Fire Emblem Engage is the next game in Nintendo’s hit tactical RPG series, the company announced today. It’s coming to Switch on January 20, 2023, and features the return of fan-favorite fighter Marth alongside a new red-and-blue-haired hero.
The new game keeps the series’ familiar grid-based combat but adds a new mechanic where players can summon heroes from the series’ history like Marth and Cecilia. Players will be tasked with collecting Emblem Rings scattered across the world to prevent the Fell Dragon from reawakening and bringing chaos to the land. The graphics also look like they’ve gotten a welcome improvement over Fire Emblem: Three Houses.
Here’s the trailer:
News of a new Fire Emblem game first leaked earlier this year when blurry screenshots of the protagonists’ multi-colored hair leaked online. There was so little to go off of, however, that it left fans wondering what exactly the series’ future held in store. While today’s trailer didn’t offer a ton more information, it looks like Engage will be a meaty successor to Three Houses.
One big question will be how much the next game strikes a balance between complex strategy combat and relationship-based visual novel storytelling. The pendulum has definitely swung in the direction of the latter, and Three Houses was one of the best games of 2019 because of it. But some long-time Fire Emblem fans have been looking to see the series put as much investment into evolving on the battlefield. A new summon mechanic could do exactly that.
Fire Emblem recently passed its 30-year anniversary in 2020, and in addition to Three Houses, Nintendo released a remaster of the original Fire Emblem for NES on Switch as well. Earlier this year, fans were also treated to a hack’n slash spin-off called Fire Emblem: Three Hopes. The fighting got monotonous, but the story delved even deeper into the characters from Three Houses.