H Scene Count- 22

Created by Luwen Workshop, translated/edited by Grim9888

Length- 20~ hours

An RPG Maker MV Fate inspired game. Calling this a fan work would be right, but it’s a bit more budgeted then most. This is very obviously a labor of love. As someone who plays Fate Grand Order daily, this is something I wanted to play, even though it is edited machine translation. It is fairly legible, though there’s plenty of rough spots, especially during the lore expositions and plot dumps.

It’s more of a VN then a game. It has essentially puzzle boss fights using a combat system vaguely similar to Grand Order’s, though the fights are pretty far apart. Like hours of reading and day passing. Along with Fate this feels Persona and shounen plot structure inspired. Essentially, if Fate Stay Night was made today, it would probably be almost this.

Story

So I’m going to have to hold back a lot when writing the summary. There’s a lot near the start of the game that is easy to tangent on because of how Fate is suppose to work and how obvious something is just wrong with the world. I’m also not going into detail about Fate lore like servants because if you are going to play this, watch or play something officially Fate first. While Empire of Dirt does go through the general lore, it’s a lot more concerned with its own rules and such doesn’t spend a lot of time on things like The Root or the Throne.

So you play as Cyril, a magic instructor at a college like school in a city named Pyramid City. The game starts with three days of his casual life with notes about beatings and in the background, worrying Cyril’s wife, Raikou. On the third day Cyril stays out late after meeting his friend Rama, and his attacked by a Witch who turns a nearby person into a spiky skeleton thing. He runs and is saved by a girl on a motorbike. At home he kind of freaks out and also gets excited about the drastic change in his life.

Then the angel shows up. I forget the acronym, but basically magus can have this follower spirit that guides them to a goal in life. This one, named Angel, reveals Cyril not having all the memories he should and that Pyramid City is cut off from the outside world. It is also stagnating, which to a magus is bad news. Angel reveals that to save the town, Cyril must gather 7 servants and go to the biggest pyramid in town to do something. Angel’s not exactly sure on the end details, but he knows this is your goal.

So Cyril sets out to do just that, starting with the biker lady from earlier, and that’s where I’m going to stop. That’s basically everything from chapter 1, and the game has 9 chapters. Anything more spoils essentially the point of the game, which is reading the Fate esque story where it makes rules then breaks all of them. Baring the translation making some of the info dump scenes hard to follow, I think it’s well written, though I wish Cyril had more of a character. He kind of does at the start, with being a teacher and wanting something to happen, but he kind of just becomes a general good guy. He’s really not very magussy, which I guess is important but does make him kind of bland.

As for the servants in this fan game, you have Scathach, Brynhildr, and Raikou for existing characters with endings plus Nightingale and Kiara have an extra scene each. Then you have 1 extra new girl and 2 originals with endings. Route/bond content is completely separate from everything else until the last month of the game, and even then it really only changes the ending and like 5 lines of dialogue during the final boss. It does have dates with your chosen girl so you do get a decent amount of content at end game to make your choice feel more then just porn time.

As for writing quality, I think it’s pretty bland. The ideas are cool and it works, but it has a lot of slice of life kind of trappings where obvious things get repeated a bunch and everyone is just a general nice guy while the few villains are over the top bad guys. The servants personalities in general just feel weaker, like they were hitting cliches they shouldn’t or they weren’t extreme enough on anything. It makes sense in the context of the story on why they don’t feel right, but in the end it just lacks the power of strong characters because they don’t have strong personalities. Bryn should not be shy, especially when she’s in love. Raikou is to sensible. Rama should have a lot more pride in general, and complain about being summoned as an archer. It lacks the quality of writing I’m used to from later FGO I guess.

So in general, it has a good story but lacks the strong characters needed to carry it. It just drags at points, and yet it feels lacking in foreshadowing. Like it’s basically impossible to guess the real villain before the final dungeon basically tells you who it is. Yet some things are super obvious, like Raikou, and yet the game kind of drags on those. It’s also just paced oddly, with lots of slow then fast changes. Whole days can go by without anything really happening and then bam! Dungeon. Which I guess Fate Stay Night basically did the same thing, the cooking scenes are a complaint I used to see a decent amount. Empire of Dirt is oddly faithful in weird ways…

Gameplay

So the non combat stuff first. It’s a lot of reading with map movement thrown in for really no reason. Like almost every day ends with you picking your house on the map with no other locations, the day passing screen goes, and then you start the next cutscene. There’s actually a lot of small wastes of time like that that probably add up to almost 2 hours, though that might be a bit high of a guess.

The point of the map moving doesn’t appear until near the end of chapter 2, where you start the first investigation segment. You have to gather 4 bits of info by talking to the right person in the right place before a deadline, which is usually one or two weeks away. The game tells you right off where you need to go, and you don’t have that many options or any thing else to really do for the first one. You have access to 1 bond thing with Kiara, who you do every chapter she shows up to get her bonus content. For the actual heroine’s, bond content is essentially a social link/route. They are limited to rank 5 until the end of the game where you get a whole month of time to pick one to romance and then see some dates around town while waiting for the final battle. You are given enough time to get anyone from bond 0 to 10 in the final span of the game, so you really only need to worry about Kiara and Nightingale. Kiara because you have to do hers per chapter, and Nightingale because she leaves after 2 chapters. Every other girl hangs about.

The only other thing to do during the investigations is gather crystals of desire, which you get each time you talk to a new NPC for that day, or from bond and story progression. The currency is for an end game shop that only houses extra menu stuff like some h scenes and the music. Thing with this shop is that anything purchases stays purchased for your global save, so you can save in a different slot, load the old save and buy out the shop via save reloads. There is no reason to actually grind crystals, making them feel kind of pointless. This also makes standard fights pointless, as the only thing dropped from fights is money which you don’t need.

The only optional items/equipment you can get(Mystic Codes) are from bond content. The three side girls all have one, and your route heroine will give you one right before the final dungeon. That is all the side content that is actually usable in game. So basically, investigation is mostly raising bond until you have nothing else to do, since the required plot stuff takes so little time. Only 1 investigation takes more then four days to complete, and that one just has 1 extra day. You can actually focus on bond over progress and still succeed just fine since the girls have weekly schedules and once they hit bond 5 you can’t do anything with them until end game. You are just given way to much time.

Then you have dungeons, or dream fields to use the game’s terms. Each one has a puzzle theme and some scouting enemies that are more of a pain then threatening. Scathatch has an instant death skill in her basic set that works on 90% of the basic enemies in the game. The game even offers a mystic code that will auto kill these for you, and you might as well. The fights are more time wasters then worth anything. As for the puzzles, nothing special.

Now, the combat. It’s inspired by Grand Order but has a lot of differences. It uses the buster/arts/quick setup but they all do different things. Buster still does the most damage, arts is for charging special, but quick is for hit count as crit stars aren’t a thing here. Crits in general are kind of just a small bonus to damage and some extra special gauge(NP). So in each turn you pick three of the options and if you’ve used a certain amount of a type you get bonus effects. Buster does more damage, arts heals on hit, and quick doubles hit count of everything. You can trigger all three effects on the same turn and it affects every attack. There are no card chains from Grand Order so you are free to fight how you want going for those bonuses.

Hit count is actually incredibly important. Some skills have a chance of causing status effects by hit, but also a couple of bosses have effects that get bigger the more hits you do. Damage cut, bonus damage, status effects and such. So matching your attack plan to what the enemy is doing is important and to do this you switch servants. Switching resets your attack counters but gives you a lot of options. You start with just 1 servant but by end game have 7. This is another difference from Grand Order is that each fight is one on one with you able to switch through your entire team.

Then you have have skills. There is no MP, skills come back based on turn count. There are three skill sets. The top one has a heal, an NP charge and the skill from the mystic code you picked. The right side set has the swap servants and a skill based on which servants starts fights. The final skill set is the servants. Each have three and are the biggest difference between what each is capable of. Bryn has a fire effect that on hit can add a state to the enemy that does 500 damage at the end of the round per stack so using a bunch of quick cards to build that up does a lot of over time damage. Scath has an evade and a counter so she’s the one who takes the big hits and so on. Of course each servant has an NP which is suppose to be your major damage source, but the Bryn strat did way more for me. NP are still your win button though and some servants are really just good for charging gauge and blowing their special and going away.

H and Other stuff

All vanilla, all well written with some actual personality shining through. Wish there was some more foreplay scenes for variety(there is one scene without penetration), but it’s good. Each route girl gets 3 scenes, with Scath and Bryn getting two bonus ones. The three extra girls each get 1 scene each.

My favorite is probably the Witch’s who’s scenes made me laugh a bunch. Her gimmick was just so fun… She was the best really.

Anyway, voiced scenes. Single pose/action per scene. Each one is pretty long. Like I said earlier, the girls keep their personalities pretty well into the scenes(which is far rarer then you’d think in porn), though I wish Scath didn’t do the whole embarrassed warrior thing, it really doesn’t suit her. Kinda wish all the scenes didn’t happen at the 95% mark of the game, but oh well. Don’t play this for porn unless you want to spend 20+ hours getting to it.

Verdict

A good attempt. The combat system was fun for a while, though I tired near the end because it felt like every boss was the same 3 gimmicks. The porn happens really late, which is fine, I didn’t really play this for porn though I imagine a few people have and walked away real early.

Story is interesting. It’s a decent game to try if you like Fate. It definitely has some issues with pacing and the editing could have used another run or two, especially during the exposition bits, but it’s readable. Apparently it’s getting a sequel of sorts, should be interesting.

Save for Fate Empire of Dirt

Contains- All cgs, scenes and songs unlocked. Saves to every route start, ending, and some saves to final bond/platonic dates earlier in the game.