Review | Dark Deity 2 - Wartime Diaries
Dark Deity 2 is a game about conflict. Not just the kind that involves powerful spells, legions of troops, and warring nations, but interpersonal disputes as well. When starting up the game, which was clearly inspired by Fire Emblem, I had a few expectations going into the experience. I did not find the immaculate gameplay, an exciting story, or amazing music, that I would have in Intelligent Systems’ series. Nevertheless, I still enjoyed my time with Dark Deity 2. While the game experiments with the format of what a tactical roleplaying game can be, a confusing and sometimes obtrusive UI, strange dialogue and stranger story turns, and a lack of modern gameplay options hamper Dark Deity 2’s efforts to stand out from merely being an imitator of other entries in the genre.
Dark Deity 2 has you continue from where you left off some years after the events of Dark Deity, with previous main character Irving’s children now part of The Eternal Order. Of his three children, Gwyn takes center stage and is the main character, which I would not have realised if the game didn’t make it an actual game over condition. While Fire Emblem games are known to have more than one main protagonist at times, Dark Deity 2’s three primary characters may be stretching what little there is to work with on this occasion. Having to hear from not one, but three people on certain topics throughout the story had its charm at moments, but many times I found myself clicking “next” to speed through dialogue. While the game definitely fulfils the basics that I remember from Fire Emblem games like The Blazing Blade and The Sacred Stones, I think it gets a bit lost in trying to be retro, one of the game’s stated aims.
For my first playthrough I set the game to Hero difficulty, which offered virtually no challenge beyond a final boss with the most HP I think I’ve ever seen in this genre. While I recognize I only played on the second to lowest difficulty, generally in another turn-based tactical game I would experience more consequences in response to poor decision-making. For instance, if I rush through a map in Fire Emblem, there is a chance that reinforcements will trigger and either endanger my vulnerable rear that contains fragile units or overwhelm the unit I’ve sent to scout ahead, possibly killing one or more characters. While you can add challenge in Dark Deity 2 by opting into turn limits, if you’re familiar with tactical gameplay they are easily met with minimal planning in order to achieve the objective of that particular stage. Stages are completed in a number of ways: the all-too-familiar “Seize”, Survive, defeat all enemies, defeat the boss, Escape and more. What most of these boil down to, unfortunately, is eliminating most enemies, the boss, and completing as many side objectives as possible (with the turn limit in mind, if you have that option enabled).
Unlike Fire Emblem, certain types of side objectives, such as recruiting allies, visiting houses, and chasing thieves, are absent. While, in the case of visiting houses or recruiting, you may say, “doesn’t that make the game easier?” — that isn’t the point. Recruiting in Fire Emblem is part of the fun. Yes, there are your initial characters and characters that automatically join your party, but part of the experience is when you see a named character, who could even be a boss, seeing if you can figure out what circumstances might allow you to recruit them. Oftentimes, your main character has to speak to them to perform a bit of “Talk no Jutsu”, but sometimes you can recruit them via a different character in your roster that they just happen to know. They could just be a mercenary who’ll switch sides for a showing of gold, or a thief or innocent bystander who’s evacuating the battlefield, currently aligned to neither side. The recruitment process is important because it provides player agency. In some cases, recruiting one character can make another unavailable, giving reason for additional playthroughs.
In Dark Deity 2, every recruitable character joins you — even if you just made a decision that goes against everything they stand for — which is not only odd but feeds into the fact that decisions in this game don’t matter. And while it’s not recommended, maybe you don’t want to worry about more characters and would rather leave them to their devices (sometimes these units can be very powerful to confront) or kill them yourself. Though you do visit houses in Dark Deity 2, you never speak to any potential party members or villagers who may have helpful advice, want to yap, or have an important item for you. I always found this to be a very cool part of Fire Emblem in that if I never visited a certain nondescript house, I would’ve missed out on quite an opportunity.
Dark Deity 2 features a great variety of units and powers, and this is an area the game does shine in. Alden, a unit you start with, can recharge another unit’s mana with his Ancient Writ ability, and teleport an ally with Phase. Generally, if an ability like this is even present in a Fire Emblem game, it is rare or costly, and not available until the latter half of the game. Other great character abilities can be unlocked, like the Ascendant’s Divine Flow, which makes attacks guaranteed to miss against the Ascendant, or the Hemomancer’s Simulacrum ability, which lets the unit clone an enemy at a percentage of their stats to fight for you. In particular, it felt great having defensive abilities beyond a character just having a high defence or fortitude stat and a big HP pool, such as Wreathed in Flames or Repulsor Shield. In an inspired decision, the game promotes non-combat actions in addition to combat actions early in the game. As much as I love Fire Emblem (and the more recent games have gotten better about this), I’ve spent thousands of turns rescuing units, waiting for units to catch up with the rest of my army, and the like. By allowing multiple actions in a turn, Dark Deity 2 opens up many possibilities for buffing and movement options. Also, combos that would otherwise be impossible or unwieldy are much more achievable. However, there are some bizarre choices with units and abilities, like ranged units being unable to shoot arrows or fire magic through Impassable spaces. While it is understandable that Riordan, archer and wisecracking sibling of Gwyn, cannot shoot an arrow over or through a castle wall, he also cannot do so if there’s a bush in the way. Additionally, while there are abilities like Overpower — which mimics Smite and Shove from Fire Emblem — if there’s any character in the way, it will simply fail, wasting that unit’s turn as well as what most likely was your plan for the unit that would’ve been overpowered. There also doesn’t seem to be much point in waiting to promote your units to tier two or three as soon as you unlock those upgrades. In Fire Emblem, quite similar to Pokémon, you may want to keep a unit as its base class for stat growth and due to the level cap, which resets on class promotion. In my time playing Dark Deity 2, I never reached a level cap despite reaching up to level 46, and the new abilities your units get on levelling up are such game changers, there’s no question about promoting.
Units can also be customised with rings, elixirs, weapons, weapon runes, and ability upgrades. Dark Deity 2 does a great job of bringing out what would take a Fire Emblem or Pokémon game dozens of hours to reveal to the player, if the game decides to shine a light on the mechanics at all. These sorts of features are normally hidden away, yet many players take a very specific joy in taking advantage of them and turning a usually decent character into an invincible, turn-one unstoppable juggernaut. In Dark Deity 2, the customisations make it easier than ever to do the same. In addition, there are multiple difficulty sliders, options, and even a recruitment randomiser.
Unfortunately, a number of bugs and unoptimised settings also harm the experience, such as ranges not updating or being turned off when the player does certain actions. Fullscreen mode doesn’t work if I wait for the enemy to take their turn and do something else in another window, and windowed mode turns scrolling into a slog. While there is definitely merit in reaching back to some of the all-time tactical RPGs that I’ve mentioned in this article, the genre has moved forward with certain quality of life changes such as rewinding turns, or Into the Breach letting you know exactly what was going to happen with enemies. What Dark Deity has achieved by implementing a randomiser and many different difficulty toggles and modes should be commended, but it feels like key ingredients are missing in what made some of those older games standouts.
Additionally, I found some objectives unclear, such as a map where I was directed to defeat the boss without understanding which unit represented said boss, because boss characters can be generic enemies, something Fire Emblem has rectified by letting even the lowliest bandit have a small piece of dialogue and an actual name if they’re a boss character. Speaking of bosses and chapters in general, there is very little dialogue (save for certain characters) on maps and even when confronting bosses. While a generic brigand may not have anything important to say in the grand scheme of Fire Emblem, the game Fire Emblem: Three Houses managed to make every piece of dialogue enrich the player’s understanding of the world. Even before that entry in the series, bosses at least offer a quip before being obliterated. Dark Deity 2’s murkiness reared its head again when I had a Seize objective: because there were multiple flashing blue tiles on the map, I had to figure out which was seizable. It is important to note that you may be doing all this on a timer if you choose to turn that option on. The game could also communicate the arrival of reinforcements better — with a sound, perhaps — as the map will seemingly randomly zoom around and point them out with a yellow flashing box. Enemy units can also hide behind buildings, which can easily result in a game over on the higher difficulties.
Even the pre-battle forecast is confusing, with information arranged in a strange format that lists alternating actions of the player and the enemy, with the player’s prospective attacks displayed in blue and the enemy’s in red. It feels clunky compared to Fire Emblem: Engage's approach of using arrows to show which way damage is flowing and an “X” to denote defeat, while having all stats segregated on each side of the screen. As a comparison, even older Fire Emblem games like Blazing Blade display the forecast more clearly, using a vertical format that compares the player's and enemy's stats side by side — a nice, clean distinction and separation compared to Dark Deity 2’s alternating unlabelled boxes.
In another bizarre twist, there is a very late map where you’re escorting a caravan through a fog of war, and at this point, it almost felt like Dark Deity 2 was taking the wrong lessons from Fire Emblem. During the Dark Deity 2 escort mission, fog hides enemies from you, which mirrors a gameplay mechanic that has been used in early-game campaigns in Fire Emblem. In these Fire Emblem chapters, a healer taking an arrow or a mage getting ambushed by a brigand is something you can easily recover from. These early maps are also not combined with escort missions, so the player can focus on navigating through the fog. Unlike in Fire Emblem, Dark Deity 2’s characters have no innate ability to remove fog of war or the ability to buy torches, so you’re left at the mercy of what the hidden, late-game enemies do.
There is definitely unfulfilled potential in Dark Deity 2’s bonus objectives — they could be a real strong suit. For instance, in the game’s ninth chapter, Great Expectations, your characters get into a tavern brawl after accidentally speaking too brazenly about the Shamac, a fearsome godlike creature. A side objective of this map is to throw eight drinks, which the game does not tell you actually causes a spill on a number of tiles and lowers dodge and movement (because it’s slippery!). Not only is this a flavourful implementation of a bonus objective, but it also has gameplay ramifications that can help win you the map’s objective of surviving eight turns, and adds variety. I would have liked to see much more of this in Dark Deity 2, because the environment does not matter the majority of the time in many games in this genre as a whole. In truth, movement and terrain have decided many, many battles in real life, so why not here, as well?
Most disappointingly, the game tells you that choice matters, when it ultimately does not. Early on, you are tasked with picking between the Merchant Lords, Southern Riders, and Izn’s Chosen: which is the best choice to support to save the land of Verroa? Ultimately, this decision (and every other story choice you make) does not matter beyond what specific rewards you want. I don’t know if Sword & Axe LLC was influenced by Fire Emblem: Three Houses as a whole, and I do not expect four-plus campaigns with varied content out of the sequel to a Kickstarter game, but only changing a couple of lines of dialogue does not make for a choice that matters. If we take a different example, Khamari and Zanele are Sylvans who live in the Towering Weald. Gwyn and company see them having a dispute and decide to intervene. This results in the player having to choose between the severe and world-weary Khamari, who wants to repair damage done to the Weald, or the optimistic and fledgling Zanele, who wants to destroy the wards and open the Weald to all. You would think this decision would cause either Khamari or Zanele to oppose you and not want to join your team, only for them both to become companions moments after you make the choice. While I am used to stories and games where decisions mean very little, the game asks you before choosing if you are completely sure and emphasises that you cannot take back that decision, implying that it will have a significant impact.
On the topic of the game’s characters: Dark Deity 2’s voice cast is excellent, yet some dialogue strikes the wrong tone. I never thought I’d hear a character in a game adjacent to Fire Emblem say they’re “gettin’ jiggy”, and I’m not sure I ever want to hear it again. Certain characters like Khamari talk in what I imagine is a pseudo-fantasy version of English, while the main cast speaks as if they were streaming on Twitch. The game feels like it doesn’t know whether it wants its audience to take it seriously or not. I do want to reemphasize the voice cast is great, though they do a bit too much sighing, with well-known voice actors like Allegra Clark (Street Fighter 6, Fire Emblem: Three Houses), David Matranga (My Hero Academia, Attack on Titan), and Elizabeth Maxwell (My Hero Academia).
My issues with the dialogue are also compounded by the actual story being pretty bland to the point I’m not sure I know what the “Dark Deity” is. The lack of consistency in the story and dialogue is especially frustrating because the actors give such entertaining performances, chewing the scenery as they make their way through a horrible war. Even more puzzling was when I found out how good the bond conversations are. Tal’dera, a powerful elven mage and drama queen both on the stage and in her personal life, insists Calith’s sewing, as art, should be shown to the world. Calith rebuffs her, stating her “creativity” is entitled to who she decides, and her decision is a very personal one. Saxon and Aya, both young and powerful pariahs from different places, have very different views on how that power should be used. Wizened Alden and angsty Gwyn dance around whether she should open a letter from her absent mother, and all the buried feelings that would stir up. While some are humorous, oftentimes the bonds start with the characters having an actual conflict and coming to a mutual understanding, no matter how likened to oil and water they are. Most importantly and impressively, the conversations aren’t played for laughs, and the concepts discussed are inherently interesting instead of being throwaway anime gags. Though not all bond conversations lead to a romantic relationship, I found them to be just as compelling as the story’s best moments of impassioned speeches and opposing ideals. The dialogue in these scenes, though sadly not voiced, is about characters coming to each other earnestly and becoming better people in the process.
While there is a game here for the Fire Emblem community, I cannot recommend it to much of anyone else as there are more well-rounded, engaging experiences to choose from. Hopefully, whatever comes next from the studio can reflect a more cohesive whole, as there are so many good parts to this game, but at the end of the day, they do not add up to something I will feel the need to revisit.
