Best all recruit student route. (No paid DLC)

[drattakbowser]

For me : 

- Azure Moon for all paralogue , Crest relic, Sacred weapon and their battaillons.

- Silver Snow for paired ending (28 character, 14 men (Byleth count) and 14 women). Can make 14 paired ending.

[Fire Emblem Fan]

Azure Moon or Silver Snow. You get the most paralogues in AM, if I remember right, and SS feels "natural" for everyone to me.

[Azure the Scale Tipper]

Azure Moon gets you all the paralogues and the original Heroes Relics. So it’s the best from a gameplay standpoint.

On the other hand, Silver Snow has the symmetry of the paired endings on display, and everyone at least has a small reason to be in the path. It’s the baseline of making sense. With no specific banner other than the Church of Seiros and Byleth, I think that’s mostly a good justification.

[Crysta]

Gameplay = AM

Storywise = SS feels like the most realistic "I'm here just because I like senpai" route

Mind you the only 'recruit everyone' route I've done is HM VW, but it didn't really feel natural. Personally I'm becoming more and more of a fan of recruiting no one outside of the core house tbh, but that's kind of due to simply wanting to explore those characters more instead of forming the most optimal team.

I do believe the everyone belongs in their starting House more than anywhere else, though.

Edited August 14, 2020 by Crysta

[Dark Holy Elf]

I'll go with the crowd, I suppose, and say either AM or SS.

AM is the only path where you can recruit 21 of the 24 students (the other routes miss two lords and two retainers), as well as Gilbert. I don't personally care about number of paired endings but on AM it's possible to have 15 instead of 14.

As for SS... well. One of the strengths of Three Houses is that it shows you the cost of war by making a number of people that you kill people you already know and like, i.e. your students. In my opinion, doing an all-recruitment run dilutes this message by replacing them with faceless nobodies (even though those faceless enemy soldiers still have families and friends, hopes and dreams and favourite types of tea, we don't know them, so it feels far less visceral). Silver Snow already lacks this at base, though (to its detriment, IMO), so recruiting more people doesn't take away from it... in fact it's entirely impossible to influence who appears as enemies in SS (you always fight Ashe, Lorenz, Hubert, and Edelgard).

Edited August 15, 2020 by Dark Holy Elf

[Shadow Mir]

Crimson Flower or Silver Snow for being able to bypass the most aggravating recruitments, namely Ferdinand and Caspar.