Fire Emblem Engage: Level Grinding guide

Some of the more recent entries in the Fire Emblem series have been tailored to allow for some pretty generous methods of level grinding to improve your units, and Fire Emblem Engage offers options to do so as well.

To maximize your time-to-experience ratio, the tips and tricks in this guide will help you get the most bang for your grinding buck. Both of these methods only apply when you want to grind levels and won't work if you are looking to grind SP, Support Levels, or resources! For that, check out our guide on respawning Skirmishes to grind gold, SP, and more!

As a handy trick to speed either of these methods up further, in your settings, turn off the animations and turn on skipping turns to go even faster!

The 'Retry' Method for Level Grinding:

Regardless of whether you play on Casual or Classic mode, this method of grinding levels will work if you want to try and boost a bunch of units or just one or two at a time to act as team carries. This method will also work in skirmish missions, training maps, paralogues and even normal story chapters as it utilizes an option that is presented when you game over - the option to "retry while retaining experience". 

When all your units on a map are wiped out, if you have it, you will be taken to the screen where the game will automatically prompt you to use the Time Crystal to reverse time and attempt to change fate by picking things off from an earlier turn. 

Instead of selecting a previous turn, hit B to go back; doing so will give you the option to opt out of using the Time Crystal and instead go to a game over. Select that you will take the game over instead.

Once you have the game over, you will have the option to try again with or without retaining the experience you had gained in the latest level attempt, select to retain the experience and try again! 

In no time, you will be back at the level preparation screen where you can select new units to level up, keep the previous ones, change classes, etc. Simply jump back into the level when you're ready and continue the grinding! Depending on the map and its difficulty, if you take only a unit or two onto a map, you can easily get 3+ levels each run!

BIG warning, however, if you are playing on Classic mode with the permadeath enabled, you will want to make sure that if a character dies during this method, you then do everything you can to make sure ALL of your units also die. Otherwise, you will permanently lose the characters that died during that grinding session. If it looks like you will win the map and have lost any units, it's best to manually retry the map by selecting it from the menu, though you won't retain the experience gained by retrying this way. It's recommended that after every few retries, so you save your grinding progress (this isn't a concern if you are doing your grinding on a training map, though, as your units do not die in these specific maps!)

The 'Micaiah' Method for Level Grinding:

Perhaps the best way to quickly level up a single character is by utilizing Emblem Micaiah's special action, "Great Sacrifice". Being perhaps the most overpowered ability in the game, Great Sacrifice will reduce the unit that is paired with Micaiah down to a single health, but in exchange, the health of every other friend and neutral unit on the map will be completely healed - regardless of where they are located on the map. 

Why this makes for a great leveling method is due to the fact that Fire Emblem Engage allocates experience by looking at how many units are healed with this action as opposed to how much health is healed in total. To get the most out of this method, you will want to have a full party of characters and try to have all of them take a little bit of damage as soon as you can. Once everyone has been dinged up, pop Great Sacrifice and watch the experience roll in!

This is a great method for characters like Jean or anyone that can't take a hit, as you can just focus on keeping them safe until they can use the ability. Pair this with the previous 'Retry' method, and the characters that you may have left behind will be back in fighting shape in no time!