Fire Emblem: Engage is the newest entry in the Fire Emblem series, a long-running tactical RPG series. Its success and the success of previous titles have been part of the game’s growing love in the west, a region that usually excluded it. The fanbase has only grown as more have fallen in love with the series.
The series has been beloved for its wondrous strategical gameplay, the rich stories it offers, and how it mixes the two through how you use the lovable cast of characters. And for those who just need more of what Engage offered, there’s plenty more in the series and outside it with these ten games.
10 Undertale
One thing that fans love about Fire Emblem is the grand and emotional stories the games tell like other RPGs, and for those interested in just that, Undertale offers quite the tale. Undertale is an RPG that sees you as a human child falling into an underground world full of monsters who you can choose to befriend or kill as you try to get home.
While it takes itself far less seriously than Fire Emblem, Undertale still offers an incredibly emotional story using characters you get to know very well through the course of the game. Undertale goes in wild directions with its story and even uses the idea of being a game itself as part of it, making for something that many consider being one of the best games of all time.
9 XCOM
Some fans really don’t care too much for the story and instead find themselves hooked on the intense strategic gameplay, and for those players, something more like XCOM is their style. XCOM is a tactical strategy game that sees you commanding an elite squad of humans, going on missions to defend against an alien threat where any of your men can die for good.
XCOM is currently the king of the tactical strategy game with plenty of interesting missions to go through, plenty of options for building up a team, and so many interesting enemies to have to go up against. XCOMs general gameplay is very similar to Fire Emblem, and players will feel at home, especially with mechanics like perma death and other such things making an appearance as well.
8 Persona 4
For those who want a good mix of character and strategic gameplay, another series that does that excellently is Persona, most notably for the story, Persona 4. Persona 4 sees a small Japanese town suddenly shaken by a strange TV channel and murders associated with it, the heroes must travel into the strange TV world and hope to eventually solve the mystery behind the serial killer.
One of the main gameplay mechanics of Persona is that you get lots of time to spend with various party members, growing close to them as you unlock new abilities, each of them having interesting aspects to discover. And this comes back into the gameplay as the time spent with them can give them all sorts of advantages, letting you build parties around who you love or learning to love who you want to build a party around. Either way, you’ll love the cast!
7 Into The Breach
While some games like to tell grand narratives with many characters and events, sometimes gameplay itself can be the best storyteller, such as with Into the Breach. Into the Breach is a strategic roguelike that sees you traveling back in time to overcome an invasion of Earth from giant aliens, using massive mechs to take them down.
Into the Breach is a game that doesn’t pull its punches, fights aren’t the hardest in just winning them… But winning them without giving something up is much tougher. You’re forced to manage mission objectives, civilian buildings, and your own mechs through every fight, and these can make not only for great gameplay but great stories of a pilot having to sacrifice for the mission, accidentally destroying a city to save someone, or abandoning your missions to save a favorite pilot.
6 Fire Emblem: Awakening
For a long time, Fire Emblem was a franchise that simply didn’t have a chance in the west as games really weren’t released over here, that was until the revival of the series here with Fire Emblem: Awakening. Fire Emblem Awakening sees the player take control of Prince Chrom as they travel across the continents to do battle and decide the fate of the lands.
Awakening has everything players have loved about the Fire Emblem series with its tactical gameplay, wonderful story, and the way it gets you attached to your characters, just like in Engage. And Awakening served as the perfect revival for the series in the west with far more advertising, new 3D graphics and voiceovers, and a casual mode for those who couldn’t handle perma death, it’s the perfect game for newbies to the series.
5 Advance Wars
For those wanting more of the same but not quite, there’s plenty of series to go to, but it can’t hurt to get it from the same developers with Advance Wars! Advance Wars is a series of GBA and DS games that see you commanding troops in a fictional war, trying to bring your soldiers to victory and bring peace.
Advance Wars has been considered the sister series to Fire Emblem, having a lot of the same DNA but made to be simpler and more easily accessible through its tutorial and more generally appealing art style and tone. Advance Wars is the poster child for simple yet complex, with the general gameplay being simple, but the economics, terrain, and ways to win add so much more strategy that Fire Emblem fans will love.
4 Chrono Trigger
RPGs are known for their rich stories, having some of the most beautiful tales ever woven, and amongst them, none is better than Chrono Trigger. Chrono Trigger is a game that sees you flung back in time, connecting with friends new and old as you go on an adventure to stop a world-ending calamity.
Chrono Trigger is considered one of the best RPGs ever made, thanks in part to the incredible story it tells, offering a large and memorable cast that has so much depth to each of them. And the amount of content helps with this, having lots of things to discover with full side quests for each main character. It’s a game that is perfect in almost every aspect and a must-play for RPG fans.
3 Wildermyth
While the story of the Fire Emblem games is by far one of their best and most beloved aspects, sometimes the best stories aren’t the pre-written ones, but those made by your characters through gameplay, and for those wanting more of that, Wildermyth scratches that itch. Wildermyth sees you following a party of random heroes through a fantastical adventure, watching them grow, learn, and lose in a procedurally generated story.
While Wildermyth may seem simple and like too little to be compelling, the game is genius in that it gives just enough compelling info through the characters and choices that we, as players, have our imaginations rushing to fill in the blanks and make the story more compelling than it otherwise would be. And because of that, it ends up making what feel like extremely compelling stories without even lifting a finger.
2 Banner Saga
What some players love about Fire Emblem is not only the gameplay affecting your cast of characters but also the sometimes harsher tone, and for those players, The Banner Saga is perfect. The Banner Saga sees you having to control a group of refugees in a Norse mythology-inspired world as they try to escape a calamitous force overtaking their world.
The game offers a new take on the Fire Emblem tactical gameplay, spicing things up with a unique armor system that changes up the entire pace of fights, a health system that leads to interesting give-and-take flow to fights, and fascinating types of units, each tied to their character and personality. On top of that, it offers such a rich world and story to tell that will have you hooked to the very end.
1 Fire Emblem: Three Houses
Though, for those wanting more of Engage, the natural step for a franchise so big isn’t to go looking outside of it, but instead to enjoy the other best titles like Fire Emblem: Three Houses. The game sees you taking control of an ex-mercenary teacher seeing over students from three different houses representing the nation, having to choose between them, and fighting when war threatens the land, even if it means betraying those you called friends.
Fire Emblem: Three Houses is by far the most beloved entry in the franchise so far due to having everything people love about the series plus additions to the battle system that makes it so much more rich and customizable, along with character writing above most of the series. And it’s one of the most accessible yet with its variety of difficulty options, so it’s a perfect diving-off point!
