Dark Deity

And here we have the first Fire Emblem game I've ever played. I mean, Dark Deity, a game I enjoyed to play through. The story is pretty acceptable for what I assume is their first game ever made. You get an idea what's going on, more things will happen, chaining into new discoveries and events. One shouldn't expect it to be of JRPG levels or compare it to the bigger names but it was fine to understand what's going on, and working onward with that. It pretty much goes from A to B for locations, not going too deep into what each place and area is about, but it's something you can work with. Each character's unique and brings something new to the growing group, a few of them not getting much of screen time or could be considered a nothingburger, but you can still get some more information about them regardless. The bond system helps with getting some more knowledge about the characters and interacting with each other, often being more casual chatting while it also offers a bit of background story about the character, and partially goes into story-related bits as well. It was fine for how it was done. The artworks and pixel graphics are pretty nicely made and look good, especially the artworks of each character's pretty. For their sprites, it's done in a way like you have each class have the same body, and then each of the character's heads is added to those to differ between them. While a bit boring, I can forgive it for what I assume was their first try in making a game. The music fits pretty well into a fantasy setting, giving it some nice atmosphere boosts and never felt annoying or bothersome to me. The game has voice acting but not for the entirety of it. You'll hear each of them saying their quotes when dealing a crit, leveling up, and having either noises or short sentences within dialogues. To me, that was a nice and added touch to the game which is more effort put into it than I could name some AAA studios put into their games ever. Highly appreciated and enjoyed by me to hear each character having a voice. There's no tutorial but you can read about those in the menu so if there's something you may not understand, you can simply read about it and aren't forced into X tutorial maps or similar things which would've bothered some people for sure. Each character has options for class advancements, allowing you to decide on those as free as you can think about. And given you have a huge roster of characters, you can freely make your teams to your heart's content, no restrictions or anything being thrown into your path. Each character has four weapons, for raw damage, higher critical chances, higher accuracy, and a mix of all three in one. So depending on enemy, you can see the numbers and decide how to approach those and what to focus on. Personally, found the raw damage the least appealing option, focusing the most on enhancing accuracy weapons for highest chances to hit enemies. Map objectives are on the rather standard levels of beating a boss, getting to point A, and so on. Nothing with depth but acceptable. The game has pretty much one stronger flaw, and that comes from the tech department, battles often being a bit wonky at times. Not always but there were maps where my controller only worked partially, needing to use the mouse for a moment to be able to get full control of the controller movement again. It can happen that you or enemies end up in position bugs, standing on a tile they shouldn't be on, or even on the same tile, not getting into a bad situation but made things a bit more difficult than needed. On one map, I can't be sure if it was intended or not but one can be on tiles outside the map objective ones to reach, getting attacked from those, unsure if it was supposed to be like that or if these tiles shouldn't be possible to move on. In two cases, I think voices were swapped in bond dialogues, the talking character being voiced by the other character instead. I honestly don't know if there are class advantages over others, feeling that a few classes also felt a bit weak against almost everything. I had a caster who could handle almost everything while my other caster only tickled enemies a bit, my hybrid healer/caster doing a better job in dealing damage. Not impossible to get through the game but some classes felt like a much better choice over other options. My tanks were pretty unbeatable in the endgame, sending them out alone to tank four or more enemies without a problem which felt a little bit too good to be true. Not a big gripe with it but the enemy variety majorly consists of the standard classes you can become yourself, rarely throwing someone unique in like for bosses etc. And not all bosses got their unique battle sprite and just looked like a common enemy in the battle animations. I've never played any Fire Emblem game yet so I can't really compare those to Dark Deity, but despite the tech and probably minor balance issues, I had a lot of fun with the game. Expecting an indie game to be on par with a series which exists for decades is something people should consider to be an insane comparison, the game being fine for what it is and being created by a smaller studio, and if you can forgive the tech issues, you'll have some hours of an enjoyable trip through a new series. I'll highly consider to get the sequel when mood for an SRPG strikes again so in short, I liked Dark Deity.