Push off a cliff: Azama – Not exactly what you’d do to a favorite per se, but if he survives his reaction will undoubtedly be entertaining. Definitely don’t do this one to Takumi, because it leads to possession in his case.
Kiss: Ryoma – Not crazy about him, but he’s undeniably hot and well-connected. He also seems like one of those men who’s much sexier when his mouth is otherwise occupied.
Marry:Xander – This one is a no-brainer. A guy like this might even be enough to almost convince me to be monogamous.
Set on Fire: Takumi – I don’t hate him…but it would still be funny, and so fitting with his massive inferiority complex.
Wrap a Blanket around: Odin – Not that I don’t mind his half nudity, but he’s been dealt something of a rough hand under all the crazy, and unlike Laslow he’s not an aggressively heterosexual flirt.
Be Roommates with: Leo – Stable and without any annoying traits, not much else to say.
Here’s all the links for this series gathered in one place for easy viewing. This is now the longest single project I’ve ever worked on for this blog – can’t say I was expecting that, but so it goes.
My half-joking aim for this project was that, come next summer when the fandom is collectively dissecting FE16 and scrutinizing its every flaw, I could get the jump on the inevitable re-evaluation of Fates by linking the master post for this series and showing everyone that at least I’ve already put in my work on making that argument. I would be lying if I said that this replay got to rethink any of my earlier opinions on the game in a big way, but it did help me to recall bits of the experience that I’d forgotten, for better or worse. FE14 is still a game with some major shortcomings, but here’s the thing: in my considerations of Fire Emblem as a franchise I rank Fates alongside the Jugdral and Tellius settings as flawed masterpieces, and while Fates may be the only one of that group to be inarguably more “flawed” than “masterpiece” that’s still saying a lot.
In common with those two settings in particular, Fates is both foundationally unlike anything else in the franchise and makes a strong – if not always well-executed – thematic statement that resonates with what Fire Emblem at its core is about. Every game in the series to one degree or another advances the idea that war is an inevitable result of fallible human nature, and as a result the games’ endings are not happily ever afters so much as temporary resolutions before someone else screws up all over again. On a Doylist level this is a great position for a long-running, messily interconnected game series to take, but I also appreciate it as a realistic take on human nature despite the supernatural trappings of the setting(s). FE14′s basic premise plays into this idea in indirect but intricate ways, as suffering and death result from Corrin’s choice regardless of what it is. The way in which other characters react to the route split highlights the individual shortcomings of people who would be in other games either unambiguous allies of the protagonist or sympathetic but doomed anti-villains. The Camus can be a loyal older brother, the Jagen can be a self-interested traitor, the asshole archer can be a genuine antagonist, and prime secondary protagonist material can turn into a manipulative villain depending on the circumstances caused by a single but significant decision. The route split with its myriad consequences is not only the high point of the game but most likely its greatest contribution to the series as a whole.
And yes, for the most part in these posts I’ve been glossing over the more obviously cringeworthy elements of Fates. Everyone knows about the localization gaffes, the fanservice, the present but highly questionable queer representation, and the various holdover mechanics from FE13 that see the two being frequently lumped together in derision and declared signs of all that is wrong with modern FE…despite, of course, being modern non-remake FE. It’s not feasible to disregard Fates’s status as the followup to Awakening, a game that was designed as a capstone on the series but met with unexpected success and the need for a (spiritual) sequel. I’m obviously glad that the developers decided to continue from that point with such an original concept, even if the game by necessity had to carry over a lot from its predecessor in order to appeal to a similar player base. And even though I’m not the biggest fan of Awakening for a number of reasons, throughout this replay I made note of many of this game’s failings that are entirely its own – writer bias, poor pacing, bizarre contrivances, and so on. Just like Jugdral and Tellius, Fates trips over its inability to invest itself for as long and as thoroughly as needed to suit its own concept, and that’s a much deeper problem than face touching or microwave child soldiers.
But it tries, which continues to be my biggest takeaway from FE14. Sometimes in spite of itself, but it tries. Referring back to my ranking of the games and how FE tier lists used to be argued in the fandom, I’d have a hard time bringing Fates up a slot. It’s right under FE8, and it would be incredibly difficult to compare the ambitious mess that is this game to the well-crafted, self-contained textbook FE that is Sacred Stones. My biggest hope with regard to Three Houses is that the game tries – and succeeds – even more such that I won’t have to make that call because then I might have to ask myself why almost all of the less experimental FEs leave so little impact on me.
It should be quite obvious by now that I’m not very fond of Revelation. I’d even go so far as to say that it’s a more flawed experience overall than Conquest, and I get the impression that that’s a somewhat unpopular opinion. It’s easy to rag on Conquest’s contrivance-laden story and conversely hold up its gameplay as its sole redeeming feature, but the case against Revelation’s story depends more upon what it lacks than what it actually offers.
I think a major reason people are slower to outright condemn Revelation is that it delivers exactly what it promises. It is indeed a golden route where almost everyone is recruitable, only two playable characters die and one can’t be supported (and all of those are among the chronically under-developed group of Corrinsexual units), and the player gets to bring together both the Hoshidan and Nohrian royal families and their entourages for maximum warm fuzzy friendship moments and/or cross-cultural eugenics shenanigans. Arguably more than any other story campaign in the series it encourages taking the time to stop and grind, not through an unreasonable enemy level curve as in many grindy games but by giving you far more resources – units, items, and supports – than you’d ever have any use for in a no-grind playthrough. In a drawn out run it’s harder to notice all the narrative shortcuts and unearned emotional moments, and it’s less likely that the player will take the time and mental energy to separate what they know from Birthright and Conquest from what Revelation!Corrin has experienced. Perhaps it even makes the many tedious maps seem less so when they’re broken up with skirmishes and child paralogues and DLC.
That’s not to say that I consider Revelation to be irredeemably awful. There’s a good story buried somewhere in here if the player cares to fill in the gaps for all the underdeveloped characters (all the royals except Azura, Ryoma, Xander, and maybe Leo, everyone in Valla except possibly Arete and Mikoto, etc.) and assumes information from the other routes and relevant DLC. I sincerely believe that the route would have been greatly improved had it been allowed to be longer than the others, with extra chapters in both the pre-Valla and Valla sections of the plot to better develop the important conflicts and give major character moments time for appropriate impact. The wish fulfillment ending might be the least defensible aspect since it glosses over so much of the political situation to give your self-insert a crown, but I suppose that’s where fanwork comes in to stitch together the pieces of the three routes into a cohesive whole where almost everyone lives and puts their differences aside to create a better world that might actually make logical sense.
Revelation feels like a necessary element of Fates despite its technical status as DLC, though not in the way I was initially expecting it to be. It’s not in the worldbuilding, which generates more questions than it answers. It falls to the Hidden Truths DLC to explore the full story behind Anankos’s relationship to Mikoto and Corrin as well as the nature of Vallite magic, and the interdimensional portal tied to the skies over Hoshido and Nohr is just tension added for its own sake. Instead, what feels like the most important addition of Revelation comes back again to the route split. Corrin – and the player – are allowed to reject the clean division of the setting and pursue an alternate third route, albeit one in which the world still faces the threat of war and people still die. Golden route it might be, but there are unavoidably some characters who come off worse in Revelation than they do in either Birthright or Conquest, and the political situation at the end of the game is inferred to still be a precarious one (thanks mostly to the Leokumi moment in the last cutscene, but still). I’ve unfavorably compared Fates’s premise and setup to World of Warcraft in a few posts before, but I can definitely appreciate the idea of Revelation better when I consider that no such third option exists or is ever likely to exist in that game. In both cases the smaller conflicts over land and resources and retributive cycles of violence are going to exist regardless, but there’s a bigger force at work that can only be addressed when the two sides work together. WoW occasionally does this for specific moments in its storylines, but FE14 actively allows the player to choose to upend the board and go after the real threat.
And ultimately, your self-insert gets a kingdom and the biggest possible harem out of the deal so it’s in your best interests to be indecisive.
Next time: final thoughts on FE14 as a whole. I’m not doing a separate post on the plot-heavy DLC because I have little to say about them. Hidden Truths is mostly exposition that would have been better appearing in the main campaigns, and Heirs of Fate is just The Future Past from Awakening with less impact like everything else involving FE14′s second generation.
Chapters 20-Endgame, in which the Fire Emblem is a chainsaw.
Chapter 20 + 21
I bet this scene looks wonderfully silly if Takumi is promoted to kinshi knight.
I’m going to be combining many of the chapters in this post, because even though they take a while to play through there’s not much to them in terms of story. Of course Anthony is evil and Corrin has to kill him, although not before Anankos turns him into a Faceless (or was he one all along?). I think I would have preferred the humor of fighting him as a village with ludicrous stats over the sympathy grab they go for with him. It’s also worth pointing out that it’s the three older Nohrians who call out Corrin for trusting Anthony first, putting some of that healthy distrust they show off in Conquest to work again. I don’t like that we’re apparently meant to find Corrin’s endlessly trusting nature endearing because it’s what brought this group together and not, you know, self-insert narrative privilege, but whatever. None of FE14′s routes could go forward at certain points if Corrin didn’t occasionally grab the idiot ball, and at least this time they had the foresight to come up with a backup plan.
And I am actually glad that they did so with Anthony, because while Chapter 20 is more standard Valla fare the trap they fall into in 21 comes with a clever premise that’s fun to play around. I dislike how the chapters continue to be loaded down with entirely too many drops and chests as I mentioned last time, but I find that as long as you plot out routes for your units before you start the size of these maps isn’t a problem.
One final question, since I didn’t bring it up in Birthright: why is the S rank naginata, which is obtained in Chapter 20 in Revelation, called a Waterwheel? Just…why? I have never found an explanation for this.
Chapter 22 + 23
Well of course she has, just look at those growths.
I find Arete intriguing as a character, though not so much either version that appears on screen – the brainwashed servant of Anankos or the sentimental dying mother – but rather the idea of her as she existed against the backdrop of the volatile Nohrian court. That element of her has to pieced together from inferences and bits of information in supports, but it’s clearly there. I fully understand why Revelation includes characters like Arete and Anthony. They have to convey over only a few chapters the nature of Anankos’s rule over Valla and its dominated subjects as well as make for credible threats to Corrin as they trek through the kingdom. This is the main reason why Arete’s real characterization is, much like Garon’s, extremely minimal, because the pain it inflicts on Azura is meant to demonstrate how Anankos operates. It’s a natural lead-in to the antagonists inside Gyges, certainly.
Kind of a shame though that the most lasting impression Arete leaves on the player is that of a boss who just will not give up, seeing as you have to fight her three times. I can’t think of another antagonist in the series who’s fought so often over such a short span of chapters. What’s worse, neither of these maps is very engaging; the first borrows the forest-burning Dragon Veins from Midori’s paralogue without the gimmick of chasing down the boss, while the second demonstrates something everyone already knew, that turn-based platforming is not fun. Scarlet’s return as an enemy leaves no impact unless Corrin or Ryoma fights her, so that’s not working too well either.
Chapter 24 + 25
Chapter 24’s gimmick may not be original, but an optional stealth mission works substantially better here than it does in Path of Radiance’s earlygame since Revelation is already well-established at this point as being one long experiment with gimmicks. I also like how the door mechanic plays into Corrin’s desire to trust Mikoto – and that the last door rewards players willing to go against the desperately trusting personality of their self-insert. Plus, it’s not a complete cheat; one of the first things Mikoto tells Corrin in the chapter is the blue doors are the correct ones, so her contradiction at the ends rings false even on the level of a simple puzzle. For what it’s worth mentioning I never bother with the stealth option here just as I don’t in FE9, because it’s tedious and requires a very specific setup and execution for a reward that’s not really worth it.
I find Mikoto difficult to engage with on an emotional level however, for much the same reason that her death didn’t resonate very strongly with me. It helps this time that all of the Hoshidan royals verbally react to seeing her again, but for Corrin this feels like a less substantial meeting than Azura’s reunion with Arete. Azura and the Hoshidans have memories of these women and the positive influence they played in their lives, whereas Corrin has, what, a few days’ worth of interactions with their mother and some very hazy memories from before their capture? I do like how Mikoto reveals at the end that Corrin is Vallite royalty, not because it adds even more to the super special Avatar status or because it establishes that Corrin and Azura are cousins (surprise sort-of incest, yay!) but because it re-contextualizes their place in the world both connected to and apart from the other royal families. It does absolutely do those two other things and is rather awkward on that basis, of course, but Vallite Corirn is able to comfortably exist in between their two families while still having a place to call their own. A ruined, empty place, but that’s for the epilogue.
At first I was planning on doing Chapter 25 as a separate entry, but then I played through it and realized that it’s just more moving platforms and hard enemies with another family reunion boss that’s nowhere near as emotionally affecting as the previous two. We see nothing of Sumeragi prior to this chapter aside from his brief death scene flashback, and unlike Arete his role as a parental figure overlaps significantly with someone else’s. I don’t get a strong sense of how important this reunion is to anyone except maybe Ryoma, and half of that comes from remembering their one-on-one back in Chapter 5. Come to think of it, the disguised Sumeragi has that quick cameo on the Birthright ship map, right? I suppose that’s technically the only appearance of anything from Valla on that route, although in retrospect it’s even more random for him to have shown up there. So, yeah, harder chapter, but can’t really compare to what came just before as a story moment.
Chapter 26
Betrayed by a Jagen! Who’d have thought we’d ever see the day…unless you consider Orson in FE8 a Jagen, that is.
As big twists in FE go Gunter’s doesn’t quite measure up to some others, like the Belhalla barbecue or Nasir in FE9, but it took me some thinking to properly parse out why this isn’t as effective a climactic reveal despite adequate use of foreshadowing and setting. It actually ties into one of the overall problems I have with Revelation and another time it compares unfavorably to Radiant Dawn (and I’m sorry to keep bringing it up if you hate FE10 or haven’t played it, but the parallels really are apt). One of the biggest genuine criticisms of that game’s plot, particularly near the end, is that the story gets too big for itself and spends all of its final chapters throwing at the player numerous major reveals about the plot and setting, many of them not directly related to each other and only immediately involving some dozen or so of a cast of playable and/or named characters about ten times that size. Like Revelation the pacing is utterly frantic, and moreover it gives the player the impression that in order to understand the Tellius setting as a whole and what themes the developers of that duology were aiming for you have to be intimately familiar with the content of Radiant Dawn’s endgame specifically, which…yeah, you kind of do. How that could have been better handled would be a subject for another post, but suffice it to say that the apparent conclusion that Sephiran did every bad thing (except racism) ever in Tellius as a means of tying everything together rings hollow even in-universe.
The narrative approach of the Valla chapters is similar, but most of its big moments are clearly aiming to be character-driven, fueled by the relationships between the royals and their loved ones forced into fighting them. As I brought up earlier in this post however not many of those moments land because of another major problem Revelation shares with Radiant Dawn, that there’s been almost no time to develop any of those relationships with the plot moving at such a speed. You’d have to have seen Gunter’s supports – which aren’t even accessible on this route – to be able to appreciate at all his history with Corrin, since from the story text of Revelation and Conquest too for that matter there’s little to suggest anything beyond a straightforward master-servant relationship until the very moment when Corrin is pleading with Gunter to resist Anankos’s possession. Without that context the most relatable emotional moment of this chapter comes from Ryoma’s anger at learning the identity of Scarlet’s murderer, which we’re clearly not meant to dwell on much because that might imply Ryoma is capable of holding a grudge. It doesn’t help either that Gunter’s genuine hatred of Garon gets muddied by the Anankos possession angle, something that didn’t come into play until years after he began grooming Corrin as an instrument of his revenge. At least Takumi didn’t go off the deep end until after being possessed.
As for the chapter…ugh, I’m just so tired of this route. Mikoto’s ward actively discourages you from splitting up your forces to go after the absurd number of chests that line this map, and this late in the game there’s almost no reason not to just rush Gunter. Funny that’s he’s pretty underwhelming for an endgame boss – that’s a Jagen for you.
Chapter 27 + Endgame
A question I’ve never seen anyone else ask before: why is Anankos wearing a Buddha mask anyway? It’s apparently just a wall fixture in the castle that he’s hiding behind, and while I get that they wanted to conceal his true size and cosmic horror features for Endgame in the fashion of JRPG bosses with multiple phases the mask is entirely unexplained. Is it meant to be ironic that a dragon styling himself as a god is wearing the face of the major figure of a religion/philosophy with no deities?
I will say that the mechanics of the final battle match the concept of Revelation perfectly. You’re strongly encouraged to split up your forces into three groups to attack all of Anankos’s weak points quickly, which matches up well with the route’s theme of Corrin (and Azura) + Hoshido + Nohr. It’s also not one of those final bosses that’s easier than what came immediately before, so additional kudos for that. Also, Garon’s death on this route is mercifully swift, ripe for even more trauma for the Nohrian royals that no one’s got any time to dwell on.
Aside from those remarks…bleh. The story may conclude faster thanks to lacking the near-death sequences of Birthright and Conquest, but that pace just pushes forward to the very end with Corrin being crowned ruler of a kingdom with no people…except Hoshido and Nohr both cede territory to Valla so that they can have some citizens, because that’s reasonable and won’t cause any confusion or hard feelings. I even took the trouble to S rank Azura, believing incorrectly that it would in some way be reflected in the ending as the only instance of supports in Fates affecting the main plot. Nope, Azura still rejects the rule of Valla and passes it off to her husband as if nothing were different. Then everyone hugs and it’s a little bit gay and the series main theme plays and oh God I’m just glad this route is over. But hey, a chainsaw Fire Emblem is bizarrely badass if you’re into that kind of thing.
PS: Chapter 10 is still The Worst.
Next time: ending and final thoughts on Revelation
agoddamn said
yeah, artbook says touma was conceived of as a “middle” kingdom between east and west, and so they based it off silk road civilization thru india and china (loulan, xian mei, longtao, etc). i will never get over the greek thing since you LITERALLY FIGHT A GIANT BUDDHA HEAD
I think of it more as an addition to what was already there than a total change. The Buddha head and Central Asian architecture is still there after all, and then there’s stuff like Azura’s vaguely Arabic dance style. In any case, Anankos’s Japanese name is Hydra, so you could make the argument that Greece was already a mild influence before localization. As for Arete, I prefer that her localized name is Greek-derived rather than Chinese-derived as originally, as between her and Mikoto she leans more toward Nohr. All in all as Greece (and Scandinavia, assuming Valla is meant to be a corruption of Valhalla) also belong to the extremely broad geographic region between Western Europe and Japan the localization preserves the sense of a middle kingdom if not all the specifics.
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.
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.
imoooo its so stupit that the same ppl who complain abt the incest in genealogy which is, yknow, treated as taboo and terrible. are like “uwu my azurrin babies” and try to justify it by saying it doesnt count as incest bc it was a plot twist. like no. you’re just a hypocrite and don’t like games with good writing. genealogy has flaws, its a 20some year old game, but fates was poorly written and fanservicey and catered to incest fetishists lol and suckers like you still try to defend the plot as anything other than a cash grab off awakening’s success. lolz.
While I agree that there’s a lot of unnecessary hostilities between the different subsections of fandom and that criticisms of the games can be made in bad faith from preexisting biases against those groups (i.e. that Awakening and Fates represent newbies/casuals or that Genealogy, Blazing Sword, and/or the Tellius games are the ones most often exalted by older fans/elitists), the idea that Genealogy has a morally stronger position against incest than Fates or any other game for that matter is fundamentally flawed.
Sure, Arvis/Deirdre is explicitly a plot of the main antagonist…but of the numerous instances of unambiguous incestuous feeling in the Jugdral games this the only one condemned by the text, and arguably it’s more because Manfroy kidnapped and brainwashed Deirdre to make it happen than because he set her up to marry and sleep with her half-brother. The children of this pairing are practically demigods, and for Julius at least it is acknowledged in-game to be so because he is the product of incest. Then there’s Lachesis, whose powerful attachment to her brother is presented as a star-crossed love that can potentially get “fulfilled” if the player chooses to pair up Lachesis’s daughter and Eldigan’s son, who are fully aware of their parents’ unconventional attraction and lean into the implication in one of their conversations. That’s not even touching upon the other instances of potential incest the game allows for, among them an uncle and niece (Shannan/Larcei), two pairs of first cousins who could also be considered genetic half-siblings as their mothers are identical twins (Lester/Patty and Febail/Lana), two Gen 1 pairs ambiguously related through common holy blood (Ayra/Chulainn and Claud/Silvia), and possibly others depending in Gen 2 depending on who gets paired up in Gen 1 (ex. Lex!Larcei with Iuchar or Iucharba is another set of first cousins). The game does nothing to discourage any of these and could even be said to support these potential pairings as all of them have lover conversations, something that quite a few pairings in this game lack.
Overall I would say that FE4 takes a morally neutral stance against consensual incest, something that could be said for Fire Emblem as a whole and that crops up in smaller concentrations in most games. Fates may have a host of writing problems – I’m going over them again myself in a series I’m working through at the moment – but its stance on incest is entirely consistent with the rest of the series, from Lachesis’s tragic love to Priscilla’s clingy attachment to Raven to the twincest rumors of FE8 (freshly rekindled by Heroes, incidentally) to the bara bandit brothers in Awakening especially to, yes, Corrin’s ability to bone a whole host of people who are their siblings after a fashion. On that note though I do have to remark that Azurrin is not where you’ll find FE14′s incest fetishism. They’re only cousins – not considered incestuous in many cultures, including in Japan apparently since both Awakening and Fates include cousin pairings that are romantic in Japanese but clumsily censored to be platonic in localization – and are only revealed as such near the very end of what will probably be the last route the player experiences. It’s not something the story or their support dwell on either. No, the real incest fetishism comes from pairing Corrin with any of the Hoshidan or Nohrian royals, each of which plays up that angle for the benefit of those who are into that sort of thing.
And, for my part, I don’t consider that a problem. I’ve engaged in incest roleplay in my own sex life, and I don’t see anything morally objectionable about exploring the subject in fiction either. For better or worse incest is a recurring motif (or running gag, if you will) of Fire Emblem, and while we can speculate endlessly as to just why the series repeatedly feels the urge to go there it is something that fans either have to square with and accept or attempt to ignore. The individual games can be freely picked apart for their ethical and representational missteps – and old and new alike they all misstep in their own ways – but I would be very much surprised if there were ever an FE that took an all-around definitive stance against incest. Would it even really be FE then?
The popular consensus among FE elitists – a group to which I theoretically belong as my experience with the series predates Awakening – is that Conquest is the only truly salvageable part of Fates solely on account of its difficulty. As I also happen to be a filthy casual who will shamelessly abuse Phoenix Mode and the grinding DLCs if I’m really in the mood I naturally do not agree with this assessment, or at least I don’t put anywhere near that much stock in the challenge that Conquest provides. I am then left with an important question – appeal to older games’ less forgiving difficulty aside, does Conquest live up (down?) to its reputation as hot garbage?
For starters I don’t care for the base assumption that Birthright has all the good story moments and Conquest has all the good gameplay moments. There are several maps on both routes that I find more engaging in Birthright than in Conquest, such as Izumo and the opera house. Conversely, there are moments when Conquest’s story covers similar territory to Birthright’s but does so in a more satisfying way, from Takumi’s arc to each route’s fight against shapeshifters to their endgames.
It would perhaps be most accurate to say that Conquest’s failure as a story stems less from individual moments like those and more from the disconnect between the story it’s trying to tell and the story fans were expecting based on promotional material and Nohr’s overall aesthetic. This is not a villain campaign, and Corrin’s inability to genuinely commit to Garon’s goals of scorched earth imperialism throw that fact repeatedly in the player’s face. Rather, this is the unsettling tale of a family of abuse victims learning to push back against their upbringing – while being to a point complicit in their abuser’s horrible actions. It’s not an easy story to experience in those terms; you’re practically required to like and sympathize with the Nohrian royals in order to make it work, not to mention accept a narrative starring a (potential) self-insert who receives remarkably little agency in directing the course of the plot. I can’t really say that there’s anything else quite like it in Fire Emblem, which may be another reason fans are quick to dismiss the story outright. It’s neither the series standard plot enacted in Birthright nor is it the hybrid of Awakening’s basic ethos and Radiant Dawn’s grandiose plotting that comprises Revelation. At best I can maybe draw a comparison between Conquest and Thracia, which also casts a degree of moral greyness on its main characters and takes several of the major plot motions out of the hands of its protagonist. That’s still a stretch however, and at the end of the day Conquest alone among the routes of Fates is best understood on its own – a flop, albeit an ambitious flop.
I don’t mean to excuse the genuine instances of lazy plotting, questionable worldbuilding, and bias in favor of this route’s enemy nation. Those are all present in Conquest and do indeed bring down the experience, but it’s far from the only story in the series to suffer from those same problems. It’s not great or even good writing, but thanks to Fates’s split story structure it can lean on the other two routes to help fill in the gaps and come out to be – in my opinion at least – just about serviceable for the purposes of this unconventional tale of pacifistic conquest, learned helplessness, and miscast antagonism. As I’ve expressed before when talking about story in FE, ambition counts a lot for me regardless of execution, and Conquest may be the single best example of that in the series thus far.
Next time: a week or so off, then Revelation Chapter 6-12
Gascon-en-exil: Gallophilic Cultural Posturing 