Board 8 > Fire Emblem Engage not doing so great [Nintendo game sales topic]

(+) Yeah! (+)

https://twitter.com/pierre485_/status/1721793572515508425

From the period of March 2023 to June 2023, it sold 70k copies. That was after selling 1.63 million copies in its release period of Jan 2023 to March 2023.

While the strong release period will prevent it from being a total flop, this is a huge step down from Three House's performance, which had a similarly strong start but then retained strong legs over a period of years, selling hundreds of thousands of copies every few months until it eventually reached 4 million. Whereas Three Houses clearly brought in new fans, Engage not only failed to bring in new fans; it failed to hold onto many of the people that 3H hooked, representing a major lost opportunity for the series.

Why does any of this matter to any of us, who don't need to care about Nintendo's financials? Well, Engage was the exact opposite of what I wanted out of a mainline FE game, so hopefully this reception will send a message to...not do that again. Poor critic reviews, poor user reviews, and (relatively) poor sales should be difficult to ignore.

I never played it, but wasn't Engage supposed to be closer to how the older titles in the series were like? That's kinda disconcerting.

Also, in related news, Pikmin 4 outsold the entire rest of that series handily. Weird how that shakes out.

Grand_Kirby posted...

I never played it, but wasn't Engage supposed to be closer to how the older titles in the series were like? That's kinda disconcerting.

Also, in related news, Pikmin 4 outsold the entire rest of that series handily. Weird how that shakes out.

Maybe in terms of gameplay, but I wouldn't say Engage's plot, tone, or characters are like anything else before. Not even Fates.

Pikmin 4 didn't outsell Three House's lifetime total. Whether it does will depend on legs, which might be undercut by the Switch 2. 3H had years of a head start.

It seems like the universal consensus on this game (journalists and longtime fans alike) is that the gameplay is fantastic but the story is disappointing, right? Gotta wonder how IS will react to these sales and adjust with that in mind. Ideally I'd hope they'd adjust and turn out a game with both great gameplay and story but they might flee back into the comfort of a Three Houses style game which would... not be great.

The part where you actually move the people around and hit them in the face was better in Engage than 3H.

Not a little better. Much, much better. Arguably one of if not the best in the entire franchise. 3 Houses is a difficult game to even play after paying Engage, and I really LIKE 3 Houses. A LOT. 320+ hours of playtime does not lie.

But Engage dropped the ball in story and characters, and as frustrating as it is even as someone who is part of the problem, the waifu and husbando part of Fire Emblem is what people care about more now, and 3 Houses had that in spades. I may be an absolute God damn SIMP for Panette, but there's only so far that can take me, even as someone who like Engage's cast more than the average person.

The next FE game is still supposedly FE4R. This...was already the first FE game to have a child making system long before Awakening was a twinkle in anyone's eye. It is very easy to see how they could fuck it up. I can only hope they don't.

I will say that the controversial Engage character art looks fantastic when drawn by the original artist. Mika Pikazo absolutely killed it one her end of the bargain.

Oh, also the Engage DLC really sucks. Probably didn't help.

I don't really know if that's a controversial take.

I'm one of those that bought 3 Houses but not Engage. The idea of classic FE gameplay does sound appealing, but a lot of the stuff I heard about returning characters from other FE games doesn't appeal at all. I did 2 complete playthroughs of 3H to beat two of the routes, and it took a long time. If I want more FE, I could probably just do Fates anyway (I bought all the routes while I still could before 3DS shutdown, but only played far enough to unlock online stuff).

Also, 3 houses did not feel like a waifu/husbando game at all. Aside from choosing a spouse for Byleth, I didn't try to match characters together. Whatever pairings the game wants to give me at end game is what's going to happen. I mean, there's a lot of building relationships with the students, but that feels a lot different than pairing up characters in Awakening.

3H is not that 3DS type of Waifu Husbando game, what I mean is that a large, arguably majority, portion of the still active fanbase is here for the Twitter art and to read fics on Ao3.

And that's ME to a degree! I'm a jack of all trades. I read the super depressing Edeleth doujins. I'm on board!

But I tried and failed to do a 6th 3H playthrough right after my 3rd Engage playthrough, and couldn't stick with it.

UshiromiyaEva posted...

what I mean is that a large, arguably majority, portion of the fanbase is here for the Twitter art and to read fics on Ao3.

I don't think this is true at all. Ao3 readers aren't the majority of almost any fanbase - they're just the most, uh, passionate ones. There's literally millions of people that picked up Three Houses because it looked appealing, then played it and moved on.

That's more of a generalization, I'm not narrowing it down there specifically lol.

But "move on" is the keyword there. The 3H fanbase is still notably active, and it's not because of the gameplay. The Engage fanbase, on the other hand, didn't really even start. 3H is much more appealing on the fandom side of the equation, and that's what keeps people talking. A loooooooot of 3H players have not played any other FE games, it has a million more sales than the next game below it (Awakening), and a lot of those people want 3H 2 Electric Boogaloo.

3H is amazing on the first playthrough but it suffers enormously on a second and becomes mind-numbingly tedious on a third, which is kind of hilarious because that's how many playthroughs you actually need to see all the major story stuff.

Fire Emblems are typically fun to replay and blitz through, but Three Houses is extremely unfun to replay and you can't blitz through it with all the clunky monastery stuff even on NG+, so even if it offered a great initial run I kind of have to look back at it as a poor "Fire Emblem" game. I quit in the middle of my third playthrough to play New Mystery of the Emblem instead and holy hell the comparatively rapid pacing of that game made me feel like a drowning man who finally came up for air.

I know there's zero chance, but I really hope the next brand new FE game is a fully guided, linear experience again. Outside of an Arena I really don't want to even have the ability to grind. I want Path of Radiance to be the blueprint.

Won't happen.

I also don't really know what I want from FE4R. Like, God. What do you do?? If you do that game justice people are gonna hate it lol. The only way to make it actual sell and review well is to fuck it up <_<;

UshiromiyaEva posted...

and a lot of those people want 3H 2 Electric Boogaloo.

I'm sure they do to an extent, but this also feels like too much of a generalization. They want a game with similar tone and feel of 3H - which many games in the series also have. It's hardly the first one to have a serious narrative with branching paths and multiple sides. Even just 'serious narrative' probably would have sufficed. Engage looks and is written like a Saturday morning cartoon.

Xiahou_Shake posted...

Fire Emblems are typically fun to replay and blitz through,

I disagree. No games that are as long as typical FE games are run to replay numerous times. Three Houses maybe has it worse there with the monastery pacing, but the vast majority of people weren't going for their 6th (?!) replay regardless. You only need one to create a memorable experience. That's the most important thing for me, and for most others, I think.

Engage really only appeals to two types of people - someone who heavily prioritizes strategy gameplay and can actively ignore sub-par writing, or someone who actively loves embarrassing anime nonsense. Those are smaller markets than what 3H being a well-rounded experience hit.

UshiromiyaEva posted...

If you do that game justice people are gonna hate it lol.

Why? I think a faithful FE4 would do well. Would be held back by being a remake, but yeah.

I really don't think people are going to take well to 2-4 hour maps and regularly spending 10 combatless turns traversing the map. At least not modern FE players. 90s PC gamers maybe!

I DO, but I'm a crazy person who's spent and hour in the castle before every map minmaxing the arena with 100s of savestates and 10x speed.

Oh, you mean that faithful.

Yeah that could be an issue lol.

KamikazePotato posted...

I'm sure they do to an extent, but this also feels like too much of a generalization. They want a game with similar tone and feel of 3H - which many games in the series also have. It's hardly the first one to have a serious narrative with branching paths and multiple sides. Even just 'serious narrative' probably would have sufficed. Engage looks and is written like a Saturday morning cartoon.

To be clear this is what I meant. They wanted 3H to be a blueprint. IS clearly wanted to branch out instead.

Three Houses is the closest game to the Tellius series since...the Tellius series, so yeah I'd be okay with that being the blueprint moving forward.

UshiromiyaEva posted...

IS clearly wanted to branch out instead.

They talked about wanting to reach new fans with Engage in a bunch of interviews, which is incredibly bizarre to me. Your last game already reached a bunch of new fans. I'll cut them some slack with that because I think Engage and 3H were in development at the same time, so they couldn't have predicted 3H blowing up, but even then...if you want this game to break out, why make it an anniversary title with a million references that only diehards will care about?

What I probably want from 4R as far as structure goes, is having sublevels within the level. I don't know the specifics, but basically you've got an overarching map that redeploys with every conquered castle, maybe with some kind of system to recover some HP or, actually preferably, having to swap weakened units out for fresh ones (full roster deployment wouldn't probably not be the case in this scenario). Yes, you do lose the fully open map exploration, but...but yeah that....probably wouldn't fly for most people today!

I will say as a very casual follower of FE on the Switch I saw FE Engage at a Gamestop when I whimsically visited it a few weeks ago (first time at a Gamestop in years) and thought it was some weird spinoff like the Musou game and didn't have interest in buying it

I wonder if I'm weird or that happened to a non-minuscule amount of people. FE with focus on classic gameplay seems awesome so now I wish I grabbed it it was even on sale

UshiromiyaEva posted...

What I probably want from 4R as far as structure goes, is having sublevels within the level. I don't know the specifics, but basically you've got an overarching map that redeploys with every conquered castle, maybe with some kind of system to recover some HP or, actually preferably, having to swap weakened units out for fresh ones (full roster deployment wouldn't probably not be the case in this scenario). Yes, you do lose the fully open map exploration, but...but yeah that....probably wouldn't fly for most people today!

I'm thinking of the one map in PoR that's 4 parts in the forest and each part is just a different part of the forest. You want that but like the whole game

BASICALLY yes. Much more in depth of course, but yes.

I just hope they dont do major diverging story you have to pick between again in the next game. It was ass in both Fates and 3H and resulted in none of the routes being polished as much as they should be and a mess of an inconsistent and poorly fleshed out plot.

Lopen posted...

I will say as a very casual follower of FE on the Switch I saw FE Engage at a Gamestop when I whimsically visited it a few weeks ago (first time at a Gamestop in years) and thought it was some weird spinoff like the Musou game and didn't have interest in buying it

I wonder if I'm weird or that happened to a non-minuscule amount of people. FE with focus on classic gameplay seems awesome so now I wish I grabbed it it was even on sale

Maybe a bit? Although, I think people were more thinking Fire Emblem Heroes rather than Fire Emblem Warriors.

KamikazePotato posted...

I disagree. No games that are as long as typical FE games are run to replay numerous times. Three Houses maybe has it worse there with the monastery pacing, but the vast majority of people weren't going for their 6th (?!) replay regardless. You only need one to create a memorable experience. That's the most important thing for me, and for most others, I think.

The average Fire Emblem game isn't particularly long, though. Like, they average below 30 hours which sure, is a good bit longer than your average character action game or survival horror (which I view as the most replayable games out there personally,) but replayability is absolutely a huge and fun draw for longtime series fans.

Three Houses and Radiant Dawn are notable outliers on length and are unsurprisingly seen as the worst games in the series for replays (though both also have additional problems that make them unfun in that aspect - tedium for 3H and runs being too samey for RD.) You're definitely right in saying that for a lot - probably most - people all you need is to make the initial impression a good one, and I think 3H is proof that this approach definitely works with tons of people. I just think it's a bit of a bummer that most of the rest of the series gets better the more you sink your teeth into them and really lose yourself in their intricacies whereas with 3H you only see more cracks in the veneer for trying to doing so.

I feel like every FE after Path of Radiance is very long (not counting the remakes), but that might just be how I play the games. Awakening took me 90 hours (105 with the DLC), the first Fates game I played took me 60, RD took me 50, and Engage took me 60. PoR was a bit under 40. It's been 20 years since FE games were short.

Awakening is nowhere near 90 hours. That's you grinding waifu points. You can easily do every mission in the game in 20-30 hours even watching the story.

In a replay setting where you're skipping cutscenes and playing efficiently you can probably half that without approaching anything resembling speed running.

I suspect later games are similar but I don't have as many playthroughs of them as Awakening so I don't feel as confident saying it.

Each individual Fates game is comparable with one playthrough of Awakening, yeah.

3H is really the only one that isnt and thats entirely because of how awful the Monastery is for replays.

FE is such a weird series, man. It's amazing to me how it's one of my absolute favorite franchises and I've happily sunk triple-digit hours into multiple entries for multiple playthroughs, and yet every second or third entry I end up saying, "Welp, this clearly isn't for me" within 30 seconds of watching the first trailer.