Kagero: Deception II

By shifting the point of view to the third person and focusing on trap combos, Kagero: Deception II, which was released two years after its predecessor, formed the basis for the current Deception titles and was to be further expanded in future titles. In it, the player takes on the role of Millennia, a young girl who is used as a puppet and guardian for an ethnicity called Timenoids (or TMD, as the game abbreviates the name of her ethnicity), who are like humans, only immortal, and whose power is coveted by the humans whose lives they rule. Millennia finds herself in the middle of a war between her own ethnicity and her captors, with the choice of side being determined by the player. One of the game's endings strongly suggests that Kagero is a prequel to Tecmo's Deception and that Millennia grows into Astarte from the first game; this interpretation is supported by the fact that by naming the main character in Kagero "Astarte", you can start with a sizable amount of extra Ark (the game's currency). However, Tecmo has not clarified whether this ending is canonical. The change in how the traps work gave the game a much more strategic edge than the first game, as the traps can interact with each other in long strands that can be compared to Rube Goldberg constructs, only much deadlier and involving other people. Instead of items like healing herbs, blue glowing crystals called "loons" were used for healing, which could only be touched once before they broke and could never be used again in a chapter. Upgrading traps used the points you received after successfully killing an attacker, called an Ark, and followed a somewhat logical "tree" - for example, if you upgraded an arrow slit after making a lightning rod, you could make a laser arrow. Six secret traps (one of which featured Suezo, a popular monster from Tecmo's own Monster Rancher titles) could be unlocked in future replays by playing the game to completion and reaching all four ends of the game. Built traps can be used as many times as you like, but must be recharged between levels. Game saves have a size of one block.