Find your soulmate, forge your own path!
"As you may know, the soul of the Demon King resides in my body. But it's with everyone's support that I can firmly keep that foul being in check. My people give me the strength that I need to overcome this hurdle every single day..."
— Princess Faratras
Path of the Midnight Sun
is an Eastern RPG Visual Novel developed by Studio Daimon. It previously began its life as a ROM hack for Fire Emblem: The Sacred Stones known as Midnight Sun, but quickly grew beyond the scope of a simple hack. In 2019, a successful Kickstarter campaign funded the game. After three years of development, including hand-drawn art, receiving professional voice acting, and a fully orchestrated soundtrack, the game released on January 10, 2023 on Steam.
Taking place on the continent of Arvium, the land was previously ravaged by the Demon King, a being of immense power that disrupted mana in the world, creating monsters and twisting the forces of nature around him. A long and bloody war was waged across the continent to stop the King's slaughter, but all seemed hopeless. Possessing immortality that rendered any attempt at killing him impossible, the greatest magical scholars of the era nevertheless found a solution. With the aid of the Eight Legendary Heroes, the Demon King's soul was eventually removed from his body, and its host was slain. But that was only the beginning.
The Demon King's soul was not so easily destroyed, and soon found new hosts known as Vassals to contain its power. With training and strong magic, Vassals could contain the Demon King and keep the world safe from his influence. Even so, hosting such a powerful source of mana is doomed to eventually drive those chosen to lose their control and break under the strain. Despite their best efforts, none of the Vassals could last much longer than a decade.
Sixty years later, the fourth Vassal, Princess Faratras of Hoikade, struggles to train her body and mind to contain it. Until one day, circumstances force Faratras to kill her own soldiers, the mind-controlled members of a secretive cult lying in wait. Now, she must flee with the help of a strange man, to protect herself, and the demon that'll emerge upon her death...
Meanwhile, in the Theocracy of Pylom, an amnesiac knight named Suzaku and the blind priestess Shiori continue their journey to investigate the Vassal's condition.
The game takes place across primarily two perspectives, each with their own choices to manage. From your opinions, to your relationships with other characters, you'll have to manage everything from the food you eat, to the sanity lost, and carefully balance the time you spend, both in battle and in Visual Novel segments.
You never forget these tropes!
- A Dog Named "Dog": Literally in this case. The luckos (a breed of dwarf wolves) accompanying the party is named...Luckos.
- Adjective Animal Alehouse: "The Sly Owl."
- After-Combat Recovery: A percentage of HP is recovered in lower difficulties after battle. More generally, unconscious characters will be restored to 1 HP once they've returned to the tactical map.
- Alcohol Hic: Pops up frequently when a character is drunk. It even comes up in battle quotes!
- Always a Bigger Fish: Long after common Squinks have ceased to be a threat, the party encounters the strongest of them all, the Squinking in chapter 8. After a long battle fought with a squad of Golden Squinks on top of the already strong Squinking, the party spends a moment to congratulate themselves. Cue five other Squinkings arriving, prompting Oh, Crap! responses from the party.
- Amnesiac Hero: Suzaku, one of the viewpoint characters, struggles to remember who he is, while Shiori fills him in on the details.
- And Now for Someone Completely Different: Suzaku and Faratras are the primary viewpoint characters, though occasionally the game swaps to another character briefly, such as Shiori when looking for Faratras in a tavern, and Luckos during the Hot Springs Episode.
- Arbitrary Headcount Limit: A maximum of 6 party member slots can be filled, while two Active and two Passive slots are available for Adjutants.
- Assist Character: Adjutants are non-party allies who've decided to join your cause, either permanently or temporarily. Each Adjutant can Actively or Passively be deployed, giving various attacks, buffs, or heals either with percentages to join in, or on specific turns.
- Black Magic: Faratras specializes in this type, though it's not seen as especially evil in the setting. Several characters are mentioned to use it, and you can find several books on the subject.
- Blessed with Suck: Shiori's ability to sense malice allows her to ignore many of the problems she might've suffered from being blind, and lets her see into the hearts and minds of others, but it's also ensured that she's constantly bombarded with everyone's worst, most secret jealousies and hatreds basically all the time. She wears it with grace, but even the bumbling and newly-amnesiac Suzaku quickly realizes that life is pretty hard for her.
- Blind Seer: Shiori is a blind priestess with the ability to sense the darker emotions of others called Malice.
- Bloodier and Gorier: Not to an excessive degree, but the game features characters bleeding from their wounds, unlike Fire Emblem.
- Booze-Based Buff: Beer is a cheap source of healing, but it gives the character drinking it the Tipsy status, where they'll have severely weaker or stronger attacks at random, complete with drunken battle quote.
- A Boy and His X: An amnesiac knight and his greedy dwarf wolf.
- Breather Episode: Chapter 14 is the only one in the game that has absolutely no combat. It mainly serves as a breather where the player can finalize Suzaku and Faratras' relationships in-between the final battle with the Demon King and confronting Soraya and putting an end to her schemes.
- Cast from Hit Points: Many skills cost a percentage of HP instead of fixed MP to cast.
- Content Warning: Right before entering the hot spring rooms, the owner will warn you that you're likely to see partial nudity. You can choose to enter either the male, female, or both rooms, or just skip the event.
- Critical Status Buff: The longer a character spends in battle, the more mana they have to cast. As magic is otherwise hard to obtain, the player will have to carefully manage their health while planning out spells in later turns.
- Derivative Differentiation: While much of the setting and characters are very similar to its origins as a Game Mod of Fire Emblem, battle mechanics are very different. Instead of tactical turn-based maps as the main source of gameplay, maps are instead relegated to shaping the composition of encounters, with the battles themselves using row-based formations. Sanity and hunger mechanics akin to Fear & Hunger are a prominent part of resource management, while a time system advances the clock with each action, similar to the Devil Survivor games.
- Disability Immunity: Being blind herself, Shiori naturally isn't effected by that particular status ailment. She starts the game with the skill that grants the immunity already equipped, implying it's unique to her.
- Dumb Muscle: Although Rya insists Christoph has other skills (and while he does manage to find Faratras's trail at night, in the dark), he's mostly her loudmouthed and impulsive retainer.
- Evil Mentor: Master Alvano teaches Faratras Black Magic, does little to restrain her rival, and orchestrates a plot to have her killed, despite his seemingly good nature. Or so we're lead to believe.
- Evil Gloating: Those under the influence of the Demon King are cheerfully insane, relishing in bloodlust and acting cruel out of pure sadism.
- Failure Is the Only Option: In the first chapter, no matter what you do, you can't save Tobias. Even though Suzaku mentions he doesn't want to kill common drunks, even if Shiori disapproves of him doing so, it'll always be too late to realize what's going on.
- Gameplay and Story Integration: During the brief segments from Shiori's perspective, the screen is almost completely black, since Shiori is blind, but during conversations she "sees" individuals as golden lights swirling with black dots, presumably representing her ability to discern malice.
- Gay Option: Faratras can romance Rya, fairly easily, in fact.
- Great Offscreen War: Three wars against the Demon King have been fought in the past 60 years.
- The Heart: Shiori's kind and compassionate nature helps restore Suzaku's sanity in the opening just by being open and honest with her. It's played for drama later when she can't help Faratras to the same extent.
- Hot Springs Episode: The party, per Shiori's suggestion, opts to spend some time to relax while in Ferasew.
- In Vino Veritas: A particularly dark example. While everyone is drinking in a tavern to celebrate their victory in chapter 6, Faratras is off by herself. When Shiori finds her, she's a sobbing mess, struggling to speak with her voice cracking and slurring through a lengthy breakdown as the guilt over her choices become too much to handle. While Shiori attempts to comfort her, none of your options can help, and both characters suffer steep Sanity drops until Faratras runs away in grief. And it was something particularly strong, slipped by a malefactor hoping for her to lose control of herself...
- Point-and-Click Map: Nearly every action in the game uses the mouse as a cursor to interact with the environment, from looking at items, finding places and quests, Flavor Text, and talking with characters.
- Ragtag Bunch of Misfits: An amnesiac knight, a blind priestess, the princesses of two countries, one of whom is host to a demon, an eccentric, bloodthirsty priest, and their greedy dog.
- Red Eyes, Take Warning: Invoked. Despite being the host to an unstoppable demon's power within her, Faratras' red eyes are a family trait. Many of her people are superstitious about it, but her eyes don't reflect on her as a person.
- Red Herring: Partway through the game, one of the Demon King's dread powers is revealed to be the ability to sense and discern others' malice. This points the obvious finger at Shiori... who actually is the sweet priestess she's always portrayed herself as. The true dark mastermind is elsewhere.
- So Long, and Thanks for All the Gear: Inevitable when the party is so drop-in-drop-out thanks to the story. Eventually, Hellios will fully betray you and you'll lose out on all the Mana points you invested in him up to that point, although admittedly he'll probably have carried his weight to get you there so long as you didn't over-invest.
- Take That!: The description for pizza. "People forgotten by God put pineapple on this."
- Timed Mission: Just about every action takes up your time on the clock. Every mission has a time limit or a specific condition that need to be met at certain points, so a player needs to be observant from eating food to taking turns in battles, lest they miss out on plot events, make other characters angry with them, or just get a Game Over in missions.
- Tomato in the Mirror: Hellios is the manifestation of the Demon King's will, separated from Faratras the moment she was forced to kill her own people.
- Trauma Conga Line: Hellios ensures that Faratras is lead through as many painful experiences as possible.
- Voice Grunting: While several key scenes and moments are voiced, the game uses Fire Emblem-esque general statements to sum up the atmosphere of a textbox.
- Voices Are Not Mental: Any character that's currently being possessed by the Demon King speaks in their own voice, though the mannerisms are obvious.
- Wizard Needs Food Badly: Taken far more seriously than usual in an RPG. Food is by far the easiest way to restore health, expensive as it may be, and your characters' Hunger will need to be managed before large battles. If your characters get too hungry after a while, their performance in battle will suffer, their sanity decreases, ensuring they'll be doing less damage and having lower accuracy until it's been dealt with. If characters mention it's a good time to take a break, you'd better eat.
- World's Strongest Man: Saai is consistently said to be the strongest fighter in all of Arvium. Though as an Adjutant when he's available, he does decent, though not spectacular damage.
