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Very cool how the heroes are keeping a professional assassin on retainer just in case the nobles don't fall in line.
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Feb 14, 2023 09:30
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I am honestly shocked that the final boss had a unique sprite. I'm not at all shocked by the visuals of the unique auras being complete garbage. How could anyone look at that battle and think that the orange squares of development testing were okay for the final product? That sort of visualization is fine if you swap to a tactical overlay where enemies are red dots and allies are blue dots and hazards are some other color, but to just leave orange squares there is so absolutely loving lazy that it beggars belief. It's possible that they hosed up the game engine so badly that they couldn't overlay any sprites onto tiles and just had to bodge a color change in there for effects, but if that's the case, then don't use those as a mechanic! And then the final credits don't even scroll properly. What the actual gently caress were they doing with their time other than writing the shittiest of all fanfics? It's such wasted potential. If they had cut the cast down dramatically to something like 12 characters, and then focused on those characters and their stories, they might have had something coherent to work with. They ended up spreading everything way too thin, with way too much "Hi, I'm going to say my line about my one character trait!" But I think a lot of the devs had their favorite anime oc do not steal in the story and the character bloat almost certainly torpedoed a lot of their ability to write a narrative.
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Feb 14, 2023 09:38
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So does the game just have a completely random selection of dudes to chime preceding the final battle, or were you simply being merciful on us and not transcribing literally every character popping in to say a one-liner? My fond memories of this game are the sheer number of times that the writing communicates the exact opposite of what the writers intended. I have never seen writing get flubbed so hard and so consistently to do that. Special callout to Sloane for somehow managing to materialize an accidental but consistent and interesting personality in all that. She'll totally be ruling the place within a month.
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Feb 14, 2023 09:39
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this game was total rear end!!! gotta wash out the taste with a good fe like engage or sacred stones or smth
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Feb 14, 2023 12:30
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TheGreatEvilKing posted:by being a cool new tactics game that hearkened back to the GBA Fire Emblems after the main series devolved into dating sims with violence. Funny thing is, IntSys agreed that this was a niche that needs filling! That's why the new Fire Emblem is exactly this! I've said it before and I'll say it again: Dark Deity feels to me like a cargo cult game design. They understood what was popular in other games, but completely failed to understand why they were popular or how they worked. They've got all the flashy headline features but none of the foundational work, in gameplay design and writing, that glues it all together. Thank you very much for a well done LP of this game. Thank you for convincing me at great length not to buy it. 
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Feb 14, 2023 13:23
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Was there ever a fantasy game that tackled medieval class dynamics better than "kingdoms are good, empires are evil?" The first half of FFT, I guess.
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Feb 14, 2023 13:25
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So, Sloane completes her character arc by manipulating the party into effectively putting her on the throne. The king’s dead, and Sloane and Monroe immediately seize the moment to simply dictate the form of the new government, which coincidentally leaves them, as nobles, in direct control. And though Sloane’s house is apparently pretty small, the other nobles are scattered or in hiding, so they’ll be returning to find Sloane and Monroe already reigning over the capital in triumph and organizing everything. Monroe is a doormat with no charisma, so hail Queen Sloane. And, of course, Irving and the rest of the party just sort of smile and cheer. Sloane wouldn’t do anything bad, she’s our friend! It’s not like she murdered her father in front of us or anything. Fervent anti-monarchist revolutionary Alexa is immediately on board with the aristocracy once they offer her a minor position in power. The Aramoran princesses are the only other ones who seem to care about Delia’s government, and from their perspective they’ve just infiltrated an enemy nation, turned a bunch of its soldiers, convinced them to destroy their own army and kill their own king, and installed a pro-Aramor regime led by someone they know personally. It’s a win-win, really. What? What do you mean that wasn’t what the writers were going for? Don’t be ridiculous. megane fucked around with this message at 13:35 on Feb 14, 2023 |
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Feb 14, 2023 13:33
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At least when Black Geyser had Sea Hag and Jade being fun and good, it was deliberate and clearly the writing being good, here, Sloane is (somewhat) fun and good but only as a failure of the writing, impressive stuff, really. And the gameplay looks absolutely riveting, especially the map design. I understand how they got to that, I also get really tired by fifty different timed objectives and whatever else is there to distract me from the fact that this is another grinding advance or grinding defence in which my key skill is placing units on good terrain and checking beforehand on the wiki what the reinforcements are so I pick the correct set of rock paper scissors to send on each path, because the mission briefing certainly doesn't tell me "twelve berzerkers with swordreavers appear above the east villages in sets of three through turns 10, 12, 14 and 16." and yes, it's kinda annoying after too many of those. It also means you can just lift the fun map gimmicks, the raising and falling platforms in a water temple that trap units, half the map being air only, the crawl up and down the cliffside path that actually rewards having archers (for once), the time limits that aren't spelled out and arise naturally from the situation, having to carefully manage forces without healing before a rendez-vous. Not all map gimmicks are loving terrible and it's a shame they picked none of those. Also the supports were incredibly crap, I know everyone was down on them but I want you to imagine being a writer on such a project and being given like a month to writer out all this crap between characters that have only one character trait scribbled on their character art and the clear inability to add in narration.
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Feb 14, 2023 14:44
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Even at the end of the game, there is no coherent plot. Everything we've seen in the last 18 pages boils down to 'an unnecessarily large group of someone's OCs wander over to kill this wizard guy because the game says so'. Nobody has any coherent motivation worth a drat and none of the villains actually do anything, villainous or otherwise.
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Feb 14, 2023 18:26
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The most depressing thing about how that update played out is that killing the big bad wizard felt like nothing. Didn't feel good. Didn't feel bad. Didn't feel like an end because the story meandered so much. Just... nothing
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Feb 14, 2023 19:05
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BisbyWorl posted:Why even bother with reloading here? The game is over, it isn't like the stat penalties matter anymore. gotta keep them in top-form for the DLC
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Feb 14, 2023 19:30
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What a journey. I don't know how the writers managed to flub things up this bad, or how no one thought not having an official QA tester or three was a bad idea. I'd say I hope they learned from this experience, but I very much doubt it.
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Feb 14, 2023 20:50
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there are a few tolerable ideas in this game, i will say. the weapon system is extremely poorly balanced but as an evolution of how fe gaiden/echoes works its a novel enough concept. but like with a lot of things in this game it feels like they just slapped together their first draft of it and shipped it.
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Feb 20, 2023 16:34
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also heres a very funny typo nobody caught 'sent countless delians to their lives'
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Feb 20, 2023 16:37
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anyway as a last bit of commentary the one advantage to chucking permadeath and making every character pipe up in cutscenes is that you can have those characters get actual subplots. like theres plenty of examples of that sort of thing in FE games. Soren in FE9/10 isn't a main character but gets a whole arc about overcoming his past of being prejudiced against due to being mixed-race and has the reveal at the end that he's almedha and ashnard's kid, naesala in fe9/10 has the whole 'slimy guy who backstabs you a bunch but finally comes around' bit, jaffar and nino in fe7 have their betraying the fang bit and the thing where you have to fight the one of lloyd/linus that isnt already dead, etc. theres points in most FE games where characters that arent the main lords are driving the plot, or at least are relevant to the current events this game, despite insisting on every single character chiming in in cutscenes... doesnt have that? the plot just meanders in circles and only maybe 3-4 characters get any sort of 'arc' focused on them. we have a single dwarf party member and learn basically nothing about the dwarves. have us deal with dwarf politics for a couple chapters or something, itd be more interesting than Vague Magic Bullshit.
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Feb 20, 2023 17:07
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TheGreatEvilKing posted:
What a perfect way to end this piece of poo poo. This is on par with Ride to Hell: Retribution, and I'm shocked that review OP linked scored it higher than a 2.
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Feb 20, 2023 22:20
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I have played this game a lot. It was actually my most played steam game last year. What it has going for it is the built in randomizer. Adding variance to classes and character growths and my insistence on never benching units makes it an excellent puzzle to clear maps, but this is something I will admit is accidental. But it goes to show that having a built in, extremely customizable randomizer is a very good thing. It hurt me a little to see it poo poo on so hard, but the plot is honestly bad, and some maps weren't thought out at all. (In the duel against the wizard you can just.... Not deploy Irving, and no one will duel the wizard is the biggest  concept in a game with a lot of them.) And I made the NBA2k20 thread, so I certainly can't find fault with an LP that repeatedly tears a deeply flawed game apart for its many flaws. Especially the plot, which I've skipped so much I think I memory holed how bad it actually is.So to offer a slightly different perspective, I will say that I got quite a bit more enjoyment out of this bad game than I did at least one game I would say was excellent, and I will almost certainly come back to it more. So I really wish more games were anywhere near as customizable.
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Feb 20, 2023 23:44
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anilEhilated posted:Was there ever a fantasy game that tackled medieval class dynamics better than "kingdoms are good, empires are evil?" The first half of FFT, I guess. 'Fantasy game' and 'medieval class dynamics' is a bit mutually exclusive, isn't it? The presence of the supernatural kinda shakes up those dynamics by just existing. There's a few I can think of that have at least a little bit of that stuff though. Tyranny or Long Live The Queen come to mind and if you're willing to go more retro, Final Fantasy 12.
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Feb 21, 2023 04:12
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Veryslightlymad posted:I have played this game a lot. It was actually my most played steam game last year. anilEhilated posted:Was there ever a fantasy game that tackled medieval class dynamics better than "kingdoms are good, empires are evil?" The first half of FFT, I guess.
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Feb 21, 2023 13:13
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At least with regards to customizers/randomizers, the recent FEs have been programmed in Unity so it's been very fast getting those randomizers out (as well as making your own customizations in case you want to do that). The only issue being that since they're Switch, you almost certainly have to emulate it or homebrew your Switch so it's still both a pain in the rear end and of not very safe legality.
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Feb 21, 2023 13:53
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FE3H had this thing were it clearly tried to be more than previous FEs and just shook itself apart every time on every axis each time I tried to think about any aspect of what it tried to be. Also I think one character who never appeared in game but is fairly relevant to the backstory has accounts conflicting on her name, clearly as a coordination mistake and not as a reveal, which is more the sort of thing I'd expect from this game instead. Speaking of it, I wonder if it has any NG+ options, bringing on the megacheese for a second run seems like the sort of thing it'd have. (Not that I'd complain, I like getting back in there and thoroughly flattening a game after having my scrap with it.)
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Feb 21, 2023 23:19
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Dark Deity: Postmortem This has taken a long time because Dark Deity is such a unique game. This is not to say that there's something interesting to say about Dark Deity, because it falls on its face at every turn. I'm going to try to sum up some of the core failures of Dark Deity so my spirit can rest in peace and I can finally move on from this drat game.  I could seriously just post this again and it could be the entire post-game commentary Who Is The Dark Deity? This game spilled a lot of words about plot, but I really can't tell you who the titular Dark Deity is. I assume that the title is supposed to refer to Empyrean, but it doesn't work for several reasons.  This line is supposed to be ironic because he's going to the regular Astral Plane that dead people go to, but I don't trust the authors' command of English enough to assume this is deliberate The first and most obvious is that Empyrean never becomes a god! The game drops the revelation on us that he's doing the standard JRPG plot two or three chapters before the end, but he never actually becomes a god as Team Warcrime kills him before he gets there. The game never even expresses the idea that a dark god can exist - the gods are referred to in the plural always. I think Vosh is supposed to be the blood god or something, as it lets Faust cast his blood spike spells, yet there's no stigma against Vosh worship and Sterling even swears in his name. The Very First Update posted:
Thus we end up with a weird situation where not only is there not a "Dark Deity", but it's not even an idea any of the characters recognize! It's not even a lazy mystery box like Amazon's awful fantasy shows, the very concept doesn't exist. The characters fight Empyrean not because they're afraid of him arising as some kind of tyrant god, but because they've somehow convinced themselves that his ritual will destroy the world. Empyrean's not even characterized with the usual umbral imagery that Satan analogues are usually characterized with, he uses "Arcane" magic which is generally purple and glowy and can be freely used by the party mages without consequence. There are a few lines about how Empyrean may retaliate against the party once he becomes a god, but he doesn't really seem to have a goal other than becoming a god for... reasons.  This runs smack into the text's lack of motivation for Empyrean. It's not really clear why Empyrean wants to become a god, because the man is an immortal wizard with the power to destroy armies and teleport around. It's honestly not clear what differentiates Empyrean from being an actual god. The text tells us he is not a god because he's trying to become one, but the game wastes tons and tons of words desperately avoiding revealing anything about these villains. We don't get the idea that Empyrean becoming a god would herald an age of devastation or that he's morally unfit to wield the power. All of the evidence that Empyrean did bad things is literally just the Illuminati women speculating about his evil motives and how he maybe killed Varic's dad and masterminded the whole thing. The devs apparently did a complete story rework at some point, but it's astounding how they're completely unable to describe what this story is about. This is a story about coming of age, but Irving never matures. There are no plot twists because there is no plot to speak of. There's a lot of chatter about how maybe the villains aren't really evil and they have understandable motivations, but it all falls flat because they're never onscreen and do nothing. Interview transcript posted:yeah uh our villains definitely have a Hilariously enough they even lend some credence to my interpretation that Irving and company are war criminals. Interview transcript, again posted:you know there's some there's some A Strategy RPG Without Strategy The devs have talked a lot about character builds and how the characters can be built to stomp people, but the game is very much not focused on any tactics and the developers don't care. There are no secondary objectives except chests. All of the Aspects are dumped on the player in cutscenes and that's the only unique loot the game. the autogenerated interview transcript posted:all right i know dylan dylan doesn't Having played that map it's not very interesting! We've covered how the spriting of the elementals is incredibly lazy, but the damage is incredibly minor and the enemies are dully scripted to wait for someone to obligingly bait them into the killzone where your invulnerable dodge tank with lifesteal just kills them. This is a recurring problem, where all maps can be solved with a grinding advance noob square and you don't need to put any thought into it at all. Thus we end up with a game that has poorly thought out gameplay, an abysmal story, and a recommendation to buy the DLC so we actually understand such trivial things as "the villains' motivation". Apparently the Evil Rock caused the Calamity per the DLC (...per TVTropes, which is literally the only source I can find of anyone playing the side missions) and inspired Empyrean on his quest. That would have been nice to include in the main game instead of Alastair having an entire warning about not trusting the rock and that plot going nowhere. Conclusion Ultimately the picture you can pierce together from these developer interviews is that they had no idea what they were doing. Yes, I can tell they were trying to avoid spoilers, but they are so desperate to try to come up with something to say about it that they can't even fall back on "this is a story about hubris" or "the characters must survive being drafted as child soldiers in an immoral war of conquest". I'd be extremely curious to see the story they threw out, and I'd venture to speculate that story had actual answers to the questions of "why is Empyrean doing this". Unfortunately, it doesn't matter. The game fails at everything it attempts, and while I applaud the developers' ambition to make a game I unfortunately cannot endorse the final product. Does anyone actually want to see the DLC?
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Mar 7, 2023 03:50
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: By Vosh, you've all grown. That was quite the thrill.
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Don't give these people more money. Great LP of a game that didn't deserve the effort. The only real smile I got from this game was when someone on discord pointed out that in Sloane's original design:  Her panty and jewels look like a pokemon face.
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Mar 7, 2023 03:56
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Don't subject us to any more of this nonsense.
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Mar 7, 2023 04:03
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Thanks for the final nail in the coffin of this sad affair. And yes, Cythereal posted:Don't give these people more money. please.
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Mar 7, 2023 04:59
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I'd tell you to actually subject yourself to more of this, but I don't think we'll even get enjoyment out of it. I was going to write a couple paragraphs about how I'm willing to accept the story being terrible if it's only there to be an excuse plot to enable the gameplay, leaving that to its own (bad) devices. I still will. It's only fair after all, the Fire Emblems are basically waifu and husbando collector anime chess at this point and it's mostly taking that point in account that people will say that FE3H has a good story, because it kinda falls apart on examination, no one is going to wax lyrical about the marvels of FE Fates's plot, characters or writing in general, and so on, and they are taken for what they are and are afforded some good will for that, you willfully paper over the faults, sighing if necessary, because they aren't pretending to be mighty and powerful modern classics. No Miserables, no Anna Karenina. There's a bunch of other games I could name that do think themselves to be modern classics, Bioshock infinite, TLOU and so on, and probably had the words "Citizen Kane" thrown around a bit in their creation, games in which the story waves a gun in your face, demanding to be taken seriously and requiring a pronunciamento of its correctness, thoroughness, seriousness, how beautiful that trolley problem, how incisive its acne ridden teenage cynicism, how subtle the cage imagery, how, in an FPS, they have you use context prompts instead of aiming to decide where to throw something. (Forming a beautiful intertextual bookend with the ending of Prey 2017 here.) Let's be honest, no matter what the devs say, the game definitely isn't one of those. They ditched the first draft, I'd call it a good thing and I'm very mildly interested in getting my hands on it and seeing what saw it tossed. They have interviews extolling something, but not doing puffery in those is basically gamedev and advertising malpractice. Let's evaluate it for what it is, a no pretense fantasy story that tries its hardest to have no message (and fails for that very reason) ultimately existing to support frankly minimal amounts of waifuism for its bizarrely sexless extruded fanservice character art and mostly justify the existence of gameplay. It's really bad. I think like half a dozen of us have posted about it, but on my end I'm pretty sure it's significantly worse that my 13 years old self's old shame fanfics, the plot doesn't hold, at any point, I'd say over half the time the writing achieves the opposite of the desired effects, not just in impression but in actual, textual meaning, there's the usual r/worldbuilding disease lurking about, making people confuse writing a story with writing an RPG sourcebook, and even then forgetting to put in the plot hooks for the DM, and then there's approximately a thousand times too many loving words in supports and so on. In my mind's eye, I can see my French teacher writing endless "waffling, padding" notes all over the place. I hope she never sees this though, it might hurt her. When it comes to story, some games are lucky they are just games, but this one? It's still really, really bad even at that standard.
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Mar 7, 2023 06:12
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Cythereal posted:Don't give these people more money. 
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Mar 7, 2023 09:26
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Y'know what you could do with the ~10.30$ it costs to buy the DLC instead, and will bring you much more joy? Buy yourself a bowl of nachos. (also, per steam, 73% of 1829 user reviews for this game are positive, for a "mostly positive" rating. Somehow)
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Mar 7, 2023 09:39
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With no disrespect intended, please don't. Honestly, even with your summarized bits, I glazed over the story. Heck, I almost prefer the clusterfuck that is Fire Emblem Fate's story to this. There are better things to spend about $10 on...like a fast food meal that's your guilty pleasure.
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Mar 8, 2023 00:45
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Yeah, nthing "don't bother with the DLC." Based on the rest of the game, I doubt whatever Deep Lore they shoved in the DLC is gonna be a particularly interesting kind of bad.
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Mar 8, 2023 00:57
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Let's judge if these people deserve your money. Let's see... the writing is awful, the plot is nonexistent, the character designs are generally boring or baffling, the gameplay is terrible, and the coding is falling apart at the seams. Yeah, don't give him more money.
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Mar 8, 2023 01:08
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No money to bad devs. Unless you already bought the DLC, in which case you may as well get some yucks out of it.
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Mar 8, 2023 01:11
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If you already own the dlc I would have a laugh at the origin story of Irving's hat(tm). Otherwise I'd echo the sentiment to not give them any more money when most of what can be said has been said.
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Mar 8, 2023 01:50
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I backed the game, and even I say don't. I admire what they tried to go for, but they didn't hit the mark. While being part of the development was fun, and I would never say anyone on the dev team was malicious in their actions, it just didn't end up being the game that people were expecting, and sadly, didn't have the quality to make up for missing that mark. I'm also a little annoyed with what they did to Nao in a throw-away line in the DLC. Not that they did it, but that they kinda neutered her story with it.
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Mar 8, 2023 02:36
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UneditedBear posted:I'm also a little annoyed with what they did to Nao in a throw-away line in the DLC. Not that they did it, but that they kinda neutered her story with it. Care to explain? No need for spoiler tags, I think we're done here.
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Mar 8, 2023 06:11
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I mostly lurk in your threads, but having followed along with this one, I don't think it's worth it. Don't buy the DLC, invest that money on a
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Mar 8, 2023 14:00
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A more interestingly crappy game imo.
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Mar 8, 2023 14:06
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More than anything, Dark Deity just makes me want to compare it to other FE romhacks.
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Mar 8, 2023 14:58
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The game is bad, but it's also mostly boring. I doubt that there's any interesting gameplay in the DLC, and the odds that the story will be anything more than "blandly incompetent" are pretty low. Why spend money on something so boring and incompetent?
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Mar 8, 2023 15:29
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| # ? May 8, 2024 23:32 |
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If you already own the DLC, feel free to show off more of this terrible game for the laughs. If you don't own it though, keep your money for other, better things.
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Mar 8, 2023 23:00
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