Rev propaganda, nature is healing

"Unless you promote using an Ocean Seal"
Silly Dani, you can't just spread Mew under the truck style rumors of a one stage class using an item that only exists to be sold to get a super secret promotion.

I don’t mind the snow-shoveling, but mostly because I see it as a grinding map, and it’s convenient for training scrubs, I don’t know why Zola thought burying his army in snow was a good idea. But it makes feeding kills super super easy.

Also it’s funny.

I promote using an ocean seal

And for the true rev experience remember to make at least half your army ballisticians for good luck and to help with the final boss

But how am i supposed to give it a second chance when ive never played it to begin with

as a dirty casual who always plays at "hard casual" i think i fully agree, brithright felt quite braindead to me, while the other two could be quite engaging gameplay-wise depending on the situation

I never thought it was bad until I saw internet people said that it was bad. When I first was so excited to play both Nohrians and Hoshido characters in the same playthrough.

Feel like I've been seeing a massive uptick in recent months in videos of people taking Birthright seriously as a game beyond just "the easy one," going into in-depth descriptions of its mechanics and the like, so glad to see that coming to people suggesting good-faith looks at Revelation as well, much as I'm absolutely in the camp that it's the messiest of the routes. I think that the reason that the unit balance is a pain point for Rev in particular is that both Birthright and Conquest are generally very good at giving you units in a way where, even if someone gets rendered redundant by someone later on, they'll still have a chunk of the game where they shine or at the very least a reason to try them out, meanwhile Rev has so many characters come later but worse and enemies are just strong enough that you really are incentivized to just toss genuinely interesting units onto the bench. Though gigachad Hayato suddenly being one of Rev's out-the-box great units is really really funny.

Funny you mention the replica map on Rev as a fun one, because I think it's probably one of the places where the game wanting to be your third playthrough works the best - some of its maps amount to being a ramped up or somehow more complicated version of a Conquest gimmick, like how Conquest also had a map where you replicate yourself, but only Corrin, Azura, and Gunter playable for it as opposed to an entire team, or how it has a version of Conquest's wind tribe map that comes way earlier on with the wind being an even more hectic aspect of it than before. I recall actually really liking a lot of the times it placed you on a map from either base route but with some major element of it flipped. In general the maps that get recycled across the various Fates routes are genuinely fantastic at meaningfully recontextualizing what you do within them, I think.

Maybe they could have made a story like Radiant Dawn:
You go through the story of two diferent armies, one fron Nohr and another from Hoshido, each one with a diferent lord. After a few pointless skirmishes, some big evil empire swoops in and wipes them both. Then when they are nearly defeated, a mysterious third party convinces them to join forces to defeat some evil god that... Oh wait, that's what they did in Heirs of Fate

my favorite part about Revelations is how enemy Def is artificially inflated which is very effective at making sure that your earlygame scrubs will accomplish absolutely nothing and Corrin is the only unit that does damage.

Especially glaring example from Ch9, Fugas Wild Ride Rev Edition: You finally get an actual amount of units beyond your starting handful, you're ready to start doing some hecking gameplay with a real team and not just Corrin ft. Corrin's Support Bots, and what you get is the 11 Atk Kaze (maybe 12 or 13 if you got lucky in the prologue section) the 13 Atk Hana, the 14 Atk Subaki and the 13 Atk Rinkah. They are now tasked with facing 15 Def Oni Savages, 14 Def Spear Fighters (common enemy types on the map that they literally can't even damage without pairup, tonics, or a weapon upgrade they don't have the rank for) and my personal favorites, 12 Def Archers and 10 Def Ninjas. Even the Samurai have 9 Def, and everything has around 30 HP too. You have an entire team with the combined damage output of Wolt and a Corrin who soloed the last three maps and is now horribly overleveled. Fates mechanics are a lot less engaging when it's either "guard stance Corrin kills everything on the map birthright style" or "by utilizing attack stance, Hana now deals 2+1 damage instead of just 2"

and yeah you could use DLC items to turn everyone into basically promoted classes (except Rinkah unless you bring a promotion item to the map lol) but having to do that just so your earlygame squad starts to perform like actual earlygame units and not like Donnel ain't it. Rev earlygame is such a disaster and I can't bring myself to slog through it when my reward is gonna be fighting generic enemies with class skills later instead of the carefully crafted enemy formations of Conquest.

Will say though that I think there is potential in the snow shovel map if it had some sort of time constraint and came at a later point in the campaign with more units, where you'd have to weigh the risk vs reward of getting to make more progress by shoveling more snow but potentially leaving yourself open to hidden enemies with not enough remaining units to deal with them. But with what, 6 deployment slots and zero incentive to move fast, that risk/reward comes out to one snow shovel per turn.

(I'll still never forgive Rev for marketing itself as the golden route where no one has to die and then having the gall to kill off two of my three favorite characters for no reason other than shock value. yeah sure oops I guess Izana is dead now because the gods literally just felt like it. Welp, bye Scarlet, villain's just kinda there killing you with fire now. Could've taken out Peri instead but I guess I can't have anything today.)

We are becoming sail with this one

Although I always disagreed on the idea of having a paywall for the true ending, Revelations itself was always the most enjoyable fates to me. Tbf I am a bit biased for happy endings, so having both families surviving and standing together was definitely something I enjoyed. Not to mention that it gives the player more options for my castle haha

Corrin has been my favorite fictional character/kin/comfort character for a long time now, so any video that comes to the defense of my favorite FE games is always welcome!

Coming back to this video after watching your Unit REViews and it's still nice to hear someone defend Rev despite its problems

Rev is decent if not straight up good your right and should say it

Never gave it the first chance because I didn't like Fates enough to buy a dlc, and now I'd need to sail the high seas, oop

Everytime I get the idea to try Rev again for the first time in years, I get to Ch.9 and Ch.10 and just have zero motivation to keep playing. Rev's earlygame is just sooo baaaad, man.

Being Fates disliker, Revelations ended up really cementing what I both like and hated about it. Really ended up frustrating me by quite bit by the end. though really it that was mostly the writing fault more then anything else. a common problem I have with fates. but  gameplay wise it fairs a bit better mostly because even at it's worst its doing something interesting.

I never thought Revelation was a bad game. You could definitely argue that I'm biased--Fates was my first Fire Emblem, and I have a large soft spot for it to this day; the writing may be unsatisfactory, but from the gameplay standpoint, all three of the routes, Birthright included, have so much to give. I think the reclassing system is the best of any FE game to feature reclassing, as it does the best job of promoting replayability; half of a unit's reclassing options are tied to who they S-supported and A+-supported, so if you want to try other classes on them, you need to explore using multiiple different characters and pursuing multiple different support chains. Also, the only one of Rev's unique maps that I genuinely dislike is the one where you fight Sumeragi, as it is SO tedious; the rest of the gimmick maps are at least interesting.

I do not fault people for taking issue with the way the purchase of the three routes was handled, though. I think the special edition should have been made much more widely available, and, uhh, I do not fault anyone for going to the desert with a sieve to try and find an Ocean Seal. Especially with Spotpass going away soon.