Radiant Dawn Part 4: The War for Humanity

Although this is technically a look at Part 4, it's not really correct to look at Part 4 on its own- it's largely a wrap up of the entire setting of Tellius, looking at the plot developments of both games and breaking down what was going on there, and who it benefitted.

So what's Part 4 really doing? The main six chapters are largely just spinning wheels plot wise- throwing Disciples of Order and Senate characters the game knows you want the catharsis of killing but which the game doesn't want to dump all in one part of the Endgame (although that would be an interesting take on the Senate fight). Perhaps having Valtome, Numida and Oliver fight separately is to keep the excitement of the battles up, because otherwise the story is largely exposition.

• Prologue: Hints about Naesala's betrayal, the Blessings on both the Disciples of Order and the allies.
• Chapter 1: More Disciples of Order paranoia fuel, Kurthnaga explaining the dragon's role in the conflict.
• Chapter 2: The nature of a world of Order, Almedha explaining how her arrangement with Ashnard came about, and the results of it.
• Chapter 3: Yune reveals she flooded the world, Lekain reveals Sanaki is a fake, the Black Knight tries to take Micaiah to safety.
  
• Chapter 4: Tormod and co re-emerge, the Senate illicitly saved Oliver's life, and Rafiel reveals how his slavery to Hetzel made him such a game-changer on the world stage.
• Chapter 5: Bastian found Renning Feraled, and captured Izuka to try and get him fixed. Izuka gets to be stopped as a result.

Endgame ramps up the dramatic nature of the reveals, but the plot itself is still largely just seeing these reveals and learning how things unravelled. This isn't necessarily a bad thing- if we didn't find out how things were set up, we'd be arguing about what did happen rather than why it happened that way. This feels like a key difference between Tellius and Fodlan, in a way- Fodlan tells a great deal of its story as window dressing to a much more active plot, which can allow some of the details to escape notice without the assistance of a fine-toothed comb.

Another key comparison to Fodlan is in its approach to politics. Tellius has the same opinions about the qualities of a good ruler as Fodlan does, and it's clear that the game expects you to understand people like Sanaki, Elincia, Edelgard and Marianne are good rulers. However, Fodlan is much more hands-on in exploring how to get this to work within its setting, offering endings that explore how the Middle Ages turned into the Renaissance, and from there offering windows into later settings. Tellius largely ignores these finer details, preferring instead to show "good rulers did good things and settled the continent into a peaceful era". This is very much in line with Fire Emblem tradition, which is something Fodlan is more interested in escaping, but it's clear that the developers had ideas way back here that weren't quite explored at the time that got a new lease in a later game.

As for how the ending of Tellius runs mechanically? Part 4 is a lot like Part 3, but with enemies in line with your demands, this is where you focus more heavily on how you hit the later levels for capping, rather than just the fact that you're well and truly outclassing the enemy and happen to be capping incidental to the process. The lack of plot leading to a lack of interesting objectives gets some people, but I find my own somehow. The Endgame itself is unleashing all your finely honed warriors on an unsuspecting cast of Disciples, before bunkering down and matching the powerful dragons and Ashera's onslaught. Again, on Normal. With Yune's help, things go a lot more smoothly, and sometimes I feel like the "Easy" difficulty moniker is applying in earnest.