Get Dark Deity on Steam ➜ https://store.steampowered.com/app/1374840/Dark_Deity/
We do a little trolling, and a little critical examination of the one-way comparisons often made in reviews of Dark Deity.
Note: When writing the script for this video earlier this month, I included Starcraft as an inspirational example for an indie developer. Starcraft was developed by Blizzard Entertainment, a subsidiary of Activision Blizzard. After development of this video’s script, this corporation became well known for harboring sexual harassers in its workplace and covering up the abuse of its female employees. This video does not contain an endorsement of Starcraft and I support all efforts to boycott Activision Blizzard, as well as the efforts of its employees to gain better working conditions.
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This is complete bullshit, i can't believe you'd spread misinformation like this, i thought you were better, xet.
Both FE and Dark Deity are Online Checkers knockoffs, how could you have missed this?
2:20 Peri hate spotted unsubbed disliked perish
Great vid, Xetetic!
Clearly what SRPGs down the line need to do is return to their roots. 2:55
Jokes aside love the video!
My problem to me is that games like Vestaria Saga and FE Romhacks like The Last Promise and Project Ember have shown you can make a better game by straight up copying Fire Emblem's good points (and in Kaga's case, expanding on it a little)
The reason I feel scammed by Dark Deity is that they marketed their games towards the core Fire Emblem fanbase and gave us a game that is somehow less engaging than Awakening on a tactical level, something I never thought I'd see within my lifetime.
I'm perfectly fine with the graphics being shoddy and with the game having 8 billion bugs but you can't just build your game on a foundation of "here's the weapon triangle and a bunch of quirky dudes, have fun in these castle corridors that go on and on" and sell it to people who play FE for the nuance.
That said, I think it's perfectly fine for a new audience to form who enjoys this kind of game, it's just definitely not for me unless they decide to make a more player phase oriented game which rewards mathematical thinking/risk taking and allows room for creativity.
This game is like Mighty No. 9 is to Megaman, while I want a game that is more like Bloodstained is to Castlevania: A labor of love which respects its core audience.
Like, you don't have to reinvent the wheel. Give us threatening enemies with predictable damage output, put some timed objectives near the end of the map, give us branched choices in recruitment/item obtaining, add reason to use your grid based system other than to reach the enemy that's on the other side.
I really liked stuff like the lil warp spell and abilities that shove and so on, just give us more of those so we can actually play around with the playground you're trying to give us.
at least dark deity's job selection is better than fire emblem
As someone who has spent an undisclosed number of hours poking around SRPG Maker to try and relieve some of the crushing ennui of dealing with the turmoil of liking parts of all of fire emblem but never actually the entire experience of any given entry into the series, this spoke to me.
Also has anyone ever used Rose or Benji? I've never seen anyone use Rose or Benji.
Raid of Iran next playthrough? Also the Xetetic lore runs deep; I see the you've adopted the growlithe that worked for SKOB.
Good insights here! I definitely feel a level of frustration with how most reviews for DD revolve around how the game resembles FE, and I found the points of comparison to be frankly reductive and inaccurate. Not to say that people who liked or disliked DD for reasons are correct or incorrect, but in my experience DD is a game that looks like FE, has FE roots in its game design, but plays differently when actually engaging foes.
In my personal opinion, because of how expansive the FE series has been, and how Dark Deity is 1) not finished and 2) still in it's infancy as a series with only one release, your analysis on Dark Deity itself gets lost because your conceit for this video revolves around a direct comparison of Fire Emblem to DD.
I think if you were to compare this to FFTactics, because FFTactics and DD treat offensive damage types against set resistances based on class/race in a somewhat similar manner, your critiques of Dark Deity would be more coherent, and the differences between the many, MANY FE games wouldn't dilute the points of contention. There's only been 3 non-mobile FFTactics releases, and it'd be easier to make a comparison, IMO.
Unrelated to this wonderful content, would you make a Project Ember Unit Review? I know for sure I would watch and share it, your video on Project Ember sent me down the rabbit hole of related content, and I'm dying to know your opinion on different units' viability in combat (including comparisons to similarly classed units), how well you feel they are written, and especially how you feel about the additional recruitable characters, and if they add to the game in a positive, meaningful fashion.
I don't think the comparison in terms of bugs is fair. There's a few things to consider when it comes to bugs, and this is true of all games as far as I'm concerned, and I'm going to go ahead and list these in order of what I consider most important to least important.
1. Are the conditions required to make the bug happen likely to happen in normal gameplay? I think this is the most important point because if the glitch is incredibly easy to stumble into by accident, anything that isn't harmless would be rather bad to have. Taking an example from Fire Emblem, the infinite dancer exp bug in 3H is rather unlikely to happen normally in normal gameplay, while the glitch that gives Ike 4 iron swords is basically so common that people don't even realize it's a bug most of the time since the requirement to activate it is to simply play without tutorials. In Dark Deity, one of the bugs fixed in 1.01 had the simple requirement of opening chests in chapter 4.
2. When the conditions for the bug to happen are met, how often does it happen? Taking the example of the FE6 100 hit misses are 1 in 3 million, despite the prerequisite being simply playing the game normally. This one is harder to quantify for DD unless you have access to developer data. A lot of people could be crying about the chest bug I mentioned, but unless we know how much of the playerbase they make up, that's meaningless. Meanwhile taking the example of say, the iron sword Glitch, it happens 100% of the time.
3. Does the bug have the potential to harm the experience of a player? If a bug is harmful, then clearly you'd want to get rid of it. No one has ever argued that a game crashing has made it more fun for them, after all. Taking the examples above, the worst that could happen in the two Fire Emblem bugs I mentioned is that your dancer is super strong, or that you have to discard an iron sword you didn't already have. In the case of the aforementioned DD bug, the game crashes and potentially makes you lose automatically.
4. Lastly, is the bug fun? I'm going to go out of the SRPG genre for a moment and mention Mario speedrunning. BLJ was fixed in a latter release that was then ported to 3D all stars, and that's a bit of a shame because the bug is both unlikely to happen in normal gameplay, and leads to more fun options to use. When a bug is fun, I think it would harm the game to fix it, not benefit it.
Okay, so why did I write all this about bugs? Well, because I think the vast majority of the known bugs in FE fall under the kind of bugs that I wouldn't want fixed, or that I don't mind having around. Hell, some of the bugs in the list you used on the wiki aren't even really glitches, they're more like oversights with unintended consequences (exploits). Skip recruiting Gray comes from his position resetting once you've recruited Lukas and reset. Larcei and Ulster using Balmung is incredibly hard to set up, and doesn't really make the game less fun. Some of the more harmful glitches like the wall gambit crash in 3H have hard requirements to reproduce, requiring both a large enough gambit, a monster that happens to lose its barriers from it, and a wall to all be in close proximity, and for good measure it requires you to think that gambiting a wall is a good idea in the first place.
By comparison, a few of the fixes I see in the patch notes of DD (And to be clear, good on them for fixing them) are gamebreaking and easy to set up, and that's the real problem here.