I loved elden ring and gow ragnarok
The maps would’ve been more bearable if Nil wasn’t a complete liability
I gave him Tiki so he could give people revival stones and do Something. Still miserable tho
I gave him Micaiah so he could use staves. Still awful.
Yeah. Shine was the only weapon that I felt sure he wouldn't instantly die and even then I only used him as a finisher/healer
I used him mostly just for Veronica. Summoning and dancing seem like the only support things he feels good at
Basically every OC is a liability in Fell Xenologue
Engage is so strange. It’s so at odds with it’s own design at almost every turn. I see they’ve continued this into the DLC as well.
One thing that frustrates me story-wise is that Alear is the only character from the main timeline to (canonically) be in Fell Ellyos but there's no explanation as to why their army can show up in battle. Even if it was just something as simple as "Alear can summon illusions of their friends to help" I'd be satisfied.
If you consider all the minor mid-battle dialogues between the retainer units and the enemy lords to be canonical then your army does canonically go to the other world. Still no explanation on how they do that, but the dialogues do confirm that your army is actually in the other world and aware that they are in a different world.
I think at least Vander is canonically there because he's shown fighting Nil during the end credits.
@@topgun4695 Even if we do consider them canonical, they're never explained nor even hinted at in the cinematics, which essentially makes them feel like they don't belong. There really should have been at least some recognition of the 'forces Alear brought along' or something.
@@jessiehogue. The cinematics are the worst part of Engage's story telling method - characters show up out of nowhere to say their lines then vanish for the rest of the cutscene (Hortencia was not present before her father was killed, but her line of dialogue implies she was there all along, then after she shoves Veyle she vanishes from the scene never to be seen again), remain in place doing absolutely nothing while the villains do their thing (nobody tried to remove Veyle's horn accessory despite knowing it was being used to brainwashed her, nobody tried to heal the MC after they tried to block the attack that would have killed Veyle, enemies show up for a surprise attack and the characters just stand there talking for minutes about how doomed they are, etc.), and just let enemy generals escape without giving chase or making any type of attempt at stopping them (Alear let Ivy get away after her defeat within the castle walls, then again in the snowfield despite being more than capable of -and obligated to - taking her as a prisoner)!
Engage is a first draft given budget and a VTuber artist who had no idea what he would be working on!
@@TwilightWolf032 It's really unfortunate, too. You'd think that after Three Houses, they'd have a better idea of how to do a lot of those things. Three Houses really made me feel like I had an army alongside me with their troops mechanics whatchamacallit. It felt badass.
One of my BIG issues with FX is that Vander ALSO losses his Jeagan Promotion and thus prevents him from even being useable.
It is truly legendary how bad Vander was in FX.
@@TheDeanofLean People actually *used* Vander in FX?
@@Lechgang showing him fighting Nil in the artwork had to have been a troll
@@Lechgang That I'm aware of? No. If you accidentally scroll over him in the unit selection you can see how hilariously bad he is.
@@pearsemolloy9656 I had a good laugh at that one. Vander must have been daydreaming
> For reference on how easy Normal is, for me the first four chapters were just Louis and Jade sweeping the map by themselves and taking no damage EVER.
> You forgot to mention the lack of scaling for the OCs when they join in the base game: They will always join as Prepromoted/ Level 20 Unpromoted no matter what. If you recruit them too early, their high level will over-inflate the difficulty of the skirmishes and Divine Paralogues. If, like me, you recruit them near the end of the game, you now have five underlevelled units you have to waste time babying up to the current level of your roster. In Three Houses, the Wolves would always scale with the progress of the story by the time you recruited them, just like students from other houses when they transferred over to your class.
For further evidence, I got to chapter 5 with only Alear and was only halted because it's mechanically impossible to solo that map with Nel before Alear gets killed
And if you recruit them when they would be on par with the rest of your squad at around level 20, you're going to be underequipped to deal with the Xenologue due to lacking most of the emblems at that point in the game. Not fun.
One thing positive i gotta say; the lines with the respective retainers can be heartwrenching. I had Pandreo attack Fogado and he sounded so.. dead inside, it almost made me tear up.
Ivy and Zelkov had a really loaded conversation as well.
That out of the way, i was really saddened on how it was handled in terms of difficulty, or rather lck of balancing. Mauvier would just tear through everything (thank god i guess) while the four (three) winds had to be constantly babysat, not to mentuion Nel and Nil.
I found it interesting how despite Alcryst being an insensitive jerk to Diamant, he shows complete remorse for his retainers dying.
@@AkameGaKillfan777 I'd imagine that his retainers dying was exactly why FX Alcryst became the way he was, while FX Diamant became a coward for similar reasons.
@@SatoKure He's not exactly the same though, because he states that he would be the one to become King, not Diamant. Also the cadences in their voices are different.
7:55 The funny thing about that is, that that's extremely unlikely to be a programming accident, because that restricting equipment function doesn't exist anywhere else. Which means somebody actively decided that was a good idea and ordered it to be programmed in.
Not quite. They're basically the equivalent to the "Royal+Retainer" auto recruits at the start of every chapter. It's just that for some reason, they refresh every chapter.
Except that you are allowed to give them Emblems. So you're right that it's a new programming feature. It's just that the new programming feature was to give fresh recruits Emblems, not to remove existing characters from the Inventory menu.
@@Sines314 It's still very odd that you can give them Emblems and not items. I'd prefer we couldn't give them anything to be honest as that at least would make more sense.
@@Sines314 "It's just that for some reason, they refresh every chapter." Wich make them NOT like the auto recruits at the start of every chapter , incredible how you contradicted your own statement with TWO phrases
" It's just that the new programming feature was to give fresh recruits Emblems, not to remove existing characters from the Inventory menu." again wich means is somebody actually WANTED it to be this way
So basically you tried to correct the dude but both of your statements just prove him further right and dont add anything to YOUR point lol
I would also just love it if I could recruit the new characters without having to do the Fell Xenologue every single time. Mostly because I think they could be fun units. I just wish I did not have to do it every time and maybe not have them at Lv. 20.
That's the worst part honestly. After the initial playthrough of the Xenologue I really never want to go through it again. Three Houses' DLC story wasn't that great either, but at least they only made you do it once.
@@GoldenSon18 I'd say the 3H-story was still way better. Maybe not because of the story itself but because you could actually level the guys you used which felt alot better than to be just handed a bunch of garbage units (in the FX) with fixed stats.
@@GoldenSon18 This doesn't make up for it all but you can just auto battle, and skip turn on normal difficulty fell xenologue.(Since the fell difficulty is seperate from the main story difficulty) The ai is decent enough to do most of it by themselves while only occasionally making you do minor and quick changes with the time crystal. Still sucks that they join at way too high of a level though.
outside of FX, i personally found the four winds to be really powerful and really helpful units. honestly one of the only things that really annoys me about FX is the fact that you have to complete it from start to finish every playthrough
That's horseshit
Same fr
Yeah they should have done what Three Houses did, and let you have the DLC characters as long as you completed FX once
Engage: Surprisingly fantastic gameplay, absolutely laughable story.
FX: Surprisingly satisfying story, absolutely disappointing balancing.
Perfect things really don´t exist
Since FX is still part of Engage’s canon as a whole, it doesn’t get a story pass from me
@@SerpenTyx Three Houses was much closer to perfection that this game ever has, having a better story and a fun gameplay.
@@lunatic0verlord10 HAHAHAHAHAH NO FUCKING WAY YOU SAID FUN GAMEPLAY AND 3 HOUSES IN THE SAME SENTENCE
@@steveters8187 I found the gameplay in Three Houses perfectly fine as well. Nothing spectacular but fine for me. Add the incredibly interesting story and lore. the great cast of characters and the insane replayability and you have a Fire Emblem package that blows away Engage on almost every level. Engage is 6/10, 3H easily 9/10.
I played this on Hard and it was the hardest FE has been for me. The final map got me to say screw this I'm going to normal (at least 9 hours were spent on that map) and I was blown away by how easy it was. It soured my experience because I felt like I cheated and beating all the other stages on hard was so damn satisfying.
Like this isn't Normal Hard and Maddening. It's easy, maddening and Maddening+.
I might just be a filthy casual but I thought it was hard on normal, I had to rewind a few times on the last chapter
Wit the final map i just decided to eff the bottem right corner and go straight up to smack Diamant and the Firene-siblings. Nil went to chill in the south and i had enough time to mop up the north. And if i spent 2-3 turns more wittling down the extra live, didn't really make a difference anymore anyway.
Wow. I'm glad I didn't get the dlc
@@leargamma4912 Missed out on two new classes and 5 new character, oh well sucks for you I guess. Your decision of course.
@rockowlgamer631 5 characters - 3 of which are boring opposites of the bland AF villians of the main story? Ok. And going through this pain of an experience on top of ruining the design of the main campaign AND chapter 11, the best one in the game? Yeah no thanks. 30 bucks isn't worth it for that. And the new classes aren't that interesting either.
I seriously recommend everyone who just wants to try the new OCs in the main game to beat the Fell Xenologue on Normal and as early as possible (Chapter 9-10 is the best spot for it imo) and then make a separate save where the sidestory's done for subsequent play-troughs.
Wait. Don't you have to play the xenologue everytime for each playthrough? If I want to play maddening I cannot use another save file to make the characters appear in the somniel. This Is not Cindered Shadows
@@stefanoandreani2562 If the maddening file is new then yeah, you should have to play the sidestory again sadly. Thankfully, you can change the xenologue's difficulty without affecting the main plot so there's that at least.
If you're going to do that, might I recommend cheesing a Deirdre S ring while you're at it? Giving that thing to Framme is amazing for the early game. It's actually pretty darn good into the mid-game too, depending on her HP growths. It scales especially well if you're not using the bracelets and need to use Bond Rings during Solm.
You'll want to keep in mind, though, that the other Xenologues' difficulty scales to the level of your army. So, once you complete the Fell Xenologue and 5 Level 20 characters at once, any remaining Xenologues will get much harder.
@@Mercurius19 You could always bench them and only use them AFTER you reach the point where you can use them and NOT be badly effected by the boost to the increase in the Divine Paralogue's (or just do them before completing Fell Xeno and getting them. The only other effect they cause is boosting the Skirmishes, and really minus Gold ones, I really stop caring about those by Chapter 10/11 anyway)
But yeah, unless I want to challenge myself on purpose! I'm happy Normal is "easy mode" and won't effect my "Hard-Classic" (and occasional Maddening) playthroughs negatively (I tend to leave beating the Fell Xen about around when I get Timerra, Co & Ike or around when I get Hortensia & Byleth! I usually only do the divine Paralogues based on IF I have the ring connected to that character at that point! Meaning Tiki while I still have Marth, Veronica is done after Tiki simply because she doesn't have a connecting ring" and well you get the idea! Found I balance the game this way and avoid BADLY over leveling, and properly RESETS the Sominel so my "adopted" (READ: Kidnapped) Doggo's get me Silver Ingots (And I avoid Arena Abuse, only really use it for ironing out levels mostly).
I don't know whatever to be mad they messed up bad with balancing, or glad cause I had fun finding ways to "fix it for them for my own amusement and challenge" LOL
I had lost Nil on Chaper 3 to three cannoners hitting three 9% shots at the same time. Twice
One little thing you didn't touch upon is the fixed promotions. They follow a very strict formula. Axe Fighters ALWAYS promote to Berserker, for example. The problem is, several characters obviously do not have this as their cannon promotion. Clanne starts off with a Sword Talent without having to train him in it, and it matches up with his decent Strength growth, making it clear that the intention was for him to go for Mage Knight and be a mixed attacker. He's a Sage, instead. I don't think there are ANY Mage Knights in FX. What's worse, Anna has not just an innate Bow talent, but it's her BOON talent. Which means the game rewards you for using it. She gets B-Bows as a Warrior, and Warrior is the only good way to make use of her good Magic stat, through the Radiant Bow. She gets to be a Berserker, and thus be terrible.
I can forgive Chloe not promoting into a Sword Griffon and getting Levin Sword. I can forgive Anna not being made into a Sage or Mage Knight. But I cannot forgive Berserker Anna.
Doesn't Chloe still have a magic option with Flame Lance? I mean, I know it's heavier than Levin Sword but at least it would fit with the fact she specializes in lances.
@@utlukka950 I don't think you even get a Flame Lance. Only a Levin Sword because of Celine's class.
I believe that fx is genuinely impossible on the highest difficulty as soon as you get access to it. The fact that late game units are just better due to higher bases and lower growths meaning even when leveled down they are significantly stronger for most of fx, early on your skill inheritance will likely only be small things like avoid+10 or canter unlike the spd taker and vantage wrath settups you wont have axcess too until much later. And on top of all that, you won't have the emblem rings to equip everyone unless you get the dlc rings or complete most of the original campaign. Also, the units levels, when recruited to your main party, are stagnant and dont change no matter when you complete fx on a run. Do it super early and you will have monsters capable of destroying the first 2-3rds of the game but if you recruit them around the time you have all your rings, their bond levels and poor stats for that time will make them almost as useless as they are in the campaign of fx. Awful design
In a nutshell: FX needs a patch baaad.
The thing about warp staves only becoming available in chapter 6 is because of story reasons I can't talk about in relation to what happened in the previous chapter, which is hilarious gameplay to story integration.
Spoil me, I'm not buying this DLC.
@@aninymouse1651 Basically Alear and Nel are separated from the rest of your part, so Warp and Rescue would mitigate that aspect of the map.
@@Darkluster3 I watched the story spoilers for Fell Xenologue just now... I really am not getting why people are saying this story is better than Engage. I found it boring at first, then depressing. It was no less contrived than Engage, just a different set of arbitrary rules.
@@Darkluster3 On the other hand you can just warp-ragnarok Nel out of the chamber...
As for any threats to alear.. Soren can help alot with that. The big issue was more the hall with the wolves, who somehow reduced max-hp despite not dealing damage.
@@aninymouse1651 Because of the darker tone, adding an interesting new angle for our side characters, the stellar new characters (the winds singlehandedly made the 4 Hounds more interesting/have more impact), and the fact that this is easily the darkest FE ending. Even Thracia includes lots of themes of hope and Leif overcoming his dark circumstances.
I had to switch to normal for that last map, it was just hours of failed attempts and pure frustration. I feel validated that I’m not alone in these feelings about the dlc
I'm with you. I played every map on hard, but I just couldn't beat the last map on Hard, because Nel & the winds were just too big of a liability since we couldn't alter em.
i swithed directly after chapter 5 and looking at the 6 map no hard, additionally in chap 5 i lost all dieable units and had to kill nil with nel it was auwful
I did the same thing here because of the stupid miasma wyverns constantly spawning at the top after trying to take some out. Three of them at the top was already enough, no point in spawning more of them repeatedly and I'm only getting even more frustrated. On Normal was when I started to enjoy the whole Chapter 6 battle, all that stress gone.
I gotta ask how you dealt with Ch4, because those Wyverns Ivy summons are f-cking my units up.
@@Spore9996 I learned this. Go straight to where Timerra is as fast as possible and deal with her first. Then get someone who can Astra Storm Ivy, equip someone with the Three Houses bracelet. Take one or two out, it depends on how near Ivy is and those miasma wyverns, but you really want to use the engage attacks on her to end the chapter. Drop it down to Normal, because you're not getting out of Chapter 5 if you were to finish Chapter 4. It's even worse.
First map I loved a lot. Same as the last one with nil as a dragon.
The rest I could do without. I hate how engage has infinite enemy waves coming to force you to rush. I'm fine with 1-3 waves and then it stopping but it's not fun.
Units were worth it as they are cool
I’ve done 5/6 chapters on maddening and I can confirm that reinforcements are not infinite on any of those maps… except chapter 4, I think that map has infinite reinforcements. I can confirm because I did turtle strats for all of them (except chapter 4).
@@tristanbowles7258 Ch 4 is what I'm currently on, and it's endlessly annoying...
I think going the route of Fate's "Heirs of Fate" maps would have been fine giving you set characters for each maps with each map being its own puzzle to solve. The Cindered Shadows route would have been best in my eyes to agree though. I was excited to see maps designed around using the Braclets also assuming we would unlock them as the maps went on...
I've actually beaten Heirs of Fate 5 and End: Lost in the Waves for Speedtaker and Point Blank so many times that I've memorized how they do it. The only annoying parts are Sumeragi's ridiculous amount of avo and the fathers that spawn after you get rid of Anankos's arms, but there are tricks to both which reduces the amount of RNG you need to get lucky with.
Did you know that using Master Seals in HoF 5 affects the same unit in the next battle?
Players:bad maps
Game: but good characters
Players:.....ok I'll play it.
Sounds like the exact opposite of this entire game
@@emrakultpe Truly the mirror world xenologue of all time
the characters were not even good
Sounds like Shadows of Valentia.
@@mihaimercenarul7467 zelestia as a usable unit is enough to make me cry with joy.
Nel and Nil are really likeable units too, so even if Nel falls off and Nil is garbage during FX, Nil is good after you finish it and Nel is still cute.
My issue is that you only get the 4 dragon stones that are held by the twins when they are recruited. I know you can’t get any more for canonical reasons, but considering that you have several possibilities for how they exist(forge or whatever it’s called changes them) and that the twins are meant to be deployed together, it’s just annoying to get only four
Honestly the two useful ones are ruinstone and magistone giving you both range, magic, and physical coverage and the others are mostly situational
@@unidra To be fair, Rafal is a physical unit, so magicstone is only useful for Nel who is a mixed attacker.
@@utlukka950 magicstone uses physical stat it says so on the description
That also makes nel’s magic growth entirely useless unless she’s using an engage weapon that uses magic. However, I do wonder if you can give her veyle’s dark tome and reclass her as a mage knight since the requirements for the tome is that the user has to be a fell dragon
@@unidrayou can, Rafal and Nil can use Veyles unique tome
Fun fact the OCs are NOT scaled when you beat it, they will always be level 20 and level 1 promoted
Even if you’re almost done with the game
Man if only the game could read your average level or something
That would be crazy
I mean, you can do the xenologues as early as Chapter 6. So at least they'll be super good units around early. They just need a little extra investment for middle-late game.
Yeah, Engage doesn't make it easy for units to "catch up." I don't understand why Fell Xenologue is so rigid given that all other DLC chapters (and skirmishes in the main game) do scale.
It would also be crazy if the game had a way to exclude certain units from your party level calculations, so the level the game "thinks" you are at isn't wildly inaccurate because of an outlier unit
I learned that the hard way. I got them way too early and skirmishes became almost impossible to beat since the enemies were over leveled
Honestly, the FX show exactly what's been a general issue I've had with Engage; it's overreliance on the various OP-ish gimmicks.
Engage gives the player a giant list of rather OP gimmicks, with emblance, reclassing, crafted weapons, etc.
To "balance" this, the AI gets an obscene amount of reinforcements, often ends up bumrushing you with a large amount of units at once, and AI units are on the powerfull end, often more than capable of one or two-shotting your units, and "tanks" really only seem to work reliably in perfect matchups (without engaging at least), only to be murdered if a bad matchup shows up (e.g. I had a random Mook with an armourslayer literally oneshot Jade. Sure he has an armourslayer, but is oneshotting really necesary?).
FX then takes a lot of the player power away, forces you to use a bunch of fairly bad units. And if you're not at end-game, you won't really be able to cover for those losses with the more powerfull inherited skills/emblems. At the same time, the AI stays relativly powerfull, aggresive, and with loads of reinforcments.
Which ends up showing just how reliant the design in Engage is on the various OP gimmicks.
And honestly. I wish Engage hadn't go so hard on the gimmicks. It ends up undercutting the core gameplay, and it becomes increadibly noticeable whenever you're forced to work without (some) of the gimmicks.
I feel like this kind of balancing was done with the Maddening/Lunatic playing crowd in mind. They wanted to make it uber hard for no good reason in some weird attempt to please the crowd that wants FE to be some extremely difficult puzzle for them to crack by figuring out what's most OP and abusing it so they can go to some forum and brag about how ezpz it was for them. It's just not fun to play for everyone.
I enjoyed the Fell Xenologues, mostly because of the story. However, I really wanted to add some of the OCs to my main team, so I did the FX around chapter 12, meaning I had barely any bond levels with my main team which was really frustrating. As someone who normally plays on hard/maddening, I ended up playing on normal just because it was so impossible to keep Nil alive
It terrifies me that I'll have to go through this all over again every new file. Cindered Shadows rocked for letting you keep your clear bonuses, but Fell Xenologue is even more of a slog thanks to Emblems and skills not being pre-built on your pre-built units. Demon Twink Nil's pretty groovy though. It also hurts that Gregory and Madeline weren't the appetizer for Enchanter and Mage Cannoneer.
I made a mistake on playing through it all on Maddening so your experience with FX is literally how I felt, ESPECIALLY when I got into chapter 3 and so on. It took me 64 turns with no usage on the time crystal and even then I barely beat the boss before the reinforcements cornered Nil and Nel.
I get it why Nil is super weak and it makes sense because of [spoilers]. But having Nel and the winds be super underwhelming was so annoying and got in the way of my attachment to these characters
I'm not ashamed to say that it took me all of 2-3 maps to drop from maddening to normal. Trying to keep Nil alive was forcing me to play in the least fun way possible, and on top of that I quickly realized Nel would also need to babysat because despite turning into a giant fell dragon, her damage is okay at best and she needs to get her hair out of her eyes so she can actually hit something.
I genuinely feel like they intentionally made FX miserable. Either it's an effortless stomp on normal or it's an infuriating babysitting adventure on hard and maddening.
I suspect some working condition problems at IS. Alot of these things should have been noticed with proper testing, but weren't. It's likely that this thing was rushed out. Which is a shame. Alot of it seems pretty easily and quickly fixable by just changing some configurations.
I mentioned when the Xenologue first came out that it truly is the opposite of the base game.
Base game has fantastic gameplay, but only ok story
Xenologue has fantastic story and characters, but meh/bad gameplay
It's just so weird that they dropped the ball this hard with the Xenologue
The only positive thing, is that at the very least the base game and the DLC have separated difficulty levels, so you can play the Base game at the highest difficulty, and the DLC at the lowest one, enjoy the story of the latter and get its characters in the main story without having any repercussions on the base game's progress.
I'm going to do that myself in my future playthrought, because despite the messed up gameplay, I really love the story and most especially the characters of it, and I don't want to leave them behind in my playthrought just because bad game design.
Nah, base game stroy was actual terrible garbage, let's be honest here.
The mother was so incredibly clearly going to die with all the forced bonding, but it happened on DAY MOTHERFCKING ONE. NOBODY CARES. Then it's all the generic fire emblem goop with maybe an interesting dynamic here and there
the fell story was mediocre at best
I'm happy to see I'm not alone on thinking this DLC was mishandled. At first when I saw you can bring your units over from the main game I ws excited because it meant the units I'd raised can be put to more use so when I saw that tutorial pop telling me everything was preset I just sighed so hard that I thought a monster would appear.
And I think what makes this worse is how well-handled the main game was, they clearly play-tested the main game as unlike FE:TH Maddening, that mode actually feels properly made.
But then you get to this and it's like....what happened? How did they mess this up so much? The good thing is a lot of the issues can be fixed via patches so hopefully Nintendo will acknowledge our criticism and address them.
It's been 2 months they are not patching it 😭😭🥶
@@BreadBup 8 more months later and still not fixed. But they've already stopped printing physical copies of the game since no one bought it a little longer after the DLC.
Still hate it that the new classes are not given to Gregory being a enchanter and Madeline as a Magic Canonneer. Because in Cindershadows it let you get a great understanding of the classes strength and weaknesses are so you can understand which builds would be the best for your main campaign units. Plus I feel like Madeline having a more mature personality she would found it more reasonable to attack from afar. While Gregory being a more reasonable timed person would rather support plus I can see the wings let him have knifes because he isn't gonna cut himself with it. plus the other OCs have new classes or classes that are not playable in base game.
I agree they should let us to try the new classes in fx campaign. In cindered shadow it was fun to play around with trickster foul play combat art. Instead of that they just showcase the new classes from enemies... I guess IS probably wanted to commit the mirror concept so they kept gregory and madeline in the same class as their counterpart.
@@renren5660 Especially since they showcased them in annoying manners. The enchanter could put some really obnoxious buffs on boss units that are already tough to kill and the mage cannoneers on floating islands that could only be reached with fliers was really dumb especially since they have an archer guarding them so you have to rely on 3 range or canter on your flier to safely take them out
I loved it when bonded shield 'just happened' to not proc on Nil and only Nil on Maddening, leading to a game over. Then the enemy phase lands two crits in a row on my units.
That last map was a nightmare, it would have probably gone a lot smoother if had realized earlier that won't outright attack your units so putting them in his danger zone would have been fine, but otherwise it took me WAY too long and the only way I could finish him had to be with draconic hex, and even that took me quite a while
Hello! Nine months into the future here where we have discovered new Rafal cheese tech: Give Alear Edelgard and re roll until he starts on Claude, then we engage to forcefully keep him on Claude and attack Rafal with poison gambit Liberation. Then use Veronica’s contract skill to force him into another poison gambit rush. This can also be made easier by giving him a revival stone through tiki’s divine blessing and buffing his stats through chrom’s rally.
How Fell Xenologue should have worked:
- No relation to your ongoing main campaign playthrough at all
- Most importantly/related to the above, no bringing over any Emblems that you haven't earned within the FX campaign -> you got a bracelet in the campaign? Wow, it actually matters!
- Related to that, auto-set bond level to (whatever) for all characters (you could also let them build bond level within the campaign but eh)
- Fixed roster of OCs plus maybe a handful of handpicked units that came with Alear for whatever reason (similar to Cindered Shadows)
- YOU CAN F***ING TRADE WITH THE OCS IN PREPS OMG
I was able to do most of the maps on Hard difficulty until that last one. I restarted the map twice on Hard difficulty until I gave up and just completed it on Normal because I was wanting to be done.
Nil is the most appropriately named character in all of fire emblem
The restore staff that Nil can’t use in chapter one is a great example of the general confusing and sloppy experience of FX.
I think the idea is that you either give him micaiah (which you might not even have) or have him trade it to a staff unit, but the game doesn’t poorly explain that until after you start the map and he can’t access the convoy prior to starting.
It’s so poorly conveyed that everyone I’ve seen play that chapter for the first time has been confused at why he has that staff he can’t use lol.
When he said he had a staff, I didn't use it at all on the first map because I was playing Normal and didn't need it, then on the next chapter I went to have him go heal someone, saw that he didn't have the staff anymore, and then saw his class doesn't even allow him to use staffs and it genuinely made me close the game for the day. Probably a skill issue for not paying more attention but I've always been a "Throw my units at the enemy without micromanaging everything and somehow still winning" kind of player. Probably a side effect of Awakening being my first FE, where that was genuinely the meta because of Pair Up.
How was it confusing? In the map itself, he says he has it and that it should be given to someone who can use it.
The flaw there is you might not have deployed someone who could use it. Which isn't poor explanation, just bad design.
@@OrderOTCB Exactly, why would he have it and why would he bring it up if he couldn't use it, why not just give it to the staff units by default, since the entire DLC has fixed inventories anyway. "How was it confusing? They literally (Explains why it was confusing)" Dude.
I would've appreciated more variety in the preset classes, like being able to use a Mage Knight or High Priest instead of just Sages and Martial Masters
My biggest gripe for FX was not being able to access inventory in the prep menu for the new OCs. This made it unnecessarily cumbersome and a waste of time.
I played FX on hard and after beating the campaign, I didn’t want to immediately replay FX and felt no need to touch FX ever again. This was the opposite reaction for me when I played cindered shadows from 3H for the first time: I wanted to replay it to optimize my run.
Yeah. It's at least more "enjoyable" using endgame units, but then the three characters you unlock are pointless. It seems like everyone will just play it on normal to unlock the units earlier. This could all be fixed with a New Game Plus mode.
Its completely unacceptable you’re forced to replay it to get the units in a new game, i just beat it on a completed save with intent to use the units during a new game, and now i’ll have to replay this entire slog if i want to do that. Great.
Ngl I’ve never ended up playing this dlc because I was hoping for a similar situation as you since I had already beat the game by the time this last wave dropped. I figured whenever I sat down for a 2nd play through I’d do it then and….i still haven’t replayed Engage lol
Story spoilers below.
I'm sure others have stated something to this effect, but I agree with the slight caveat that Nil being a liability is deliberate, and honestly some of the most interesting gameplay and story integration I've seen from FE in a while. Carrying him is part of the challenge, he is a complete pain in the ass who will rarely if ever see combat, and yet Wounded Pride procs over and over regardless. The result is that you viscerally feel his conflict as a "failure." I actually really, really like this, and I played on Maddening. It took less than two chapters for me to feel more invested in the implications here than literally anything in the main story. Nel and the Winds being almost just as bad, however, is insanely stupid and I could not agree with you more. You know there's a problem when the Winds "die" in chapter 5 and my immediate reaction is "oh thank god I won't have to use them again." Followed shortly thereafter by a frustrated string of curses when they're totally fine and get forced into my roster in the final battle.
I think a lot of your proposed fixes would go a long way in mitigating the issue, but I maintain that you fundamentally alter, and IMO worsen, the overall experience by making Nil anything other than a borderline deadweight.
(Also, I, too, am devastated they all give NPC type support boosts in the main story ☹)
Completely agree with everything you said! The reinforcement spam is what really got to me-but in chapter 5 not chapter 6. I Warp Ragnorok’d Nel out of her box in the first turn, which made Nil, Fogado and Hortensia advance earlier, with Fogado continually summoning reinforcements. It got to the point where reinforcements were 5 deep in that narrow corridor so I just had to give up and it made me want to give up on the whole DLC. Great video mate!
Thank you for talking about this Faer. I loved engage enough to spend $30 on the dlc just for FX. FX borderline made me hate all fire emblem. I wanted a refund but of course you can’t refund DLC. You hit almost everything on the head, but I feel like you missed a few things.
First, while yes the story is compelling, there are some problems. It’s never made very clear why Nel killed the corrupted royals outside of “she’s edgy”. Fell Alfred in particular is a great example of how even in FX, when you get corrupted the way Veyle corrupts people, you basically just become alive again and being corrupted is pretty much irrelevant. I also feel like the story is kinda pointless. We don’t know what “Sombron’s goals” are, and so Nil becoming a dragon when he wishes to grant him what Sombron wanted feels forced to me.
The other, more egregious, problem is the state of the OCs once you recruit them to Engage. They’re so unbalanced I actually found it to be malicious on the part of the developers. FX is supposed to be this hardcore mode you can only really reasonably beat in the postgame, but then they give you unusable internal level 20 characters as a reward. They might as well not be recruitable if they don’t join with levels scaled to your progression in the game (which ironically scaling was their problem in FX as well). If I’m paying half the cost of the base game for this DLC, I had better feel rewarded after I actually complete the DLC, and this almost felt like being spat at in the face.
Though I feel that the fell Xenologue is a mixed bag for me, overall I like it.
The story with Nel and Nil was good and I really like the four winds and how they are almost polar opposites of the four hounds, well except for Mauvier of course.
And right now I am enjoying them as units when you get them.
Some things to note:
The fell Xenologue hits so much harder when you figure out that the people you fight are actually corrupted, yes corrupted as in they already died corrupted. And somehow you can figure it out already, before the big reveal, when you play the second map when fighting alternate Alfred and Celine. How I figured it out was when I had Celine engage with Celica and used Seraphim against them and the corrupted symbol popped on a unit I was fighting.
However when I said mixed bag at least to me was the difficulty to finish the Xenologue.
I definitely agree with you on the gameplay portion so for me,
First off, Nil is a walking losing condition as he has abysmal stats and will get two shot by enemies. At least because he is a dragon he gets the emblem benefits of the dragon so I stuck him Veronica though Micaiah is also good too.
I see your point with the OC's stat spread with auto battle.
Wolves, I hate the status condition it gives that if you don't heal it your base hp stat itself lowers by 5. So have a very good tank with Hector equipped.
Mage Cannoneers constantly attacking you. Deal with them quickly chapter 3😮😮😮
Emblem Veronica, just Emblem Veronica, not the one we have, the one the enemy gets. Spawns too much reinforcements.
Chapter 5 in a nutshell and due to story reasons the condition that you have to through with this map sucks but I am glad that you ended up liking it, I don't like it
Final Chapter if you decide to play on higher difficulty mainly due to the constant reinforcements. I just said screw it at that point and wanted the characters so played it on normal to get over and done with. And it just becomes easier, way too easy. But if you do decide to play this map have a healer with Micaiah equipped on the ready, you will need her specifically.
Main game: Gameplay>story
Fell Xeno: Gameplay
I actually thought the Winds were great units in my playthrough. Madeline was a tank, Gregory was powerful magic user, and Zelestia was a great sword flyer. I also really enjoyed the Ivy and Timerra chapter because we never got a Rival faction on any base-game maps.
Moments like those are ones you can really sink your teeth into
Yes yes… but consider the following: Madeline and Zelestia are best girls so it was all worth it. 10/10 would look up a guide for chapters 5 and 6 again.
Chapter 3 was honestly fine for me, felt challenging enough where I had to think but not outright bullshit. Chapter 4 I guess I got lucky on cause I surprisingly didn’t have too hard a time with it. Chapters 5 and 6 like I hinted at were bullshit though. Literally had to reset multiple times for Chapter 5 and just gave up and looked up a 1 turn guide for chapter 6.
Chapter 4 is literal childs play if you just go the intended route east. Timerra will usually run with her squad at the Elsuians in the west and get smoked by Ivy's wyverns while running with your own group northeast away from the wyverns will make Ivy overtake them and make for an easy target.
@@hoshueyeplopper4465 I just waited for the enemy to pick each other off until I realized Ivy summoned wyverns and was heading in my direction and the made w B-line to Timerra and baited Ivy into killing range and then took out Timerra.
@@hoshueyeplopper4465 I unintentionally made ch 4 harder by thinking I had to go to the northwest, Soren Veyle nuked the Elusians.
but man doing that really makes you realize without alacrity++ those corrupted Wyverns are actual hell to deal with and you're forced to boss rush both ivy and timerra. at least Timerra comes to you doing this but then you'd be forced to rush ivy down. I only made it out cuz Merrin wrath and vantage++ Edelgaurd crit Ivy.
at least in FX6 Panette with max ike emblem can to one shot all the corrupted wyverns on hard.
based
@@hoshueyeplopper4465 I just flier rushed her before she called reinforcements. A quick Lyn Astra on top of Soren and Celica Warp took care of her before the dragons rushed in, so I just turtled in the back.
19:50 Uh, Ghast. You know if you're worried about spoilers in this review, you should probably remove that "Fell XXX" labeled character scene here aswell as a bit earlier with the fat dragon who also shows his label a few times. (around 15:00-15:40)
Gameplay Wise: Cindered Shadows > Fell Xenologue
Storywise: Fell Xenologue > Cindered Shadows
Honestly I’m glad we got the winds and the twins but I expected right away Nil was evil or I should say rafal. I loved the story and different characters too.
I have to say, having the retainers of the main lords and ladies in the alternate universe be killed off was a massive missed opportunity, or even other supporting characters like Yunaka not being mentioned at all. I would have found it interesting how psychotic they could've made her, especially if the more murder hungry part of her character was the main personality.
It's so unfortunate how I get a semi-version of my endgame team. My team just got the new bracelets, has the classes and skills I want, but there's no more content to actually use them to their fullest potential outside a tempest trial.
They balanced the bracelet DLC maps totally fine with scaling difficulty. They could have just done the same here and let you use your main team. Even let them gain Exp and bound levels like any other paralogue. And then give Nil and Nel bond level 10 or 20 with all rings depending on your team's highest bond level.
Honestly, what screwed the FX over (and all of Engage), is that the game was finished... and then shelved for 2 years... then released... but the original team was gone by now, so we can't get any new updates to the game.
If the DLC and updates were released soon after the game was completed, all of these issues would have most likely been fixed. This also applies to updates that people wanted (like a new game + or using the somniel clothes in battle).
At the very least... this game is a case study for why Modern Games need post game support. Because some features and fixes will naturally be missed by the developers. This was acceptable back during the SNES and the N64 era, but now in 2023.
i thought that the fell xenologue was fucking insanely difficult because i tried doing it on maddening from chapter 8
what a fool i was
The fact its not like CS and you have to do it more than once is my biggest gripe. Those 6 levels are an absolute grind that had my eyes rolling into the back of my head at some points then wondering how its even meant to be possible on higher difficulty at others and now you have to do them every single time you want to use any of the characters in a playthrough. Like, just make it optional to replay for those masochists that actually wanna go back to it and put themselves through that again.
Thank you for the video Ghast!! Awesome analysis as always.
I feel people forget in addition to fell xenologue, we got maps for each bracelet. I agree that the restrictive gameplay mechanics for difficulty sake sucked, but that doesn't make the dlc as a whole a hot mess.
Being able to recruit and see supports from the 4 hounds/winds was actually something I really wanted in the base game. So I kinda like this dlc despite how frustrating the Fell Xenologue felt.
Also I just want to say, this dlc is the exact reason why the time crystals and mid battle saves are necessary. The amount of times I got screwed over by a miss or enemy crits would of had me quit the game entirely.
That the only problems is the restriction other then that the dlc was awesome after beating the last level on first try LUCKY I got all the 5 characters and my girl Madeline so it was worth it for me lmao
It is so abundantly clear that nobody play tested FX.
Honestly kinda surprised you liked the story and characters! Personally, while I love the supports, I thought the writing of the characters and story was genuinely awful lol. Just the worst.
But I'm glad to hear you liked that part! I'm interested in watching your video and seeing your thoughts on it!!
Yeah I agree, it kind of felt like the entire cast had to bend over backwards to offer Nil an unearned sense of understanding and forgiveness just to justify him being invited to the somniel at the end of the story. Like, Veyle, the little girl who was under mind control, got completely chewed out compared to Nil who was given nothing but compassion and pity even when outright explaining that he has been purposefully deceiving everyone from day one, does not feel remorse, and would actively do it again
They needed a twist villain but didn't have enough time to give him a real redemption arc so that requires the cast to be unnaturally forgiving towards Nil because otherwise making him playable in the main campaign wouldn't work. That's the same reason Nel dies and then gets brought back to life like five minutes later. They wanted a cool story beat, but still needed her playable at the end of the day, so they do the whole dramatic death that is going to be undone as soon as the credits finish rolling. Story and gameplay need to connect even when they are both going different places and as a result story and characterization gets sacrificed
I didn't like the execution of the story and I disliked that the trailer spoiled a lot of the good lines which is my fault. My biggest issue with the story is that it was told to fool the player and not done more organically where the twists could have hit harder.
Yeah, I really don't like how it just felt like an edgy version of the regular world. Also don't like how Nel's sacrifice means nothing a minute later. Sure, some people would say Rafal reviving Nel is consistent with Lumera doing the same, but Lumera suffered the immediate consequence of not surviving against Veyle while Rafal is just fine. By the end I didn't even want Rafal to be on my team because of everything he's done.
Agreed, the story felt like it could’ve worked conceptually, but just overall ends up feeling very rushed and unsatisfying. They throw so many twists at you without any time to properly develop any of them, Nil just randomly becomes cartoonishly evil and then just gets a rushed redemption at the end, and it also turns out that he wasn’t Nel’s brother after all but just some random dude. It’s a shame too since I really dig the concept of this mirrored version of Lythos where the characters have different personalities, but they handled it in the worst way possible.
I totally agree with your thoughts on this DLC. It's so sad because it fixed most of the problems (story) from the main game while taking MASSIVE steps back with player experience. I can't see myself playing this more than one or two times to say I did it. Which is different from the main story where I'm on playthrough 3.
I... didn't realize you could change the difficulty until watching this. I pushed through hard with gritted teeth, taking six hours of play time just to beat the last map.
If anyone's interested, a RUclipsr named TeeGee did a video on how to beat each DLC Map on Maddening without taking damage. It's obviously reliant on RNG and Endgame builds, but it is possible.
Mewn also did a couple of videos on how to 1-turn Chapters 5 & 6.
Edit: several other people have managed to LTC each map on Maddening. Basically just search for the videos and you'll find them. Where there's a will, there's a way.
I'd have way fewer complaints if I only had to play it once to get the items and characters on every playthrough after, like everyone else has said. They did this with cindered shadows and I'm absolutely baffled why they didn't do that with this game. I hope enough complaints will get them to patch "once and done" in somehow.
Chapter 1: I sure hope there aren't MORE wolves on Hard/Mad.
Chapter 2: Good thing Zelestia has an Elthunder tome, so the Enchanters can ruin their own prospects.
Chapter 3: I sure am glad Gregory is _just_ good enough to handle the units here-- oh shoot, I'm on Normal.
Chapter 4: Kamikaze-bombing Hortensia into Ivy is goated. I've heard that Maddening removes effective weapon damage, and I do not like the thought of that.
Chapter 5: The slight lag from fighting the wolves in that one chamber nearly killed me.
Chapter 6: Just rush to the last island with fliers; Fell Nil heads to the furthest-up island with three people at it.
One particular aspect of FX6 that I found really weird was that Hard difficulty specifically was the only difficulty that DIDN’T give you the S-Rank Weapons as obtainable items.
I can understand Normal giving you them, considering that it was designed to be the easiest difficulty, but why does Maddening give you them? And why does Hard not give you them? You would think that it would be the other way around, with Maddening taking away such high might weapons as added difficulty.
As someone who played through FX on Hard, I’m confused as to why IS decided to restrict only those who played on the middle difficulty in this way.
I did not even realize this was a thing because I played on Hard (started on Maddening and noped the heck out in the first chapter)
I have been trying to get through the fell xenologue on maddening mode and I have been stuck on the brodia map because half my team are complete liabilities. LOOKING AT YOU NIL, NEL, AND GREGORY!
I thought gregory was the most competent out of the bunch. :D
Madeline couldn't hit the earth itself if she fell down face-first.
Zelestia was a second Ivy with equally horrid hitrates (all hail Byleth i guess)
and Nel was the biggest wet paper-dragon, i've ever seen in all of fire emblem.
Gregory at least could tank some magic quite well.
If you want some help, the reinforcements are not infinite and are zone based so you can take it slower than you realize, but at the same time that makes just as annoying since they are punishing you for moving fast.
It's interesting because I do see a lot of people praise the DLC's story and characters and I just can't agree at all. "What if the same characters but OPPOSITE!!" is such an amateur writing idea. It's a fanfiction I wrote when I was 10. Nil and Nel were fine and the twist with Nil was interesting. Everything else about it was really bad including the cheap way they tried to pull at my emotions and then the cop out they hastily added to make us feel okay about killing familiar characters. Anyway, nice analysis of the gameplay! It was well worded.
"What if the same characters but OPPOSITE!!" Sounds like the name of an Alpharad video lol
@@AkameGaKillfan777 LMAO you're right...
I mean its interesting seeing different versions of the four hounds and the royals but the fact that nil is just bad makes this a whole lot iratating
The other really bad thing is, if tou wait till you have all the emblems to havw more flexibility for doing this...all the dlc units are completely unusable without heavy grinding because they join at a set level. 20 for Nel Rafal and Zelestia, and 1 for Gregory and Madeline, whereas all your units by that point would be wither max level, close to it, or evwn reset to level one of their class to gain more stats
Meanwhile if you do them as early as possible you have 5 hilariously op units that will erase all the challenge for a good while. Even if 3 of them recruit wirhout any weapons
the guy who has made multiple several hour long 3 houses documentary can’t escape three houses.
I think you hit the nail on the head. I played through Hard, started but did not clear Ch. 6, and I think I might just cave and drop the difficulty.
You mentioned Anna's reclassing specifically. Funny thing, you don't need to make her a mage, her natural class change to Warrior makes her a terror with a Radiant Bow. But FX makes her a Berserker instead, ugh...
Ch. 3 was grueling. I actually did run out of time stone charges and would have been up the creek if not for the fact that I had a mid-battle save. The reinforcements coupled with the low hit rates threaten to be overwhelming very easily; you need to get unintuitively aggressive and snipe the boss units, all while praying for good RNG.
Ch. 5 being so good by comparison makes Ch. 6 feel like a real letdown. In Ch. 5, Nel actually can beat Nil alone if you equip her with Tiki's Fog Breath, which bypasses the need to fight the other bosses.
Ch.6 doesn't do a good job of actually explaining its unique mechanics, either. You're just told to flee in a general direction, and the significance of FNil killing a Bracelet holder as opposed to a normal enemy is not explained.
Well "was this ever play tested?" is pretty par for the course in fe
I had a completely different experience when going in hard from chapter 9 save file. I had most of the OCs do equally as well as my units since I had low bond levels and no abilities. Being able to double with levin sword was extremely useful for Zelestia and Nel worked as a decent finisher for most battles. Nil was meant to be useless and I can’t say much about Gregory and Madeline as Gregory was my decoy applier for my dodge tank and I barely played with Madeline.
Even though it nearly drove me mad at times, I was determined to beat FX on maddening, and I almost did. But the final map completely broke my spirit. I did the unthinkable and dropped from maddening to normal since I was completely burnt out and just wanted to be done with it
FX 6 suffers from bad communication. When you're on the second platform you can either take the north route straight to the final sigil into reinforcement hell, or stick to the boss by diving the center. However, on the first run you don't exactly know that the top-left platform is the last on the route, and if you pull the Elusian air force and end up pushing north by mistake, then you're stuck with that choice as the map collapses behind you. Going along the "intended" route, I actually ended up routing the map on Hard, though I did need to abuse battle saves because Diamant and the boss together create a lot of pressure when moving to the top right.
And Zelestia was pulling her own weight with her marginal speed advantage over Ivy, letting her actually one-round axe wyverns with Excalibur. Her main issue was that she came with garbage default gear, as lightning is absolutely not the type of tome she should be using with her Spd. Nel was also serviceable with dragonstone attacks, though hardly a star of the show. Madeline and Gregory were really bad though, and with the singular exception of Zelestia the performance of the new units in FX gave me no indication of how they would work in the main campaign, nor could I assess the value of the new classes when they were only shown among the enemies. To go back to the CS comparison, each Wolf came in one of the DLC classes, so you could tell what you were getting when picking those up for the main game. Here you instead only experience Enchanters and Cannoneers as highly scripted enemies, leaving you with very little idea of how valuable such utility would be in your own team.
But maaaaan, do I love the recurring theme of everyone disagreeing with this video going out out of their way to be pretentious hipsters and narcissistic as humanly possible. Some of my favorite comments are: "Funny how the actual hard maps filtered the noobs of this franchise," like that's actually supposed to be a positive thing for the franchise, and: "Name me a game in the series that would be fun to replay after playing engage. I'll tell you, it's none. 0."
It never ceases to amaze me how contrarians have their heads up their asses so incredibly far.
I honestly can't follow their thought process. What is the point of gatekeeping fans while demanding more and more difficulty, past the point that even series veterans consider it to be blatantly unreasonable?
Step 1: Fire Emblem's difficulty cranks up to disgusting levels, requiring either massive RNG grinds or specific party / unit builds, limiting creativity and replayability while also making it inaccessible for anyone who isn't highly skilled at strategy games.
Step 2: Hard core masochists (a tiny minority by most accounts) flock to the series... Meanwhile all casual and mid-skilled players bail from it, unable to beat the difficulty surge, as do many veteran players, frustrated by the lack of viable options and elitist design practices.
Step 3: Sales for the series drop through the floor as its target audience shrinks massively.
Step 4: Future Fire Emblem games either get way less funding and their quality drops in all aspects, or the series is entirely discontinued.
Step 5: Everyone who ever liked Fire Emblem, contrarians and otherwise, gets to be unhappy? Yay? Mission success?
Step 6: Profit...?!?
Why u scared noob, get good. I beat FX maddeing with no skill inherit.
My IQ is 213. What's yours?
@@DuMaMayDewLay
No one's 'scared' of you kiddo, we pity you.
Go tell your parents about how proud you are for figuring out how to lie on the internet...and while you're at it, ask them about how to do it convincingly.
It’s funny how people will continually fight to create walls and segregate the playerbase regardless of if they are an old guard, new age hipster, or no life tryhard like the guy above.
Oh my goodness, i made it into a ghast video, im honored :,)
Engage: Good gameplay, weak story
Xenologue: Good story, weak gameplay
Truly is a mirrored experience of Elyos.
No final chapter should take 5 HOURS to just finish
Upon having a terrible experience with the Broadia map, I spent A LOT of time grinding my Emblem inherited skills to create a team that would pull me through the final map. The big stars were: 1) Chloe with inherited Alacrity++ and Spd/Dex +5, while equipped with Sigurd, max bond. This allowed her to move across the entire map, kill units without retaliation, and then retreat. Perfect for hit and runs. 2) Alcryst, with Canter+ and Str/Dex +5 and max bond Lyn. He would never miss, have the strength to kill an enemy in one round (w/out retaliation, thanks to Lyn), move back from the front lines, and constantly proc Luna. 3) Merrin with canter+, draconic hex and max bond Edelgard. She could hit and run while weakening enemies, and/or use Claude's bow to attack from three range, inflicting the hex w/out risk of counter. 4) Timerra with +5 Def, +5 Str/Dex and max Emblem Hector. She proved to be a tank that could take any and all things, and killed most things in enemy phase. With support bonuses with Merrin, she constantly proc'd sandstorm. During the fight with the final boss, every time she attacked sandstorm + Armads hit, doing over 50 damage. She was a killer. 5) Seadall with Dual support (Lucina's skill) and Canter +, paired with maxed out Emblem Corrin. He played a support roll, though when paired with Chloe and Alcryst, could get my two strongest heavy hitters to wipe the field. Later when reinforcements came from Corrupted Diamant, he could halt the entirety of them into one place, where they were picked off without issue. 6) Hortensia, Canter + and momentum +, Byleth max bond. Basically she became a magical Sigurd, though with the Byleth Divine +, would never miss. She came in clutch for healing and killing stragglers. 7) Ivy Mag/Dex + 5 and Momentum+, max bond with Soren. She could strike most enemies across the map, and her Rexcalibur meant that she could deal with all of the corrupted wyverns, one shotting them w/out issue. She saw less use than I expected, though that was mainly due to Chloe and Alcryst being too powerful. She also was helpful physic-ing when necessary.
I ultimately completed it on hard, though with luck this team could transfer over to Lunatic. In any case, the OCs were all but useless. I agree with what Ghast says.
It pisses me off Intelligent Systems dropped the ball big time implementing the Fell Xenologue. The Four Winds and the Fell Twins are a delight as characters and units, so it's very annoying that they're not only locked behind the new sidestory, but that they were also very poorly implemented in it gameplay-wise.
The base game is so solid man. What happened here?
@kollie79 Make a spare save next time you beat the Xenologue imo. It will help you a lot for subsequent replays of Engage.
@kollie79 If you don't mind missing on grinding for a few maps, then doing the sidestory before Chapter 10 is like the sweet spot for it, and you can start using the DLC dudes around Ch13 without having them feel overpowered.
It's optional content. You don't _have_ to get Nel/Nil/Winds every save. Story-wise, Nil only drops his act because you can get him Edelgard and let him become a dragon, so it's not like the five are effed in runs where you don't do it.
@kollie79 that's a bit debatable.
Clearing the Fell Xenologue also gives you a pile of loot, and guaranteed Gold Skirmishes that have much more Gold than those in the main campaign. Some of them are scaled to your lower-level characters, allowing you to catch up faster. I don't know how it's implemented in Maddening, but it seems neat.
@kollie79on paper, DLC should naturally become part of playing the game every time. You shoukd want to do that even if there was no rewards.
There is no inherent problem of lockibg DLC content behind doing the DLC, the problem ia not making a DLC people would want to play every run.
I was wondering if I was the only one to find such big issues with the Xenologues, glad I'm, not alone... And honestly, it seems like an oversight the Winds and Fell Twins have both unused SP and can't raise their bond levels, even giving them all 2-3 Bond 5 options would go a long way to helping them out
The way I see it, the different difficulties work best if you see them like a scaling difficulty based on your main story progress.
Maddening is going to be awful if you play it early because you have so little to bring with you, and normal is going to be dead easy late game because you have access to your *entire* bag of tools so to speak.
Y’know, I would be so inclined to agree IF the units you get rewarded with scale in levels. It kinda sucks to go through all that and get units you can’t even use, without babying them for hours on end.
7:50 The UI design in Engage is awful in general, so that's very fitting. 3H was already somewhat bad with things like using stat boosters, which could have been done in 1 button press needing several more instead via that small context menu and some other things. Engage managed to regress even from that point, still having that clumsy context menu instead of directly assigning each function to a button and then other nonsense on top, like not even stacking items. Go try buying tonics for your entire army and then using it on all of them for one fo the most awful UI experiences in a long time. The UI designers of this game need to be fired before they can ruin another project.
Fell xenologue should have been included in the base game as the endgame content lots of games always have endgame content
Yeah, I like endgame content like SoV.
PSA to all who are going to do the DLC for their first playthrough. Please do all the Divine Paralogue maps before finishing the FX if you're planning on getting the characters around chapter 6-10! If you finish the FX as early as chapter 6 on Normal, you'll inadvertently make the DLC paralogues and skirmishes harder as they scale to your highest members level. The 5 characters you get are set at level 20 and lvl 1 promoted respectively regardless on where you are. So, all the divine paralogue challenges will scale the enemies to that level and with additional skills.
I really don't know what IS was thinking when they made this DLC in regards to the balance of the game. I felt the devs had the expectation of players to do the final 2 chapters on mid to end game at least on Hard, and definitely end game for Maddening. But by that point all the DLC characters would be next to useless since you've already had an army built for the occasion, and are beating the end of the main game by the time you beat the DLC. However, if you decide to do early normal at about chapter 6 just for the characters, then you're overkilling your army, snatching previous xp for earlier characters, and making the following skirmishes and DLC paralogues harder.
If you want my personal (appropriate) order to get the characters on FX Normal for a standard Hard/Classic playthrough then it'd be:
- Play until chapter 9 so that you have as many rings to use for the other paralogues.
- Do the Tiki Paralogue.
- Finish the rest of the Divine Paralogue maps (Chrom is imo the hardest so you could save that for later)
- Finish FX before or around chapter 10 -13 so that the DLC units are on par to where you are in the game.
This is just a suggestion and ya don't have to listen to me. Just have fun and enjoy what we can outta this mess of a DLC!
PS: I'm now in a conundrum on who to marry lol.
Because the dlc was annoying. I actually prepare an exclusive save file so I don't need to replay fx again even in normal mode. I played the dlc paralogues on chapter 9 before finished fx. However not all since my units would be overleveled. I just pick tiki, veronica and chrom. The rest I prefer to do it later in part 2.
2:52 yuri got a 0% crit
Also here's another thing. Vander does not scale in this mode. Like. At all. He gains levels, but no stats other than like a point in Str and Dex.
I just made my own video about Engage and my thoughts on the Fell Xenologue, but to summarize: I think the story and the new characters it added were great additions. Not only are the characters fun and interesting in the story itself, but the new support conversations they bring are all top notch. I also think the villain of the xenologue is much better of a villain than Sombron, though I guess that it isn't saying a whole lot since I think Sombron is a pretty basic bad guy. What I take issue with is the gameplay. While I didn't have much issue playing through the first four maps, the last two maps were a massive increase in difficulty, even for me who was playing it on normal. It also sucks that the xenologue is tied to your save file instead of having its own save file like Cindered Shadows. If I ever want to replay Engage and use the xenologue units, I have to replay the whole xenologue again on the new playthrough.
Literally just finished the Fx and what can I say? You have encapsulated my every grievance with the gameplay. I started out with hard, but nearly immediately changed to normal. I was really disappointed with how easy it was on normal difficulty. I hoped it was like how normal was for CS.
It’s a shame cause the story was great, and the characters were also great. It presented some of the depth the main game was missing. It’s wonder how they fumbled the gameplay when the main game’s gameplay is so stellar. I hope they patch it in the future. There was a lot of good there, but the balancing was non existent.
I agree 100%.
I only played Cindered Shadows once, because I just hated the last boss THAT much. It was my most hated map in all of Fire Emblem for a time - though Engage did Tie it with seemingly infinite reinforcements in such huge numbers that you literally cannot defeat them all each turn. But I only NEEDED to play it once. I still got all the rewards for every subsequent playthrough, and didn't need to replay CS just to use Yuri, Hapi, Balthus, and Constance, or their new classes. I could use the Ashen Wolves as early as I could enter Abyss (so after the first mock battle but before the Red Canyon), and their classes as soon as I could reach Level 20. It was great! It was worth suffering through Cindered Shadows' final boss at least once for that!
But Fell Xenologue? I need to do it EVERY time? I did it on a postgame file first because it was my "main" file, and imagine my disappointment when all the new characters joined at level 1 promoted, and completely unuseable because of how late it was. I also missed my chance to try fielding the Winds against the Hounds, which really interested me. Lastly, I'd already given the pact ring and I was especially curious to see how Nel reacted, considering her past with Alt-Alear, so yet another missed opportunity.
Soooo... I need to... start a new file, get to a far enough chapter, play through the DLC again but with weaker units, less rings, and a more limited roster, and THEN I can check all this out? I struggled enough as is WITH all those extras, and I even lowered the difficulty to Normal for the DLC because it was just pissing me off and not worth the effort. Why can't I just... get the rewards because I already beat it, like with Cindered Shadows!?
It wouldn't be so bad if it was JUST the new characters locked behind the DLC - I can live with not using them every file since you only have so many deployment slots. But I've been eagerly awaiting the new classes - The Enchanter and Mage Cannoneer - and was super excited when I spotted them as enemies in the Bracelet DLC Maps, because I knew they were hinting at things to come. I want to run at least one of each on new playthroughs from now on. But they're also locked behind clearing the Fell Xenologue on a playthrough. Freaking heck!
If I only needed to play the Fell Xenologue once, I'd love it. But honestly, the maps are tediously annoying, and needing to complete it early if you want to explore all the content it has to offer in the main game makes it even worse since you can't rely on useful lategame units like Veyle or useful lategame rings like Corrin or Eirika. It gets worse and worse the earlier you try to play it, but the rewards get worse and worse the longer you put it off. You just can't win! What were they thinking?
I think I honestly like three houses more despite the lesser gameplay it bothers me way less than the horrible story and bland characters from engage
3 Houses has the better class system, better brawling, better support system, Combat Arts, class masteries, New Game+ and more.
@@AkameGaKillfan777 lmfao I can tell you duck at fire emblem
@@DuMaMayDewLay Still malding after all this time it seems 🤣
I have attempted chapter 6 on maddening. I now fully understand all the hate this maddening mode experience is getting and fully agree
something i heard is that the autolevels are based only on personal growths and after some testing, it seems to be true. i have no idea why IS did that cuz it just absolutely guts some units, like jean. the earlygame units just have worse stats than they otherwise would at every fixed level because...reasons????? plus there's also the weird quirk of your prepromotes having their class skills for the first 3 xenologues, losing them in fx4 and 5, then getting them back in 6.
I bought the 3H DLC soon after buying the game because I wanted to support what I felt was an overall great entry to FE and game. However, when I finally got around to CS, I have to admit I felt a bit burned. The DLS was just very mid, compared to the rest of the game. The economics of how much you pay for the dlc vs the base game just did not make sense to me. Because of this, I decided to skip on the DLC for Engage until it was all released. I am glad I waited, I think the economics still make little sense, especially as I am finding Engage base to be highly replayable, which is not something I expected.