Prologue

Opening Chapters

Revelation Part 1

Chapters 13-19, in which everyone’s going to Valla even though half of them suck.

Chapter 13

Hey look, Hoshidan scum!

Ok, meme comedy done. This is in my opinion the first really strong chapter of Revelation, with satisfying gameplay, escalation of the threat posed by Valla, and some good character development. It’s an utter tragedy that it takes place against the literal backdrop of Cyrkensia’s ruined opera house, but I can (mostly) live with the destruction of my favorite setting in Fates when it’s so effective at getting results. Azura still gets to sing here after a fashion, and although there’s no cutscene to go with it the results of this particular show do a good job of subtly foreshadowing that Azura and Mikoto use similar pacifying magic from the same source.

After Kaden and Keaton are done lampshading why the party always runs into shapeshifters in Cyrkensia, it’s time for Corrin to step between Xander and Ryoma as they left them back in Chapter 6 – at each other’s throats in a conflict ultimately engineered by Anankos. It’s a good demonstration of what the war between the two nations would look like without Corrin’s intervention, and the crown princes’ characters logically follow from their behavior as antagonists in the other routes. Xander is resolved that Corrin is a traitor and merits only death, whereas Ryoma is more hesitant to accept Corrin’s choice and, unlike in Conquest, willing to listen to their stated motivations when he’s not on the verge of death. Ryoma’s mellower outlook may be attributed, oddly enough, to the strong intimation that he’s got something going on with Scarlet, something I completely forgot about until I replayed this chapter. I don’t blame myself for doing so; in an Avatar free-for-all dating game romances between the other playable characters are naturally going to get short shrift in the story, and it doesn’t help that Birthright doesn’t suggest this relationship at all even though it’s the one route where both characters to survive to the end. And…yeah, there’s that part, but that’s for a bit later. It’s interesting to imagine how the different circumstances of Revelation could have encouraged Ryoma and Scarlet to grow closer in Revelation than they do in Birthright, though realistically it probably just boils down to Corrin not being there for most of their time together.

In any case, Ryoma shares what he knows about the Rainbow Sage – odd how the fourth person to visit the Sage is still Xander on this route when in the others it’s unsurprisingly the opposing older brother – and Corrin and co. are off to follow the path of Conquest 10 and 11. At least there’s no sequence-breaking teleport books this time.

Chapter 14

This time I’m not focusing on the cutaway to Garon and co., because his obvious gloating has reached such alarmingly stupid levels that I have nothing more to say about it. The payoff, such as it is, to that plot thread is still a few chapters away anyway…as is the appearance of Iago and Hans, who have yet to do much of anything on this route and yet get to appear as bosses at a plot-critical moment. Boo.

Let’s talk about unit balancing instead. Elise shows up with her she’s-legal-we-swear panty shot, and one look at the stats of her and her retainers showcases another glaring problem with the gameplay of Revelation. From this point onward, there’s really no point in training any of the numerous unpromoted units the game throws at you, because there’s no time to raise them up to par unless you do a lot of grinding. This is one instance where Revelation’s similarities to FE10 are more superficial than they first appear, because 

1) when compared to just one route of Fates Radiant Dawn is a much longer game, and in fact at 43 chapters still holds the record for the longest individual story campaign in the series. Revelation’s pacing and design suffers terribly from the requirement that it cover the same number of chapters as the other routes.

2) Radiant Dawn also has a massive roster (second largest in the series behind New Mystery) with several units who come behind the level curve, but they’re spread across the course of the game rather than lumped into a span of a few chapters. Examples vary from earlygame recruits just a bit behind (Meg) to underwhelming midgame units (Kyza and Lyre) to a bonus run Est type in lategame (Pelleas). 

3) and most notably, units in FE10 are divided into separate armies with different resource pools until lategame. While the balancing between those is infamously unequal, this setup almost requires that you train more units than you’ll ultimately be sending into endgame, giving even the lesser ones a small chance to shine.

I imagine that the design philosophy behind Revelation is that the player would be expected to spend a lot of time grinding on this route to get its numerous unique supports and raise a much larger army. It seems intended for a slower pace, particularly as this also helps with building up the castle base when you’ve got duplicates of most buildings to upgrade. I still don’t care for it though, because I don’t feel like taking that extra time to raise an oversized army and because some of the recruitments continue to be unexplained in story. Why would two border guards join in the invasion of a foreign port? Revelation doesn’t know or care, but it’ll make you run your new underleveled healer to both sides of this large map to recruit them regardless. At least Elise is mounted….

Chapter 15

Seriously, look at this. These two join in the same chapter, what the hell. This isn’t even mentioning that these are also some pretty random recruitments. Shura is awfully nonchalant on hearing that Corrin got his revenge for him, and Nyx has no more reason to be here than she did in Conquest 9. With her it really feels like the writers had a great (if highly fetishistic) concept for a character and came up with a plausible backstory only to find that there was no way to fit her into the plot, so…here she is. On a related note, Nyx is the only first generation character other than Gunter to outright not appear in one route, and at least there’s an explanation for Gunter’s absence in Birthright. Her presence really is just that random.

Before doing the write-up for this chapter I read back over what I’d written for the Sevenfold Sanctuary in the other routes. The gameplay of the Revelation iteration offers nothing really to speak of, lacking either Conquest’s class and skill-themed rooms or Birthright’s power jump. The Rainbow Sage uses an alternate old man sprite initially to make it less obvious that he’s repeating the same trick he pulled in Birthright, but his exposition at the end is worth the trolling for finally confirming that he is indeed a dragon and giving us the obligatory Fire Emblem name drop. Fates’s cosmology reveals itself to borrow mostly from Jugdral of all places, though I’ve never yet seen anyone try to piece together the scattered hints of worldbuilding to link the twelve dragons of the two settings. I’m certainly not going to attempt it, because even with divine weapons and draconic-blooded families in the mix there’s remarkably little to conclude definitively that the First Dragons of Fates are/were the dragons that appeared to Jugdral’s Crusaders. My pet theory aligns it a bit more with Tellius because of certain other observations about Fates’s setting and because something is going to have to connect the dragon laguz to the rest of the series’s lore eventually.

Chapter 16 + 17

I’ve been pretty down on Revelation thus far, and at first I was fully prepared to rip into these two chapters in similar fashion…and then I finished playing through them and changed my mind. If I had to pick one moment from FE14 to represent in miniature the beautiful mess that is this game, with all its inventive concepts and missed potential, its stirring emotional moments and lazy copouts, I would choose these chapters. In spite of everything they nail the very best of what Fates offers on an emotional level, and as a midgame climax they land almost as well as the Branch of Fate lands as an establishing moment.

And yet there’s so much wrong with them! Hans and Iago have never been flatter or more inconsequential antagonists; note that before this point in Revelation they’ve done nothing aside from knock Gunter off a bridge and use an illusion to piss off the Wind Tribe. The Ryoma/Scarlet angle is abruptly dialed back to the friend zone, presumably to make it okay for the Avatar to bone them, while Hinoka abruptly joins in the action after having been forgotten about for eleven(!) chapters bar one throwaway mention in Chapter 13. Xander and Leo’s apparent betrayal of Nohr has little bite to it even from Iago as Garon might as well not exist by this point, and their retainers fail so hard as backup I almost always just send them to a corner to wait out the battle. Speaking of which, the trend of underleveled units reaches its zenith, here where maybe four of the eleven units obtained in these chapters can reasonably be used without grinding after this point. It’s even worse than the torrent of garbage units the Archanea games throw at you, because at least those sometimes come with nice stuff in their inventories (hence the “Free Silvers” tier jokingly used on some of the DS tier lists back when those were popular). And to cap it all off the ticking timer that’s been running from Chapter 7 up until this moment, of the skies over Hoshido and Nohr switching as the moment that the portal to Valla will close, makes no sense either (meteoro)logically or narratively except to add unneeded urgency and entice a few of the characters to the Canyon. For that matter, since Revelation appears to take place in the same time frame as the other two routes it’s baffling that this bizarre bit of worldbuilding goes unmentioned in them. Wouldn’t it be kind of a big deal for Nohr to get a normal sky every few decades, and for Hoshido to get a bad one?

But somehow despite all that when the Nohrian brothers show up in Chapter 17 and the music switches to “A Dark Fall” (quick aside, but one thing I love about Fates as a whole is its soundtrack) I fully got what the developers were going for, and to see all the royals finally interacting with each other – something sorely missing from Chapter 6, if you recall – and calling a truce to face whatever awaits them in Valla together just sealed that feeling. The Hoshidan and Nohrian contrast to these two chapters followed by a scene of Corrin’s families united for the first time really sells the main draw of Revelation, even if for some of them the buildup to that moment was rushed (Takumi, Camilla) or just not there at all (Hinoka). Yeah, it comes with the distinct aroma of Avatar-centered plotting like everything else on this route – as Ryoma actually points out in Chapter 16, funnily enough – but even though some of the particulars are undercooked and most of the circumstances are downright silly I can completely get on board with this group of people in this moment banding together to, uh, jump off a bridge before an interdimensional portal closes because the sky is changing color and…ugh, never mind.

Chapter 18

I will say this for Valla: I really enjoy its visual style, a sort of supernaturally-ruined pastoral idyll that resembles nothing like the world above. It also helps that it’s not tied directly to any real-world cultures like Hoshido and Nohr are, and its nods to Middle Eastern, Indian, and exclusively in localization (I think?) Greek cultures come across in the series’s more typically understated fashion. Of course that otherworldly quality lends itself to more frustrating map mechanics, so it’s not entirely a positive. This one isn’t so bad provided you’re fielding a bunch of royals to activate all the Dragon Veins – and really, it’s not as though the player needs another excuse to use them to the exclusion of almost everyone else.

But of course the big moment of this chapter is Scarlet’s death. The bit with the flower is a painfully obvious hint to recall when it comes time for the reveal of her killer, but nevertheless the sequence does well despite that and some awkward staging with battle models. What doesn’t work quite as well is the reintroduction of the Ryoma/Scarlet angle just to add more punch to her death…completely ignoring the possibility that Corrin might be married to either of them (and Scarlet just undergone what had to have been one of the most hyper-accelerated pregnancies in all of fiction, if you want to be really sadistic). Because of their earlier buildup this may be the most egregious example of Fates needing to ignore its own support mechanics for the sake of the main plot. In any case, if Corrin didn’t shack up with one of them the scene after the chapter is pretty solid. I consider it comparable to Lilith’s death scenes on the other routes, since she also dies taking a hit for Corrin, but as the circumstances are less random and Scarlet actually gets most of her characterization outside DLC it’s much more effective overall.

Chapter 19

Enter the strange child with the oversized forehead. At least it’s not immediately obvious that’s he’s evil, I guess?

It’s interesting to note that the Valla chapters are structured almost as a route unto themselves, having to establish a new set of characters previously unseen in Revelation and not seen at all in the other routes. Although in terms of gameplay they function more like an extended endgame in the vein of Radiant Dawn’s Tower of Guidance, bizarre architecture and all. I’ll be talking more about Anthony and Arete and the others later on, but I wanted to note the setup for when I talk about it in the next post. 

The intro to this chapter also delves into a bit more of Fates’s cosmology, specifically its deified dragons. Xander asks what only Iago thought to question in Conquest, namely why Garon would worship Anankos and not the Dusk Dragon, only to get the obvious but still technically necessary reveal of Garon’s true nature. I do like that the First Dragons are vague enough in their presentation that I could believe either that the Dawn and Dusk Dragons are just different interpretations of Anankos or that they’re all separate entities. As I recall however this is somewhat muted by the knowledge that the emotional payoff re: Garon is going to be rather muted when it finally happens, so this really is just more vague worldbuilding. 

Oh, right, the chapter. It’s Conquest 15 with a bigger party and entirely too many items drops on the optional path. Why the developers think the player needed so many items thrown at them in a game with no durability and a route with no shortage of funds I’ll never know.

Next time: Revelation Chapter 20 – Endgame

Prologue

Opening Chapters

Chapters 6-12, in which Corrin starts a cult.

Chapter 6

As the iterations of Chapter 6 go this one feels lacking in emotional punch for a number of reasons. One is that, even though all the royals appear as enemies on the map, they don’t actually do anything but stand in their respective corners while Corrin, their servant, and Azura fight generic troops. Another is that only Xander and Ryoma have any lines; the younger royals don’t even get reaction shots to Corrin’s decision. I attribute this to the artificial construction of the chapter conflict, which shifts from Xander and Ryoma attacking each other to Corrin attacking the aforementioned aggressive generics as a way to get their attention. I’ll delve more into the differing reactions of the older brothers later on, but for now we’re left to begin the route on a rather awkward note.

One small additional thing I’d like to point out – and that I’d forgotten until this replay – is that Azura gets a concrete reason for deciding to follow Corrin other than the underlying reality that she’s known exactly what’s been going on this whole time. She cites her mother’s assumed love for Nohr in tandem with her sympathies for Hoshido (expressed in the shared early chapters) as reason to refuse to take sides. As everything’s about to get very weird with regard to Azura and the plot that’s a nice touch.

Chapter 7

And here’s where it all gets weird.

Intellectually I understand that there’s meant to be a separation between how much Corrin knows and how much the player knows, particularly for this route. At the Branch of Fate the description of Revelation even warns you not to play it before the other two routes, and the clear implication is that it is a “golden ending” not just because it’s the path where most of the playable cast lives but because it’s the complete resolution to FE14 as a whole. It was even released as DLC a few weeks after the release of Birthright and Conquest, and while much of the focus in fandom was on how sketchy that a business practice that was as a narrative practice it feels both deliberate and appropriate to have Revelation follow the other two rather than treat all three as the simultaneously occurring AUs that they technically are.

But still…the exposition dump in this single chapter alone is massive, and it’s difficult to imagine a still mostly untested Corrin accepting everything that Azura tells them wholeheartedly except for the fact that the story basically forces them into trusting her rather than lashing out at Garon for killing their mother and kidnapping them as a child (Birthright) or still hoping for an explanation from the only father they’ve ever known (Conquest). I don’t really have anything to add on the content of that exposition because most of it is just the basic underlying story of all three routes. Gunter gets a bit of foreshadowing through his backstory and there’s the first mention of Revelation’s unique plot timer which is never explained well and always kind of dumb, but that’s about it for now.

On the subject of this chapter’s map, for whatever reason it puts me in mind of the first chapter of Hector Mode in FE7, where you’re given only two units – only one of whom can actually fight worth a damn – to run around a cramped map full of doors and chests. That plus a late-arriving Jagen and this game’s only instance of fog of war (sort of) is Chapter 6 of Revelation, and just as its story suggests the breakneck pace of how the entire route handles narrative so too does the gameplay suggest the tedium of many of this route’s maps, to say nothing of the glut of items and eventually units it throws at you because they felt the need to squeeze all the game content from the other routes into this one.

Chapter 8

Chapters 8-12 rehash the early chapters of Birthright, visiting the same locations in the same order and even copying over some plot points such as Ryoma and Takumi’s disappearances (at least they don’t run off to the Bottomless Canyon for no reason in this one). Even the maps are the same in two cases, including this chapter. This is not entirely a bad thing, however; it logically follows that war breaks out between Hoshido and Nohr regardless of what path Corrin takes, and of the other two routes Birthright’s earlygame is the only one concerned with actually depicting the opening stages of that war. In Revelation Corrin and not Silas is the besieging commander of Fort Jinya, and as such the map plays in a reverse fashion to Birthright 7 and with Hoshidan enemies. Yukimura gets beaten down, Saizo shows off his penchant for explosives, and Sakura and Kaze step in to vouch for Corrin and get the Avatar cult rolling.

Because…yeah, that’s pretty much what the first half of Revelation’s story boils down to. By sheer charisma born of their status as a player self-insert Corrin convinces around three dozen people who initially branded them as a traitor to follow them in opposing an unnameable enemy by jumping off a bridge. The localized subtitle for this route is suspiciously apt in this context. It draws an instant connection to the biblical Book of Revelation, that apocalyptic allegory beloved of evangelical Protestant denominations that frequently rely on the charisma of individual preachers in the absence of the defined clerical hierarchy of other Christian churches. It’s amusing to consider Corrin stepping into this role, even as it makes Revelation the only route to lean as heavily on Avatar-centered plotting as Awakening does. Sure, the player knows that Corrin is telling the truth and that Anankos really is behind everything, but on a Watsonian level everyone’s unflagging trust in them gets increasingly questionable as the route wears on.

Chapter 9

This is just the plot of Birthright 8 plastered over an easier version of Conquest 20′s map. There’s less gloating from Iago, and also Rinkah is here because this is Revelation where you just have to roll with the arbitrary recruitments sometimes, but that’s basically it. It’s Mr. Fuga’s Wild Ride 2.0!…or more accurately 0.5.

I do want to talk about the above interlude though. This is the first of several moments where Garon whips open his Flat Villain Handbook and follows the part about gloating loudly about his evil plan within earshot of some eventual good guys. It’s as dumb as it sounds, and while I appreciate that Anankos seems to be be aware that Corrin knows about him and is adjusting his plans accordingly the effect is ruined by this stupid setup for the Nohrian royals’ defection. As I’ll be talking about later, Revelation suffers from massive pacing issues, and the Nohrian family drama is just one of many plot threads that gets condensed to an absurd degree as a result.

Chapter 10

I was going to make a joke about shipping it, but I’m still getting over just how big a role Gunter has in this route as a designated protagonist support/chorus character. 

Observations about crack shipping opportunities aside I loathe this chapter, and while there’s probably a few Valla maps that I blocked from my memory just because that section of Revelation is so heinous overall I remember hating this chapter and dreading having to play through it again. Slowly whacking your way through a map covered in ice to find hidden enemies (pretty much all of whom drop stuff including stat boosters, so going straight for the boss is a bad idea) is so boring, especially if you’re not running a very large team. This is just the first taste of the tedium to come, but overall it may just be the single worst map in Fates.*

Once again the story doesn’t offer much that the comparable chapters of the other routes didn’t already cover. Zola impersonates Izana, Corrin beats him down, Leo randomly shows up and kills him, Izana is weird, and Takumi is a stubborn ass until he isn’t. No time is spent explaining how Zola managed to capture Takumi and his retainers along with the entire population of Izumo, but it’s not too hard to fill in that particular blank – especially in contrast to the geographically nonsensical movements of the same characters in Birthright. I don’t really understand why Izana gets killed off telling Corrin to visit the Rainbow Sage, though. What god (who’s probably some dragon or other) demands human sacrifice for such a cryptic bit of information? Izana may not be recruitable in Revelation, but neither is Yukimura and he apparently gets through just fine. Plus, for named character deaths there’s a more significant and effective one in the midgame, so…I still don’t get it. Did someone just really want to write an Izana death scene?

*I reserve to right to declare future Revelation maps The Worst…because I know there are some that can compete for that title.

Chapter 11

Mokushu again…whee. Instead of possessed Takumi ambushing from behind this chapter features one of those annoying “race to recruit NPCs before they get themselves killed” objectives, but aside from that and a slight change to how the Dragon Veins work it’s effectively Birthright 10.

The reason I keep bringing up how repetitive all these chapters feel is connected with a point I made near the beginning of this post, that Revelation’s narrative was plainly written to be the last story route the player experiences. This is a problem when you take the time to observe just how much of the first half of the route copies sets and plot elements of Birthright and to a lesser extent Conquest. The sense of déjà vu is unpleasantly strong in these chapters, particularly as they add nothing substantial of their own. Conquest also includes a chapter wherein Corrin teams up with Saizo to rescue Kagero from Kotaro, but it’s not only set on a different map but presents the conflict from a completely different angle to match Corrin’s allegiance in that route. Thankfully the story largely moves on from the Birthright script after this chapter as the Nohrian characters enter the picture, but I have to say earlygame Revelation does a poor job of selling its own price tag as DLC. Thus far its only innovations over the other routes have been a spoiler-laden info dump (that has yet to really affect anything, because per the terms of the curse it can’t), a pointless death scene, and the boring slog that was Chapter 10.

Chapter 12

And here we have some of the most flagrant character compression in Revelation: Camilla’s entire Birthright arc and the plight of the Ice Tribe from Birthright 17 smashed together into one chapter for no apparent reason and no room to explore the differences that do exist. Flora doesn’t set herself on fire, Camilla’s declared motivations have more to do with Garon than her own love for Corrin, and both of them are willing to join Corrin in opposing Garon after the battle even though the two of them have vastly different opinions of the man. Good thing they took a moment to still get in some of that crucial fanservice, right?  This is a unique and well-executed chapter to play through, but the rapid fire characterization blindsides the player and makes it difficult to get invested in these characters to any significant degree.

Incidentally, while the separations between these posts have always been somewhat arbitrary, I’ll be picking up the next one with Chapter 13 because it reintroduces the only two non-Vallite characters to get anything like a full arc in Revelation. I might as well dive into the midgame on a high note.

Next time: Revelation Chapter 13 – 19