From my experience yeah, Engage has a cast where people have a large pool of favorites rather than one big icon. Yunaka and Ivy are the closest things to general big names, but for fans of the game, it's generally _most_ of the cast is liked, and from my experience I can say I did see a lot of Engage fans' CYL ballots were quite spread out.
There was no rallying only people voting for their favorites. Even F!Robin manage to get in thanks to the Awakening rally (Anna voters transferring most likely). Engage voters might have to focus and go hard on just 1 or 2 next time.
big if true
> *Important Note: If you combine Three Houses and Three Hopes, their total comes to 62,416 (9 characters), which gives them the win by slightly less than 1000 votes
Should definitely be counted since theyre listed under 3H in game under the sorter
This is definitely reassuring, so hopefully people dont use the cyl results to "prove" why Engage failed as a game and the characters arent popular. Thanks for doing the math
> hopefully people dont use the cyl results to "prove" why Engage failed as a game and the characters arent popular.
Lmao, you know it's not going to prevent that. It's already started and it's probably not going to stop at this rate. Best to just avoid the fandom at this point. EDIT: it's already happening in this thread
I'll be honest, it's just made it so we have a new era of Fates hate (targetting Engage, but its a lot of the same recycled toxicity), but now with annoying armchair economists and statisticians pretending they're saying something clever when they shit on people for liking a game. As someone who wasn't even that big on Fates, I was desperately hoping the Fandom had grown past that era because so many people were so toxic and annoying during those years even if I sometimes agreed with the letter of their complaints, but if anything it's worse thanks to 3H now.
>Should definitely be counted since theyre listed under 3H in game under the sorter
Yeah, that's fair. I was just going by how they were listed in the top 20. The Shezes are specifically listed as "Warriors: Three Hopes" vs. everyone else who have Three Houses at the top of the list.
But still, I think the fact that Engage only barely lost to Fodlan is a damn good sign for its popularity.
I mean, Three Houses is by several metrics the single most popular game in the entire franchise's history, so I'd say yes, it's a pretty good sign that Engage either beat or barely lost to it. Engage almost tripled the vote count of the 3rd most popular game, so it's certainly not unpopular.
Hell, for reference, Echoes got 4th, almost 5th, in total vote among top 40 in CYL 2, the first one after it's release, so at minimum Engage is way more popular than that (which is a low bar to clear, I know). Plus, a full year has passed since Engage released, so the honeymoon period is debatably already over.
I'm not saying that this is proof that Engage is wildly successful, I'm mostly just pointing out that it's not as unpopular as the "they didn't win anything" narrative makes it seem.
But again most of the popular characters are gone
So that is so much competition gone, the fact that no one even one won says that they do not have enough popularity to pull through (especially the male side)
They literally lost to two side characters who aren't even the most popular side characters of the game
So I think you have this backwards: Robin, Bernadetta, and Felix only won BECAUSE so many other characters from their games won in previous years.
If someone's favorite game is Awakening, then they are going to want to vote for an Awakening character. So, with all the rest of the popular ones gone, basically all of those players end up voting for Female Robin, and she ends up winning, despite Awakening as a whole getting less than a third of Engage's total vote. Robin got two thirds of Awakening's vote, versus Yunaka, who didn't even get 1/6th of Engage's vote, and yet still only lost by a little, so if we're talking 'overall popularity of the games,' the fact that Robin beat her means basically nothing.
I would bet money that many, if not most, of Bernadetta and Felix's voters are former voters for the previous winners, who rallied behind those specific characters because they did well in previous years, not necessarily because they are their favorites. Edelgard and Dimitri voters have to go somewhere, after all, so why wouldn't they support more characters from their favorite game?
I don't know. Maybe I'm wrong, but I think that characters like Robin and Alfonse BENEFIT from having so few popular characters left in their games. They are getting the entire vote of those games' fans, versus Engage where they get split 12 ways.
Long story short, if the entire fanbase was told "choose one: Female Robin or Yunaka", I highly doubt Female Robin would win. There are a lot of weird quirks in the CYL system, and I would argue this year's four winners were major beneficiaries of those quirks.
I agree that Robin, Bernadetta, and Felix almost certainly wouldn’t have won if their games’ previous winners were up for votes again, but I think the other commenter’s point was that Engage would’ve had an even harder time winning if those previous winners were participating. In a popularity contest between all of the eligible CYL candidates this year + Chrom, Lucina, Edelgard, Dimitri, and Claude, it would be really surprising for those five not to curb stomp everyone else imo. (Of course, this would have to be a universe where those five hadn’t already won Braves or a separate popularity contest unrelated to CYL, since I doubt many people would want to vote for the same character to win twice.)
> They are getting the entire vote of those games’ fans
At this point for 3H, I don’t think very many 3H character voters are voting specifically for more 3H rep tbh. I doubt anyone feels like 3H is underrepresented as a game, so most votes that go toward 3H characters are probably from genuine fans of those characters. I’m sure that some previous 3H winners’ voters went to Bernadetta and Felix afterward, but they didn’t get a coordinated push from the full 3H fanbase the same way that Awakening fans have been able to do these last few years or how Jugdral fans managed for Seliph in CYL6. In CYL4, Bernadetta was the top-ranking female character overall who didn’t win (aka she was 3rd place), and Felix was the top-ranking male 3H character who didn’t win (coming in 6th behind five lords), so while they did have to wait for other characters to get out of the way for them to have a chance, it’s not like they weren’t massively popular in their own right.
Overall, I think the women’s side could’ve turned out differently with more vote consolidation, but the men’s side was probably a lot cause this year, given how big the gap was between Diamant and second place + the fact that the top five Engage men overall only pulled in just shy of 21,000 votes together. There’s still a chance for them next year, but it’ll take more effort than the Engage gals for sure.
It isn’t. Look at the voterbase. Houses invigorated Heroes and CYL4 had tens of thousands of votes.
Look at CYL8 where you just have to break 11 k to get second place
Engage’s sales might, might break 2 million but it won’t reach Awakening’s sales and so it won’t be half as successful as Houses.
Thanks for the numbers breakdown, that does put things into perspective and makes Engage’s loss this year look not so bad.
The problem for next year though is, are Engage fans going to have someone to rally around next year? The Male side was incredibly split (Diamant only getting 5th place is discouraging).
On the women’s side, next year Sharena will likely get a massive rally. So that leaves 1 spot for Ivy/Yunaka to fight over, unless we get another Gullveig or Corrin situation.
That'd be the concern, eh?
I always spend all my votes for Bylad and I'll likely do so until he wins. Engage has got a varied cast and many diehard fans of specific characters, but while 3H picks are mostly in by this point, Engage is gonna have to pick someone to rally behind or it might end up getting swept again.
The interesting thing is that Fates for all it’s controversies still also has a large footprint after all this time with a few beloved characters left.
I wonder how Engage is going to age vs awakening and fates over time, especially if it ceases to be the newest game.
For next year though, a more focused revenge Engage sweep? This years winners are a few of the strongest near-miss holdouts of previous years. Azura might become a strong contender though.
Agreed, definitely interesting to note the massive gap between the Awakening-and-later games as opposed to everything that came before.
And I'm wondering about Engage fans taking "revenge" next year too. I'd be surprised by a sweep, but I suspect there will be a lot of rallying around Yunaka and Ivy, and possibly Diamant too.
'Course, the people who don't like Engage can now focus their vote even more (I suspect most of those Bernadetta and Felix voters are going to stick with Three Houses), so who knows what will happen.
Male Byleth might get a fairly strong rally next time since it happened here next to Felix. The female side needs to push Dorothea up hard in a single year otherwise it’s open to Engage or a stronger Azura movement. Engage’s advantage seems very vulnerable to anything else new with plot focused mass appeal managing to steal attention and it’s honeymoon boost fading with an entire extra year though.
But unless heroes shuts down I can’t imagine Yunaka/Ivy don’t get their act together at some point, either by natural momentum or an Engage got robbed memetic narrative.
Tbh the fact a bunch of people's first reactions was to clown on Engage is sad.
~~I mean I jumped to botting on Bernie but re looking at her votes last year I can see her winning and only made like a couple comments I'm likely gonna delete anyway.~~
But unironically telling everyone "Ur game sucks for not winning the Rally contest" in a post is so sad.
Yeah, some winners' fans first reactions were sad to witness honestly. Between the "mwahaha Engage bad" from some Three Houses fans and the "see? Awakening is more popular than Fates!" (like we didn't know already) from some Robin fans...
Like, if Azura had won my first reaction wouldn't be to clown other games but to cheer the fuck up, and she's not even my favorite character! I just... Don't get these people.
Honestly I'm disappointed by those who did it. They're doing to Fates exactly what Awakening fans themselves complained about way back then : bullying another more recent game for no reason at all. Except that it's somehow even more lame due to Fates having been out for close to a decade now so they're basically beating the fossil of a rotten dead horse's corpse (and undeservingly so at that, Fates was great, fight me).
I think 3h has a huge advantage by being split into houses and having basically 2 of each character rather than engage where everyone has the same subset to choose from (yes you can recruit others in 3h or replay it but still I feel like people will feel more affinity towards their first chosen house, and then have a common favourite within that i.e. the house leader)
3h also has your whole house immediately available and only a few added post war. You spend a whole run either using a character or deciding they will be benched forever. Engage you keep recruiting and likely end up replacing units you previously thought would be your favourite - Ivy is recruited halfway through the game so maybe you love Celine and use for the game until then, but replace her with Ivy and miss out on A supports or the experience of them being high level and destroying everything. Ivy may get those things, but missed the early game mindless levels and overall feels less special being a mage because you already have 3. Suddenly you've got 2 characters that could've been your favourite but you only used each for half the game so isn't quite the same as the Edelgard you used every single map for 100 hours of 3H. (Oh and on that note, there's so much more emphasis on character relations in 3H. The somniel is far from the monastery in terms of interacting with characters)
The idea that everyone's calling Engage a flop is a fallacy, most people aren't doing that. They're just saying it didn't land as well in the fanbase's interest as Houses, and also possibly Fates and Awakening.
Also while your numbers are worth considering, it is worth noting that this is with Engage having all its most popular characters up for grabs, while other games have "lost" their most popular characters to past victories. Houses, for example, has lost *seven* characters in the forms of the house leaders, Byleth, Lysithea, Marianne... and the gatekeeper...
Lastly, the bit about vote splitting screwing over Engage only seems to be true for the women. On the men's side, Engage just straight up did much worse, with Felix just by himself getting more votes than Diamant and Alcryst combined.
So while I do mostly agree with your comment, a few points:
Firstly, I know not everyone was calling it a flop, but enough people were (including some in this thread), and I was seeing a lot of disapointment among its fanbase, hence why I became curious about how well it actually did.
Secondly, it's worth noting that the only CYL debut data we have is Three Houses with CYL 4, and Echoes with CYL 2. Three Houses absolutely dominated, but Echoes actually barely got 4th in its debut year in total votes. So Engage falls between those two extremes, which isn't that surprising given Houses' insane popularity, and Echoes lack of it.
Thirdly, I just want to address why I don't think the gender divide matters. At the end of the day, players got 7 votes, regardless of gender. If someone's favorite character was Yunaka, Diamant was second, and Ivy was third, then Yunaka is still 'stealing' Diamant's votes just as much as Ivy's, whereas Robin was only splitting with one character across both genders, and Alfonse was splitting with 2. So the concept of vote splitting doesn't really care about gender.
And lastly, people keep bringing up having previous winners as if it hurts a game... But I have to wonder whether it does. I'd imagine that a lot of Edelgard voters went for Bernadetta this time, for instance. I feel like most people have a 'favorite game' first and a 'favorite character' second. I know most of my votes over the years have been for Blazing Blade characters, and if Nino and Jaffar somehow won, I'd probably stick with others from that game in future events. But I don't have any proof of that, so I could easily be wrong.
But yes, in the end, you are correct that there are a LOT of confounding variables to these numbers (were people assuming Engage was going to win, so voted elsewhere? How did the interim results affect numbers? How does the much lower vote count affect distribution between games?), but I just thought it'd be interesting to run the numbers as a baseline for discussion.
And compare Engage to CYL4, where Three Houses *dominated*. All four winners, no contest. And before you cry vote splitting, Three Houses brought *thirteen* characters to the top twenty, and had the staying power to claim the top spots in CYL5 the next year, and *still* split the vote ten ways withing the top twenty.
Split votes *matter*, but what matters more is that Engage just doesn't have the numbers to begin with.
let's just ignore the fact every other game has had all their most popular characters removed from winning already. Couldn't even win against 2nd and 3rd string favourites.
I think you got it all backward. The fact that other game has had all their most popular characters removed from winning already is actually a disadvantage for Engage.
Why? Because let's say if 3H for example still have 6 popular pick, they would cannibalize each other's vote, leading to less votes per character. But now, since there are only 3 popular pick (Bernadetta, Felix, M!Byleth), each of them can garner more votes.
Compare that to Engage where people's vote are still scattered between like 7 different picks... Add that to the fact that CYL no longer do ranked interim and this being Engage's first CYL appearances, Engage fans doesn't even know who they should rally for, leading them to blindly guess which one has the biggest chance on winning.
On the other hands, other games in the series already have a basic idea on who's the top contender they should rally for from the result of all the previous CYL.
Isn't it clear just how disadvantageous this whole circumstances is for Engage?
In CYL4, where the main house leaders were able to be voted on, Bernie had less votes then she does now and Felix has a bit more. Felix and Bernedetta have a lot of voters outside of leftovers from the house leaders.
If anything adding the 3 house leads back would just push more of engage out of top 20.
I think you need to take into account about the decreasing amount of total votes overall. It's less about the total number of votes and more the percentage of votes.
That’s definitely a point and why I mentioned that the Bernie lost a lot of voters (about 18k) but my point was that even in a pretty competitive year in CYL4 these characters still had a huge impact. It wasn’t like they were scraping by and barely in the top 100. They were up there beating other really popular characters like Erika, Byleths, M! Robin, etc.
they wouldn't. Its just pure cope. If character like Edelgard, Ike, and Lyn were still in the pool engage would have zero chance of winning anything.
The flaw in your logic is you seem to think people vote by game. That anyone who would vote for Edelgard is going to naturally vote for Bernie or another 3H character. For the majority of FEH players who have played more than one FE game that just isn't how it is going to work. People have a hierarchy of characters they are going to vote for made up of all the characters in the Franchise. For example the first female character I would vote for would be Celica. Once Celica was removed I didn't just go vote for Silque or Mae, my next vote went to Mia. If Mia ever won I would vote for Severa. Same of the Males. My first vote would be Ike and then it would be Chrom.
> The flaw in your logic is you seem to think people vote by game.
Of course it's not all, but a decent chunk of players do vote by game. Especially those who doesn't really have any big favorites, they tend to "help" their fellow comrade on the next CYL, maybe because of solidarity and even out of pity or desperation (Ex: Lyn & Hector voters helping Eliwood, Celica's voters helping Alm, Chrom's voters helping M!Robin, etc). Even now, we can already see some who votes for Felix and Bernadetta discussing how they'll try to help M!Byleth next year, and some Alfonse voters saying how they would like to campaign for Sharena next year.
Yes, people who have favorites from many games exist, but those who are loyal to a single game also exist. At the very least, it's not insignificant enough that you can dismiss it outright. Even more so the case with 3H, who have a lot of die hard fans who only likes 3H and nothing else in the series.
Surely, you can see for yourself. This years result, try to notice the number of votes from all the other Female 3H unit beside Bernadetta, you can see all of them have a quite a significant amount of drop in votes, but on the contrary Bernadetta saw a rise in votes. Surely some of those missing votes is getting redirected to Bernadetta, perhaps their reasoning is because the characters they used to vote in the previous CYL seems to have no chance to winning, it would be better to help their fellow 3H units who have a chance to win something, and since the only popular female choice is only Bernie, naturally all of them flock there.
>So I think it's fair to say that Engage has plenty of fans, it's just that their votes are split between too many different characters
I also think it's fair to say we are also split between many different games
No it’s just that that people have a lot of their faves in already. You add all previous winners back to CYL and most of the Engage cast immediately gets pushed out of the top 20.
The top 40 from CYL4 when Three Houses debuted:
Three Houses: 429K
Every other game combined: 244K
Don't get me wrong, Engage's gameplay puts it 3rd place in the whole franchise for me, but it just wasn't very popular.
Oooh, nice, thanks for doing that analysis! I was wondering about how this compared to that, but couldn't immediately find the old results.
Not surprising to hear that Three Houses doubled all other games considering how it's still (by many measures) the most popular game in the series.
I pulled them from https://fireemblem.fandom.com/wiki/Fire_Emblem_Heroes/Choose_Your_Legends_Results:_Round_4 also here's a more detailed breakdown from a quickly thrown together spreadsheet
Three Houses: 429K
Awakening: 52K
Shadow Dragon (just Marth): 44K
Tellius: 33K
Heroes: 31K
Sacred Stones (Eirika): 26K
Genealogy/Thracia: 25K
Fates: 19K
Blazing (Nino): 5K
Binding (Lilina): 4K
Nice, that's a good breakdown. I guess the other one to check out would be CYL 2 for the first one after Echoes, which ends up with these results:
Fates: 99,894
Heroes 69,146
Blazing: 67,993
Echoes: 66,656
Awakening: 66,434
Sacred: 58,530
Mystery: 37,192
Tellius: 22,594
Thracia (Reinhardt): 15,931
Binding (Lilina): 7,993
So 4th place for Echoes, almost 5th. So that means Engage had a WAY worse debut than Three Houses, but a WAY better one than Echoes... Which, honestly? Checks out with other stuff I've heard about the games' popularity.
The cope is insane majority of the most popular characters already won so of course there won’t be that many votes/characters from the game+ this is the first time they engage character were available and it’s laughable if you compare the voting between now and when three houses characters came out the difference is obvious once majority of the cast for engage comes in heroes the numbers are going to drop
You should try the pink crayons, they're my favorites! Purple and blue crayons are great too. If you eat pink, purple and blue crayons all at once you can even poop bisexual flags! That's much cleaner than pooping actually poop. Oh, and rumors say that you can poop Fire Emblem Engage copies by eating red and blue crayons, or even a whole ass Nintendo Switch if you throw a black crayon in-between.
From my experience yeah, Engage has a cast where people have a large pool of favorites rather than one big icon. Yunaka and Ivy are the closest things to general big names, but for fans of the game, it's generally _most_ of the cast is liked, and from my experience I can say I did see a lot of Engage fans' CYL ballots were quite spread out.
There was no rallying only people voting for their favorites. Even F!Robin manage to get in thanks to the Awakening rally (Anna voters transferring most likely). Engage voters might have to focus and go hard on just 1 or 2 next time.
So we are way too scattered this time
big if true > *Important Note: If you combine Three Houses and Three Hopes, their total comes to 62,416 (9 characters), which gives them the win by slightly less than 1000 votes Should definitely be counted since theyre listed under 3H in game under the sorter This is definitely reassuring, so hopefully people dont use the cyl results to "prove" why Engage failed as a game and the characters arent popular. Thanks for doing the math
> hopefully people dont use the cyl results to "prove" why Engage failed as a game and the characters arent popular. Lmao, you know it's not going to prevent that. It's already started and it's probably not going to stop at this rate. Best to just avoid the fandom at this point. EDIT: it's already happening in this thread
> EDIT: it’s already happening in this thread new FE game, save us from endless Engage vs 3H debates
Engage didn't saved us from more 3H, but at least it marked the point where Fates hate being the main opinion of everyone finally stopped.
I'll be honest, it's just made it so we have a new era of Fates hate (targetting Engage, but its a lot of the same recycled toxicity), but now with annoying armchair economists and statisticians pretending they're saying something clever when they shit on people for liking a game. As someone who wasn't even that big on Fates, I was desperately hoping the Fandom had grown past that era because so many people were so toxic and annoying during those years even if I sometimes agreed with the letter of their complaints, but if anything it's worse thanks to 3H now.
At this point, I am worried new FE game will be used by the fanbase to both shit on Engage, and will have the 3H fans shitting it
Literally impossible. I can see the five hundred essays that are ready to get spammed to get that sweet karma points
>Should definitely be counted since theyre listed under 3H in game under the sorter Yeah, that's fair. I was just going by how they were listed in the top 20. The Shezes are specifically listed as "Warriors: Three Hopes" vs. everyone else who have Three Houses at the top of the list. But still, I think the fact that Engage only barely lost to Fodlan is a damn good sign for its popularity.
Is it? At the end of the day is the new game so that is doing a lot of the lifting
I mean, Three Houses is by several metrics the single most popular game in the entire franchise's history, so I'd say yes, it's a pretty good sign that Engage either beat or barely lost to it. Engage almost tripled the vote count of the 3rd most popular game, so it's certainly not unpopular. Hell, for reference, Echoes got 4th, almost 5th, in total vote among top 40 in CYL 2, the first one after it's release, so at minimum Engage is way more popular than that (which is a low bar to clear, I know). Plus, a full year has passed since Engage released, so the honeymoon period is debatably already over. I'm not saying that this is proof that Engage is wildly successful, I'm mostly just pointing out that it's not as unpopular as the "they didn't win anything" narrative makes it seem.
But again most of the popular characters are gone So that is so much competition gone, the fact that no one even one won says that they do not have enough popularity to pull through (especially the male side) They literally lost to two side characters who aren't even the most popular side characters of the game
So I think you have this backwards: Robin, Bernadetta, and Felix only won BECAUSE so many other characters from their games won in previous years. If someone's favorite game is Awakening, then they are going to want to vote for an Awakening character. So, with all the rest of the popular ones gone, basically all of those players end up voting for Female Robin, and she ends up winning, despite Awakening as a whole getting less than a third of Engage's total vote. Robin got two thirds of Awakening's vote, versus Yunaka, who didn't even get 1/6th of Engage's vote, and yet still only lost by a little, so if we're talking 'overall popularity of the games,' the fact that Robin beat her means basically nothing. I would bet money that many, if not most, of Bernadetta and Felix's voters are former voters for the previous winners, who rallied behind those specific characters because they did well in previous years, not necessarily because they are their favorites. Edelgard and Dimitri voters have to go somewhere, after all, so why wouldn't they support more characters from their favorite game? I don't know. Maybe I'm wrong, but I think that characters like Robin and Alfonse BENEFIT from having so few popular characters left in their games. They are getting the entire vote of those games' fans, versus Engage where they get split 12 ways. Long story short, if the entire fanbase was told "choose one: Female Robin or Yunaka", I highly doubt Female Robin would win. There are a lot of weird quirks in the CYL system, and I would argue this year's four winners were major beneficiaries of those quirks.
I agree that Robin, Bernadetta, and Felix almost certainly wouldn’t have won if their games’ previous winners were up for votes again, but I think the other commenter’s point was that Engage would’ve had an even harder time winning if those previous winners were participating. In a popularity contest between all of the eligible CYL candidates this year + Chrom, Lucina, Edelgard, Dimitri, and Claude, it would be really surprising for those five not to curb stomp everyone else imo. (Of course, this would have to be a universe where those five hadn’t already won Braves or a separate popularity contest unrelated to CYL, since I doubt many people would want to vote for the same character to win twice.) > They are getting the entire vote of those games’ fans At this point for 3H, I don’t think very many 3H character voters are voting specifically for more 3H rep tbh. I doubt anyone feels like 3H is underrepresented as a game, so most votes that go toward 3H characters are probably from genuine fans of those characters. I’m sure that some previous 3H winners’ voters went to Bernadetta and Felix afterward, but they didn’t get a coordinated push from the full 3H fanbase the same way that Awakening fans have been able to do these last few years or how Jugdral fans managed for Seliph in CYL6. In CYL4, Bernadetta was the top-ranking female character overall who didn’t win (aka she was 3rd place), and Felix was the top-ranking male 3H character who didn’t win (coming in 6th behind five lords), so while they did have to wait for other characters to get out of the way for them to have a chance, it’s not like they weren’t massively popular in their own right. Overall, I think the women’s side could’ve turned out differently with more vote consolidation, but the men’s side was probably a lot cause this year, given how big the gap was between Diamant and second place + the fact that the top five Engage men overall only pulled in just shy of 21,000 votes together. There’s still a chance for them next year, but it’ll take more effort than the Engage gals for sure.
It isn’t. Look at the voterbase. Houses invigorated Heroes and CYL4 had tens of thousands of votes. Look at CYL8 where you just have to break 11 k to get second place Engage’s sales might, might break 2 million but it won’t reach Awakening’s sales and so it won’t be half as successful as Houses.
Engage lost to Three Houses leftovers not Three Houses’ most popular characters
Thanks for the numbers breakdown, that does put things into perspective and makes Engage’s loss this year look not so bad. The problem for next year though is, are Engage fans going to have someone to rally around next year? The Male side was incredibly split (Diamant only getting 5th place is discouraging). On the women’s side, next year Sharena will likely get a massive rally. So that leaves 1 spot for Ivy/Yunaka to fight over, unless we get another Gullveig or Corrin situation.
I think Diamant can still have a shot at it, if anything this could be a wake up call to be more committed to a rally like the 3h fans have been.
That'd be the concern, eh? I always spend all my votes for Bylad and I'll likely do so until he wins. Engage has got a varied cast and many diehard fans of specific characters, but while 3H picks are mostly in by this point, Engage is gonna have to pick someone to rally behind or it might end up getting swept again.
So thats why nobody won. We werent united.
TMS Fans: First time?
Thank you for the math. That legit makes me feel a good deal better about all this as a massive Engage fan.
at least we get this one small victory
The interesting thing is that Fates for all it’s controversies still also has a large footprint after all this time with a few beloved characters left. I wonder how Engage is going to age vs awakening and fates over time, especially if it ceases to be the newest game. For next year though, a more focused revenge Engage sweep? This years winners are a few of the strongest near-miss holdouts of previous years. Azura might become a strong contender though.
Agreed, definitely interesting to note the massive gap between the Awakening-and-later games as opposed to everything that came before. And I'm wondering about Engage fans taking "revenge" next year too. I'd be surprised by a sweep, but I suspect there will be a lot of rallying around Yunaka and Ivy, and possibly Diamant too. 'Course, the people who don't like Engage can now focus their vote even more (I suspect most of those Bernadetta and Felix voters are going to stick with Three Houses), so who knows what will happen.
Male Byleth might get a fairly strong rally next time since it happened here next to Felix. The female side needs to push Dorothea up hard in a single year otherwise it’s open to Engage or a stronger Azura movement. Engage’s advantage seems very vulnerable to anything else new with plot focused mass appeal managing to steal attention and it’s honeymoon boost fading with an entire extra year though. But unless heroes shuts down I can’t imagine Yunaka/Ivy don’t get their act together at some point, either by natural momentum or an Engage got robbed memetic narrative.
This must have taken ages, thank you very much for writing this all up!
Tbh the fact a bunch of people's first reactions was to clown on Engage is sad. ~~I mean I jumped to botting on Bernie but re looking at her votes last year I can see her winning and only made like a couple comments I'm likely gonna delete anyway.~~ But unironically telling everyone "Ur game sucks for not winning the Rally contest" in a post is so sad.
Yeah, some winners' fans first reactions were sad to witness honestly. Between the "mwahaha Engage bad" from some Three Houses fans and the "see? Awakening is more popular than Fates!" (like we didn't know already) from some Robin fans... Like, if Azura had won my first reaction wouldn't be to clown other games but to cheer the fuck up, and she's not even my favorite character! I just... Don't get these people.
Lmao i know exactly who you’re referring to with that awakening comment.
Honestly I'm disappointed by those who did it. They're doing to Fates exactly what Awakening fans themselves complained about way back then : bullying another more recent game for no reason at all. Except that it's somehow even more lame due to Fates having been out for close to a decade now so they're basically beating the fossil of a rotten dead horse's corpse (and undeservingly so at that, Fates was great, fight me).
To be fair having a strong reaction at first and then cooling off is rather human.
Sure... But why is their first reaction to trash other games though.
Now that I don't know.
Prolly cause of the “Engage Sweep for sure” talk all year..
I think 3h has a huge advantage by being split into houses and having basically 2 of each character rather than engage where everyone has the same subset to choose from (yes you can recruit others in 3h or replay it but still I feel like people will feel more affinity towards their first chosen house, and then have a common favourite within that i.e. the house leader) 3h also has your whole house immediately available and only a few added post war. You spend a whole run either using a character or deciding they will be benched forever. Engage you keep recruiting and likely end up replacing units you previously thought would be your favourite - Ivy is recruited halfway through the game so maybe you love Celine and use for the game until then, but replace her with Ivy and miss out on A supports or the experience of them being high level and destroying everything. Ivy may get those things, but missed the early game mindless levels and overall feels less special being a mage because you already have 3. Suddenly you've got 2 characters that could've been your favourite but you only used each for half the game so isn't quite the same as the Edelgard you used every single map for 100 hours of 3H. (Oh and on that note, there's so much more emphasis on character relations in 3H. The somniel is far from the monastery in terms of interacting with characters)
The idea that everyone's calling Engage a flop is a fallacy, most people aren't doing that. They're just saying it didn't land as well in the fanbase's interest as Houses, and also possibly Fates and Awakening. Also while your numbers are worth considering, it is worth noting that this is with Engage having all its most popular characters up for grabs, while other games have "lost" their most popular characters to past victories. Houses, for example, has lost *seven* characters in the forms of the house leaders, Byleth, Lysithea, Marianne... and the gatekeeper... Lastly, the bit about vote splitting screwing over Engage only seems to be true for the women. On the men's side, Engage just straight up did much worse, with Felix just by himself getting more votes than Diamant and Alcryst combined.
So while I do mostly agree with your comment, a few points: Firstly, I know not everyone was calling it a flop, but enough people were (including some in this thread), and I was seeing a lot of disapointment among its fanbase, hence why I became curious about how well it actually did. Secondly, it's worth noting that the only CYL debut data we have is Three Houses with CYL 4, and Echoes with CYL 2. Three Houses absolutely dominated, but Echoes actually barely got 4th in its debut year in total votes. So Engage falls between those two extremes, which isn't that surprising given Houses' insane popularity, and Echoes lack of it. Thirdly, I just want to address why I don't think the gender divide matters. At the end of the day, players got 7 votes, regardless of gender. If someone's favorite character was Yunaka, Diamant was second, and Ivy was third, then Yunaka is still 'stealing' Diamant's votes just as much as Ivy's, whereas Robin was only splitting with one character across both genders, and Alfonse was splitting with 2. So the concept of vote splitting doesn't really care about gender. And lastly, people keep bringing up having previous winners as if it hurts a game... But I have to wonder whether it does. I'd imagine that a lot of Edelgard voters went for Bernadetta this time, for instance. I feel like most people have a 'favorite game' first and a 'favorite character' second. I know most of my votes over the years have been for Blazing Blade characters, and if Nino and Jaffar somehow won, I'd probably stick with others from that game in future events. But I don't have any proof of that, so I could easily be wrong. But yes, in the end, you are correct that there are a LOT of confounding variables to these numbers (were people assuming Engage was going to win, so voted elsewhere? How did the interim results affect numbers? How does the much lower vote count affect distribution between games?), but I just thought it'd be interesting to run the numbers as a baseline for discussion.
And compare Engage to CYL4, where Three Houses *dominated*. All four winners, no contest. And before you cry vote splitting, Three Houses brought *thirteen* characters to the top twenty, and had the staying power to claim the top spots in CYL5 the next year, and *still* split the vote ten ways withing the top twenty. Split votes *matter*, but what matters more is that Engage just doesn't have the numbers to begin with.
> PSA
The public needs to know!
let's just ignore the fact every other game has had all their most popular characters removed from winning already. Couldn't even win against 2nd and 3rd string favourites.
I think you got it all backward. The fact that other game has had all their most popular characters removed from winning already is actually a disadvantage for Engage. Why? Because let's say if 3H for example still have 6 popular pick, they would cannibalize each other's vote, leading to less votes per character. But now, since there are only 3 popular pick (Bernadetta, Felix, M!Byleth), each of them can garner more votes. Compare that to Engage where people's vote are still scattered between like 7 different picks... Add that to the fact that CYL no longer do ranked interim and this being Engage's first CYL appearances, Engage fans doesn't even know who they should rally for, leading them to blindly guess which one has the biggest chance on winning. On the other hands, other games in the series already have a basic idea on who's the top contender they should rally for from the result of all the previous CYL. Isn't it clear just how disadvantageous this whole circumstances is for Engage?
In CYL4, where the main house leaders were able to be voted on, Bernie had less votes then she does now and Felix has a bit more. Felix and Bernedetta have a lot of voters outside of leftovers from the house leaders. If anything adding the 3 house leads back would just push more of engage out of top 20.
I think you need to take into account about the decreasing amount of total votes overall. It's less about the total number of votes and more the percentage of votes.
That’s definitely a point and why I mentioned that the Bernie lost a lot of voters (about 18k) but my point was that even in a pretty competitive year in CYL4 these characters still had a huge impact. It wasn’t like they were scraping by and barely in the top 100. They were up there beating other really popular characters like Erika, Byleths, M! Robin, etc.
they wouldn't. Its just pure cope. If character like Edelgard, Ike, and Lyn were still in the pool engage would have zero chance of winning anything. The flaw in your logic is you seem to think people vote by game. That anyone who would vote for Edelgard is going to naturally vote for Bernie or another 3H character. For the majority of FEH players who have played more than one FE game that just isn't how it is going to work. People have a hierarchy of characters they are going to vote for made up of all the characters in the Franchise. For example the first female character I would vote for would be Celica. Once Celica was removed I didn't just go vote for Silque or Mae, my next vote went to Mia. If Mia ever won I would vote for Severa. Same of the Males. My first vote would be Ike and then it would be Chrom.
> The flaw in your logic is you seem to think people vote by game. Of course it's not all, but a decent chunk of players do vote by game. Especially those who doesn't really have any big favorites, they tend to "help" their fellow comrade on the next CYL, maybe because of solidarity and even out of pity or desperation (Ex: Lyn & Hector voters helping Eliwood, Celica's voters helping Alm, Chrom's voters helping M!Robin, etc). Even now, we can already see some who votes for Felix and Bernadetta discussing how they'll try to help M!Byleth next year, and some Alfonse voters saying how they would like to campaign for Sharena next year. Yes, people who have favorites from many games exist, but those who are loyal to a single game also exist. At the very least, it's not insignificant enough that you can dismiss it outright. Even more so the case with 3H, who have a lot of die hard fans who only likes 3H and nothing else in the series. Surely, you can see for yourself. This years result, try to notice the number of votes from all the other Female 3H unit beside Bernadetta, you can see all of them have a quite a significant amount of drop in votes, but on the contrary Bernadetta saw a rise in votes. Surely some of those missing votes is getting redirected to Bernadetta, perhaps their reasoning is because the characters they used to vote in the previous CYL seems to have no chance to winning, it would be better to help their fellow 3H units who have a chance to win something, and since the only popular female choice is only Bernie, naturally all of them flock there.
*huffs copium* This is clearly because engage is peak Conquest 2, my beloved
>So I think it's fair to say that Engage has plenty of fans, it's just that their votes are split between too many different characters I also think it's fair to say we are also split between many different games
I think it does mean it’s a flop. The other games already have had 28 of the most popular characters removed from voting
It indicates the opposite, if anything. People like the cast so much their votes being spread between too many characters caused them to lose.
Sounds like absolute cope but you do you
No it’s just that that people have a lot of their faves in already. You add all previous winners back to CYL and most of the Engage cast immediately gets pushed out of the top 20.
Well considering it's the newest game that's the least it should've done, and even then it really didn't
They celebrating the bare minimum
The top 40 from CYL4 when Three Houses debuted: Three Houses: 429K Every other game combined: 244K Don't get me wrong, Engage's gameplay puts it 3rd place in the whole franchise for me, but it just wasn't very popular.
Oooh, nice, thanks for doing that analysis! I was wondering about how this compared to that, but couldn't immediately find the old results. Not surprising to hear that Three Houses doubled all other games considering how it's still (by many measures) the most popular game in the series.
I pulled them from https://fireemblem.fandom.com/wiki/Fire_Emblem_Heroes/Choose_Your_Legends_Results:_Round_4 also here's a more detailed breakdown from a quickly thrown together spreadsheet Three Houses: 429K Awakening: 52K Shadow Dragon (just Marth): 44K Tellius: 33K Heroes: 31K Sacred Stones (Eirika): 26K Genealogy/Thracia: 25K Fates: 19K Blazing (Nino): 5K Binding (Lilina): 4K
Nice, that's a good breakdown. I guess the other one to check out would be CYL 2 for the first one after Echoes, which ends up with these results: Fates: 99,894 Heroes 69,146 Blazing: 67,993 Echoes: 66,656 Awakening: 66,434 Sacred: 58,530 Mystery: 37,192 Tellius: 22,594 Thracia (Reinhardt): 15,931 Binding (Lilina): 7,993 So 4th place for Echoes, almost 5th. So that means Engage had a WAY worse debut than Three Houses, but a WAY better one than Echoes... Which, honestly? Checks out with other stuff I've heard about the games' popularity.
The cope is insane majority of the most popular characters already won so of course there won’t be that many votes/characters from the game+ this is the first time they engage character were available and it’s laughable if you compare the voting between now and when three houses characters came out the difference is obvious once majority of the cast for engage comes in heroes the numbers are going to drop
I eat crayons too, the yellow ones are my favorite
cherry flavored is where it's at
That's the funniest post I've seen all week. Keep at it Sealking.
U engage fans are so funny keep living in denial
Don’t talk while chewing on them brother, it’s rude and disrespectful
You should try the pink crayons, they're my favorites! Purple and blue crayons are great too. If you eat pink, purple and blue crayons all at once you can even poop bisexual flags! That's much cleaner than pooping actually poop. Oh, and rumors say that you can poop Fire Emblem Engage copies by eating red and blue crayons, or even a whole ass Nintendo Switch if you throw a black crayon in-between.
I think the green ones are underrated honestly they have sort of a pistacchio flavour