I finished Deity Device around a week ago and wanted to give my thoughts on it here. Overall, I’d say it’s a pretty cool hack, well worth playing for a good story and some interesting gameplay mechanics. I think the peak of the hack, as some others have mentioned, was early Part 2. The map after Adelle’s join, Chapter 14, is probably the best in the game, and the story is really good in this section. Before I get into specific feedback, here’s a few bugs I saw:
Bugs
Main issues I saw: Victor or Arachne dying causes some weirdness with how they load back in. They load in normally during the Callista gaiden, but when they return in 21, they’re both level 1 and unequipped. The original Arachne seems to load in also after the chapter, so you end up getting two of them. However, Arachne’s gaiden forces her new spell onto the level 1 unit. I’m assuming this weirdness only happens if they’re dead.
Midge doesn’t seem to have a flier weakness, not sure if that’s intentional actually but it seemed odd.
In Chapter 9, skipping the event after seizing the first castle causes Ceres to not despawn as she should.
Any boss with Sleep (there are a few, but the standouts are Chapter 10 and the final chapter) will prioritize using it over attacking, so they are easily cheese-able (the final boss in particular was easy; I just put him to sleep with Walter and killed him within two turns).
On the gameplay side of things, I do have a couple of gripes. Others have already mentioned the size of some maps being fairly large and the lowish enemy quality. I think you could probably just increase class growths in Strength/Magic, Skill, and Speed and/or increase weapon hitrates to make generics a bit more threatening. More effective weapons on enemies is also an option to curb horse/flier/mage dominance. It’s something that would need some finetuning, but if you do this and reduce the number of enemies a bit accordingly, it would make the units run over the game a bit less.
I’d also suggest reducing the number of area spawns and seize spawns as much as possible (and removing the ambush spawn on Turn 1 EP during Chapter 17, felt pretty unnecessary). Area and seize spawns can often feel like ambushes in that if the player moved their units in a specific way, then they’re unable to respond to the new enemy units, which can feel unfair as a blind player. The only reason it was usually okay is because enemy quality is low, and therefore, they didn’t often screw me over. When they did though, it was very frustrating (I lost Arachne in Chapter 10 this way, due to the mages on the left combined with the mounted bow unit killing her over the wall, both triggered by an area spawn that I couldn’t react to). You could refresh the player’s units after an area/seize spawn, but it would probably be ideal to reduce the spawns wherever possible.
The Chapter 20 spawns also stand out as tiring since they spawn over and over, without warning, and right on top of you. If I didn’t have Harold on the left side, then they could have attacked my squishy units and killed them relatively easily, if they hit. Also felt that the Chapter 26 mage knight formation encouraged huddling in a corner more than anything due to how strong they all are, their effective weapons, and the boss being able to move. I barely managed to kill enough that I could bait the other two to kill summons while moving forward, but it was really close.
Something that also seemed rough is how important gaidens are, to the point that not getting them felt very punishing. As an example,
Spoilers
If one of Olga, Ivan, or Bertram dies, the other two never rejoin with no 18x, and you don’t get Cecily since you can’t access her gaiden. In my case, I lost Olga in like Chapter 3 and chose not to reset. Losing four units for the price of one is something a player could never really foresee, and it ended up feeling kind of unfair to me, especially considering the small cast size. It’s particularly strange because other characters that this could happen to, like Victor, Arachne, and Helen, get a free pass presumably due to story importance. My suggestion is to give the aforementioned trio the same treatment and have them spawn as Level 10 versions of themselves if they “died” in Part 1.
Another example:
Spoilers
Losing Luke in Part 1 and choosing not to reset is one of the worst things that could happen to a player in this game. Even beyond all the great stuff that Luke has like Hammerne, Bless, and Restore, you lose Seraph Fire, Orville’s promotion + Mystletainn + the El tomes, and Forseti/Trueseti. That’s a pretty high price for a single unit’s death, not even counting what you already lose from having a unit die. This makes the game very hostile to ironmanning or even just not resetting after every unit death.
Speaking of Orville, his requirement that he be Level 16 or higher to get the gaiden… kinda makes no sense? If it’s just about being a level high enough to promote, then it should only be 10. Level 16 feels very arbitrary, and in my case, he was level 15 and some change, so I was just out of reach at the beginning of 21x. I only knew about the gaiden due to a friend also playing it, so I went in and checked the requirement, decided it was silly, and removed the check, lol. If it was just stuff for him, I wouldn’t have bothered, but locking your lord’s strongest weapon behind a level check on a completely unrelated character seems pretty harsh.
Going off a point I mentioned earlier, the cast size seems pretty small at 23 permanent units over 47 chapters. Sacred Stones has more characters, and it’s half the length. I didn’t even lose that many units, really (just the one I mentioned already which caused a chain reaction, and Max), but I found myself deploying less than the maximum amount sometimes because specific units just weren’t worth deploying (like Adelle, for instance). I particularly felt this during the two chapters where:
Spoilers
You lose all of your light/dark mages due to some plot reasons. Wasn’t a fan of this either, since it felt like it really wasn’t necessary to do and massively constrained who I could deploy.
There are a number of unrepresented classes that you never get as playables currently, and I think all of them, barring monster classes, would be good to give to the player. Even giving some extra copies of certain classes like another thief or two would be nice since you only get one over the entire game.
Finally, although the magic system is interesting, it’s pretty imbalanced, in my opinion. It’s much, much better than physical weapons due to range creep and the aforementioned low enemy quality. If physical users had meaningfully higher damage and enemies were strong enough to warrant it, then there might be a niche for them, but as it stands, pretty much everyone can kill enemies with ease, so higher range or effectiveness is generally more useful. The only physical users who can stand on even ground with magic users are probably Orville and Harold, but everyone else is pretty eh in comparison.
That’s pretty much all I have to say on the gameplay, so next comes the story. imo, it can be distinctly separated over three main areas: Part 1 (Prologue to Chapter 10), Part 2 (Chapter 11 to Chapter 21xx), and then Part 3 (everything that comes after). I thought that Part 1 and 2 were pretty solid over all, but I didn’t like Part 3 very much. Specific stuff:
Spoilers
Part 1, although very wordy at the start, generally has an interesting story. Glenn at this point is less obviously pure evil until the end, so he’s more compelling, and the plot is going places. I was fairly invested and looking forward to the story in the second patch.
The beginning of Part 2 pretty much delivered and kept the momentum going. The dynamic between early Carson and Nathan was pretty solid, and I liked the group that you had in the main chapters. I was fairly ambivalent on the Cosette gaidens; while I like Cosette generally, her conversations with Orville are extremely repetitive. The basic cycle is this; something bad happens -> Cosette doubts herself -> Orville comforts her -> she thanks him -> rinse, repeat. It happens very often, to the point that I became very bored whenever I saw both of them due to the predictability. Eponine is fine enough as a villain, not much else to say there.
Part 3 starts off with a bit of a doozy of a chapter. The amount of dialogue in the beginning of Chapter 22 is pretty long compared to recent chapters, and it worsened my opinion of several characters. Callista, despite having gone through so much to see Nathan again, is still (somehow) considering going back to Glenn, after he lied to her about Nathan being dead, among many other terrible things. It doesn’t feel very realistic that she falls back on her obligation to her duties now, after flouting them repeatedly over the last couple of chapters. The entire opening scene feels like she’s regressed as a character just in time for Vesta to die and make her feel bad about it. The Vesta “death” scene itself is pretty whatever as she comes back in two chapters anyway and spends most of it detailing how Cosette and Calista hate themselves, which didn’t really feel like it needed to be there.
In 23, there’s a good number of monologues and characters telling rather than showing. My advice is always “why use lot words when few do trick?” It feels like the dialogue could be significantly reduced without losing the meaning behind it, and as is, it felt like a drag to read through it. I generally liked the plot, but long winded segments like this are hard to get through, and most endgame chapters have at least one, if not more. I was also kinda iffy on Vulcan’s death as it didn’t really feel necessary, but I see why you did it (to force more character development for Nathan and Calista).
24 does the classic “enemy bosses retreating after you obliterate them” schtick with Glenn and Jake (who has already gotten this privilege once). I personally dislike retreating, but beyond that, it was fine. Genuinely liked 24x along with most gaidens since they gave some insight into the side characters.
Marius’s death is like Vulcan’s but way worse. He’s one of the dumber Camus-type characters I’ve seen yet, in that he actually rejects healing with magic or something for completely asinine reasons. Orville’s meta reference to Eldigan doesn’t help matters either as it feels like you’re holding up a neon sign that says, “Hey, look! This guy’s a Camus!” If Marius was closer to Vulcan in his reasoning, I wouldn’t mind as much, but as is, it’s difficult for me to take his death or Cosette’s crying scene seriously due to how stupid Marius is. Also doesn’t help that Cosette’s scene has Orville, and I’ve already said my piece on Cosette/Orville scenes.
If Olga was alive, I might have more to say on 27/27x, but since she wasn’t, the only real thing of note was the super evil spooky man being revealed to be the Patriarch. Not really a surprise in the standard way because JRPG church being evil is the oldest “twist” in the book. I was surprised that the story actually went for that despite it being so obvious, so it wrapped around to being a twist anyway.
28/29/30 are kind of a blur honestly, not much to say there. Glenn dies which is cool.
31 is a large dump of text on the Church’s motivations, which, as expected, they are wholly evil. The story feels very black and white in general; on the one side, you have the heroic typical JRPG protagonists, and on the other, you have the typical evil church oldies. There’s little nuance involved, so the main antagonists end up feeling very meh after Eponine (who wasn’t particularly deep, but her motives were understandable after she gets wrecked by Cosette.). This makes it somewhat difficult to care about the central conflict of the story, in my opinion. If the Patriarch and Matriarch were less blatantly evil, the story would benefit from it overall. Regardless, this would have been an ok if a little disappointing ending if not for the next chapter.
Mankind’s World is very anti-climactic. Augustus is a huge nothing character until this point; he shows up maybe once or twice beforehand, and the last you see of him is his imprisonment by Glenn. He doesn’t really seem like endgame boss material at all in comparison to the Patriarch who’s been built up since Chapter 2.5, and he’s so comically elitist (peasants bad, nobles good) that I found myself liking him more than the main characters. His death is particularly wild. Killing yourself because you don’t want to be a commoner tops even Marius’s stupidity, and the response from Cosette (“It can’t be helped”) made me laugh, which probably wasn’t the intended reaction.
The scene that follows, where the main characters define what a human is, felt a little unnatural.i couldn’t really envision actual people saying a lot of these lines. Part 3 has an issue with this in general, where sometimes, characters speak in a manner that feels like it’s for the sake of the player or expressly communicating themes, but this scene in particular takes it to another level. I think this chapter weakens the ending of the hack in its current state. It unfortunately leaves the story off on a meh note for me when I had previously liked most of it.
I could probably mention more, but this post ended up being much longer than intended, so I’ll leave it here. Despite any criticisms I have, I still enjoyed the hack quite a bit overall. It was a cool experience, definitely worth the time I spent playing it, and I’m looking forward to DD0 and any future development on DD (also, for fun, here’s the units I brought to the last chapter + some quick thoughts on them):
Endgame Units
Nathan was pretty solid, all things considered. Restore was pretty invaluable as it made playing around status staves much easier, and I found a lot of use for Barrier as well. His actual combat is kind of so/so since his promotion is so late, but he definitely contributed sometimes.
Carson is wild lol. He starts off pretty reliant on White Pool to get one rounds reliably, but he snowballs super hard after promotion. Forseti is bonkers, pretty fun unit.
Cosette was the other hard carry in lategame besides Carson. Spread/Tidal Wave was pretty clutch for a lot of late bosses since many have really high Res, and Orville Charisma + support buffs her hitrates to the point that she can kill them fairly reliably.
Calista wasn’t that crazy for me since Big Bang comes so late + I didn’t level her that much in Part 1, but I also didn’t abuse Vantage+ as much as I could’ve. Still a solid unit, contributed a good deal later on.
Powerstaff Dancer/10. White Pool just makes her utility even greater. Pretty fun unit to play around overall, was sad when she was gone for two chapters due to that.
Magic fliers are somewhat divisive, but Midge was fun to use. Kind of filled the Est quote for me since I never got Cecily, lol. I don’t even usually train Ests, but with those kind of crit rates, it was too tempting to not do it. She ended up contributing quite a bit, though her rescue utility was fairly limited due to female Aid sucking.
Lailah filled the Gregory void for a while and ended up being a great unit in her own right (6 Range Solar Ray is overpowered as hell). Her Speed ended up being a bit of a problem towards the end, but her range and power made up for it.
Gregory is possibly the most epic unit in the hack. Definitely my favorite due to how hard he carries late Part 1 and how much of a beast he is when he rejoins. After the Midge/Greg/Lailah gaiden, he ascended to a new level of godhood. 46 AS on EP… absolutely insane unit.
While I didn’t care that much for Orville in story, he was super solid gameplay wise. Earth Sword and Recover made him really great at healing himself and others early on, and post gaiden, he has 14 effective range with a Silver Bow or 13 with a Brave Bow. Mystletainn is also obviously crazy good. Good unit, would hack his gaiden in again.
The champ. Honestly, I would have been more annoyed at a lot of chapters without this guy pulling all the aggro. The S rank Lance just made him crazy strong, and this is one of the few times I’ve proudly given an armored unit boots lol.
Somewhat underwhelming. Her damage isn’t bad per se, but since everyone else is doing around as much damage but at higher ranges, her combat wasn’t that useful for me unless I absolutely needed one more unit. Still, only unit that can open chests in the hack afaik, so she’s got that going for her.
Walter starts off pretty shaky, but once he gets Sleep and a few levels under his belt, he just starts powerleveling. 100 Exp for each Sleep seems really high, and I ended up using 20x to give him tons of exp along with Midge. The summons only make him even stronger. Really fun unit to use.
Warp/Rescue bot came at just the right time to skip late game maps. Didn’t find myself using her healing much if at all, but that’s fine. She did her job, which is enabling warpskips lol.
Helen is a unit I leaned on a lot in Part 1 and early Part 2 right after she rejoins. I never even got Solar Ray and still found her to be really good, so she’s uh, pretty busted. Definitely better than Arachne, for whatever that’s worth. Original crit god with Seraph Fire and Luke support, held up late into the game.
His combat turned out kind of underwhelming, but that’s fair enough given everything he has going for him. His utility is really insane (Bless, Restore, and Hammerne are all pretty great). He occasionally killed things with Divine Saber when I needed him to, but beyond that, mostly rescued stuff and supported Helen.
