Hey there! Thanks for taking the time to make this, I'm deeply sorry that you ran into the issues you did. I wanted to take a sec just since I saw this to explain a bit why the game is in the state that it is, and also assure that this won't be the case for game 2. I started making Dark Deity as I learned to code in my spare time in college, and the foundation of the game is a complete mess because of it - something that I didn't have enough expertise to understand until I was far far too deep in the process to do a whole lot about it. I'd never made a game before, and while it was buggy on launch I worked my ass off to fix bugs constantly for months. In the end, when I had to update the engine to be allowed to put the game on a variety of non-steam storefronts (EGS, Nintendo, GoG, etc), it fundamentally broke a ton of the game because I hadn't updated the engine in years. It came to a point where I was putting out patches and breaking more things than I was fixing, and to boot almost all of the issues were machine specific - so I had little real way of debugging them with any level of speed as a solo engineer. I didn't stop patching it because I gave up on the game, I stopped patching it because its so fundamentally badly built that damn near anything I fix simply causes a different issue - and the only real answer to having a more stable game would involve completely rebuilding the entire game which would take years. Now all of this is really one big excuse that doesn't change the fact that for some the game is unplayable, and I don't really have anything I can say to curb how shitty that is. I was inexperienced, and I built a shitty game that has a ton of issues. I constantly feel awful about that, but from a functional level there isn't a whole lot I can do about it now. What I am doing is working my ass off to make a game 2 that stands far above Dark Deity 1 in every way, not only in it's design aspects but most importantly from the engine. I could very easily have coasted and reused assets and codebase to make a quick turnaround game 2, but DD2 is completely from scratch with an entirely new codebase, UI, concepts, and classes. Essentially I could have spent a year and a half rebuilding the dark deity 1 codebase to rescue a game that already had a ton of game design issues regardless, and I've instead put that time into doing my best to go the extra mile on 2. All that to say - I hope you give Dark Deity 2 a chance. I have a ton of passion and I readily admit the mistakes that were made along the way, and I work myself to the bone. I carry a lot of shame around the handling of Dark Deity 1, but I am doing my best to rectify that by giving y'all a game that blows you away.

I remember seeing a Steam review that said something like "they released swimsuit DLC but don't bother fixing bugs" and that perfectly sums up how I feel about this game.

The main thing that took me out of the game was the weapon and armor percentages. It might be because I'm really used to FE but it felt very nebulous and hard to come to grips with, especially since I'm the kind of player who likes to know exactly why combat is going the way it's going and percentages for damage calculation aren't as easy to calculate as FE's basic arithmetic Edit: the fact that you can't typically keep units with the same weapon and armor when they promote and one of them changes makes it worse cause then it's like, ok I have this unit's niche figured out now, but then once you promote either their weapon or armor type changes and now you have to come to grips with it again. It's like if an FE myrm promoted into a Lance Paladin, now you have a different weapon with different applications AND new weaknesses you have to get use to again

That swamp level gameplay on the back sure is peak level design.

Someone else commented about DD math being too nebulous while FE is more straightforward. I absolutely agree. What discouraged me in DD was the level of complexity in the combat system. Straightforward yet meticulous mental math is key in FE because of perma-death, the AI's priority of killing units, and the enemy's advantage in numbers. That screams to me as a player that thorough calculations are part of good gameplay strategy. Thankfully it's easy to do quick algebra in FE and the pre-combat stat screen is very informative. DD's math felt too nebulous and the multiple layers of complexity hampered my ability to comprehend and process the game state. The 'poise' concept (power attack vs. accurate attack, etc.) is a fascinating concept, but my tiny brain couldn't keep up with that ON TOP OF the unit-type rock-paper-scissors math. At least in FE the weapon triangle stays constant across unit type, and weapon effects are listed in their name (Lancereaver, Killer Axe, etc.).

I think the biggest problem with the damage type/armor type system is that it isn't really visually clear. In Fire Emblem it is almost always *immediately* clear whether the unit is using a sword/spear/axe/magic/bow or is a flier or armor knight. But then is my Strider going to do more or less effective damage to that Green Knight? I think the system is 'deep' enough to be interesting but the problem is that it is not easy to keep track of, so I basically never think about it. That is the real problem with mechanics like Biorhythm etc..

I haven't played it since 2022 according to Steam, and while I am excited for a sequel, I don't think I'm giving the first game another playthrough if there are significant crash issues introduced post-balance. I had a good time with it, but the systems were not so favourable, as you have covered in this video and others. The map design is something I don't think I will ever get over because there is a lot of choices that seem odd to me. I love variety, but there are some incredibly different tile sets that feel like they are from different games. There are also maps that are so much blank space or feel really weird in their presentation (like Chapter 19 where it is a box with two lines of enemies on each side). I also cannot agree more of unit feel because I really wanted each unit to feel more unique in what they do, but was presented with four versions of each class with slight flavour variations that class into significantly different unit types. I do hope they have learned a lot for the sequel. It looks like, based on trailers, there is some level of reclassing and a focus on acquiring skills. Time will tell, but hopefully they do fix the first game, like you said.

I dropped the game partway through, and one of my bigest issues with it was the story. At roughly the 1/3rd point, it has been nothing but going place to place, searching for mcguffins, and getting lore dumped, but in a way where the lore dumps were mostly just "it is said that/ we don't really know what's going on" because it's some random ancient conspiracy plot, but there are no proper character moments to give some genuine meat on those bones. It just feels like the templates of a plot being given just enough prose to be possible to put into dialogue boxes, and being left at that. The average FE Romhack has a better story. Also, I agree with all of your criticisms of gameplay. In particular, the map design deserves large amounts of scorn, because most of the early game maps are Awakening tier, and somehow, in lategame, it slips down to Gaiden tier. Also, there are way too many things that the player needs to decide about possible future builds completely blind, and there are a bunch of enemies, even relatively early on, that punish the ever living shit out of the player, if they don't have some very specific counter builds, like the occasional random dodgetank, that seems to have 60+ avoid compared to their peers, without having notably different stats. The way promotions work is also whack as hell. Late joiners needing to have their class lines picked is cool on paper. You could choose something that fits your army, and it makes the game more customisable right? It would be, except most characters lead towards a specific advanced classlines, both in terms of visual presentation, and in terms of skills/statline. The thing with that, is that usually, the optimal class is not the one the character's profession or design might suggest, and it isn't the case of picking a best one out of a few good options, but rather picking out of one that's going to be good, one or two that's going to be servicable, and one or two that are so terrible, you might as well bench the unit. Perhaps the best example, is one of the scant few good maps, where three characters join. 2 temps, who return later, and one who stays. the temps have a bunch of magic promotions, and the one in black clothes has almost all of them be different breeds of just regular DPS mage (different damage types, some with minimal physical bulk, some with dodge tanking attempts, or pure glass cannons), and all kinda work, but the cleric has drastically different options, of varrying effectiveness, and the choice has to be made to make them fit with the player's team by the time they rejoin, which could be a much different team composition than what the player has at the moment, with most characters changing drastically with promotions (which start rolling around during that chapter, and right after) and new units joining. Also, the rogue that stays, despite having a bunch of similar seeming classes, is only good with one promotion, namely the one that gives her the most speed, because she doesn't seem that slow without the context of future speed benchmarks, and the safe assumption that a ROGUE that doesn't lose speed with any of their promotions should be fine in the speed department. And yet, she either needs to go thief, or be on a constant, and expensive diet of speed statboosters. Speaking of statboosters, the enemies are balanced around arms racing with the players' army having 4-5 optimised to hell, overinvested units, and it punishes the bad promotions even harder. This game genuinely felt like it wasn't playtested by anyone outside the dev team at best, and completely bereft of competent craftsmanship at worst. Symphony of War came out almost exactly one year later, and puts DD to utter fucking shame.

I had so much fun with the time I spent with this game, it's the type of TBS that I really enjoy, massive shame to hear that the bugs and crash issues.

Literally got it for free out of a raffle played it until I got to a game breaking bug that basically deleted my file try playing it again got more bugs lost interest try playing it again didn't have any interest bc it was so buggy which is a shame because I was willing to give it a wide wide berth as well yes it's Fire Emblem but bro I was I was invested

Unfortunate that you couldn't make it to chapter 23. Frankly, the map and scenario design for the majority of this game was pretty mediocre or outright bad. But chapter 23 had some of the best boss mechanics I've encountered in an SRPG. Granted, I played at launch, so maybe they ruined it in a patch later on (I know they reworked a lot of the maps, including notably the one that you're currently softlocked on), but I sure hope not because it is unironically one of the most memorable (in a good way) maps I've played in an SRPG. Final boss fight was pretty decent too as I recall. One thing that's interesting to me is that you didn't mention class balance at all, which makes me wonder whether they actually did a good job with the rebalance changes? When I played the game, it was comical how overtuned the lifesteal magic using classes were, to the point where it was actively detrimental to try and use anything else. 1-2 range and Nosferatu effect on every weapon eclipsed the paltry buffs that the other classlines got. The dual swords class that rangers got dramatically outclassed all the other Ranger classes because dodgetanking was the only way to play the game at release and their class skill doubled down on speed, which meant that basically nobody on my team who started with bows actually used them by the end. It was also painful how focused the early meta was on speed. It was like FE's armor knight problem turned up to 11: defense didn't scale nearly fast enough to compensate for getting doubled, which coupled with the lower damage output meant that anyone who wasn't in the highest speed tier was functionally useless. As a result, a solid third of the cast was basically unusable on release, as they 3-4RKO'ed enemies and got 2 or even 1RKO'd back, even against their advantage matchup enemies, even on their join map. I'm curious too to hear your thoughts on the aspects (I think they were called?) as I thought that was probably the most interesting mechanic in the game. The idea to have an equippable item that could fundamentally alter the parameters of the unit was really cool. Of course, the inventory management aspect of it was a pain in the ass, and the aforementioned balance issues made it so that your units were either a) using one of the swap aspects to parlay one of their less useful stats into more speed, or b) were already a good unit and as such were using Vosh's Sanguination (which gave stats proportional to max HP) to completely break the game.

My feelings about Dark Deity are very similar. The foundations of a good game are there, but it has too many issues, from its cliched story, to poor game balance and map design, to the numerous bugs. The bugs are particularly egregious, because not only are there way too many of them, at some point the devs just stopped fixing bugs for some reason. I've been diligently reporting every bug I come across, but not only are they still there over a year later, I haven't even seen an acknowledgement from the devs. And it's not like they're short-staffed either- they have the resources to update the art and release DLC, but somehow, fixing bugs is too much? And every update seems to introduce new (and worse) bugs. It just makes the devs look sloppy and unprofessional. Fixing bugs should always be your #1 priority. No exceptions. I agree with you about permadeath. My unpopular Fire Emblem opinion is that I don't like permadeath. Dark Deity handled it much better IMO, because the penalty is bad enough that you don't want to play sloppily, but not so severe that you just restart anyways, which makes the gameplay a lot less stressful and tedious. The damage formula is even more complicated than what you described. Not only is there weapon vs armor type, but you also have to take into account mastery, and the entire formula is very long. Though for me, this didn't matter as much as I thought. I mostly play by "vibes" rather than math everything out, so it doesn't really matter that the formula is complicated. And yeah, I agree that the game is more fun than it "should be". I did a few complete playthroughs experimenting with different units and builds. Unfortunately, the more recent versions have introduced more severe bugs, to the point where it has gotten too annoying for me to want to keep playing. (though I haven't run into hard crashes)

I tried the game. Controls felt awkward and the game overall didn't feel pollished. At some point in chapter 3(?) I gave up and stopped playing.

I personally liked DD despite it's flaws. I'm still excited to play DD2. I got lucky and only crashed once though. DD2 looks pretty polish in comparison and I'm always open to seeing anybody improving on their craft.

When I first started the game, I was really impressed by how many different language options you could choose from. I really enjoy using video games for learning languages so I set the game to Chinese and started playing. Turns out, they were using Google Translate for all of it. Literally the first line of the prolog introduced Jesus as an in-game mythological character. Later in the tutorial they went on to translate the phrase "Everything else is fair game." literally word by word. To be fair, I wasn't expecting too much after seeing that the button on the main menu said "fied Chinese" since they had dropped the character meaning "simple". Why even add language options if they are done this poorly?

I would like to know your thoughts about the personal skills in the game. You mentioned that the class system takes away from the unit's identity. I am wondering if the personal skills managed to differentiate the characters.

Would you be able to do a series about other fire emblem like games, especially more current ones? A few months ago I played a bit of one called "Lost Eidolons" on steam when I was visiting a friend and it was ok from the limited experience I had with it (though sometimes the joy of hanging out with friends can make a bad game seem good).

Watching the gameplay in the back, it looks like it could be a lot of fun, albeit kinda complicated? Either way, hope they fix the bugs. Another note, I personally focus a lot on visuals, being an artist and all, and this game has... A lot of clashing art styles. UI elements, map sprites, the visuals of the maps themselves, the character art, combat backgrounds, so much of it just looks like a completely different art style, most likely because theyre done by different artists, and it causes a lot of visual clutter for me personally. Its just a bit hard to look at.

When i pkayed it was about a week after launch. I remember that i manged to have a character who tanked every single enemy. I think i only crashed at the second map and on one support convo

i remember when a lot of people were shilling this as the next indie FE big thing with two exceptions I can think of, one of which no longer being on youtube anymore, fast forward to years later you rarely hear anyone talk about this game even more, even now that it's getting a sequel, I feel like that says everything that needs to be said.

I'm always looking for alternatives to Fire Emblem like Unicorn Overlord, since I want to play more Fire Emblem but also want to experience something new. This games looks right up my alley but if it's gonna soft lock you like that then I am not sure if I should even get it then.

This game's class system seems pretty fun, do you know of any SRPGs that do a similar thing (but better)?

What's the background music from?

Looked promising with some good ideas. Character art looks nice, map art not so much. That snow map looks really bad. They need to fix the bugs/crashes, those can really mess up the experience.

I love ALL MythrilZenith videos!!!! ❤

That's a shame, the idle animation and characters look nice, and grievous wound sounds interesting (haven't play it). 6:09 This section feels confusing.

Huh I played it a few months ago and I did encounter some bugs, but nothing gamebreaking. Weird that you had so many problems when I don't think there have been any updates since then

So it got MORE buggy? That explains why i havent encountered many bugs myself (literally 0 crashes and biggest bug was push working weirdly on swamp map and one boss not doing certain attacks). A shame, it's not too bad and i completed it happily (even when its not as good as Fire Emblem really).

game bugs too strong please nerf

honestly just looking at your footage i can't help but think how unprofessional the visuals are; this isn't a question of polish so much as it is one of cohesion. it's a real mess of clashing styles; individual components look (mostly) fine but it looks really sloppy when everything's side-by-side, or map to map even; that snow map relative to that swamp map, the snow map just looks _unfinished._ It's not the end of the world for a game like this of course but I'm not a fan.

I played this back in 2021, got to around chapter 10ish and just kinda lost interest. I remember being frustrated with a lack of several QoL elements, awkward switching between units being the one that sticks in my head still.

Huh didn't even know it was this buggy. Played it beginning to end without issue....so I only had to deal with the systematic issues. I like the game but it needs a lot of refinement

It’s also like really laggy on switch

Hopefully not dumb question. Does your video mean you’ll play the second dark deity 😅

I skipped through all of the story, cuz I just didn't care. Gameplaywise, is neat with Piercing and etc but thats about it? Faust ended up mostly soloing most of the later half of the game for me for my first run, because it was faster and easier to just use him to solo the game then to put other units out there who are all behind or do nothing against the enemy comp. The map where you have to fight your doppelganger, like how it was done in Awakening, was also solo'd because it was less of a pain since if you go first then you win and thus the map really needed something else to make you want to bring other units, like how Awakening at least had Aversa. It's a good starter game, but it REALLY needs more tunning on map design. Played it on release. All of these indie T/SRPGs are just telling me to never get another one, because most of them are terrible.

Remembered trashing this game on launch with the rom hacking community lmao. Hope 2 can be a better game.

even ignoring the bugs, the game never struck me the right way. I do not think it solves issues of juggernauting or unit balance that FE has

the upgrade and class system is very weird. And the minor bugs were annoying. I think indies are evolving their FE style games. Symphony of War isn't for my taste due to team building becoming strong soldiers go brr Redemption Reapers is playing slow to beat one enemy at time like early 3H maddening for the entire game And I have to play Lost Eidolons someday

God this was such a letdown for me. There's a lot of SRPGs, there are not a lot of games that scratch the same FE itch that this was really trying to hit. It's the same for me with Paper Mario, there aren't a lot of games that get it for me. Channels like yours I hope break down the elements of fire emblem into digestible bits so some indie dev can actually make a non-buggy, nebulously mathed, unfortunate mess the DD turned out to be.