Companions

Fire Emblem Engage hands you units in a fixed order across twenty-one chapters, and the order it hands them to you has almost nothing to do with how good they are. That is the single most useful thing to know about this roster, and it only becomes obvious when you put our thirty-four unit pages next to our own tier list and read the two together.

So this guide is arranged by arrival. Chapter by chapter, who turns up, and where our tier list places them out of thirty-six. Experience is finite in this game and every point you spend on a unit is a point another unit does not get, so knowing that the person the game just gave you is ranked thirty-fifth is worth more than any amount of stat analysis.

Your starting party is the worst party you will ever have

Chapter 1 gives you three units. Our tier list ranks them 36th, 35th and 32nd out of 36. That is not a coincidence of one bad ranking; it is the entire opening cast sitting in the bottom five.

Read that column and the first eight chapters produce one top-ten unit, Diamant. Everyone else the opening act gives you sits in the back half or worse. The practical consequence is that the standard Fire Emblem instinct, which is to keep your early units alive and level them steadily, is the wrong instinct here. Feed the ones who will still be on the team in chapter twenty.

Three names are worth pulling out of that table. Alfred at 15th and Chloe at 14th are the early units that hold their value; if you want to invest before chapter 9, invest in them. And Citrinne at 34th arrives in the same chapter as Alcryst at 13th, which is as clean a demonstration as the game gives that arrival order tells you nothing.

The second half is where the roster turns

Chapter 11 alone delivers two top-ten units. Seadall at 15 is our second-ranked character in the game, and Mauvier walks in at chapter 21 already ranked 8th, which is the game telling you outright that you do not need to have built him. That is the flip side of the starting party problem: if you have been hoarding experience for the right people, this is where you spend it.

The rule is not absolute and it is worth saying so. Bunet joins at chapter 12 and is 33rd. Amber joins at chapter 18 and is 31st. Late arrival is not a guarantee of quality any more than early arrival is a guarantee of the opposite. What is reliable is the shape: five of our top eight join in chapter 11 or later, and three of our bottom five are in your party before the end of chapter 1.

The four who do not fit the table

Alear is the protagonist and cannot be lost, which is why no chapter is quoted; our tier list has them 7th, so the unit you are obliged to use is genuinely good. Louis joins by simply progressing and our page gives no chapter for it, ranking him 27th.

Jean comes from his own paralogue, Budding Talent, rather than a story chapter, and sits at 21st. And Hortensia is the awkward one: our page says you first encounter her in chapters 7 and 10, and you fight her before she is ever an ally. She is 3rd on the tier list, so she is worth the wait.

Veyle is the biggest asterisk in the bucket. She is ranked 1st, ahead of everyone, and her page notes that she first appears in Chapter 4: A Land of Bloom but may not be available to recruit at that point. Treat the chapter 4 date as a first sighting rather than a join date, and treat the ranking as the reason to care.

Two more units sit on our tier list without a page of their own: Lindon at 12th and Goldmary at 23rd. Goldmary is the one you will notice, because she joins in the same chapter as Rosado and his page mentions her arriving alongside him.

What the individual pages are actually for

Every unit page in this bucket runs the same six sections: how to recruit them, best class, personal skill, best gifts, best Emblems, and their stat line. Once you have decided who is worth building, those are the four decisions left, and two of them are cheap.

Gifts are the cheapest. Each character has preferences, but our Pretty Pebbles page points out that one item is liked universally, which means you can raise support with anyone without memorising thirty-four preference lists. Class is the expensive one, because it consumes a seal; our when to promote and best classes guides cover the timing and the destination, and all classes is the full list.

Emblems are the decision that matters most and the one this bucket cannot settle on its own, because a ring is a shared resource and giving it to one unit means taking it from another. Our best emblem pairings guide handles that question across the whole roster, and the mechanics guide explains which parts of a ring's power stay with the unit after you move it on.

Where to start

If you are early in a first playthrough, the useful move is to stop levelling Vander, Clanne and Framme past the point where they can survive, and start banking experience for chapter 11. If you want the full ranking with base stats for all thirty-six, our character tier list is the page this guide has been quoting throughout, and recruitment covers the handful of units you can actually miss.