Another of my favorite guilty pleasure games, the Game of Thrones RPG is a great example of how a good adaptation of a license and a great story can carry an otherwise mediocre to bad game.

I'm a huge fan of both the books and the HBO shows, and right out the gate the first thing I noticed is how the rough presentation is. The graphics and art design are a mix between the show and the books, faithfully recreating a lot of the most iconic locations like King's Landing and Castle Black. But any positives this might add are held back by how dated the graphics and character models look. Animations are stiff, the textures are blurry and the voice acting for almost every character ranges from boring to downright terrible. Even the two main characters suffer from this, with Alester's voice actor sounding confused half the time and Mors sounding like he's been smoking 12 packs a day since he was 9. Only the characters voiced by the actors from the show do a good job, especially Varys and Commander Mormont, who serve as the narrator and one of the main quest givers, respectively.

Combat is also pretty decent, with the entire system reminding me a lot of Dragon Age: Origins. Hell, on PC the UI even looks the same as DA:O. It's fine for the most part, but the lack of permeant party members really hurts it since it makes it almost impossible to plan for combat encounters going forward. And even when you do get a permeant party near the end of the game, it only consists of 2 people and a dog, so it always feels like the game is holding back from letting you go all out.

So by this point, this probably sounds like it's just another forgettable, low budget licensed game thrown out to tie in with the show. And it would be, if not for how good the story is. It was apparently co-written or edited or overseen by George RR Martin himself, and he officially gave it his seal of approval by voicing a character named "Maester Martin" modeled after him who shows up as a cameo. It's very clear that he had a hand in the writing since the format of how the story is told matches the style of the books and the show almost perfectly, alternating between Alester and Mors whenever the chapters switch before their stories sync up and they team up for the rest of the game. The story starts out slow but it gets really interesting as it goes on, with tons of twists, a decent amount of side content and one of the coolest final boss fights I've seen in a western RPG. I won't spoil it, but how that reveal and fight is handled is proof of how important a good ending is to a story like this, something that Game of Thrones the show would spectacularly fail at years later.

If you're a fan of A Song of Ice and Fire or either of the HBO shows, then you owe it to yourself to play this. It's $15 at most and goes on sale for much cheaper than that all the time on Steam. Even if it's just to set it to the easiest difficulty and playthrough the main story, it's a worthwhile experience that's backed by the author of the books himself.

One of my all-time favorite games. Planescape's writing is often touted as a highlight of RPGs and video games in general, and I generally agree with that. It's reputation for having mediocre/boring at best combat is also, unfortunately, appropriate.

Planescape's world is inherently intriguing, with it's rusty gothic architecture, strange creatures, and multi-dimensional portals. It becomes the "almost sci-fi" D&D setting, and thanks to its relationship to the Forgotten Realms the setting stands out as more bizarre next to the more standard high-fantasy worlds. It is still, of course, high-fantasy, but it is more Elric of Melniboné than, say, Lord of the Rings.

The writing's focus on introspection of the Nameless One, naturally leads to introspection of the player if it manages to grab you. While it is more on the level of a "Philosophy 101" class, that is still more impressive and interesting than the majority of video games. Of course some parts of the game's writing are as shallow as any other RPG, but the highs still stick out enough to warrant the game's reputation. The writing's great strength is that it effectively uses ambiguity to allow the player to imprint themselves and their own feelings into the narrative.

Sadly, the combat is just sort of "there". Encounters are rarely interesting, with so many enemies just doing melee and ranged attacks against the player. There is no shame in just cranking the game to the easiest difficulty or walking past enemies when possible.

I love the game and it's writing. For me personally, the strong introspective and melancholy writing is enough to warrant 5/5. However, my objectivity says that the slog of combat is an undeniable detractor.

Having played this game for the first time from 2023-2024, I can say without nostalgia that this is my favorite BioWare game.

I started with Baldur's Gate 1, but dropped it after only a few hours. The world and writing of the first game felt... bland, with dull low-level combat, and too many empty forest maps. Baldur's Gate 2 immediately catches my interest from the first moment, with a very well voice acted main villain and a darker (and also edgier) tone. The combat became much more interesting with higher level spells, making me micro manage my party way more. The world this time cuts out the fat, no more empty forest tiles, now you travel directly to relevant locations.

It is impressive how much more engaging the writing is. The bright, standard fantasy adventure of the first game is replaced with a much moodier atmosphere, where strangers are more suspicious and deceptive. The "main" companions get fleshed out, with more interesting interjections during some conversations. The game even got me to care about Imoen in the beginning, where the first failed to make me feel anything about Gorion. The villain Irenicus is very effective at being both intriguing and satisfying to hate, making the player more and more eager to clash with him.

A double-edged sword is the sheer variety of companions and how easy they are to miss. For example, I never even saw Viconia, who is one of the more popular characters from the series as I understand it. It's partially my fault as a player, as I almost never changed my party. I got used to a group combination and felt too lazy to learn a new one, and likely missed out on a lot of fun content. This could theoretically encourage multiple playthroughs, but the length of the game is a bit of a deterrent. In my case, it took around 55 hours for this first playthrough.

I cannot comment on what changes the Extended Edition has made, other than that it also includes the companions it added to the first game. The game does try to force you into interacting with them, but you are able to decline them (after saying no several times).

For anyone looking to get into older cRPGs, I can absolutely recommend this as a great starting point. If anyone is like me and disliked BG1, I would encourage them to try this game. In many ways, it improves on the first and becomes the blueprint for the RPGs (especially BioWare made) that came after it, for better and for worse. You can see a lot of the conventions that are now ubiquitous in the genre: romance, companion interactions, melodrama, more linearity.

A mix of fire emblem style battles meets some very light turn based map stuff. It's really not bad at all, it looks good, nice soundtrack, attacks and tactics look cool and feel impactful. There's a vs mode that's actually really fun.
But the main feature is it's story mode, featuring 3 campaigns, all of which have multiple paths where you can follow history, or stray from it.
Koei has a reputation for cutting corners, but i genuinely think this is one of their better titles, there was love put into this.

I genuinely don't think I have had a single enjoyable experience on this game that lasted longer than 15 minutes. Single player is incredibly boring and involves waiting ungodly amounts of time to tame an animal that you will use to help tame another animal. The game definitely has a unique concept, however. Multiplayer is really the only major experience I have with this game and even on boosted servers the game is atrocious. Unless you are unemployed and have limitless free time you are guaranteed to not have a fun time on servers. Finally built a base and grinded enough to get a fabricator and some guns? Too bad, you just got offline raided by some no lifer with a Wyvern while you were working your 9-5 at the Hobby Lobby. This doesn't even account for the abysmal optimization of this game. 200 gigabytes and the game runs like absolute garbage. And, no, the glitches typically aren't the funny kind like a corpse ragdolling or something goofy happening with the physics - the menus sometimes cease to function properly, core game mechanics just randomly break and don't work, etc etc. I may just hate survival games but I really do not like this game at all.