Playing engage atm. Seriously who writes these dialogues?

[u/Rex__Lapis]

Just met this Yunaka girl and holy crap who writes this shit?

Also every mf gushing over the divine dragon from the second the game starts... I can not take this game serious.

What happened?

Edit: okay after a day with Yunaka she's my favorite character and literally my wife. Am i schizo?

[u/Bokuja]

As good as the gameplay is (and as likely as I am to catch downvotes here), the plot and dialogue of this game are atrocious.

Objectively. And to anyone claiming that this series is not about good writing or characters, kindly play FE4 or the Telius games.

Sure, not every game has to be some grand political war drama with absurd stakes and social commentary...but ffs even more lighthearted stories tend to be better written than this.

[u/Ythapa → u/Bokuja]

It's a really bad sign when I can confidently say, that amongst the games I've played/been exposed to, Engage + Fates both are personally unparalleled in my absolute worst stories I've ever read.

To be worse than many gacha game story arcs, which are notorious for its medium being a terrible way to tell good stories, is a colossal feat.

For any vet gacha players, I actually PREFER FGO's Agartha/Septem arcs and HSR's Luofu, and Genshin's Inazuma arcs compared to Fates + Engage if I had to pick a story to sit through.

That's baaaaaaaaaaad because those arcs are all pretty well-acknowledged to be a whole-tier of awful.

[u/Odovakar → u/Ythapa]

To be worse than many gacha game story arcs, which are notorious for its medium being a terrible way to tell good stories, is a colossal feat.

While I think Nikke is in a huge slump writing-wise and has been for a long time, it's bonkers to me how well a Korean gacha gooner game holds up in terms of story quality, characterization and chemistry between characters and clowns on supposedly higher quality games. I recommend anyone who's interested in a good video game story in general check out this video. It's long, but well worth it if you have the time.

I'd recommend the actual best Christmas story I've ever seen outside of It's a Wonderful Life if it was the season for it.

[u/Bokuja → u/Ythapa]

Agreed.

I cannot comment about the gacha thing, as I don't play gacha stuff, but Fates/Engage was bad on a uniquely bad level. Like, I can sit through games that have narrative flaws but have something decent here and there...but Fates (particularly Revelations) and Engage I almost felt like my intelligence was being insulted.

Does nobody proofread the planned storylines anymore? And, to stress, I am not asking for Witcher 3, Disco Elysium or Berserk (Manga) levels of writing here, just something with a basic plot structure executed in a competent way. Though if we got Berserk levels of writing, I would certainly not be complaining.

[u/X_Marcs_the_Spot → u/Ythapa]

Okay, but, while we're on the topic of terrible writing and gachas, Fire Emblem Heroes has way worse writing than Engage.

[u/RamsaySw → u/X_Marcs_the_Spot]

IMO Engage is worse - the moment-to-moment writing of both games are comparable with each other but at the very least Heroes' story isn't agonizingly drawn out the way Engage is.

[u/X_Marcs_the_Spot → u/RamsaySw]

but at the very least Heroes' story isn't agonizingly drawn out the way Engage is.

Fucking.

What.

It absolutely is. Book 1 alone is worse than every writing sin in the rest of the series combined. But the other books aren't so hot, either. They spend most of each chapter not advancing the plot, and just having the new heroes introduce themselves, always to the detriment of the pacing and tone. Plots that could be summarized in a few sentences get stretched out to fill 13 chapters, because they have to have the same number each book. This, in turn, leads them to abruptly bring up plot points, only to resolve them or drop them next chapter, because they've gotta pad the book's length any way they can. Several books shift gears halfway through, because they want to justify a dramatic reveal or cool moment in the midpoint cinematic, even if it's to the detriment of the pacing to have that moment at the exact midpoint. And it's all exacerbated by the fact that we get drip-fed the story over the course of the year, making tediously slow plots feel even slower.

Even books that people consider to be better written are still slow and drawn out. Like, Book 3 spends the majority of its time having the heroes fruitlessly chase Líf all over creation.

[u/RamsaySw → u/X_Marcs_the_Spot]

When I mention that Engage is drawn out, it's the individual cutscenes and moment-to-moment writing that I'm referring to.

Pretty much every individual cutscene in Engage feels like they are two or even three times longer than they should - the death scenes are the most notorious examples of this where they get drawn out for so long that the Switch goes into sleep mode (Heroes is awful but at least it doesn't do this), but even beyond the emotional scenes, it feels like most cutscenes in Engage consist of Alear and their allies standing in a circle and dumping exposition for what feels like 15-20 minutes at a time.

[u/X_Marcs_the_Spot → u/RamsaySw]

Heroes still pads its dialogue with useless fluff. The fact that it's not voice acted means the individual scenes go as fast as you can read, but that doesn't make the content any less bloated and vapid.  You'll be waiting a month for the next chapter, only for the sum total of the story progression to be, "This MacGuffin we spent all last chapter trying to get is useless! We need to go get a different MacGuffin!"

Now, it's obviously going to ultimately come down to personal taste, so we'll probably just have to agree to disagree, but I'll gladly take one of Engage's excessively long and dramatic death scenes over Alfonse telling me that his brilliant plan is to walk directly into the enemy's trap and just see where the mood takes him, and the game insulting my intelligence by insisting that this was Very Smart of him.