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Goddamn, this whole thing is just so lazy. If you aren't willing to put in the effort to sprite anything other than human enemies, then don't loving make a chapter about fighting non-human enemies! The undead were at least somewhat passable, but holy poo poo did they drop the ball. That and the fire on the ship being a lazy and awful gimmick that the map doesn't even tell you about... And don't even get me started on the writing. Or the number of characters that need to say "Hello! I am here and I exist! I shall spout my one character trait and move on!" I started out thinking it was going to be mediocre at best and bad at worst, but it's rapidly hitting depths that I hadn't imagined possible.
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Oct 29, 2022 03:36
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I will say that I agree that most of the melee classes in this game aren't good. With that said I made Bianca and the WoW reject here Gales and they were ridiculous. Bianca in particular was just Astra-ing everything. They gave the Adept class a path that's better than all the Knight options. Balance!~
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Oct 29, 2022 03:37
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I believe Luninareph touched on this (my apologies if I get my attribution incorrect) - but there's a deep problem with numbers in this game, in that there are so many different procs and modifiers that one can't predict what numbers are likely to come out, which wrecks the genre of SRPG and X-Com, games of strategy + calculated risk. As others have pointed out, a good map has tasty but risky secondary objectives, which drive the player to take riskier options. The various FE LPs and other strategy LPs done on hard or lunatic difficulty showcase the LPer demonstrating the calculations, the map, and explaining why one risky move is worth it (or not), but this other move isn't (or is) worth the risk. Dark Deity errors on random yet meaningless, and TGEK ends up turtling or square-marching through a map. Another way to fail would be to have the outcome be random enough that one can't construct a repeatable strategy. I wonder if earlier versions had such unpredictable outcomes that they set baselines of HP to wash out the randomness and make it meaningless. I also agree with Luninareph's assessment that there is no theme; this is plot points and character beats thrown into a mixer, but no understanding of how to make these have weight. The sprites have been declared lazy effort, so at this point, I think the designers enjoyed drawing characters. Not making sprites of characters, just drawing them. And maybe writing some stuff for the characters to say, but again, no understanding of what people are like and what motivates them. I'm going to watch some Cruelty Squad as a palate-cleanser. It has a theme, great writing, great game-play, and is absolutely trying to make you feel ill, unlike Dark Deity, where illness is completely unintentional. Kacie fucked around with this message at 04:19 on Oct 29, 2022 |
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Oct 29, 2022 04:13
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Dirk the Average posted:Goddamn, this whole thing is just so lazy. If you aren't willing to put in the effort to sprite anything other than human enemies, then don't loving make a chapter about fighting non-human enemies! The undead were at least somewhat passable, but holy poo poo did they drop the ball. That and the fire on the ship being a lazy and awful gimmick that the map doesn't even tell you about...
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Oct 29, 2022 16:02
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In Black Geyser we found that Jade and Sea Hag belonged in something better, here we have Sloane telling Irving to gently caress off and then Councillor looking cool, and that's stretching, a lot.
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Oct 30, 2022 03:12
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SIGSEGV posted:In Black Geyser we found that Jade and Sea Hag belonged in something better, here we have Sloane telling Irving to gently caress off and then Councillor looking cool, and that's stretching, a lot. A better writer probably would have made Sloane the main character, she's way more fleshed out (e: pun not intended) than Emo McBangs is.
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Oct 30, 2022 03:16
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Sloane still kind of baffles me for how accidental that all is. You can read the original intent in that they're trying to make her kind of bitchy and vapid. But... she's like the only person who is actively shown to practice her craft, the people she bitches out deserve it, and she's ambitious and also willing to be underhanded about it. Of course, being accidental, the interesting follow-up doesn't exist, as shown with Irving/Sloane B. But the first impression she gave would be perfectly fine in another game.
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Oct 30, 2022 04:12
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That's how you know a writer is good, it's when they write characters that are the opposite of what they meant to write them as. Irving is incompetent and Sloane is fun and right, I hope we never get to a point where they decide that Sloane can "get better" and "grow" because that'll ruin everything good about her.
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Oct 30, 2022 13:15
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They're Still loving Talking. I owe the thread an apology. I was claiming that "follow your heart and defy authority" could be a theme of this game, only for us to be confronted with the specter of Irving blindly obeying his father, the archetypical authority figure. Luninareph was absolutely right when they pointed out that the characters were just blindly following the Illuminati like morons. Now, the game is going to continue to spout off about following a higher cause, but it's going to clash with everything the characters are doing. There's another huge problem with this theory I'll get to once we get deeper into the "story".  Support Dump!The characters are still discussing how they're following their hearts and are fighting for a cause they believe in, but are unable to articulate that cause. Let's talk about that Monroe-Sloane support because it's hilarious for all the wrong reasons.   This could be something out of someone's lovely JRPG parody webcomic where the characters break the fourth wall to explain that only the named characters matter. It's funny because Sloane can't deny the first part - that Irving basically got both armies killed for nothing - but because none of these characters have names they all disappear. It's likely some of them were Caius' old comrades, or men and women Lincoln and Bianca had worked with before, or even Alden's friends who got drafted from Brookstead. Doesn't matter, they had generic sprites and the authors are much more interested in giving us their terrible worldbuilding - such as the calendar month of "Frostsoul" - than creating a good or even decent story. They need to kill off Sterling to create cheap drama and give a reason for Irving to be invested in stopping Empyrean, but they also assume that the mystery box of "who is Empyrean" and "what does he want" is needed to keep players' attention. It's the same kind of crappy writing advice we got from Nick Macari in Black Geyser to foreshadow the opposite of our plot twists and keep people guessing - but these authors never realize that for something like the Red Wedding to work we need to care about what happens to Robb Stark. The other problem that so many of these supports are pointless chaff that don't go anywhere and are actively contradicted by this one event. Let's take a look at Cia-Caius.  Nobody cares about Duskwater! No one! We had one map there, it was a small, crappy town attacked by bandits. The one thing these supports are "good" at is mimicking natural human small talk by meandering from topic to topic while conveying no real information and wasting time. Thus we meander over to Caius and his hatred of fighting. The Support Under Examination posted:
It would almost be a commentary on the cycle of violence, but this is complete nonsense once again undone by Chapter 11. How does Cia reply when Irving asks her to slaughter her own countrymen to attack a wizard based on speculation from an elf they just met who has no actual knowledge of magic? Earlier in the game posted:In a vacuum, these supports could serve some purposes like foreshadowing or setting up characterization for future events, but there are so many characters who have so little effect on the plotline. Sara and Samara talk about their mother, but Serenity Rhoane neither appears on screen nor do the sisters ever cite her guidance as to what to do. Caius' friend Marana never appears in the game. In another work you could have these supports set up something, but there are so many of them and they go so many different places attempting a coherent analysis is nigh impossible. Fighting for what you believe in is good! Following authority is bad... no, wait, we're following the Illuminati and that's good! This is the most important thing anyone has ever done...but we can't tell you what the point of it is or who the villains are, and any time a character expresses curiosity about why we're following this sequence of events they get smacked down. At least they won't take away Sophia's ferret.
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Oct 30, 2022 22:20
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: Something you see, serving a town that knows its share of mercenaries, fighting is an easy thing to get into. Easiest thing in the world, really. Getting out? That's hard. 
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I'm just gonna get the "Using 1000 words where 10 will do", "talk so much yet say so little" and "sound and fury signifying nothing" low-hanging fruits out of the way by saying them all right here, because we probably need to invent new terms for this kind of word-vomit folderol. Or at least rediscover some terms used back in Quovak's Golden Sun LP.
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Oct 30, 2022 23:23
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Again, it's odd that Sloane is actually coming off pretty well in the supports. The only wrinkle is the radius of stupid that Irving causes everyone to devolve into whenever he's even tangentially involved (the Sloane/Irving C support being the exception so far). Even Brooke being stupid is not causing Sloane to be stupid, it's just essentially Sloane going 'wtf' over this nonsense woman. Edit: Also, the Ford/Maren conversation is actually pretty good? As TGEK mentions, he comes off really well there. Maren's not bad either there from the view of 'dumbass but well-meaning teenager'. Keldulas fucked around with this message at 23:47 on Oct 30, 2022 |
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Oct 30, 2022 23:40
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the situation with the three-way battle is very funny because you can solve it in a single sentence and like two lines of code. irving: dont kill them if you can help it, they aren't our objective anyway then give you some bonus item or something if you manage to avoid killing a certain amount of troops. bam, done. a little lazy? sure, but it completely solves the problem and gives the map a slightly more interesting side objective. like you arent writing the next great american novel here, its fine for a video game plot to use shortcuts to resolve issues like this. fire emblem games do it all the time and most people think their narratives are serviceable at worst. Endorph fucked around with this message at 01:59 on Oct 31, 2022 |
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Oct 31, 2022 01:57
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As with Black Geyser, I’ve found my eyes have just started sliding off of the text, andIm not even reading the supports. There’s so many loving words from so many loving characters, none of it matters and it’s all bad. This game is just bad. I know that’s not exactly new information, but it’s amazing how they’ve managed to bungle pretty much every part of the game.They animate sprites well and sometimes have some cool character designs, and Sloane is accodentally cool. That’s it!
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Oct 31, 2022 05:36
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Advanced Pro Tier Hannibal Barca Tactics Welcome back! Last time on Dark Deity we met Irving's cowardly and worthless father then got hit by piles and piles of meaningless supports. Today, despite the chapter being called "Resurgence of Purpose" we have... another pointless filler level!  First however, I think I owe the thread an apology for loving up. You see, I'd been mindlessly upgrading the yellow weapons cuz, uh, I dunno.  I am now 99% sure the "correct" way to "play" this "game" is to dump everything into the blue weapons. You lose a few points of damage compared to yellow, but Jesus Christ look at that crit rate! I think the weight is somewhat heavier which is why we went with yellow in the first place.  I upgrade Iris' electric blue and notice the move that unleashes Free Willy.  Well, it's fully upgraded, and I'm not going to lie, this move actually looks cool as poo poo. We'll see it later, but keep in mind the guide I'm reading says Iris is useless trash.   : Among them is Maeve, a half-elven inquisitor from the Mystic Council of the Expanse.These are proper nouns you do not care about and they will never be relevant. Maeve and WoW man are not going to betray the party because the Mystic Council is secretly backing Empyrean or something.   : Maeve has been tasked with joining the expedition by the council, and as her warden, Thae'lanel must join as well.They could cut these map segments, because the narrator is saying the opposite of what we saw! Maeve volunteered, then Alastair asked if WoW Man was joining and he jumped in to say he was. : They seek the Trial of the Soul, and must head to the Towering Weald to find that which will bring them to it.: Though they sought to avoid the wandering Sylvan tribes in the Weald, they find no such luck.Remember those guys Alastair briefly mentioned? Now we have a filler level starring them!   : Pretty sure we want it to be quiet, Caius. : There's a stream and plenty of foraging. We should be hearing animal sounds. Remember Helena? Fighter who couldn't be spear infantry because the game's class system is terrible? Finally, she gets to show up and deliver a pointless line.  : If Helena can't hear anything, I think you're right to worry. What was it that Maeve said about the Sylvans yesterday? : You don't hear them until they want you to. Maren, watch out! These random horse guys show up and run in to annoy us further.  These guys are a nomadic tribe, which is why they all have expensive plate mail armor from all the mining and refining they do as a nomadic tribe that wanders around killing everyone they meet. : We are simply passing through. : Hold on, the maps placed your consecrated land a week's journey west. How are we standing on it now? : They take the remains with them. The consecrated land is simply where they are.This is the stupidest loving twist. : Great, go ahead and make it SO easy for us to avoid offending your sensibilities. Let me guess, the punishment for- So these guys are a tribe who apparently drags their dead god around with them so they can arbitrarily attack people who wander by, yet somehow there are maps of the area. I don't even know.  This guy runs in and knifes all the horsemen before they can get off any more tedious lines of dialog.  Is it bad I agree with Irving right now?  : That clearly doesn't seem very efficient with how much they move around.: Not now, Brooke. Wren, how do we get out of here? : The only clear path away is north, through the shallows. If we ran south they would pick us off one by one.But... why? The water slows us down and they have cavalry. We could just form into a square and retreat south. How are they going to separate us?  Welcome to another "Irving is incompetent" moment. We met some Sylvans. As far as I can tell those horsemen didn't actually want to attack, they wanted to talk. For all we know the "punishment is death" is a prelude to them trying to posture for leverage. Naturally this random assassin guy runs in and kills all the horsemen, treacherously breaking a parley and telling everyone that the scouts raised the alarm and then telling everyone to run into the shallow water that makes everyone go more slowly from a force that, as far as we know, is entirely mounted. He also dodges the question of "who he is" and while I appreciate it's a sudden panic situation and we need to make decisions, Irving immediately rushes to agree with the mystery murderer man who started a fight on behalf of the Plotless Force. TheGreatEvilKing summary posted:
Literally for all these guys know this could have happened: TheGreatEvilKing devolves into writing lovely Dark Deity fanfic posted:
It's funny, but writing this fake dialog made me realize that for our main villain, Empyrean has little to no impact on our actual characters. His only actual follower is Akmenos and whatever undead Akmenos has lying around, but he himself doesn't do much of anything except wait around while Irving flails like an idiot looking for him. The game wants us to see him as a really powerful threat and tells us he and Akmenos are aware of Irving, but he never bothers to actually intervene in Irving's attempts to gain more power in any way. Anyway, Wren.  Wren has a great passive but dumpster tier strength so he never does any damage. He's most likely getting permabenched after this - under no circumstances do we need five rogues - but I spend far too long agonizing over making him a thief.  Anyway, Wren, Maeve, and WoW Man are force deployed here so we have to pick 13 more, and to my regret I forget to grab Sophia. Sorry Sophia fans, she'll be back in the next map despite the fact that... she kinda sucks.  The entire army is considered to have escaped if even one unit made it here. There is probably a pro strat that involves grinding out a Dragon Knight/Stormlord/Illusionist to rush the exit or some poo poo and skip the level, but there are a few twists to this.  Namely, that there are a whopping four whole chests full of crap we can buy for money - one +2 speed booster I will probably forget about and 3 70 HP healing holy waters that you will never, ever use because your tanks usually don't take damage if you've built them right and healing is easy and resource free! You also never really fight on enough fronts that all 16 characters are actively engaged in receiving enemy attacks, so there's that.  The game also has a semi-hidden objective where you're on a 25-turn limit that you don't know about unless you know to look for this garbage like I do. It's...not a big deal.  An OK start for WoW man.  Iris procced both the autohit and the critical. Eye of the Storm is an auto-hit that adds an additional 25% crit, so her lovely 55% chance to hit turns into 90% once the 35% chance of an autohit proc is calculated. Iris' passive is to heal every time she crits, so maybe I should try using her as a drain tank or some nonsense.  Her cool animation I promised to show off is this dragon that flies up and dive bombs the target.  These are supposed to be the storm spirits from Alden and Sophia's support, and honestly if we'd been attacked by lightning dragons and orcas and poo poo I'd have liked that level a lot better. How do the adepts summon the spirits that want to eat them when that's a mage thing? Shut up.  I'm cutting out a LOT of grinding through these jerks. Maeve starts with 30 speed, which is more than Caius and Cia. Now, you might ask why we need all 3 of these dodge tanks, and I maintain that it makes the Dark Deity Hell Square formation require absolutely no resources. I'm ordering healers to end turn because there's no one to heal!  Turbodargon!  Yeah, I think Iris gets to stay on the team. Her speed's kinda poo poo but she's kinda deleting people.  The last gimmick of this lovely map? The shallow water actually does reduce movement of all the characters. This sounds like it would be a problem for our Hell Square, but all that means is that we get to choose whom to engage because the enemies are all coded to stand in place and wait to be baited with their new, lower movement.  Bianca's helping.   These three cavalry pop in as reinforcements and I just don't care. The Hell Square has enough people in it loaded for bear that there's just not much these guys can do unless they all gang up on one character, and that's trivially avoided by using the art of "putting people in a square formation".  This screenshot looks doofy so you all are getting something funny to look at.  Lucky dodge on Maeve here. This game would be absolute hell if enemies had the proc extra damage skills. I can kind of see what they're going for with adepts (wild mages who can explode into extra uncontrolled power) but all the pyromancers and warriors and poo poo have no excuse.  "You will die as you lived!" Maidenless.  Look I need entertainment somewhere.   Thae'lanel has a lot of crits too. If we had Sloane or Sara lying around we could give him the magician accuracy bonus, but we can't.  Sloane is occupied elsewhere.  Bianca summons the spirit of JJ Abrams lens flare.  There were complaints in the thread about how Irving's no time for failure message had no punctuation. Neither does this one. If this is supposed to show how he's evolving into a more mature, realpolitik leader it fails.  WoW Man's passive is legit.   None of these enemies are in any way threatening because the enemy design in this game is so binary and the characters are so dodgy. In a real FE you'd get killed by putting Bianca the crit machine out because she'd get slammed by five guys in a platonic way and attritioned to death. Here people are so dodgy we just... don't attrit.    Alright, two reasons to show this screenshot off. The first is that the "Wait" command is hidden under the character UI here because this game blows. The second is that we're going to use super advanced elite tactics and split the army into TWO infantry squares so we can get the chests AND slog through the water. Sure, I could slog the entire army over land, but they're just going to get in each other's way at this point.    I don't even know what to say at this point. I'm certainly not threatened.  From what I've read, the dodge stuff falls off harder on Deity but it's a little nuts right now and if my memory is right, we'll be getting infinite XP soon anyway   Some of the enemies drop weapon tokens. I don't care.  The thing about the massive deployment limit is that even splitting our forces in two leaves us with enough characters on each side that neither detachment feels threatened or can't clear the immediate area in one turn.  I - Maeve - what does that mean, Maeve?  Emo!Irving is a lot more enthusiastic about killing people.      Wren sucks and deals no damage.  Second chest. Holy water is an item that heals 70 hp. I don't care.  This is the closest anyone comes to forcing a restart on me, but there are no enemies who can follow it up partially thanks to the water. Remember, we have infinite healing that also grants XP.  I am cutting turn after turn of inexorable advance.  I also want to reiterate that I've left tons of XP just lying on the table, and it doesn't matter because every new recruit scales to your level. Even if you've neglected a bunch of training, Maeve and Thae'lanel are extremely powerful units. This isn't like Fire Emblem where your prepromotes are poo poo that exist in case you got all your starting mages killed.  It's not as much as some of the big nukers. I'll have to see how well she can tank next map.   ..holy poo poo, is that 33 magic? This is what I mean. Thae'lanel just joined the party with a whopping 32 mag, and that's better than pretty much any unit I have so far including Alden.  If Alden got 3 more levels of +1 mag he still wouldn't catch up to the man who just joined our team. He is a lot faster and dodgier though.  I mean, Jesus, look at WoW man's stats compared to Iris'. She's been getting good levels too!   Irving is gonna be an alright Dragon Knight. Dragon Knights use their strength as their magic stat. I really don't understand why the game split the stats in the first place, because there aren't many hybrid attackers.   At this point we've exterminated every enemy on the map. The last few enemies switched to aggressive mode and rushed us in a moment I completely failed to capture, but it was too little, too late and they got barbecued to death by titty ladies and small children.  I waste a bunch of turns having Maeve run over to the last chest. Cia is in position to take the objective and win the mission. What do we get?  Now, in a real FE game this would be worth it, but the game sells all the stat boosters at the between mission store, so  Cia runs up and ends the mission. God drat Bianca's outfit is stupid.  Oh. Oh. This level. Spoilers, there's a kickstarter backer character in it.  : Fearful of the Sylvans' pursuit, they keep a swift pace. No one speaks until they reach the temple.I could probably ejaculate a bunch of words about ludonarrative dissonance from our relatively easy destruction of the Sylvan forces, but we murdered a ton of people their tribe probably can't just replace because a suspicious man attacked them for no reason. : Eventually, they are able to catch their breath.  : Who is this Alastair?Better question, who the gently caress are you and what do you want?  ...holy loving poo poo. Did a character in Dark Deity have an actual, measured, intelligent response? : Hm. Why. Why do you think this adds anything to the conversation.  You're an assassin. We already HAVE an assassin. Could we just have not put this character in the game?  : A man in my line of work finds use for many names.  There's just so much poo poo. If you've ever seen a gangster film you know what wetwork is - he kills people for money. We do not need three different characters tagging in and out in failed attempts at humor. : Then I will not waste words. This entire loving exchange is a waste of words.  Irving you dumbass that was the first thing he said.  : Yes. We should prepare. The Grand Vicar warned of a challenge. : Well, there you have it, Wren-of-many-names. We got where we were going. Your help is appreciated, but you're free to go.: No. You have stirred the Sylvan hive. I would not travel alone.  : Fine.: Take a moment to catch your breath, and don't expect this to be easy. We'll take in only what we need, and dare not take out more than necessary either.That's a fuckin lie, the last time I played that level it had a bugged chest that gave us infinite Tier 3 weapon tokens. This game has it coming. TheGreatEvilKing summary posted:
It's honestly legitimately impressive how little sense this level makes, and it's filler! The basic concept that the Dark Deity gang goes into Forest of the Mean Elves and has to fight the Mean Elves is fine, but they manage to poo poo it up with stupidity. To recap: -The mean elves have a religion that means they have to kill everyone they ever meet, because they carry the bones of their god and random people showing up in the woods desecrates the god or something stupid. This extends to assaulting sorcerers and armored knights. Did you notice that the Sylvans didn't field any mages? I did! -Wren, a random assassin guy hired to kill one of the Mean Elves, stops sneaking around to attack the scouts that seem more interested in parlaying with the party than fighting. If they wanted to kill the party presumably they could have snuck into position and filled Helena and company with arrows. He then gives terrible tactical advice that Irving follows because he's a moron. This pisses off all the Mean Elves and thus Wren is forced into joining the party because the unofficial contract is five characters per class tree. It's a mess. I'm not sure how the Mean Elves survived this long without picking a fight with someone they couldn't beat and getting rolled, I'm not sure why Wren chose to reveal himself and kill some scouts instead of using the party as a distraction to kill his target, except that the writers desperately needed to have Wren join the party so we could pad the character count. The saddest thing is that it would have been super easy to make up some bullshit about how Alastair sent him to meet the party because he knows the woods or something. Oh well!  ...gently caress.
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Nov 2, 2022 06:03
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: Hey! These are sacred woods here!
: Yo my sketchy dude I don't have an organization or followers or any of that poo poo except Akmenos and his undead. I will pay you to go intercept that emo kid and his friends and make sure they get into a fight with the... Sylvan tribes? What the gently caress is a Sylvan?
: Can I... can I be in the summary?
: So how does that bring you to the elves?
: Hey! Look at ME!!
: Did someone say "rotate in to deliver another pointless line?"
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So the bits of ineptitude that jump out at me is: - They clearly have no idea how to stat their characters. Character competency varies SO wildly. I already made the Sophia comparison earlier because she's lagging so hard behind the other archer-tree people. I'm going to mention Sloane and WoW elf. I went back and looked, Sloane joined at level 7 with 14 magic. If she gained a point of magic for literally every level-up to level 25.... she would have 32 magic at level 25. Than'lanel has 33 at that level. She's obviously designed as a slow nuker mage in the same vein as him. What the gently caress is this stat balancing? - You're already making an excuse plot to just make the party randomly fight things, why are the nomads so stupid. They run around killing anyone who trepasses "sacred lands", and "sacred lands" are literally anywhere they travel because they bring their holy remains with them. If they're already going with a blatant excuse to just kill people, why the gently caress would they stop and explain it to the people they're attacking. Just attack them without the talking. Jeez! We also have the repeated blatant laziness with having no visual identity to the enemies since they're all literally the same art.
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Nov 2, 2022 08:12
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I'm not a Sophia fan, I'm a Butter fan  Maybe Irving isn't actually incompetent, maybe he's evil and/or possessed and/or ludicrously emo and genuinely trying to get everyone killed. It would explain the hair.
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Nov 2, 2022 10:54
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"We attack anyone who trespasses on sacred ground; also we carry our dead god around so wherever we go is sacred ground," sounds like something that would come out of a parody of dark fantasy, not something trying to be a relatively serious and dramatic war story. (Emphasis on trying.) Though, as a counterpoint, I like the party taking the piss out of Wren much more than anyone taking his persona seriously.
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Nov 2, 2022 13:53
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TheGreatEvilKing posted:
90% of the time, Monroe is a character who does not want to be in this game and has nothing but disdain for all of its characters and contrivances, and it's pretty great. (The other 10% of the time he gets infected by Irvingitis just like every other character, but with Dark Deity, you gotta take what you can get.) Ah yes, the absolutely terrifying "six damage twice" that Wren was doing. Yes. Very deadly indeed.
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Nov 2, 2022 17:26
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the issue with the lines mocking wren is that it basically undermines him as a character, which would be fine if, say, his supports were also jokes about how hard he's trying to be cool, but somehow i doubt thats the idea
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Nov 2, 2022 17:33
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The mockery is probably only to reinforce the comic relief gimmick of the characters saying the lines. Otherwise it's pretty hypocritical behavior when we have similar party members trying too hard to look cool and getting taken seriously, like Brooke. Where'd you hear about Shaka Zulu from, TGEK?
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Nov 2, 2022 18:01
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Delphisage posted:Where'd you hear about Shaka Zulu from, TGEK? He's fairly well known, isn't he? We still have a ton of competent military commanders for Summary!Irving to compare himself to. Maybe he'll declare himself a Hero of the Soviet Union next update.
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Nov 2, 2022 18:46
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TheGreatEvilKing posted:He's fairly well known, isn't he? We still have a ton of competent military commanders for Summary!Irving to compare himself to. Maybe he'll declare himself a Hero of the Soviet Union next update. Anyone with a decent knowledge of British history, South African history, or is just a fan of the Civilization games knows about Shaka Zulu, yeah.
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Nov 2, 2022 18:47
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Cythereal posted:Anyone with a decent knowledge of British history, South African history, or is just a fan of the Civilization games knows about Shaka Zulu, yeah. Oh right, Civ games. That makes sense.
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Nov 2, 2022 19:08
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Tedious. Just tedious.
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Nov 2, 2022 19:11
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I actually chuckled a bit at Cia being utterly dismissive to Wren, she knows she's the better character.
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Nov 2, 2022 21:03
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This map is a desert level. They made a worse desert level. FE's desert levels are awful and this is worse!quote:Oh. Oh. This level. Spoilers, there's a kickstarter backer character in it. The worst one, yeah there's more than one  Ugh these maps have some real tedious gimmicks, but this next one takes the cake for worst map for me. Bellmaker fucked around with this message at 02:00 on Nov 3, 2022 |
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Nov 3, 2022 01:49
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This writing is so terrible I'm curious if and how it will get worse as more characters are added to the "random one-liner" carousel. It's not difficult to have characters comment on current story events. Fire emblem Path of Radiance did it very smoothly with the base conversations and support system. Just having a random assortment of the 40 something boob ladies, idiot men and murder children chiming in every other line is completely intolerable. You can even have one of your army chime in in the missions where it's relevant, but Dark Deity can't even do that right as helpfully shown in the LP how often a character like Sloan says nothing about weird magic so dark elf history man can have a few lines, etc. Just a disorganized, unedited mess. Reminds me of my high school fiction writing.
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Nov 3, 2022 19:25
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You know, everyone keeps commenting on the giant hooters, but man did the artist have a thing for corsets. Even the people with big suits of armor are wearing giant, solid steel corsets.
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Nov 5, 2022 14:29
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I think someone actually mentioned the name of at least one god, the goddess Faine, which means that there are fanes to Faine? Yes, this is an useless post, but I thought it funny.
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Nov 6, 2022 00:36
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Support Recycling Welcome back! Last time on Dark Deity we learned that the writers were incapable of writing even a filler level. Today we're going to watch as they literally recycle supports. We can also watch as the game's class system bites Iris in whichever body part you see fit to imagine. (Personally, I prefer the foot). Support DumpYou know what else is weird to me about all these things? Supposedly the party values stopping massacres of soldiers and whatnot. You know what scene I'm about to bring up again.  Yet despite Irving not wanting to witness the slaughter no one seems to have any kind of moral quandary about associating with Brooke and Wren, despite them literally being nothing more than contract killers for hire. Irving even refers to Brooke as "the mercenary" and insists she stay with the party. It's thoroughly bizarre! Brooke openly brags about how many random people she's killed, and the game's writing doesn't do the usual fantasy trope where they only kill obviously bad people. Then in the next breath the game has its characters start prattling off about "honor". These very supports posted:
This is from the same person who tried to hire Brooke to massacre her personal enemies. Now, I'm not against characters being hypocritical or irrational, but it's just another confusing instance of "what does this army stand for"? Chapter 13 is supposedly about how our team has a new purpose now that we got Sterling killed, but we just wasted the last level on a filler fight with the Nonsensical Murder Elves to get a new character who's completely redundant in both a story and mechanics sense. Oh well, Dark Deity's bad, news at 11.
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Nov 7, 2022 01:48
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: Huh... He's not very talkative, but he's definitely had his share of bravery and honor.
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SIGSEGV posted:I think someone actually mentioned the name of at least one god, the goddess Faine, which means that there are fanes to Faine? The fane to Faine was the chapter where we found Vesta 
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Nov 7, 2022 03:00
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Now that we established Dark Deity is not good, what about Symphony of War? They're a combo deal on Steam
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Nov 7, 2022 03:14
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Bellmaker posted:The fane to Faine was the chapter where we found Vesta It all makes sense now. Her holy symbol is the boob window.
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Nov 7, 2022 03:25
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Nissin Cup Nudist posted:Now that we established Dark Deity is not good, what about Symphony of War? It's ok. The game is pretty easy if you put a modicum of effort into managing your forces, but it's fun enough if you aren't looking for a challenge. The plot is pretty good, but it's dragged down by characters who are somewhat flat.
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Nov 7, 2022 04:27
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mr_stibbons posted:It's ok. The game is pretty easy if you put a modicum of effort into managing your forces, but it's fun enough if you aren't looking for a challenge. The plot is pretty good, but it's dragged down by characters who are somewhat flat. One can argue that this game, at least, doesn't have flat characters. Not the female ones at least.
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Nov 7, 2022 04:34
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IthilionTheBrave posted:One can argue that this game, at least, doesn't have flat characters. Speaking of, has this game made flat chest jokes yet? I feel like that would be their brand of bad animu humour/tropes.
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Nov 7, 2022 04:45
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I don't think so and I thank the writers for it, it's about the last thing it needed.
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Nov 7, 2022 04:51
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I'll give the game this, if the...3? Fantasy Illuminatis we've actually sort of seen so far are anything to go by, it's a bold move for the writers to have a bunch of ineffective and irrelevant shadowy conspiracies running around instead of one or two secretly running the world.
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Nov 7, 2022 09:43
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Nissin Cup Nudist posted:Now that we established Dark Deity is not good, what about Symphony of War?
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Nov 7, 2022 11:04
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| # ? Jun 11, 2024 17:12 |
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mr_stibbons posted:It's ok. The game is pretty easy if you put a modicum of effort into managing your forces, but it's fun enough if you aren't looking for a challenge. The plot is pretty good, but it's dragged down by characters who are somewhat flat. +1 to this. To add to it, there's some unfortunate lack of Quality of Life due to them contorting it into existence from RPGMaker. It's still a fuckton more polished than Dark Deity, to the point I think putting it in a combo sale with it kind of insults Symphony of War. I do have an overall positive opinion of it, but the lacking difficulty ended up making it too much of a slog unfortunately. It's still very much worth a look if you're remotely interested in the SRPG/Ogre Battle circles though.
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Nov 7, 2022 11:19
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