Some successful video games spawn legions of imitators. Hell, look at Fortnite. After it made, roughly, all the money in the world, how many games had new battle royale modes jammed in? How quickly did things like ‘battle passes’ become a regular part of game design? This is a normal and predictable thing, as money chases success. But not all success stories see imitation on that scale. Fire Emblem, for instance, has been a popular and well-liked series of tactics games for years. Fire Emblem: Three Houses was a legitimate hit for Nintendo. And yet recently released indie game Dark Deity is one of the few clear knock-offs of the classic Fire Emblem format I can think of.
Now, pulling inspiration from a source like that isn’t necessarily a bad thing by any stretch. It’s not like we’re inundated by Fire Emblem clones, after all. So, what is Dark Deity? How does it use that Fire Emblem style? And is it worth your attention?
1
In Dark Deity, you start off as Irving, Alden, Maren, and Elias. You are students at a prestigious military academy, preparing for a life of service. But service to what? Your king has been acting increasingly erratic of late. His most recent decision forcibly graduated all students at the academy and sent them into the field. Ostensibly, this was to prepare for a war with a neighboring kingdom, though the swiftness and brutality of the king’s choices are shocking to the former students.
However, in your first field missions, you find evidence of a strange magical plot running beneath the conflict. Powerful necromancers roam the land. Someone is pillaging temples for their powerful old artifacts. Soon, you encounter rogue sorcerers and nobles from your enemy who are also investigating the causes of this war. Do you unite with your enemy, betraying your king, to investigate what is behind these strange events? Even if it means turning against your king and his most faithful commander, Irving’s older brother?
2
Comparisons to Fire Emblem will be immediately evident to players familiar with the franchise. The way tactics battles work involves sending out single character-based units on a grid. Those units can attack a single enemy in fighting range. However, if you are within range of that enemy’s attacks, they will counter. You can move your units in any order, moving all your units before the enemy moves all of theirs. When you attack — or are attacked — we leave the overhead grid for a one-on-one screen. Whoever instigates the attack does a pre-rendered attack animation.
Key to deciding that damage, as well as frequency of attack and accuracy, is the game’s multi-weapon system. An archer, for instance, may have a crossbow, a longbow, a shortbow, and… fuck, I don’t know, another kind of bow. Some of these specialize in accuracy, doing less damage but hitting more reliably. Others focus on powerful critical hits, or strong base attack with lower overall accuracy. Combined with natural strengths and weaknesses — mounted units tend to be weaker to spear-bearing units than sword-bearing ones, for example — it lends a smaller tactical layer to be aware of to the combat overall.
The thing is, you may have gathered from my inability to think of a fourth kind of bow: Four is… a lot. The differences are often minute, and upgrade resources, while plentiful, can’t handle upgrading 4 weapons for all, like, 30 characters you get over the course of the game. Which means that most players will end up upgrading a single weapon (always pick blue or yellow), leaving at least two functionally useless weapons you nevertheless can’t unequip. It’s a good idea, but it clutters the UI and slows down combat, and ultimately has far less effect than the unit-by-unit weaknesses.
3
Dark Deity is full of issues like this. Most are minor, but frustrating. For instance, every unit has four item slots and no equipment slots. And yet, there is equipment in the game. It must take up one of your item slots, sitting unused in the way every time you pull up the menu. Because of this, I often thought characters were holding healing items when they were not, a quick glance missing the non-existent UI differentiation between the two. Trading, purchasing, equipping — all of these fall prey to the same frustrating vagueness.
Indeed, even within battle, the UI continues to vex. For many of Dark Deity‘s missions, you don’t win by killing all your foes but by controlling specific points on the map. But you can’t just control the point; you have to open a menu and select ‘Arrive’ or ‘Hold’. Unfortunately, these contextual options aren’t highlighted or illuminated in any way, making them easy to miss. On multiple occasions, I reached the end of a level, shuffling characters around a small set of squares on an empty map trying to make the mission end, only to realize I was missing one of those context choices. Once, the layout of the map made the context choice almost invisible. If I hadn’t noticed a couple pixels of an extra box off the screen, I wouldn’t have finished the map at all.
There’s a similar shoddiness to the worldbuilding. “Adepts,” people born with elemental affinities, are introduced as a major concern partway through the game. However, this presents no particular change to the gameplay. It would make sense for adepts to attack or defend with their natural element, but their classes are no different from the rest of the party. As with the undercooked artifacts, if there’s an effect, I certainly didn’t notice it.
The prejudice against them is likewise half-cooked. Compare how little care or attention is payed to the plight of a seemingly permanent ethnic underclass in this world with a similar struggle in another modern tactics game, Triangle Strategy‘s Roselle. That game makes some big mistakes in how it portrays the Roselle, but their place in the world is strongly contextualized. The religious prejudice against them as an outsider group of a different faith makes sense. Dark Deity does none of that work with the adepts. They’re just kind of… there.
4
And yet, while I think Dark Deity is a deeply flawed game, I happily completed it. It turns out that the Fire Emblem-esque gameplay is a blast. There’s a reason those games are popular, after all. Dark Deity feels… incomplete. And yet, despite that, Dark Deity also feels invigorating and charming. The missions are short and well-designed. The characters have strong personalities that bounce off each other well. Though, while the ‘Bond’ system is gives players a better view of interpersonal drama, it is also strangely divorced from the gameplay, offering no benefits or drawba–
Damn, I did it again. Okay. Start over. Dark Deity is a good game — but an unpolished one. I have a lot of fondness for this type of tactics-style gameplay, and in this single core area, I think the developers nailed it. The combat is weighty and fun. It prioritizes risk-taking without being too challenging. Best of all, the vastly different ways each character handles combat means that I came to build strategies around my characters. They felt like a group of heroes, rather than simply units.
Despite all its flaws, Dark Deity gets that right. There are so many issues with the game’s UI. Aspects of the world-building feel underconsidered. The weapon system is flawed. But the core thing you spend the game doing, Dark Deity‘s tactical layer, is rock solid. For me, that was enough to have a largely engaging time. But I can’t let go of the myriad small mistakes that plague a solid, well-built foundation. A stronger game would pare back some features or give them more time to cook. Dark Deity does neither. It satisfies, but never thrills.