Dark Deity by Sword and Axe is a tactical turn-based role-playing game strongly reminiscent of the classic Fire Emblem games. In Dark Deity, you collect thirty characters, form a party, and lead them through a series of battles and story scenes telling a cliché fantasy story in a typical fantasy world.
Overview
Dark Deity features a series of 28 turn-based tactical battles. In between these battles, players are presented with several story scenes, the option to perform one of the limited customization options, and a choice of units to use and where to place them on the map. Â
Battles are turn-based with sequential turns in the “I-Go-You-Go” format. Each unit gets a single action either to attack or perform a secondary skill based on the character’s class; warriors and mages can move other units, priests heal their compadres, adepts prevent units from moving, hunters improve the speed of an ally, and rogues remove the special weapon benefits of an enemy. Choosing a unit to move is relatively simple as there are only two factors to consider, but environmental factors, the combination of weapon advantage vs armors, relative speed, enemy threat level, and so on all contribute to battle evaluation and make for dynamic and frequently interesting decision making.
Characters have one of four types of armor and have weapons that feature bonuses vs. two of these armor types and penalties against the other two based on what particular armor they have. For example, axes are good vs. plate and runic robes, swords are good vs. leather and runic robes, and lightning magic is good vs. chain mail and leather armor. This is a bit more complicated than the rock-paper-scissors-style system of weapons that is featured in other Fire Emblem-style games, creating a complex of advantages to account for when making tactical decisions.
Dark Deity characters are also differentiated by class, a unique special ability, stat aptitudes, weapon upgrades, and their equipped aspects. Of these, ability score aptitudes is one of the most prominent as it is the only one that is driven, in some part, by chance. Each stat has its own aptitude rating which indicates the percentage chance that the score will go up when the character goes up a level. Each character also has an ability that is specific to them. While these are good and can definitely impact the character’s power level, they are definitely overshadowed by aptitudes. In fact, one of the best characters, Cia, has one of the worst abilities, extra healing from items. Aspects are inventory items that typically alter one or two stats or provide a special bonus for a stat or a combat action.
The upgrade system is one of the build-based aspects that you have the highest degree of control over. A character can pick between the four different weapons on any of their character’s turns during combat and each has a pretty noticeable impact on stats. Power affects damage, and has a much smaller effect on crit, while also adding a lot of weight which slows a character down. Finesse is crit-focused, adding less damage and weight while adding a little bit of accuracy. Focus is like power in that it is very focused on one stat, namely accuracy while having smaller increases in the other stats. Balance has a relatively even impact on all stats. Weapons can be upgraded with special tokens, with successive tiers requiring more advanced tokens. With available resources, this gives you some ability to play around and customize which weapons you use, but not so many that you can improve more than a single weapon on most characters.
Characters start with one of six basic character classes: Adept, Cleric, Hunter, Mage, Rogue, and Warrior. Each of these classes has its own special active ability, but they each receive further customization once you unlock their second form at level 10, and their third form once you reach level 30. Each of these forms alters your stat aptitudes and adds two abilities. These combinations of aptitudes and abilities can provide a varied experience from other options, which can either be used to make a character more specialized or generalized depending on their personal growths. This leads to some pretty clear choices for some characters. For example, there is one mage who has good HP growth and has personal ability keyed off of hit points. The conjurer class is a natural fit for him, as there is a chance to do extra HP-based damage, and has a percentage-based healing ability. Other classes are more ambiguous, which may be exciting or nerve-wracking based on your own preferences.
Dark Deity’s story is mostly shown through cut scenes between stories, but there is also a bond menu that can show interactions between two characters that are developing a relationship as the story progresses. This has no impact on the game outside of a couple of aspects, but if you want to find out about the character’s relationships and personality this is the way the game provides it.
Weaknesses and Limitations
Dark Deity’s character customization options are rather limited and frequently leave you with minimal choices or ones that are not particularly interesting to make. While at first, it may be difficult to determine how stats and abilities fit together – a problem that is exacerbated by the game’s utter lack of a tutorial – it does not take long for it to become apparent how few choices the interlocking elements leave.
Similarly, stage design in Dark Deity varies. Some are good and fun, providing interesting challenges and a fair amount to think about. Others, particularly later in the game, are either ineffective in irritating ways or are so easily exploited that they are virtually trivial. With only 28 total stages in the entire game, this is a bit of a problem and one that hurts more than it would have for a game that has a much wider variety of stages to go through.Â
This is further reinforced by how unbalanced the characters are. Some characters are dramatically stronger than the others, to the point where certain builds can effectively solo most, if not all, of a map. While they would not necessarily win every stage, particularly those with alternate win conditions, these characters are so strong as to render a lot of squad-building decisions to be unimportant. Why consider the optimal 14 characters, when you can have one or two kill most things and the rest are just along for the ride?
The story, quite frankly, is not good. Much of it is driven by the overall plot needing the character to do something or go somewhere rather than organically flowing from the characters themselves. This isn’t helped by the plot itself being pretty generic fantasy. There are twists, sure, but they ring hollow with how little the character’s personalities and perspectives actually matter to what is happening.
Achievements
When the stage designs are successful, they do create quite an engaging environment and a lot to think about in unit deployment and configuration. There is some value in also taking advantage of the built-in customization options to vary initial starting conditions to add replay value even after you have finished out the optimal path through the story. With the limitations that they have played this is greatly appreciated.
While I listed the character imbalance as a weakness, it also can be a strength for the right type of character. I enjoyed figuring out which characters excelled and seeing what about them really made them stand out vs. the other options. The alternate starts made this even more interesting and fun, as it forces you to figure out how to get through the early game with an entirely random cast of characters, potentially leaving out some of the more overpowered characters you get early in the game and forcing you to deal with a party that may not necessarily be optimized for the early game.
Dark Deity’s new mechanics are interesting. The upgrade system and the weapon vs. armor advantage system both work very well and add to the game’s depth. Unfortunately, these smart innovations are so focused, but it can be argued that it is easier for players who are familiar with Fire Emblem-style games to get into Dark Deity by just taking a few steps.
In fact, if you are a fan of the older style of Fire Emblem games then Dark Deity is an easy acquisition. It really emulates the look and feel of them with some nice, easy-to-appreciate modern upgrades.
Conclusion
While it introduces some fun new mechanics, Dark Deity is held back by some poorly thought out level design, imbalanced characters, limited customization, and a blandly written story. Even with that though, if you like old-school Fire Emblem games, Dark Deity provides that experience in spades. It will be a lot of fun for that target group, even if it does not stand out enough to be worth noting for people outside of that group.
Jesse is another of our turn-based game aficionados and is often found playing many different types of turn-based games, whether they be strategy games, deck-builders, RPGs, and much more. He also really likes cats.