Dark Deity

A REASONABLY solid game if you’re looking for Fire Emblem adjacent content and not bad for first go from this studio. Since I want to be as honest as possible I'll be pretty in depth so skip to the TL;DR if you don't like analysis PROS: -The characters are generally quite fun. Benji is a standout, but characters like Caius, Alden, Elias, Cia, and Sloane were fun as well. The supports were quite standard but there was nothing offensive about them. -The class system is interesting and has some nice mixing and matching. Good foresight with certain promotions e.g. Benji promoting into a magic using class that can use his strength. -Combat was generally fun. There was some HP inflation going on to make the game more ‘difficult’ i.e. slower, but it didn’t bother me too much. -Combat animations and the UI for battles was inspired, I loved the test tube/mana bottle system and it was satisfying seeing all the different ways it would break/disappear upon defeating a unit. The magic animations in particular were excellent (the archer one was a bit wacky though) -Varrick as an antagonist was a breath of fresh air, he had an understandable path to villainy and a definite logic to his actions. I WISH he’d been given a bit more screen time to explore the other countries perspective instead of shoehorning Empyrean in (see the CONS section) but his side story chapter was fun. -The final chapter’s map was extremely fun. I liked the gimmicks a lot, great music. The combat was a little janky and not so balanced, but the aesthetic and ideas make up for it easily -Inclusion of Side Objectives was a good choice, regular Fire Emblem could learn from this. -Suns Out, Sword’s Out was a fun reskin, I enjoyed seeing all the different designs. CONS: -The story: This game has very much earned its title of ‘From the People Who Played Fire Emblem Three Houses’. There are so many lacklustre story beats that just don’t hit home at all e.g. Sterling’s death. The way the story is told is also very strange, things just HAPPEN and we jump from map to map with little to link them. Despite how barebones the story is I still somehow felt lost when trying to follow along what was happening or why. -So little is explained about the world/lore and what happens it feels like a fever dream at times e.g. the necromancer’s staff, everything to do with the Eternal Aspects, the Astral Realm, and that one guiding stone/the gods. It feels like a bunch of tropes were slammed together. -There’s just too many characters. This isn’t a problem unique to this game by any means, Fire Emblem also suffers from this problem. A lot who showed up were uninteresting and/or contributed nothing e.g. Aurima, Helena, Wren. Faust was a total misstep, I think the lesson has already been learned. -Special mention goes to the Villains. Empyrean is perhaps one of the most bland/uninspired greater scope villains; he barely appears, little he does is explained, motivation is non-existent and I don’t even remember the name of his underling necromancer guy. - This game has some serious bugs that I can’t believe were never addressed e.g. controls locking up, things freezing, sprites becoming desynced from their actual unit position, Sterling’s hair etc. -It feels like I have to fight the menu to get to where I want, along with some unintuitive placements for certain options. - The animations are VERY slow a lot of the time. This isn’t helped by the very big maps. Tl;dr decent game for a first outing, solid enough foundation, clear areas to improve on: 6.5/10