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gascon-en-exil · 3 years

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Dark Deity Pre-Release Character Opinions

This isn't actually a tier list, but someone helpfully created a template for this game and it's as good a way as any to do a little visual showcase for this cast. Characters are listed by their class sets, which are fixed but offer a nice variety in terms of promotion options. My opinions on each are as follows, from left to right in each row. Most characters have introductory profiles written up on the DD subreddit, if you'd like to check them out yourself.

Warriors

Alexa

You know those buff female blacksmiths in Echoes and Three Houses that some people wish were playable characters? That's pretty much Alexa. Can't say I'm too hyped about her myself, but warrior + tomboyish female character will do that for me...or not do it, I suppose.

Benji

Seems to have been written to become a meme, and I still can't decide whether that's clever or stupid. Kind of like Raphael only with a bigger emphasis on training than on eating, and with brotherly devotion replaced with brotherly angst that might theoretically go somewhere if the character isn't reduced to being a goofy joke all the time.

Fenton

Doesn't have a character profile, so as far as I know he's just a generic dwarf because DD swaps out its inspiration's loli dragons and other vaguely fetishistic shapeshifters for the two most cliché non-human races in Western fantasy. I wonder whether his VA will voice him with a Scottish accent, to go all in on the (ironic?) laziness. There are a handful of elves in the playable cast, but Fenton is the only dwarf so for better or worse he's representing.

Helena

She's the embodiment of the FE exotic swordswoman archetype, but curiously DD seems to have turned that broad ethnic brush inward. Helena's last name is apparently a Japanese verb, her art shows her with a spear (as in the association of the naginata with women), and she studied and trained in a monastery that seems to blend elements of Buddhism and Shintoism. Not sure how all that fits into the larger setting yet, but at this point she's still got more background development than Petra.

Irving

Our Hero, the one front and center on the cover art. He sounds a bit on the blander side as far as lords or lord equivalents go, with his most promising hook for me being his established friendship with Garrick (see the ranger section). At best I can hope for a bit of a romantic friendship dynamic, although they sound a bit rougher overall as they're military academy schoolmates I wonder why DD went with that instead of lordlings of different territories.

Rogues

Brooke

Looks like Camilla; has a backstory like Niles. Cleavage aside though the sexual element of both is toned down here, and there might be some sapphic bodyguard shenanigans to be had as her current employers are a pair of highborn sisters further down this list.

Cia

For some reason she reminds me of Tressa from Octopath Traveler, only bustier and a bartender rather than a merchant. She's still just a small town girl with big city dreams, and this being a tactical war game following those dreams will inevitably involve stabbing people.

Corvan

Hard to judge him at the moment, as his profile was only the second written and so isn't terribly detailed. He's a moon elf with scholarly interests, apparently. Still, as of right now he's the only rogue who doesn't slot loosely into either a ninja/assassin or pirate aesthetic, so that's kind of neat. Also, he's one of several characters to have FEH-esque beach fanart made of them already, so clearly someone's into elf twinks.

Ford

A former officer at the military academy Irving attends and a smuggler who dotes on his niece, Ford has major dad energy. Per developer reveals he's also bi, and as I mentioned before I'm totally fine with that. More bear sex, please - but what guy in this cast would hop in the sack with Ford? Only time will tell. His personal skill makes him extra dodgy, which combined with the mug of booze in his art makes me think of WoW brewmasters who dodge-tank through the power of being wasted.

Wren

Like Brooke, he's an assassin from a foreign nation - in his case the same one as Helena so presumably he's a not!Japanese ninja. I'm not really feeling him at the moment. What is it about Hao'Fen (the city/territory he and Helena come from) and massive families? That comes up in both their backstories.

Rangers

Caius

I feel like this is the third or fourth character to grow up in some slum or other; at least they've all been in different towns so far. The relative rarity of noble characters is certainly different from FE, but it reduces the political stakes which leaves me wondering a bit about the story. Anyway, Caius is a small town desert hunter who learned how to make arrows out of animal bones. How aerodynamic is bone, I wonder?

Garrick

Irving's BFF and seemingly the Hector to Irving's Eliwood, only with more flirting (his intro doesn't specify that Garrick is flirting with women, but I'm not going so far as to say that indicates anything). He's the academy headmaster's son, with a strained relationship with his father for some of that hotheaded lead tension. Notably, his VA is the one I'm most familiar with in this cast, as he's the voice of Revali from Breath of the Wild as well as love interests in two different erotic gay dating sims I've played. In other words, I know what this guy sounds like making awkwardly simulated sex noises...and I have no idea what to do with that information.

Maeve

She's a half-elf with a very storied background, so much so that it's all rather hard to follow her exploits when little of what's being described has been fully revealed yet. I'm expecting her to be a mid/lategame recruit, unless she's dropped in early on to reveal that (sun) elves exist or something.

Rose

Imagine if Bernadetta were a commoner, although we can only hope they'll be less screaming. Alternatively, Neimi without an obvious boyfriend. She won the beach contest so now she has official swimsuit art, which I guess makes her a top-tier waifu in the eyes of players who care about such things.

Sophia

A ranger in the "has animal companions" sense, although whether that will come into play mechanically aside from her personal skill - Butter the ferret can attack with her! - remains to be seen. Her preference for the company of animals is explained by a lack of social graces, so prepare for klutz-related humor. Of note to those interested in F/F is that her introduction specifically brings up her connection with Sloane (see the mage section) and how close the two of them are.

Clerics

Faust

Doesn't have a profile yet, so not much to go off other than his decidedly unhinged look. The cleric class set does feature some darker-flavored options, so presumably he's more naturally aligned with those. His VA was announced to be the YouTuber behind So This is Basically Fire Emblem and other similar videos, so I'm picturing a kooky and somewhat demented Henry type.

Lincoln

Also lacks a profile at time of writing...clerics get so little love. The Discord has identified him a bland blond paladin sort, but as we know from the likes of Perceval and especially Dimitri that doesn't necessarily mean he'll be boring (or not gay).

Maren

The soft-spoken healer type, and also a childhood friend of Garrick although her intro sibling-zones him but then this game is inspired by FE so who knows if that'll stick. She may have some interesting thoughts on the theology of the setting, as there seem to be several faiths and she's said to have a complicated relationship with her own. I will be utterly shocked if she's not either Irving or Garrick's eventual love interest.

Samara

One of two princesses of the country of Aramor, which appears to be loosely inspired by the Middle East. Heaven help us if the Khalidstans ever get wind of this game. Unfortunately aside from her bond with her older sister (in the mage section) and the knowledge that Brooke has been hired as their bodyguard there's not much to Samara at the moment. Hopefully the clerics all do some comparative theology in their bond conversations, and this isn't like Sacred Stones where none of the clergy characters from different countries ever compare notes. The succession crisis involving Samara and her sister vs. their less-loved cousin the king's son might be a major plot hook? It's still too early to tell.

Vesta

Much like Maeve her backstory has entirely too much going on to really follow at the moment. Basically she's a human who grew up in a sun elf city because Reasons (seriously, I don't know what they are) and was called to a clerical vocation and also something about taking a journey. Has an unfortunate case of silly boob armor, which unlike a certain other character probably won't be rectified this close to release.

Mages

Alden

Maren's precocious younger brother, also basically Ricken up to and including the comically oversized hat. As a unit he follows the tradition of Donnel, Mozu, and Cyril of having a personal skill that buffs his stat gains, so it's safe to say he's a growth unit. At least he'll probably join early.

Liberty

Comes with dead brother angst and a connection to the "aspects" system that will hopefully make more sense once I've played the game and know how it functions both mechanically and from a storytelling perspective. Otherwise she looks to be a busty older - as in, not a teenage - mage in the vein of Calill.

Monroe

Got the first ever character profile, so it's really short. He's the son of a duke and sounds like a bit of a snob, albeit one that can make explosions happen to back up his haughtiness. He's got some scarring around his eye that surely must come with a story. Someone also made featured fanart of him in Heroes summer banner style, so I guess he's got somebody horny already.

Sara

Samara's half-sister, with comparable fantasy Middle Eastern flavoring. Has an interest in discovering magical artifacts and being a just ruler in the event she winds up on the throne (so, almost definitely), and she and Samara travel around with the assassin Brooke as their bodyguard. There's maybe some lesbian possibilities there? Either way, Sara has enough development where I could see her as a major supporting character.

Sloane

Comes with a genuinely fascinating backstory involving manipulative double-crossing parents, an education in the cruelties and deceptions of social life (reflected in her personal skill), and disinheritance - and yet it's all likely to be overshadowed because she may go down as DD's equivalent to Fates's face-touching. Her initial art is even more revealing than Camilla's, and while the developers later gave her a more modest redesign after negative feedback I get the feeling that this controversy may live on. Her introduction mentions her hunting for both heirs and heiresses and she's now been linked to Sophia, so safe to say she's another confirmed bi character.

Adepts

While the other class sets are standard fantasy fare adepts require a bit more explanation. They have innate magical abilities and appear to be feared and distrusted most places in the setting. Functionally they remind me of adepts from the Golden Sun series, if anyone is familiar with those games. The classes in the adept group tend more toward physical/magical hybridization than those of other sets, so that will probably be their mechanical niche. Oh, and their default weapon type is lances, which is a plus in my book.

Aurima

Along with Caius and the royal sisters, he's another one from the desert nation of Aramor. An arena fighter who got touched by a god in what I assume was a non-sexual way and came out of it with a new appearance and adept powers. Also, he's confirmed to be over 40 - how often do you see that in games like this?

Bianca

Looks like a more carefree Mathilda from Echoes. She's a ranking officer in the Delian army which sounds like it'd sit uneasily with her adept powers. Her profile describes Lincoln as her close friend, which is still about the most we know about him at this point.

Elias

This guy's writing plays more into the fairly standard coding that comes with adept powers, as we know they manifested shortly before he was going to confess his feelings to a male paramour and afterwards he was forced to flee his homeland and wander the world. He also spent time among dwarves, so insert short bear jokes here? In the present he's attached to Cia in what seems to be a platonic way; maybe she's a fruit fly, or maybe she just likes having a friend who can light drunken assholes on fire? Elias is definitely into guys, but I would still be a little surprised if he turned out to be totally gay as that's such a rarity in these sorts of things.

Iris

Oof, another lengthy and rough backstory. Iris had better parents than Sloane, but she also had to deal with permanent facial scarring (hence the mask) after a bandit kidnapping and the stigma of manifesting as an adept pretty much eliminating the prospects of her making a good political marriage. Also, she and Elias both come from Neullais, which is prominently featured on the continental map on the DD subreddit but doesn't seem to come up all too often in backstories. I think it's a not!France? Hard to tell.

Thae'lanel

A World of Warcraft blood elf, flowing anime hair and apostrophe'd name and all. I like WoW so that's not terribly grating, but as he has no profile yet there's little else I can say. Thae'lanel is mentioned in Maeve's introduction as a member of a sun elf group called the Exiled, which I'm guessing is tied to his adept status in some way. He and Maeve form yet another adventurer/bodyguard duo.

#Dark Deity #Fire Emblem #Well it's sort of FE

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slumberinglabyrinth · 3 years

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a while back i did a review of the prison chapter in por and it was totally overblown and whatever but i kinda wanna do that again for (what remains of) radiant dawn so i guess i will

I'll be doing them in batches since this got long. In this post: 3-5 through 3-9

3-5: it's been two years and i forget why we have to defend this castle

this was a pretty alright map. the reinforcements were annoying but that's because I generally don't actually turtle all that much on defend chapters and as a result I was Right There whenever and wherever they showed up. I tried to grab the energy drop off the boss but the dude ran away from Heather the moment I created an opening and I didn’t want to reset so :^/

I moved provoke off of shinon and onto Brom for this and its... probably way too strong? like it wasn't a 100% draw rate but there were several turns in a row where he was the only person being attacked which is. insane. and also super fun lmao. I think it's a shame that the hostility mechanics in fe aren't as well documented; on some level it ruins the magic, but in cases like this where you're actively influencing it i think it'd be useful to know to what degree you're actually influencing it

disarm + steal is also a really neat/fun idea that would be a great way to counteract how i apparently will never have any money for weapons while playing as the greilgallia party crew 😔 (not to be confused with the greilgallia polycule, which disbanded around twenty years earlier) but I can also never get disarm to proc and half the things that i was able to get unequipped were too heavy for Heather to actually steal 😔

all around a decent map to ease myself back into playing rd with. I certainly could have played better, but defend maps tend to be easier and I appreciated that here

3-6: dawn brigade returns and promptly sinks into a swamp

god this map sucked. it's really hard to pick where to start with it but while i get that lore dictates that they need to only be fighting laguz right here it was probably the wrong gameplay decision with everything else that was going on. I think maybe making tigers have ~4 less str across the board would have been a nice start since I kinda needed to either never get hit by them at all or to kill them first.

several chapters later I’m also realizing maybe i should have like. started to use bexp lol

fighting laguz is also really weird in terms of like... because they have boosted stats while transformed so you can either kill them while they're untransformed (which is fairly easy but since they don't attack, you have to kill them during player phase which means one per turn per unit), deal chip damage (or none at all) to burn down their gauge so you can actually kill them, or try to power through their boosted stats and hope you don’t die in the process.

Because I hadn't used bexp and almost all my units were super weak, I mostly had to rely on the eff against beasts knife that you can buy in the bargain shop this chapter and also volug, who had enough def (even with halfshift) to not die in one round. Honorable mentions go to noland (a fitting name for this map), jill (with canto!), and zihark, who were able to help pick off untransformed laguz, and to micaiah, who could deal magic damage and actually damage transformed laguz.

this was also the first dawn brigade map! i know lots of people people dont like their maps after act 1 and while i was trying to go into this one with an open mind... yeah, they totally got shafted by this map design. it's not really their fault but this map sucked hard. I know that they generally did one of each class variant (fire mage, wind mage, etc.) and not have duplicates but I think that the dawn brigade would have benefited from another mage of some kind if only so you could have someone who could deal with all these goddamned cats

also bk shows up but since he's not a bonus unit i didn't want to feed him kills so i didnt really use him. maybe that was a mistake. also why couldn't he like. warp someone that wasn't the furthest away from the action.

3-7: hey so we heard you liked the previous map

Zihark is there? fuck this i'm reverting to a previous save and unrecruiting him

3-6: i forgot to mention that this map was a swamp map and also had darkness

I know I've mentioned that the similar map in fe6 (desert+fog) was actually kinda alright but this one isnt that at all. Playing through it a second time helped because i knew where enemies were spawning, but it was still more annoying than fun.

Swamps commit the cardinal sin of forcing everyone that can't fly (in this case: everyone but jill) to suffer massive terrain penalties. Deserts at least let mages move a little bit further (which admittedly wouldn't help much here since it's only micaiah and laura), but here everyone friend and foe alike (except Jill) moves slowly and it makes gameplay just grind to a halt which is never, ever fun level design.

Also Fiona just. could not move beyond the starting island. she couldn't even wade a little bit into the swamp like i did with ed and leo to attack at range and get laguz to untransform. they let you deploy everyone but it genuinely felt like i wasn't handed the tools to succeed at this map. always a great goal to have when designing a game

I don't know how to improve this map. unrecruiting zihark (by flying him up to the northeast with jill and having him talk to mordy/lethe) wasn't particularly difficult (battle saves make it easy enough to scout out where they were, and it's not like i'd ever feel bad about 'cheating' on this map) but... would a greater field of view actually help? would making it not a swamp actually help? would giving you more allied units that'll throw themselves in the face of danger with no regard for their own lives actually help?

I don't know.

3-7: but for real this time

Back to ikequest!

this map is... literally the same map as the previous one, but with a different map objective. and larger. and backwards. and not at night.

it's still a swamp.

Luckily, it's a survive map, and the vast majority of the enemy force does not have the time to actually reach you if you hide up in the corner.

Which is exactly what i did.

Here's the list of the optional units (ike and ranulf are mandatory, which sucks because i don't like using twinks cat laguz and ike's plot promotion feels miles away) I deployed and why I deployed them

Haar: to fly out and recruit Jill

Gatrie: to be carried by Haar and specifically to bait the single thunder mage in Haar's way (and help Haar clean out that area so Jill can be safely recruited). I gave him corrosion two maps ago and it actually fully disarmed a guy on this map! 🎊

Brom: stand near where the swamp ends and draw the handful of enemies that actually make it all the way there away from ike and ranulf and ulki and jaffar (who are auto-recruits in this chapter).

This map is. so incredibly easy to both beat and complete the (meaningful) optional objectives on. I missed a conversation between Ike and Micaiah (which requires you to travel all the way across the map that i just finished saying takes forever to traverse and do it in 12 turns), but as long as you unrecruit Zihark on the previous map (he's.... right in the middle of the main force so good luck if you don't) you can probably do this map first try with no deaths even if you haven't trained haargatriebrom At All

I think that kinda underscores a problem that intsys had with rd which was... it feels like they didn't really have a lot of time to fine-tune stuff? like you're going from the hardest (or at least most unpleasant) map to the easiest one this side of the tutorial and it just. doesn't feel good? like there's going to be some inherent difficulty in balancing a difficulty curve when you're shifting from party to party but. this was bad. really bad.

Also a side observation but it does actually say who units can talk to in battle prep which is pretty useful thing to have! you need to shift the stat spreadsheet allllll the way over, but it's there!

i promptly forgot about it by the time 3-10 came around and was like "hey i should just. have ike run up to elincia, see if they'll talk, and then reset" though lol

3-8: Less-than-Lethal Lava Land

A fairly standard lava cave map. My only real comment here is that it was kinda nice how they made the spots where you'd take damage fairly obvious while still making them appear as natural parts of the terrain. I think it was the durandal map in 7 but its "if you're on these at the end of the turn you'll take damage" tiles looked super out of place while the armads map on the other hand wasn't super self-evident and i'm glad they improved

3-9: still cant use lucia >:(

Another party shift (this time to Elincia), and there was some good use of ledges in this chapter!

Most of your units couldn't use them but it created alternate paths for the ones that could (Calill and Devdan). Previous maps tended to use them more as holes in your defenses than needed to be plugged, but it created ways to progress (and ways for reinforcements to catch up) that are usually reserved for flying units, except now you're interacting with the map instead of ignoring it completely.

I think I've yet to meet someone who genuinely likes ledges as a map element, though I think this map really drives home that the sole (inherent) problem with them is the accuracy modifications (which, as this map also demonstrates when the stairs near the end become a chokepoint, are actually present with all elevation changes). While the +2 damage dealt while on the high ground is reasonable, +50 and especially -50 to hitrate are insane and completely unnecessary modifiers. They should be half that if you even choose to retain both.

Anyway.

the absolute lack of a (player-controlled) healer in Elincia's party was also........ interesting. Annoying, but interesting. Why must allied clerics choose death?1

#fe10 #its a lot easier to articulate myself when the context of what im saying is so readily apparent

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