Jeremy Pappa

I regret spending money on this game. I was a big fan of both Pokemon Sword/Shield and Legends: Arceus, and this game feels like a major step backwards from both of those predecessors. The graphics and performance issues are major problems, but everyone knows about those already so I won't dwell on them. Even if these games looked like Elden Ring and played flawlessly at 120fps, they would still be horribly designed. It feels like Nintendo jumped on the open world trend without understanding anything about what makes it good. Massive expanses of unique landscapes that are filled with redundancy. The game wants you to explore, but does nothing to incentivize it. You may find a unique Pokemon or rare item, but more often than not you find masses of the same 5-6 standard Pokemon of the area and mundane items you can buy cheaply at the Pokemon center. The towns are full of doors you can't enter and a variety of stores with inventories that could easily be compressed into a couple. Nintendo created a massive empty world and filled it with redundancy to trick players into thinking it was densely adorned. The ability to decide your own progression is a great idea, but terrible in execution. By the time I fully explored the area around the first titan mission and went to go to the first gym, I was already severely overleveled, trivializing an already insultingly easy game. The budget was blown on a few key character models and the rest are forgettable throwaways in another of Pokemon's traditionally abysmal stories. Aesthetic qualities are personally subjective, and I'm far from a hater (I enjoyed the majority of new designs in generation 8), but I find about 90% of the new pokemon designs absolutely hideous. The three starters were promising and likable until the second they evolve, and any google search will pull up loads of fan designs that surpass Nintendo's own. If I had to describe these games in one word, it's "LAZY." It's too late for me having already purchased it, but if you bothered reading this all, save yourself the time and money, and hopefully Nintendo will realize that they need to stop coasting on Pokemon's reputation and actually put work into their games if they expect them to stand up with the other massive titles being regularly released by their competitors.

The quality of visuals and sound are above and beyond for a tv show. It captures the epic high fantasy tone of Tolkien’s work without allowing itself to stoop to the edgy, gritty drama that modern fantasy tends to favor. Characters and their interactions are grounded while still retaining a level of fantasy, and comic relief is used infrequently and tastefully to good effect. I had severe reservations prior to watching, and thankfully those fears have been put to rest. Naturally it strays from the lore, though that’s an understandable limitation and shouldn’t be held against it. I don’t think it’s perfect, but 5 stars anyway to offset some of the undeserved bad reviews it’s getting from haters who won’t give it the chance I’m glad I did.

At first glance it presents itself as another simple Fire Emblem clone, and you'd believe that if you only judged it only on its basic game mechanics. However, the game takes the best SRPG elements from the FE series and defines itself enough in its own right with new and unique systems that set it apart. Not everything is a success, the overly complex system of weapon-armor dynamics can be confounding to players who don't want to pull out a calculator. The map gimmicks have enough variation to keep them interesting and you can tell there was a lot of thought put into making each chapter unique and dynamic, but lacking significant terrain obstacles or time constraints makes them easy to trivialize. Where the game truly shines is its dedication to subtle yet deep world building without obnoxious exposition, and especially its emphasis on strong character writing. For such a large army of playable units, almost everyone gets their time to shine and the bond conversations add a layer of depth to each character unseen in many similar games (Faust was a surprising personal favorite on my first playthrough). Overall I consider Dark Deity to be a gem, even if a relatively unpolished one. For fans of the genre, it may not break your top 10 list but it's absolutely worth the reasonable price and time investment and warrants at least one playthrough.