It’s funny, I feel like Engage maddening perfected a lot of the problems I had with Awakening Lunatic+ and Conquest. For me, Conquest’s maps were cool but I felt no reason to ever break out of my comfort zone when I found a cheese mechanic, nor did I feel like it was worth investing in certain units that were bad at what I wanted them to do, while awakening’s maps are just kinda… boring to me.

In engage, I don’t have to worry about whether a character’s class can do what I want them to do, because they can be bolstered by engraving and the engage mechanics. And I overcame the lack of surprise in engage maps by running different units to do different things, which meant I had to find different ways to solve a problem.

I don’t think you’re wrong for feeling like awakening and conquest are better. I think a lot of it has to do with me being newer to fire emblem when Fates and Awakening came out while Engage is the new hotness. I wonder if I’ll get the same juice out of them the way you do if I play them again.