The Fire Emblem seriesis well-known for swapping mechanics in and out between games, but one of the staples is the importance of emotional bonds between your controllable units. It’s an important theme in most Fire Emblem stories and is heavily connected to your units' effectiveness in various ways. The Pair-Up mechanic introduced inFire Emblem: Awakeningis one of the ways Fire Emblem presents these bonds, and it’s proven to be an enjoyable, albeit difficult to balance, mechanic that has gone through many changes in subsequent games.
In some of the earliest Fire Emblem games, such as Genealogy of the Holy War and Mystery of the Emblem, your units could have hidden bonuses while fighting near other troops they know well through the story. This hidden bonus has gone by different names, like Bond Support or the Lover System, but all iterations were functionally similar to modern-day support conversations. Those support conversations first appeared in Fire Emblem: The Binding Blade, and they have been one of the few Fire Emblem mechanics to be featured in every subsequent game in the series. While fighting near each other, units can build up support points to talk after the battle, increasing their support rank up to C, B, A, and in some games S, increasing bonuses between the characters while fighting nearby one another. In addition to just making your troops perform better on the battlefield, these conversations make the units' bonds feel impactful, both from seeing how they improve statistically, and how their relationships develop over the course of the conversations.
The pair-up mechanic was supposed to be the next step forward for support conversations, not just increasing stats but allowing your units to attack, move, and defend together as one in real time during combat. Thematically, this was really cool, but it ended up being a balancing nightmare. Pairing up two characters in Fire Emblem: Awakening while they have maxed out support makes them feel unstoppable. Dual Guard can completely negate attacks from the enemy, while Dual Strike essentially gives a single unit the attack power of two, since both have a chance to strike in a single round against a solo opponent.
Intelligent Systemsknew that this was an issue when it attempted to reintroduce the system intoFire Emblem: Fates, so it attempted to limit when you could take advantage of certain pair-up benefits. You had to fill up a meter to perform a dual guard, and dual strikes could only be performed when the player initiates combat, removing them as a defensive mechanic. This alleviated the most busted aspects from Awakening, but it still contributed to a major issue from that game: stat growth differences. Certain characters in Fire Emblem may start weak but have a better chance to gain stats when leveling up, while others start stronger but grow less impressively. This is usually balanced by weaker characters needing to work harder early on to get exp, but pairing them with units that start strong makes them unstoppable within a couple chapters of recruiting them.
RELATED:Games to Play If You Love Fire Emblem: Engage
Fire Emblem: Three Housessplit up the abilities of the pair-up system into multiple parts based on a unit’s class. Some classes have a chance to attack for bonus damage, some can help defend, and some can heal. Three Houses doesn’t let you pair units you deploy together, but instead makes you separately deploy them as adjutants to support a singular unit for the whole chapter. Adjutants receive less exp than regular units, and they don’t boost stats as much, so it makes the scaling of weak characters with good stat growths much more consistent again. This approach is fairly balanced, but is also limited by the fact that characters that would function well as adjutants would always function even better as normal units, and it usually results in your least-used characters being tacked on to the more popular kids and contributing very little in terms of actual assistance.
ButFire Emblem: Engagemanages to bring all these previous attempts together in a way that finally feels like the perfect middle-ground. Like Three Houses, certain classes have different ways they can interact with other units. Engage calls these interactions battle styles, and they have uses for both working with other units and helping themselves. A “backup” battle style character will follow up a nearby unit’s attack with one of their own, but this actually works differently than the similar pair-up attacks from previous games. Outside specific skills, these attacks deal a static three damage at an 80% accuracy rate, making them weak, but consistent. Getting multiple backup characters near each other can slowly break down an enemy that’s too evasive or durable to damage normally, and it maintains the thematic feeling of characters on a battlefield working towards a unified goal while also emphasizing tactics and positioning. This isn’t limited to offense either — the battle style of a Qi Adept at full health, for example, allows one unit to protect an adjacent ally from an attack, making it a priority to keep your units close enough to protect others but safe enough to have the health to do so.
Engage doesn’t allow two units to occupy the same space, as in Three Houses' adjutant system, but it adds something similar with the new addition of the Emblem Rings. These are special items that give unique abilities and weapons for a short time when activated. After the power is depleted, you have to fill up a meter to use them again by participating in combat or finding spaces on the map to replenish your rings. The rings function similarly to Fates' guard meter — extremely powerful, but limited in duration and very circumstantial — and they are much more versatile and unique in terms of effects. Some Emblem Rings let you create temporary terrain, make an ally more likely to be targeted in combat, or equip weapons usually unusable by your unit’s class. These abilities are extremely powerful but also used by enemies at multiple points at the game, making them satisfying to use, but dangerous to go up against.
Positioning your characters in certain places based on conditions has always been one of the major tactics used while playing Fire Emblem, and having abilities only work in the proper where-and-when makes it feel much more engaging than previous entries in the series. Pair-ups and adjutants of the past feel like buffing one character at the expense of another, while the battle styles and Emblem Rings of Engage feel like a real extension of the player’s choice in strategy.
