3DS FE Fates: Revelation, starring you! Episode 15: Fear and Loathing in Late Valla

[lordofthekevins]

Previous Episodes:
1: Prologue to Corrintastrophe
2: The Clone Wars Begin
3: Corrin's Mystery Dungeon
4: Big Trouble in Little Birthright
5: In Search Of Plot
6: God Help Us
7: The Lunatic Proposal
8: Surf N' Turf
9: The Odd Couple(s)
10: I'll have to give myself a Prrrrrrromotion!
11: The Final(s) Week
12: People Die When They Are Killed
13: Floating islands, Stimulus checks, and ArmorMyrm shipping
14: Tricky Tony's Minigame Madness

The Year is 2015.
Awakening has sold gangbusters.
Paper Mario Sticker Star has crashed and burned.
Somehow, both games are getting a sequel.
Fire Emblem Fates is that sequel. With more involved mechanics, map exclusive mechanics, removed cheese, refined difficulty, Bad Writing, and 3 whole games of content; almost double the number of total chapters, Fates is-

Broadly considered one of the most widely disliked FE games.

For reasons that are not unwarranted, yes, but come along with me and you'll understand that this game has more to offer to a dedicated player than a casual fan, paradoxically. For all of the beamoaning how the series was now "Too anime" and "Infested By CASUALS", Fates arguably gives the real Hard Mode Gaming fans what they want over the 3ds noobs, to an extent only somewhat matched by future entries. Fates is a game of experimentation, vastly increasing the scope of combat by including more moving variables from combat to combat, more control over how units grow and change class, and also Gay Marriage!

But Kevins, what does this have to do with *Me????*​

---

Streetpass! Fates has an integrated streetpass system for distributing your customizable main character Corrin (You're probably familiar with them as the girl from smash bros with her feet out a chainsaw sword, but corrin is a lot more than that. Corrins can be deployed in all missions, and despite not having support conversations, they are fully featured insofar as having the exact stats and growths as the genuine article. Now, while streetpass and the Suprisingly Robust Online System have been down for some time now, through the power of hacking we can add and modify these Corrin Clones into the game, fully customizable in terms of giving them an appearance, a Pokemon-Nature esque Boon/Bane, and just about any class in the game and custom skill sets to make up for their lack of post-generation reclassing

Using the below google form, you can, without ever having had even played the game, or really understanding a ton about it, give me a corrin to use in my playthrough!
https://docs.google.com/forms/d/1sEJyHNjt909XaAd4pA7ndXIXbAHKv4qQmqbNYcTdlOE/viewform

EXCEPT IT DOESNT REALLY MATTER ANYMORE GRAAAAAAAAAAH​

However, all corrins must know that they're fighting for their lives. in this Playthrough of Revelation Hard/Classic, permadeath is ENABLED. Your corrins CAN and perhaps WILL die. I, personally, have never played through Rev before in its entirety despite owning all 3 routes since launch, and although since I'm playing on the middle difficulty and have a lot of experience with the game's mechanics, I do NOT know the finer points about the back half of Rev.


CHAPTER 22:

Oh my dear great scott! its a beautiful woman!

You join Yousef Throuple?!

what

Please excuse my very bisexual clones. We seek the king of Valla, anankos

yeah you would wouldn't you gayboy

mom please stop being weird

azura's mom please keep being weird its very funny. Evil witches and mystics of forbidden arts rule. please join the good guy server we have legendary swords and naizou will take care of us if we get too high

Yousef Smoke Point!

*beebitty beep boop* heyyyyy Arete sweety. are you at the woods yet mikky wants to tell you to pick up fish and peaches for the dining hall we're all out.

Evil dad! You're in leauge with the vallites?!

no i don't really work for them im just in their groupchat. Kamui boy please become evil our gc is way cooler than the hero gc

yeah honestly kamui you should go full silentdragon mode it'd be funny.I was here to tempt you into betraying your gay little mortal family with promises of great magic but tbh just having you in our discord would be chill too

What? no... this cannot be... my Clone Snapchat Group is too peak.. I can't simply abandon any of my clones![or family!]

fineeee. whatever

ok lol bye kamui have fun in the evil woods that kill you. My evil ex wife will have to kill you now lol. *Beep de boop*


. so is that a yes or a no on the throuple thing

I need to get the fuck out of this forest right now

Ryoma sums up what we were all thinking: We need arete defeated to continue. let's get right to it

this map will be short. These great masters have just enough HP and mixed defenses to not go down to one round of combat most of the time, although korny has the skills to pay the bills

This map has a gimmick about burning down chunks of trees with the dragon veins to make our way to more enemies and chests. all the chests have pretty mid loot and we don't really require going out of our way for more experience so we're going to mostly just beeline to the end, which is a lot faster and easier

another astra for the road she's been getting a lot of these recently

naizou was attacked by an extra enemy than I expected, but his good HP meant that he wouldn't die. thanks Naizou!

 

[lordofthekevins]

Luna gets the best hitrates of her entire life

Womp has enough numbers to just one shot this sage

Honestly we can just run directly to the boss. all the enemies are trapped behind impassable trees so we can ignore them. none of the loot is any good

Right justified yousef crit, uncommon

Kamui does damage to an enemy with a rend heaven crit he had zero displayed against

we are literally at the boss already. Olev can't quite get the kill so lets make this simple

I cast spell of bones become hollow

There we go

We are, in fact, stronger than we were in chapter 7

Yousef seize point

in the aftermath, kamui drops a hot semicolon. how well read!

anyway thats enough of that

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CHAPTER 23: WHAT WAS I TALKING ABOUT AGAIN?

All alone, at that

i dont know who that is

bisexual woman
ah I get it

this phrasing is so funny not even kamui gaf about the vallite threat

well, this level has a lot of floating platforms that move. thats cool and all, some elevator action. have you ever played elevator action? its a neat little arcade game. you ever played elevator action returns? it has a really cool mid 90's artstyle

but anyway, our whole team is just kind of moving forward hitting things

I feel like this kind of move forward and attack gameplay works best when the combat mechanics are more granular, something like Devil Survivor

Honestly, Devil Survivor is a really interesting game. I really like its aesthetic the art style I think is really good, the same artist did a whole bunch of work on Digimon, but really the thing that sells it to me is the gameplay mechanics, where it's a very slow paced somewhat methodical kind of battle system with a big emphasis on unit management.

Theres a big focus on creating specialized teams of units to move around and take out high value targets. a whole bunch of work doing the Fusion system to get the right abilities that you want on each guy that kind of thing. The plot is also really compelling too, the whole angle is that people are locked down in tokyo during a demon invasion and the more low to the ground MegaTen story keeps things engaging

it also doesnt hurt that the soundtrack kinda whips

I feel like a lot of megaten games have an issue where their Route Splits are just kinda... dull. Like strange journey and SMT4 really suffer from this in my eyes. The order route is pretty much just God destroying all free will forever and chaos route is just demons killing all human beings forever. devil survivor gets around this by keeping the alignments focused on human party members more than like, the actual God and Satan.

Post automatically merged: Aug 8, 2025

personally, if you ask me, DeSuv has my personal favorite chaos route. it's very easy for the games to feel like the neutral route is the only ending that concludes the story in a way that at all aligns with the tone of the story up to the route split, but even then tends to end up being the least interesting. "All demons and magic go away forever" is rarely an interesting way to end a story about how demons and magic effect people

SMT5, a game i'm not exctly fond of, does something I like though. the neutral ending has an Even Neutraller ending you have to fight an extra boss to get to, but I took the law ending in that game and it was okay I guess. better than the chaos ending at least which is basically just "everything is fucked forever". TBH Abdiel and Tsukiyomi were more compelling alignment reps than the actual human characters. But overall the alignment endings, to me at least, are far more interesting than the neutral one overall because I like the idea that how things turn out is a bit tragic. the conflict is what makes it

Somewhat related to which, I can't help but feel like the plot of Rev is just, so,..... insipid, in a way that BR and CQ aren't. Like don't get me wrong BR is really boring and has no forward momentum and CQ is maybe the most arbitrary thing ever written but rev is a complete nothing burger

Post automatically merged: Aug 8, 2025

We started in a neat place: corrin is kind of arbitrarily an outlaw and wanderer with a small crew. that's cool, it gives us a very different start from where we were before- the openings of the 2 main routes give us a dedicated team we're on, some friends in high places, and while CQ puts us on more of a back foot with a crew of allies who show up on the down low, BR gives us a whole backing of an army starting out. The gameplay supports the tone... but like, this doesn't make for compelling gameplay when your starting team is small and grows slowly, with a bunch of units backloaded as you get all the Royals and their individual goons

The fact that your earlygame team is just Birthright + Gunter makes it far less interesting too. The nohrian party members all show up so late and are all so dogshit. they all have precisely the same stats basically or less on the level timescale, and also theyre all so underleveled? I swear to god its like nintendo wanted them to rush this entire route out as shitty DLC. i wouldn't at all be suprised if making 3 whole campaigns was too much time and effort for them to make on a 3ds budget and they really just couldn't refine any of the crappy rev maps or the nonexistant plot

It really does feel like Rev is just kind of the lowest common denominator """Golden Route"""" where there's zero meaningful conflict at all so its by definition the ending that makes the most people happy.

I remember back when people were bitching about how you had to pay for the DLC to get the "good" ending... which is dumb. the other story routes arent lesser because they include conflict or are unsatisfactory in nature, they have Conflict between Characters in them! something rev doesnt have. If your definition of a good ending is one where every party member in the entire game is bouncing on corrins dick for how cool and awesome and virtuous he is youre ngmi.

Post automatically merged: Aug 8, 2025

it ends up being that rev's entire plot is just a series of weak forced moments where all the main characters of br and cq have to yeild to how smart and correct corrin is for his wimpy centrist takes and then all join his ever growing posse.


But like, it didn't have to be like this? I think that fates' overall tone is less Hard Worldbuilding and Countries and shit and a lot more like, fairytale fantasy in nature. its very Storylike in how it conducts itself, with big, expressive characters who drop more complicated backstories for the sake of simplicity. This isn't a bad thing, but it ends up making you ask: what, precisely is fates About?

I think the simplest idea is conflict between family. What I'm pretty sure they were going for in Rev is the idea that Corrin can transcent conflict to unite people by virtue of his family, not nescessarily inherently just because he belongs to 2 families, but because of the kind of person he is.

Post automatically merged: Aug 8, 2025

but then like, the entire existance of the vallites just makes everything so literal. the reason corrin recruits everyone isn't because of the content of his character or the bonds hes' made along the way, its because azura has arbitrarily decided to tell him the exitance of the games actual final boss. it undercuts everything.

and then like what do they do once the entire gang is all together at last? they worry about scarlet who doesnt matter, or anthony who doesnt matter, or this traitor plotline that doesnt matter, or ghost parents who get absolutely no juice to work with, instead of actually having them be together in the main storyline its all shoved into [bad] support conversations. sigh.


anyway that level was boring as sin. I think arete died.

 

[lordofthekevins]

CHAPTER 24: TURN BASED TACTICAL ESPIONAGE ACTION

whatever

I COULD buy a lot of broze weapons but I choose not to. But I can.

Anyway that bum kamui needs to eat his scrolls. getting him the ability to use these better weapons is will make him so much better, forged bolt naginata kinda goes hard

let's get this over with

yeah its almost like a ghost mom is gonna show up

Bling!

Kamui's awesome frosted halloween pretzel is taking up the frame but who cares we have sneaky boys to deal with

we need to sneak through this level to get to the boss. sounds easy enough

alright we move over here

alright this is still doable

it's fine it's fine it's fine

they have some pretty high defense for guys who don't know we're even here, right?

Guys I don't think theyve seen us yet

uhhhhh we need to get everyone moving so we can all be in the same place where nobody has detected us yet

Post automatically merged: Aug 17, 2025

we were good little corrins and opened the blue door. this is great.

where are we, btw?

Doesn't matter we can get the jump on these enemies before they see us

quite efficiently, at that

move move move we need to sneak harder

Kamui lets us down yet again. At least he's good at sneaking.

I was kinda drunk when I played this chapter so I had Naizou eat 2 arms scrolls so he could use waterwheel. Good for him

There is so much walking in this chapter

undetected

at least samus is doing well for herself

Ok guys its time to open the final doors

oh wow

thats a lot of guys

oh

Post automatically merged: Aug 18, 2025

fuck you lady you took my ninja

that was so long and so boring im gonna be real man none of those enemies were threatening at all until samus got jumpscared and died. sigh.

oh no we missed the. Master seal.

yeah yeah yeah my dragon dad is evil

hey has anybody noticed how we still know zero information about what Anankos like, Even is? or that he's corrin's dad? Or that corrin can turn into a dragon? This game sucks ass.

Whatever. Samus is getting replaced Right Now. Tharl is very cool and has a fun skill set but I dont think I used him a ton.

CHAPTER 25:

 

[starseeker300]

Oh my dear great scott! its a beautiful woman!

You join Yousef Throuple?!

what

Corrin No! She's Your Biological Aunt!

Spoiler: Bravely Default spoilers for the second half of the game

Honestly, Devil Survivor is a really interesting game

hard disagree, i tried it and hated it, one of the worst grindfests i ever played and also how it forces you to gamble to get better creatures. genuinely one of the worst games i have ever played.

Kamui's awesome frosted halloween pretzel is taking up the frame but who cares we have sneaky boys to deal with

Yummy pretzel

 

[lordofthekevins]

hard disagree, i tried it and hated it, one of the worst grindfests i ever played and also how it forces you to gamble to get better creatures. genuinely one of the worst games i have ever played.

well, we've stumbled upon sumeragi's gooncave. let's get this over with

one of the maps of all time honestly. we've reached the point where these level 10 promoted enemies aren't actually dangerous very much at all... but are still enough that i have to pay attention to the screen because people could still conceivably die. Sigh.

its elevator time baby

ah, a small hallway, whatever will we

SHSJSHSJHSJ

OOOOUUUGHGHGHGHGH

THIS IS IT... YOUSEFS.... FINAL.... CHOOOOOOKE!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

the point has been choked out, and these enemies had some pretty great numbers for somthing we blasted away effortlessly

up top the rest of the squad had a little more trouble with the reinforcements but nothing we couldn't handle

30 turns later we get everybody we need to down to the second part of the area (this was extremtly truncated)

luring out the enemies here is a pain because they don't quite work how you want

finally

sure you were big bro

Post automatically merged: Yesterday at 5:37 PM

that was maybe the most truncated level of the entire LP. Sumeragi isn't even fun to make jokes about.


NEXT TIME ON CORRINS: the final chapter(s), and the Final Episode