T w e n t y S i d e d

My wizzard Yuna and her pet cat Kimari. Arent they just the cutest?

The term “clone” gets thrown around a lot when talking about videogames. If a game is first-person and has guns and monsters, then people will refer to it as a “Doom clone”. Turn-based strategy? Must be a “Civilizations clone”.

Fate is one game where I think the “clone” moniker is deserved. Fate is more or less a straight-up Diablo clone. It duplicates the mechanics and play style of Diablo II right down to having the same windows with the same information that are opened with the same hotkeys. It would be fair to say that Fate is like Diablo, only more so. If Blizzard were to release Diablo III tomorrow, I doubt it would be as similar to Diablo 2 as Fate is, gameplay-wise.

Note that in this case being a clone is not a bad thing. Diablo II hit the shelves about seven years ago. It was an exceptionally popular game with a lot of longevity, and Blizzard doesn’t seem inclined to make another. (Most of the team that made Diablo is now at another company making Hellgate: London) A couple of games since then have taken a clumsy stab at capturing the Diablo gameplay, but up until now nobody has had the audacity to just duplicate all the stuff people liked.

It’s a tried-and-true formula. This sort of thing gets called a “roleplaying game”, but of course there is no actual playing of roles involved. The core of the game is combat and loot-gathering. You are never presented with much in the way of story, characters, or puzzles. In Diablo the plot was window dressing. (Great window dressing, to be sure, but window dressing all the same.) You could skip every cutscene in the game and you would never be confused about what you needed to do next. Fate takes this experience and concentrates it. It replaces the “go kill Diablo, Lord of Terror” with “Go kill the randomly-generated uber foe at the bottom of the dungeon.” It replaces the shallow NPCs of Diablo with simple, dialog-free characters that act as quest vending machines. It shrugs off all pretense of storytelling and lets you focus on the business of killing monsters and taking their stuff. The game is almost willful in its lack of imagination, right down to the name “Fate”, which has been used by several games already.

The game starts in the town called “Grove”, a charming little village which is beset by evil, only not so much that you’d notice. The only sign that anything is amiss is that the entire economy of the village is centered around trading with adventurers, who are encouraged to go into the dungeon from the moment they set foot in town. The entrance to the dungeon is a gigantic set of doors on the eastern side of town, which leads to a Nethack-ish world of continually descending dungeon levels and increasing difficulty.

The only way in which the game really breaks free from its Diablo envy is in the area of art. It avoids the grim, bloody style of these sorts of games and instead creates a whimsical little world of chibi characters that is suitable for kids. I’m not a huge fan of this “cutesy” style, but it is endearing. I do wish their hands and feet weren’t so huge. I think it would look a lot better without the “I’m wearing boxing gloves and my dad’s boots” look. Still, the game is safe for kids and will most likely appeal to women in a way that Diablo never did. (Assuming my wife’s enthusiasam is indicitive of the typical female response. It’s not like I took a survey or anything.)

If you want the obsessive list of how the two games overlap, then read on…

Continue reading ⟩⟩ “Fate”

Shamus Young is a programmer, an author, and nearly a composer. He works on this site full time. If you'd like to support him, you can do so via Patreon or PayPal.