Over the past three months or so, newer games have occupied almost all of my free time because covering them is in this site’s best interests. Going back to play the Deception series, on the other hand, is something I do entirely for me. I could write an entire book about my love of Kagero: Deception II (which departed from the first game’s mechanics and in doing so established the third-person trap gameplay later games would adhere to), and even Deception III and Trapt were a lot of fun despite not living up to the second entry. Then there’s Deception IV, which is technically Deception V, but Trapt apparently isn’t being counted as a mainline entry. Originally released as Deception IV: Blood Ties for the PS3 back in 2014, the game was re-released onto the PS4 a year later as Deception IV: The Nightmare Princess. Honestly, I’ve been hesitant to try it because things like “humiliating” traps, a school gym level, and some of the character art gave me the impression that, like Fire Emblem, this series had sold its soul to embrace lazy anime archetypes. There’s only one way to be absolutely sure, though, and that’s to play through it for myself.

The first thing I realized is that not playing through Blood Ties left me completely clueless about which content to start with. The plan was to start with the the content available in the PS3 release, then try out the new stuff added for the PS4 release after that. There’s no big arrow pointing to which content is older and which is newer, though, so I had to go into the software manual (which is a web page, annoyingly enough) and skim through it to try and figure out where to start. Before long, I found a paragraph stating that the playable character in Blood Ties was named Laegrinna, which suggests that the redhead Velguirie is the newer character. That means that the older content is the second menu option and the newer content is the first, which isn’t how I’d order them, but Deception games are known for jankiness like this.

The story is that the devil was sealed away by 12 saints with something called the “Holy Verses,” which were then split into 12 pieces and passed down as heirlooms over the following 3,000 years. Feeling that this was a more than sufficient time-out, the devil spawns three servants who are effectively personifications of specific flavors of cruelty to track down the pieces and free him: Caelea, the blue-haired “Daemon of Elaborate Death”; Veruza, the red-haired “Daemon of Sadistic Torment”; and Lilia, the yellow-haired “Daemon of Humiliating Demise.” He also creates a daughter by splitting off a piece of his soul, and this is the playable character Laegrinna. Since I’m never going to be able to remember all of these elaborate names, I’ll be referring to them as Blueberry, Raspberry, Vanilla, and Lae.

The game begins with some mercenaries chasing after the playable character in a castle, sending their weakest units in first to be slaughtered because everyone somehow ended up split up. So far, so Deception, but you’ll notice that dialogue isn’t in-engine anymore. That’s incredibly disappointing, and it makes screenshots of between-gameplay conversations really same-y and boring compared to previous games in the series. Also, I’m a bit mixed on Lae’s character design. She somehow manages to look even dumber than Allura from Trapt with a single horn and different-colored eyes that give her a cross-eyed and oblivious look (her insistence on letting Blueberry, Raspberry, and Vanilla speak on her behalf certainly doesn’t help), but at least she seems competent. She may have a goat horn sticking out of her head, but at least a part of the devil isn’t likely to damsel out like Allura did.

It’s really strange that Trapt isn’t being counted as a fully-fledged Deception game given how much more it has in common with the series compared to Deception IV. Before I started recording, I tried playing a little bit after skipping through the tutorials and quickly realized that I had no idea how anything worked. Gone are the days when traps were color-coded and mapped to triangle, square, and cross. Now cross does all the work, with each trap activation moving forward on a chain. This is fine. It’s not quite as intuitive or comfortable, but it’s fine, and some of the tutorial traps involve more than three elements. I don’t know if you’ll eventually be given a similar ability to chain tons of things together, but that’d make the tradeoff worth it.

There are three individual tutorials here to give each of Lae’s helpers a role in explaining how things work, and that means that the mercenaries drawn to the castle in the hopes of receiving an award for killing the “witch” inside need to take their time before arriving. Mercenary leader Dow sends some people ahead while he doubles back to grab Nasdaq and S&P 500 so that they can arrive too late to save anyone.

The second tutorial is provided by Raspberry, and she basically just teaches us that switches can activate room traps and can be used either by manually touching them or by hitting them with a trap (which is going to be super annoying now that they’re not on different buttons). Anyway, Raspberry eventually has me kill everyone with boulders, and in doing so becomes my favorite flavor of cruelty daemon.

Dow Jones finally shows up, and Raspberry and Vanilla explain to him that the entire contract was a lie designed to lure him there. Time for a stock market crash.

More relevant to the story, however, Blueberry brings up that he has a charm that’s one of the pieces of the Holy Verses. That’s the problem with handing things down over generations—sometimes your kids suck, or their kids suck, and somewhere down the line someone ends up taking a job from fruit-themed cruelty daemons.

The third and final tutorial of the first chapter is Vanilla’s turn, and she explains that certain units are resistant to certain traps. That’s long been the case in this series, and the first example of a thief-type enemy dodging a floor trap is old news, but then an armored unit shows up and is resistant to traps that shoot arrows or grab. I’m not 100% sure that this is new, but I certainly don’t remember ever having to deal with it before. Then Vanilla sets up this elaborate trap that destroys the enemy’s armor, leaving her to wander around in a state of undress. That’s pretty transparent fan service, Deception IV, and it was embarrassing even back when Soul Calibur started doing it, but sure. Apparently this removes an armored character’s immunity to certain trap types, but destroying armor requires hitting an enemy with all of their weaknesses in a single trap chain. How do you know what their weaknesses are? I didn’t notice anything like that when looking at her info, but maybe I overlooked it.

Apparently Dow’s Holy Verse piece was the second Lae and her fruit salad acquired. I’m not sure when they picked up the first piece, but they mentioned something about the mansion originally belonging to a descendant of one of the devil-banishing saints, so they probably stole it from him when they took over the place.

It’s a little weird that the game autosaves rather than requiring manual saves, but this chapter-by-chapter structure is at least the same despite it appearing that you can go back and replay chapters. That’s all a bit unusual, but probably a positive change in the grand scheme of things. Based on the first chapter, then, I can say that my fears were kind of justified, though not enough so that I’m happy about avoiding this game for so many years. I imagine the content added specifically for the PS4 release is where things take a sharp turn for the anime, and while I’m not thrilled about the the control switchup and lazy cutscenes full of static art (some enemies don’t even have portraits during dialogue, existing entirely as hazy silhouettes to reduce the amount of art required), this is still undeniably a Deception game. For now, at least; I reserve the right to ignore this game’s legitimacy if Vanilla randomly brings up her age to point out that she’s 18 or older and do that nudge-nudge-I’m-technically-legal thing that Fire Emblem Fates (among others) pulled.

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