Before I begin talking about the story let’s just start with the concept behind Revelation. From a conceptual standpoint I consider Revelation to be a total cop-out. The whole appeal of the premise is that the main character has to make a choice between their biological family or the family that raised them. This is advertised as a moral dilemma and a difficult choice with no easy answers. Unfortunately Revelations contradicts this premise in several ways. For starters, Revelations provides an easy answer to what should be a difficult problem.
“Oh you don’t want to choose between either family? That’s ok. You don’t have to. There’s actually a way where everyone can fight together so you don’t have to choose between either side at all! Hooray!”
Another way in which Revelation contradicts the premise of Fates is that there’s a Big, Bad Evil Villain that’s actually manipulating the strings from behind the scenes. This robs Nohr of their agency because they’re not responsible for the war, Anankos is! Revelation plays into one of the biggest cliches in the fantasy genre: There’s a Big, Bad Guy who wants to wipe out everything in existence and the good guys have to put aside their differences in order to team up against said evil force in order to save the world. Am I the only one that’s getting sick of this cliche? Even Game of Thrones, for all of its brilliant writing, falls victim to this with the White Walkers.
As if that weren’t bad enough it turns out that Corrin isn’t actually related to the Hoshido royals! With this information in mind there’s no moral dilemma because Corrin doesn’t have a valid reason to join Hoshido. The only family Corrin’s ever known is Nohr and based on how much little time is spent in Hoshido there is no time for Corrin to establish an actual relationship with the Hoshido cast. I can only imagine the reason why the game developers decided to take a dump on their own premise is because it would be rather icky for Corrin to marry his / her biological relatives so rather than not having an S rank with the Hoshido cast they decide to poop all over their premise and it stinks!
The plot of this game can separated into two distinct halves: The Recruitment Phase where Corrin is trying to unify both Hoshido and Nohr, and the Valla arc. Let’s start with the Recruitment Phase. The Recruitment Phase is repetitive and a little difficult to suspend disbelief over. Here’s how the dialogue tends to go:
- Whoever Corrin talks to: TRAITOR!
- Corrin: I’m not a traitor! I promise. There’s a bad guy that pulling all the strings!
- Whoever Corrin talks to: Nah, you’re just a traitor-face! KILL HIM!
(Corrin proceeds to beat whoever they’re talking to)
- Whoever Corrin talks to: How could you have possibly defeated me without killing any of my soldiers traitor-face?
- Corrin: I already told you, there’s a bad guy pulling all the strings?
- Whoever Corrin talks to: Who is he?
- Corrin: I can’t tell you because of stupid and contrived reasons. Just head toward Bottomless canyon at a certain time okay?
- Whoever Corrin talks to: Okay.
That’s pretty much how the first half of the game’s plot goes until you reach Valla. It’s annoying, repetitive, boring and predictable. So apparently nobody is allowed to talk about Valla without “vanishing”. This is why Corrin and Azura can’t talk about it whenever someone asks them to name the one behind the war. Personally I find this element to be a plot contrivance that’s even more ridiculous than the Blood Pacts in Radiant Dawn. It seems like it’s there to set up some fake drama because if Corrin could tell everyone that Anankos is behind everything that would make the plot too easy for our heroes. Here’s what one reviewer said about this part of the story: “The Avatar looks like a raving lunatic attempting to recruit two warring nations against a single enemy he is not allowed to even name. How he got the two sides together is mind boggling.” (Source: http://serenesforest.net/forums/index.php?showtopic=62270)
One of the biggest problems with the story in all three games is the fact that they all try to evoke pathos through extremely cheap means. All three games try to kill off characters in a pathetic attempt to “hit us in the feelz”. Unfortunately Revelation, like the previous two games, fails miserably at this. The game first tries to kill off Scarlet. I don’t understand why this is supposed to be sad. The game makes zero effort to get me to like her or to make her memorable at all. What’s so darn special about Scarlet again? The answer is nothing. I don’t even remember much about her personality at all. The game brings up her death over and over again as if this were some dramatic event that I’m supposed to care about. In order to get someone to care about a character in your story you have to spend time developing that character and giving the viewer reasons to like them. This a huge part of the appeal of Game of Thrones. The show (and especially the books) spend enough time developing the characters and exploring their motivations and backstories in order to get us attached to these characters. Then when crap hits the fan we actually care because by now we’ve gotten invested in who these characters are and what they’re all about. None of the Fates games do this AT ALL! As a result none of the dramatic moments in these games have any sort of emotional impact to them at all.
Why do they not have any sort of emotional impact? Well the guy I quoted from before does an amazing job explaining why:
“Sadly, these reunions were about as emotionally impactful as spilling a glass of milk on yourself or accidentally stepping on a snail.
The reason why these interactions fail to deliver any sort of emotional response to the audience is due to the fact that we never get to know any of these characters. We only spend five seconds with Mikoto before she is blown to bits, see Sumeragi’s backside in a cutscene, and hear about Arete once in Birthright. We don’t even know what Arete even looks like until we see her in Revelation. Clearly, the protagonists are upset about this, but we are not given any reason to feel anything other than superficial sympathy for Azura, Ryoma, Corrin, etc. In all honesty, these resurrected individuals were simply there to be bosses for their respective chapters, nothing else. There is also unintentional hilarity with their deaths. We witness the cliché “as I lay dying” scene THREE times in a row (almost) towards the end of Revelation’s campaign. How many times must we witness the avatar and the gang bent over the corpse of a reanimated parent?”
Another massive problem that I have with this game’s plot, and the other two as a whole, is the fact that there’s zero worldbuilding. We don’t even know what the name of the continent in Fates is called. We don’t really know that much about Hoshido or Nohr and what we do know is usually gleaned through supports or random conversations that can be easily missed. As a result this world does not feel like an actual world. This is a sharp contrast to what the Tellius, Jugdral and Elibe games did so well. Not only did they have multiple countries, and named continents, but they actually bothered to explain the history of these countries and why they were warring with each other. Heck, Fire Emblem 4 literally begins with a chronology of the events in its world that help shaped certain events in its story. In order to understand certain aspects of that game’s plot you have to understand its chronology. As a result, you actually felt like you were in an actual medieval fantasy world. I get no such feeling with Fates which when combined with all the other crappy elements in it there’s no reason to get invested in anything that happens.
So yeah, the plot of this game fails to emotionally impact the
player in any possible way. Since there’s no valid reason to get attached at all to the events of the story I think I can safely give the story of Revelation the grade of an:
F ---
The Characters
I’ll be brief here since there’s not much new to add. Revelation fails to provide any new or interesting material about any of these characters. If you liked them in the other games, you’ll like them here. If you didn’t like them before, this game won’t change your mind. Like the other two games that came before it, it’s the villains that suck the most in terms of characterization. Anankos’s entire motivation can be summed up with one line from Marik in Yu-Gi-Oh the Abridged Series: “I’M FLIPPING INSANE!” No really, that’s all there is to his motivation. That’s all we’re ever told about why Anankos does what he does. Considering how important Anankos is to everything in all three Fates stories that’s a really pathetic excuse. Heck, he doesn’t even work as an insane villain. He spends most of the time offscreen and most of his dialogue is abysmal. He fails at every level. Anankos is definitely one of the most poorly written villains in the series to date. I remember someone bringing up before how the most boring Big Bads of this series all tend to be huge, evil dragons that want to kill everything. Anankos sadly is just another member of this boring archetype.
So to sum it all up Revelations fails to add anything or merit or value when it comes to the characterization department. It fails to make Mikoto, Arete or Sumeragi interesting characters, it fails to explore the cast of Conquest or Birthright and the new Big Bad of this series is one of the most boring and forgettable villains to date. As far as I’m concerned this game gets the following grade for its characterization:
F
Funny how I'm the big defender of navy as a concept in Advance Wars. Because I'm going to say that Idiot Systems shot themselves in the foot with their mere story concept. WHOOPS!
ReplyDelete