Dark Deity 2

Much improved over Dark Deity 1. Narrated storyline, excellent voice cast who really voiced the game, not a script. New additions of Training Grounds to train up lagging characters, and Challenge stages which reward completion with high damage weapons and rare resources. The story is well-written to flesh out narrative, provide urgency in spots, and develop the world around the game. Battles are a bit more forgiving in that's not so heavily weighed to the paper, rock, scissors insta-win/insta-death outcomes of the original. Instead, it induces rage and restarts due to the enemy AI really ganging up on one character at a time, thus a new mechanic of several characters able to teleport themselves, friendlies, or even enemies up to seven or eight squares away. Not much variety of enemy units. The same enemy units you'll be fighting at the beginning of the game will be the exact same as at the end of the game, just buffed up color palette swaps. Nice set of configuration tools, such as on-the-fly game difficulty, in-battle save-scumming, disable turn-limits, ect to custom the game to player comfort level. Game can be challenging, and there will be several maps where you'll rage,…

A very solid SRPG that overall improves from the previous entry in the series while developing in its own distinct direction. I think the biggest highlights for me were the maps, which consistently provide interesting and distinct challenges and only rarely outstay their welcome, and the class design which provides a variety of interesting and powerful tools to apply in combat, and with the ability to reclass characters (within their category at least) being very accessible you have a lot of options for how to play and approach challenges. Some classes and characters are notably more powerful than others, but no one is useless and thanks to a smaller cast size (and very optional training missions) its perfectly feasible to keep everyone appropriately leveled for the duration of the story.

If Dark Deity doesn’t find any issue with giving me an Arthur that one shot every unit he faced for 40 mana on Deity difficulty I don’t have an issue with it either. Some units are unbelievably busted in my experience (Arthur and Khamari solo’d multiple maps), some fall off hard (Alden), and everyone else are healers or are for decoration. Some concepts for classes are sick, Casandra being a tanky axe welding healer made me give her all the elixirs and despite insane stats she was low-key trash. Gwyn was a glass cannon that struggled to kill. I skipped all cutscenes but the archer guy was really bad as they are in every Fire Emblem like game, I’m assuming he died. The game could use a little balancing but that’s part of the intrigue, I still don’t know how Arthur got released being able to nuke anyone he wanted. Was this much of a review no, but I only played for the gameplay. Fire Emblem gameplay will always work for me and this game was good and did just enough to separate itself from contemporaries. Also am I crazy or did checking the enemies range just not work half the time?

This game is a solid Fire Emblem inspired tactical RPG. while the story is nothing special, the gameplay makes up for it.

Overall, I enjoyed this game. I really liked the combat animations, they reminded me of GBA Fire Emblem. The class system was also really fun to use. The story felt a bit paint-by-numbers, but the main characters were pretty interesting and the voice acting was good. Map design was all right, overall the balancing felt closer to a traditional RPG than a strategy RPG. If you like Fire Emblem, I would certainly recommend this one.

Font size and inability to change it make the game unplayable. Strong VO and pixel art.