That giant sword Daert has there is funny to me. His in-game graphic wields a much more reasonably-sized blade, with nothing so distinctive in its design. It also amuses me that Daert resembles a goth rock and roll sort of person much more than a ye olde vampire, talons and elf ears aside.

I do kind of like how his cape is draped over the back of the throne. Not sure precisely why that's happening, but it looks neat.

Lucia the Priestess

Equipment: Weapon, Artifact, Artifact, and Belt if Main. Artifact if Secondary.

Passives: +10/20/30 Mana and +2/4/6 Intellect if Main. +5/10/15 Mana and +1/2/3 Intellect if Secondary.

Level 2 Quest: Kill 100 Priests of Light. Activating this Quest spawns a few battlegroups in Portland.

Level 3 Quest: Retrieve the heart of a priest. Activating this Quest allows you to inspect a grave in Portland, which triggers a fight against an Undead army. The army will be far, far outside your reach when you first can activate it (I waited until Level 40 and while it wasn't hard I didn't effortlessly stomp them either), and you'll have to come back later to actually defeat them and complete the Quest.

One of Lucia's more notable qualities is that Daert gets her quite a bit earlier than Bagyr and Neoline get their own first Companions, as she's right on the first island -Portland. This is probably for the best, as Daert has a fairly weak early game and could really use the propping-up. He desperately needs to get to his unique Skills to start getting on a roll and be able to compete with the other two characters, but Lucia showing up early is a nice consolation prize while he bides his time.

Otherwise, she's a fairly straightforward Companion for the wizardy class/character. She helps you wizard harder. Simple. And Artifact spam, which as I've covered plenty before ties nicely into being the best wizard ever.

Narratively, Lucia is kind of bland, though this is something of an inherent product of Daert's entire mindslave process. Lucia embracing her new passions as a vampire is pretty clearly meant to be overtly mind-altering, and unlike Neoline's conversions the characters don't seem to be 'fundamentally themselves, aside from now being loyal to Neoline' but rather 'a vampire effectively wearing the skin of the person Daert bit, with nothing personal remaining'. Lucia's two Quests aren't about anything personal to her, they're entirely about her wanting power so she can better serve Daert.

Design-wise, I really like Lucia's title art. Like okay we have an attractive girl who could be covering more of her skin, but she's not being overtly sexualized overall and she really comes across like a predatory animal eyeballing you. I'm also kind of curious what's up with the stuff on her arms. It looks an awful lot like rope, and more specifically like the ropes Bagyr's Companions have binding them to him, but Lucia is bound by vampiric loyalty. Is there some religious context I'm missing, like this is a perversion of some thing you'd expect a nun to wear in Moscow? Regardless, the effect is quite nice.

Her head portrait, by contrast, is almost comedic to me, like someone photoshopped a couple of fangs onto a regular attractive woman's photo. I have no idea what the artist was going for here, but I somewhat doubt they achieved it.

Barristan Witt the Paladin

Equipment: Weapon, Artifact, Regalia, and Belt if Main. Artifact if Secondary.

Passives: +2/4/6 Defense and +2/4/6 Intellect if Main. +1/2/3 Defense and +1/2/3 Intellect if Secondary.

Level 2 Quest: Kill 50 Inquisitors of Light. Activating this Quest spawns a few battlegroups in Dragandor, specifically down in the lava area you originally had to clear out to spawn Barristan.

Level 3 Quest: On Inselberg behind the castle, there is a building labeled 'Priest-Inquisitor's home'. After talking to Barristan, you will be able to enter this building, where there will be an enemy to fight and defeat in a Keeper/Hero combo battle. After defeating him, you will need to give him 100 Prisoners and then fight him again -now with his army composed of 100 Paladins, which is much weaker than his original force- after which Barristan will reach his third level.

Barristan is a pain, but fairly worthwhile. The option to get another Regalia slot can be a big deal depending on your luck -Dark Side has a fairly anemic Regalia list overall, but there's some very noteworthy ones, even from Daert's perspective- and Daert only has one Regalia slot outside Barristan. The Intellect boosts are also quite nice, and it generally doesn't take very long to get Barristan maxed out -the fights to acquire him tend to be more difficult than the fights to level him.

Narratively, Barristan doesn't have a lot going on. He's a paladin lurking in Dragandor for unclear reasons, you lure him into an ambush, and there you go. He's a bit more characterful when it comes to his desire to kill and corrupt those he once viewed as companions, but his start is seriously vague.

Art-wise, I'm really not sure what to make of Barristan. His cape-thing in the title screen art is particularly confusing; what's supposed to be going on there? It looks like he's somehow got it tucked into his pants and then coming out the other side, but I can't parse how that would work mechanically. Even aside the cape, though, he just looks generically like... I dunno, a goth teenager who happens to go to the gym a lot? I think he's meant to be a bit of an inversion of a paladin, but the only semblance of that is that his cape-thing has a cross on it. He honestly looks out of place to Dark Side's setting.

On a different note, notice that Daert has mixed-gender Companions! It's also interesting to me to note that the overall gender ratio for the main characters+Companions works out to a 50/50 split. (Bagyr+Daert+Barristan+Neoline's 3 Companions=6. Neoline+Bagyr's 3 Companions+2 of Daert's Companions=6) It could be a weird coincidence, but if it isn't that's very interesting. Plenty of games are willing to leave things at two playable male characters to one playable female character, not doing anything to address gender balance regarding plot/gameplay-importance, and indeed most games that deviate from the 2/1 ratio go even more male-biased. The 2/1 thing can often be excused by the fact that eg at 3 playable characters you're going to have uneven representation if you stick to the default binary, but even when games have 12 characters where they absolutely could achieve perfect balance... they almost never go there.

So it's very, very interesting to me that Dark Side does.

Lariel the Huntress

Equipment: Weapon, Artifact, Regalia, and Gloves if Main. Artifact if Secondary.

Passives: +2/4/6 Defense and +10/20/30 Mana if Main. +1/2/3 Defense and +5/10/15 Mana if Secondary.

Level 2 Quest: Kill 33 Paladins. Activating this Quest spawns a battlegroup in Helvedia, plus one in Portland, though my experience is they don't have enough Paladins to complete the Quest. To be on the safe side, I'd recommend deliberately leaving a regular Paladin battlegroup alive somewhere until you've gotten Lariel and then go kill that group once you've got her.

Level 3 Quest: Kill Conrad the Strong in Helvedia.

Lariel is surprisingly disappointing on a mechanical level. She's placed the latest of all the Companions in real terms, yet her benefits are fairly minimal; Daert doesn't really care about Defense, and by the time you get to Lariel you probably already have 200+ Mana and enough ranks in Transmute/Concentration/Winds of Magic that your Mana supply will go shockingly far. So the Mana is a pretty eh bonus, especially since Lucia tends to be the best Companion to keep in front and she provides Mana too. The only things Lariel does of serious significance is offer the potential for a second Gloves slot and of course adding an additional Artifact slot in general. Since Daert has a Belt/Gloves slot, the Gloves slot is only helpful if you very specifically want to wear two pairs of Gloves at once; if you want a pair of Gloves and are just unhappy with it competing with your Belt, that just means you foisted the Belt onto Barristan or Lucia ages ago.

And since there's not that many great Gloves, it's pretty unlikely you'll care about the double-Gloves scenario.

So really Daert basically hits his apex well before he ever gets a hold of Lariel, gameplay-wise.

Narratively, Lariel is the most lacking Companion in the game. She's an Elven hunter of demons who lures you into an ambush in Helvedia, and without any particular discussion you grab her to drag her off to the Spirit of Darkness. What prompted the conclusion that she fit the requirements for the Weapon of Vengeance? Nothing, apparently. What kind of personality does she have after being turned? Not much of one: her Level 2 Quest is just Daert telling her 'I'm going to kill a bunch of Paladins to make you stronger' and her going 'oh, cool'. Her Level 3 Quest is a little better, with her being mad at Conrad because he talked a big game as a warrior of the Light and then got turned into a succubus' plaything, but that's actually fairly confusing as far as the mental hoops she has to be jumping through. After all, she's now firmly on the side of darkness herself; shouldn't her flipped morals lead to her ceasing to see Conrad going to the darkness as a failing?

This is probably another consequence of Dark Side being rushed: you can also see that her design is blatantly inconsistent between her portrait art and her title screen art. She's depicted with green hair everywhere except the title screen, in fact. To be fair, other than the hair she's reasonably consistent, but the hair stands out quite a lot.

It's too bad because I quite like her title screen art. Like with Lucia, it comes across more like a predator on watch than anything overly sexualized. (Meanwhile, her portrait art has her doing that sidelong gaze thing I tend to cringe at...) I would really liked to have seen what the devs would've done with Lariel, narratively, if they'd had more time to work with.

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It's interesting to me how the vampire Companions are the least overtly-sexualized of the bunch, given that vampires tend to be used as a pretty blunt metaphor for sexual appetites and whatnot. The emphasis seems to instead be on their (emotional/psychological) distance and feral-ness, a suggestion these are dangerous predators passing for human.

Which is actually consistent with the fact that Daert is the only player character in Dark Side who is fully straightforwardly played as, if not willfully evil, then certainly evil-by-default due to his inherent nature. Bagyr is explicitly a nice guy who's largely only doing bad things because he feels he has to, while Neoline builds on the series' trend of Demons being basically like regular modern folks with office jobs and whatnot other than the sulfur baths and so on, which is to say we get moments where Neoline is really treated like a stereotypical modern teenage girl rather than a demonic princess of an ancient culture that spans multiple dimensions etc etc.

Daert never gets 'humanizing' moments like this, and indeed the characters' respective prologues extend this: Neoline flees her home, urged on by friends and basically-family, swearing to come back for them. Bagyr is urged on by clan elders, and swears vengeance on those who have butchered his people. Daert... is personally in danger and stops long enough to feed on and zombify a perfectly loyal miller because Daert felt he needed to top off his blood supply and didn't really care that doing so involved draining a loyal servant dry.

So where Neoline and Bagyr were surrounded by people who were emotionally important to them and were upset to be leaving them behind, swearing to right these wrongs? Daert's one personal connection died because Daert was thirsty and callous.

Yeah. Pretty stark contrast there.

It's also consistent with each character's contribution to the Weapon of Vengeance: Bagyr hurts the happy (Which is something one can do on accident), Neoline tempts the faithful away from their objects of faith (Again, something one can do on accident), while Daert... corrupts the pure by replacing a piously religious individual with a vampire loyal to him. Daert's role is to destroy that which is good, pervert it to his ends.

So yeah, Daert is the closest to a proper villainous figure out of the protagonists. Which is a bit surprising from a game that uses taglines like 'it's good to be bad'.

On a more game design note, an odd thing about Daert's Companion list is... how off to the side they are. It's easy to not realize his second and third Companions are actually his Companions that need to be sought out to complete the game if you're not paying close attention, where Neoline and Bagyr's Companions tend to be acquired as an incidental part of conquering a given land. Dendra on Bagyr is the only exception outside of Daert's Companions, in fact, and even then if you're wandering around talking to NPCs the game will go out of its way to call attention to the fact that Dendra is a necessary part of the Weapon of Vengeance.

On a different note, Daert's Companions are, like Bagyr's, 'out of order' when it comes to the numbers assigned to their title screen images: 2-3-1 instead of 1-2-3. That's interesting given it suggests the first finalized Daert Companion was actually the male one. I'm not sure what might have driven that, but it's interesting regardless.

Next time, we check out a not-quite-new mechanic in Dark Side: Titles!

See you then.