Dark Deity II Promises Refinement And Growth For The IP

From an evolution to the art style, to the polished mechanics, this indie TRPG’s new demo delivers on the passion felt back in the first game

Valeria crits, and this guy dies.

The Tactical RPG genre, spearheaded by titles like Fire Emblem and my beloved Triangle Strategy has been experiencing a lot of love in recent years, especially in from indie developers. One particular example was the original Dark Deity, a game heavily inspired by the GBA days of Fire Emblem and developed by the small team at Sword & Axe LLC, and published by Indie.io. The game’s successful Kickstarter led to a public Steam release in the middle of 2021, and I hopped on the train to give it a try.

What I found was a complicated product: interesting character designs, customization, and a lot of charm blended with simplistic map design, a less-than-innovative story, and some opaque mechanics to create a game that was bursting with love for the genre, but felt distinctly rough around the edges. All the hallmarks of a passionate developer new to the industry.

My Cia from my DD1 playthrough, in the last quarter of the game. She easily soloed maps for the entire second half of the game because of stacking promo bonuses and skills.

The game offered incredibly varied branching promotional paths for each set of classes, backed by a fixed 4-weapon system that led to some incredibly broken edge cases (like a Cia built to have 100+ dodge, and thus capable of soloing maps with 1–2 range daggers) and a lot of underwhelming midline performances. There was ambition, but it wasn’t paired with experienced execution.

Yet.

The game’s sequel has been prefaced by many dev logs and blog posts from the development team talking about their process, goals, and lessons learned. As a result, I’ve been looking forward to seeing what the next step in Sword & Axe’s development career looks like. The demo for Dark Deity II launched on Steam today (12/4/2024) and I’ve given it some play time to see how things have changed and what to expect.

What I’ve seen in the four-chapter long demo is very, very promising. The aesthetic love and inspiration from GBA-era Fire Emblem can still be felt, but the game definitely has its own defined identity now. Everything from the game’s UI, to its general art direction, to its gameplay flow has been improved from the first game, while (at least in the demo) retaining much of the deep customization that the first game flaunted — if in some different forms. Promotion and class changing is free-form and available to units at any time, and new equipment from weapon-upgrade runes to magic crafted rings allow the player to create many fun and nasty combos with their units.

For example, I gave Cassandra, the shaman healer the demo hands you, an axe with innate critical hit chance on it, and paired it with a rune that gave an additional flat 25% crit after using the “Wait” command. This poor sap ran into me and got cut in half as a result.

Every class has a number of active abilities that can be used in certain sequences during their turn, and not all of them end the unit’s turn on use. For example, Cassandra in the image above had (at the time of this screenshot) three abilities she could use before attacking (but after moving): A skill to heal an adjacent ally, a skill to lightly heal all adjacent allies, and a skill to cleanse debuffs and heal based on how many were cleansed. Using skills in this way requires Mana, and every unit starts each map with 100, regaining a small amount each turn and after combat. These dynamic abilities give much more of a unique identity to the combat flow in Dark Deity II compared to its contemporaries and predecessor.

Saxon, who I’d promoted into a Conduit, has the ability Chain Lightning, an offensive damaging ability that bounces to a maximum of 3 enemies for free damage not bound by the combat window. It uses more than half of his mana, but it’s damage without threat of a counterattack, and is valuable.

As for the narrative, it’s hard to make a prediction or judgement yet. While the story is only shown in part, due to it being a demo, what is shown suggests a more nuanced and politically minded narrative than we ever really enjoyed in Dark Deity I. The game takes place many years after the first game, and while some characters make a reappearance the focus is clearly on the new cast. While the verdict cannot be made until the game’s full release, it seems like Sword & Axe made this game accessible to newbies to the IP and setting without needing to experience the predecessor.

While it’s just a demo for now, what I’ve seen is enough to convince me that Dark Deity II has learned many, if not all, of the necessary lessons from its progenitor game, and is leveraging the gained resources and experiences to create a game that has the potential to carve its own dedicated fan base in the TRPG genre space. I’m keeping my eye on this game, and I recommend you do too.