Polish rings, fish, cook, and hang out with your wartime pals
A new trailer for Fire Emblem Engage details all the activities you’ll be doing outside of combat. Fishing, cooking, training, and more take the spotlight in a lengthy look at the home base activities in Fire Emblem Engage.
The Somniel is a floating home that your protagonist calls their own over the course of Engage. The castle acts as your home base, where characters you’ve recruited hang out and enjoy leisure activities, away from battle.
There are a few different categories of things to do in the Somniel, so we’ll run through them one-by-one.
Getting ready to fight
The first category we see in today’s trailer is battle preparation, where many of the activities tie into future battle performance. Alongside the standard item and weapon shop, the Divine One (your protagonist) can also head over to the Ring Chamber to tend to their jewelry. These rings are a core part of Fire Emblem Engage, as they contain the spirit of Fire Emblem Heroes past and can enhance your allies in battle.
We see a good look at some crafting and stat-boosting you can do through creating and melding rings here. There are also skills to inherit, ranging from simple boosters to special traits. Bond Rings act as stat boosting equipment made from fragments, which can be combined and melded for some good number buffs. Plus, you can polish the rings to keep the ring spirits happy.
Characters can duel for experience. A separate area, the Tower of Trials, will let you tackle trial maps for rewards. There’s also an option to make and share your own battle maps with other players.
Social time
Of course, there are also ways to hang out with the various characters you’ve recruited in the campaign. A café will let you share a meal with friends, deepening bonds and potentially boosting stats.
Shiny spots also hide items you can gift to allies, in order to build up your support levels. It’s a Fire Emblem game, you know there has to be gift-giving and support-enhancing.
The little things
There a ton of other miscellaneous activities to engage in too. Clothes and accessories for characters can be purchased, to change up your allies’ looks. There’s a pet dog that just seemed to be part of caring for the Somniel in Fire Emblem Engage, who will give you rewards for giving it lots of attention. And there’s a farmyard for animals, like your protagonist is building up their very own Mother Base.
Engage in some fishing, get your tarot read, scan amiibo at the amiibo Gazebo for extra cosmetics and music, or work out for a stat boost going into the next fight. Heck, there’s even a bizarre wyvern shooter side-game.
There’s really no shortage of things to do in the Somniel, it seems. And when it all gets exhausting, you can take a nap and be woken up by a member of your party. Fire Emblem Engage really seems to be pulling out all the social stops.
The team looks to be adding a lot of home base activities for Fire Emblem Engage. We’ll see if it, as well as the battles and more, come together in harmony next month. Fire Emblem Engage is due to launch for Nintendo Switch on January 20, 2023.
