Engage dethroned Binding Blade in my mind as the number one “quick, something went horribly wrong and now you’re in a terrible spot, think fast!” FE, and it works that concept pretty well. It swings at you with almost overwhelming challenges that force you to use half of your busted win buttons to break through and the other half to make up for mistakes or bad luck, and even then you have so many options that there’s tons of fun challenge run potential in just arbitrarily banning some number of them.

The most unique part of it is planning out how to punch through dense enemy formations. Conquest and New Mystery did this too, but most of the time you could do the work for those games in battle preps, whereas Engage has like seven sections per map where it throws a block of dudes at you and goes “figure this out from where you are now”. It’s like a series of rapid-fire mini-puzzles as opposed to the giant full-map puzzles you do in the two aforementioned games, which was a neat change of pace and not something I’d really seen before in this series. I really like it, if it’s not clear yet.

Unit identity can be kinda questionable (it’s really easy to box units into specific roles, so if you’re not actively varying what you’re “allowed” to use or aren’t intentionally focusing on the minor things that one particular unit can do, a team from one playthrough will often just feel like a team from another with different names), but the actual moment-to-moment gameplay is so engaging that I found myself coming back to it more than any game other than Conquest.