My Revelation Review Part 3: The Gameplay

          One of the most frequent criticisms of this game is its gimmicky map design. While I agree with the fact that there are WAY too many gimmicks in this game I don’t think that this criticism adequately explains the problem here. The problem with Revelations isn’t from the presence of gimmicks, the problem here is that the gimmicks often make the game less strategic, not more. Most of the time the gimmicks force people to play slowly, or they have zero impact on the strategy of the maps themselves. To the game’s credit I do think it has some of the best Dragon’s Vein implementations in the series. Well, actually only 2 levels can claim this title, but that’s two more than what Birthright can say and personally I only find one of Conquest’s Dragon Vein uses to actually be well executed. Here are some of my observations about these levels:

• Chapter 7: Lousy Fog of War! Fog of War does not help the strategy of a level. It just forces the player to play really slowly. It also gives the AI an unfair advantage. At least in this level the enemies don’t act until you’ve spotted them. The warp tiles suck and do nothing to add to the strategy here. Why on earth were they created in the first place?

• Chapter 8: Hey look, it’s the Fort Jinya map rehash of Birthright Chapter 7. Yawn. The only difference here is that you start from a different position. This level is just as boring as it was in Birthright.

• Chapter 9: The notorious Wind Chapter from Conquest all over again. My problem with the Wind Chapter in both games is how extremely unintuitive it is. If you haven’t figured the map out it’ll wreck you and cause a restart. If you have figured it out then the entire chapter is a complete joke. All you have to do is go the the bottom right corner and wait until the wind column moves you forward. You can rinse and repeat until your entire army is breathing down Fuga’s neck. I should also point out how ridiculous it is that there’s no possible way to avoid the wind gimmick. It dominates the entire strategy of the map. I also find the Dragon’s Vein here to be too poorly executed to be useable. I always avoid using it and so far it’s worked out really great for me.

                     Fuga’s avoid is ridiculous even on Normal mode. My entire army usually had a hit rate between 40 - 59 % when fighting him. Good thing that’s basically a guaranteed hit with this stupid RNG because otherwise I wouldn’t be able to hit him. These games have given me the belief that a boss whose avoid is so high that your army can’t consistently hit him is a really bad design choice as it makes the game more luck reliant than it needs to be.

• Chapter 10: Holy crap! This ice gimmick is one of the dumbest gimmicks in the freaking game. It serves as the functional equivalent of Fog of War except it’s worse because it forces the player to play REALLY SLOWLY! Ronaldo also pointed out that this level causes Corrin to snowball really fast. By the end of this level my Corrin was at Level 18. Yeah, this is too early for Corrin’s level to be that high. This level also has a ridiculous amount of easy stat boosters that fall into the player’s lap. I got one stat-booster for every stat plus an Arms Scroll just from this level alone. That’s really bad design. You never want to give the player everything all at once. You’re supposed to sprinkle it over the course of several levels and make the player earn them by doing difficult things.

• Chapter 11: Another rehashed map from Birthright. I believe this is the map in Birthright where Takumi joins the player. Once again this map is just as boring and poorly designed as it was in Birthright.

• Chapter 12: Another poorly designed ship level, just like Chapter 12 of Path of Radiance and the Ghost Ship from Sacred Stones. This level forces you to wait before being allowed to use a Dragon’s Vein that lets you actually move from one ship to another. In the meantime you’re stuck fending off enemy units who are allowed to move towards your ship and attack you. The bottom half of this map is wasted, empty space. It’s the top half where the boss is that’s relevant. This map screams “Break me with a flier”.

• Chapter 13: The idea of being able to move debris around to keep enemies from attacking you is an interesting idea but it’s completely unnecessary to beating the level. Once again here lies another chapter that screams “Break me with a flier”.

• Chapter 14: Yipee! Another flipping map rehash! This is a more poorly designed version of Conquest’s Level 10 chapter (this is the infamous defense chapter in Conquest that so many people happen to love). Yawn.

• Chapter 15: And here is this game’s version of the Rainbow Sage level that all three games have to have apparently. This level doesn’t add anything new or interesting to the “Rainbow Sage” levels that came before it. Boring!

• Chapter 16 - 17: Why are we not allowed to save between these levels? I don’t get it. What makes these levels so special? Chapter 16’s Dragon Vein has no noticeable effect on the level. It’s more or a less a boring wannabe maze that adds nothing to the strategy. Chapter 17 has forts and no interesting terrain at all. Chapter 17 is the kind of level that I’d expect in Birthright.

• Chapter 18: Okay this level was freaking cool. Forcing the player to move in multiple directions and activate different Dragon Veins in order to break down the statue in the middle has got to be one of the best executions of Dragon’s Vein in the 3 Fates games. This might just be one of my favorite levels in the series as well. Good job Revelation. God job indeed.

• Chapter 19: Oh yeah, it’s the rehash of the “clone” level in Conquest. Actually, I kind of like this one. It’s almost as well designed as the Conquest version. Of the rehash levels I actually like this one. I do think that giving the player 20 turns to escape is being WAY too generous though. Make it more like 10 or 15 at least.

• Chapter 20: A map with large sections of nothing that only a flier can pass through. Can you say “BREAK ME WITH A FLIER” any more loudly? The Dragon Vein here is interesting enough. Being able to manipulate which bridges go where is neat enough, even if it is a little slow. Overall, not bad.

• Chapter 21: This chapter sucks. The gimmick here doesn’t add that much to the overall strategy. It either keeps the enemies already promoted or it unpromotes them thereby making them easy to defeat. It would have been a whole lot cooler if they had an effect on the player’s units. Even if you take the gimmick out of the equation there isn’t anything here except for big empty rooms. Like I said before, this chapter sucks.

• Chapter 22: Meh. Boring chapter design. There are way too many Dragon Vein and most of them are useless. Some of them let you get treasure. Whoop dee doo. Terrain seems uninteresting for the most part.

• Chapter 23: This comes across as an inferior repeat of Chapter 20. The map has large sections of nothing that again scream “BREAK ME WITH A FLIER” and this time the moving bridges come across as really annoying.

• Chapter 24: What on earth was the point of this gimmick? The game tells you which door to choose from so it’s not like there’s a legitimate strategical component to this. The terrain is also extremely uninteresting here. Then Mikoto lies to you at the end because...reasons. I opened the red door and only was slightly annoyed by the fact that everyone’s HP went down to 1. I had multiple healers heal everyone and because I use a lot of Pair Up I simply blocked the approached enemies off from getting to my weaker units. In short, it was a minor nuisance at the worst. This map sucks.

• Chapter 25: I made Ryoma kill his zombie dad. Lol. Once again we have another example of a chapter that forces the player to go in multiple directions in search of Dragon’s Vein that will break down the barrier to Sumeragi’s room. Unfortunately there’s an idiotic set of slow, moving doors that seems really luck based in terms of where they go. This forces the player to play really slowly. Overall, that gimmick destroys the strategy of what could have been an enjoyable level.

• Chapter 26: This level can be beaten in 1 turn with the proper usage of Rescue and Azura. There’s only one enemy blocking the path between the player and the boss (here it’s Gunter). This is Birthright quality of map, which basically means that it sucks really bad.

• Chapter 27:  Another chapter that can be easily beaten in 1 turn? GOOD GRIEF GAME! IT’S LIKE YOU’RE NOT EVEN TRYING ANYMORE! Like Chapter 26 that came before it, Chapter 27 is Birthright levels of stupid.

• Chapter 28: Xander missed Anankos 3 times when he had a 92, 90 and an 80 % chance of hitting him. WHAT IS THIS BULLCRAP FATES?! WHAT THE HECK IS WRONG WITH YOU GAME?! Outside of that, this level is also pretty bland. To be fair, most final levels in the series tend to be poorly designed. There’s nothing interesting or noteworthy here. Anankos is more tedious than actually difficult to defeat.

                             Other notes and observations

• The map objectives of this game were mostly Seize and Kill Boss. I think Route Enemy also existed, but it was mostly the first two. A severe lack of map objectives hurts the game. Why hasn’t I.S. figured out that more map objectives leads to a more interesting game?

• There are WAY too many map rehashes. This reeks of incredibly lazy design on the part of the developers. Did they do this just to cut down on costs? That’s the only reason that seems to make sense to me. Either way, this really irritated me.

• This game tended to give you WAY too much stuff. Stat boosters got dropped everywhere like candy and there were far more weapons and items than I ever needed. I sold a lot of stuff and ended up with over 40,000 gold at one point. Even with a bigger cast of characters you don’t need that much stuff. It’s even less satisfying when you don’t have to do anything difficult to earn these things.  

                           I’ll admit that I played on Normal mode for the sole sake of speeding this playthrough up since I knew I wasn’t going to enjoy this game (and I was right) so why bother challenging myself when I could instead just get this game over with? If someone who played on a higher difficulty could tell me how challenging the game was I’d really appreciate it.

                                  As far as unit balance is concerned I think people place WAY too much emphasis on it. No Fire Emblem game in the series is balanced. Each and every game have some elements in them that are far more dominant than others. Every game has units that are objectively superior to others by a flipping landslide. However, I do find it interesting that the games with the biggest casts of characters (i.e. The Marth Games, Radiant Dawn and this game) all tend to have crappy unit balance. I think the moral of the story here is to keep the number of characters as low as you possibly can.

                        That being said, I wasn’t really bothered by the lack of unit balance here and honestly I think this is an element of the series that people shouldn’t be so quick to point out. Another problem I have with balance as a whole is how selective people are with this criticism. They’ll bash games they don’t like into the ground for a lack of balance but then ignore balancing issues in the games that they do like even if said game has similar flaws to the game that they don’t like. I just used the royals and discarded everybody else. That’s what I did in the previous two games and that worked out for me so why wouldn’t it work out here?

                               Overall, this game has some of the worst map design in the series. Awakening, Birthright and this game are definitely in my Top 5 Games With Terrible Map Design list (if I ever made one). They’re boring overall and they usually force the player to play really slowly. They often take away from the strategy of the game and so many of them could easily be broken with a flier or a couple uses of the Rescue staff.

In this category this game gets the grade of an….

F --