Patreon Pin Up 1/23/23 (Patreon)

With Fire Emblem: Engage being the new hotness this week, I put two Fire Emblem babes up for a vote on the Discord server, and Tharja actually lost by a substantial amount! I did not see that coming, but I'm obviously jazzed for a chance to draw Camilla, everyone's favorite thirsty sister/mother-but-not-really-don't-worry-about-it from Fire Emblem Fates.

My history with Fire Emblem as a franchise is complicated. I consider myself a fan, but I don't like most of the entries I've played. I am indeed a mysterious man with many layers. Anyway like many I was introduced to the series by the game that saved the franchise: Fire Emblem Awakening on the 3DS.

I loved Awakening so much. Naturally I jumped at the follow-up, Fates, but that was where the series started to lose me. In Fates, I recall the dating sim side of the narrative being far more interesting than the actual main plot. So once I'd bagged the girl I wanted, I kind of lost interest in playing the rest of the story.

But I was there and ready to love the next game, Three Houses, the first game to jump to a big-budget console release since I became a fan. In the 3DS games, I imagined how cool it would be if your home base was an actual 3D space to run around and explore, rather than the static menus on offer at the time. Boy was I ever a prime example of why game developers say that gamers are dumbasses who don't know what they want. Because when I was finally allowed the freedom to roam around my base between missions in Three Houses, it bored the living piss out of me and killed the game's pacing, having to manually seek out all the anime teens and pet them on the head before you could get back to the action.

My complaints aside, I'm always interested when a new entry is released. It's probably the horniest series under Nintendo's banner outside of Xenoblade, for one thing, and that has to be worth something. And word is Engage addresses some of the issues I've had with the series so far. What do you think? Should I give it a try when I have time? What are your thoughts on the series? As always I'd love to hear about it.