This game is legitimately so good it feels like it has no right to exist. Going into this game, I knew that it was going to have an extremely well done and in depth combat system, and be absolutely brimming with well thought out combat encounters that would force me to think tactically to make it out alive. Because, well, it’s a Larian game. I already know they’re the best at that. What I didn’t know was that I was also getting a story that sweeps you off your feet in epic fashion. I genuinely couldn’t tell you how many times this game had a cutscene or line of dialogue that made my jaw drop. Or how many times my heart was pounding from pulling off a very narrow victory against oppressive odds. The story covers pretty much all of the major beats I enjoy in my fantasy stories: low-stakes adventure, to extremely epic fantasy, to throwing in some conniving villains with political intrigue, all in one big game.

I also wasn’t expecting the characters to be so good and feel so human. In Larian’s last game, DOS2, all of the companion characters were fine. They all had well developed, unique personalities, and that serves their purpose well enough for you to spend a few dozen hours with them while you go off on epic adventures with them. But in BG3?? These characters that you spend so much time with have such well written and believable dialogue they feel so much more human than I ever could have possibly expected them to. I also found their character arcs really well done, two of the characters I spent a lot of time with on my first run made me tear up at several points in their character arc. There are also SO MANY companion characters, it makes me really excited to replay this massive game with a different set of companions, to see which other ones I really like.

I know a lot of times in RPGs like this, the dialogue choices you get often boil down to: 1.) “Goody two shoes” 2.) “Neutral” 3.) “♥♥♥♥♥♥♥” but that absolutely couldn’t be further from the reality of how dialogue choices are in BG3. Of course you often do have the “goody two shoes” and “♥♥♥♥♥♥♥” responses in there sometimes, but they’re THE VAST MAJORITY of dialogue choices in this game feel like a very logical and proper response than any other game I’ve played. I spent a lot more time reading and thinking about my dialogue choices than I would have expected because of how natural most of them feel. Plus I LOVE how many dialogue choices you get for the race or class you’re playing! It feels awesome to be playing a barbarian, then to be given advantage on your intimidation because you picked the choice, “Grip the wreckage. FLING IT ASIDE.” it practically feels like you’re playing DnD at the tabletop with your friends, and your DM just said, “Hell yeah, go ahead and roll that with advantage.”

Speaking of comparing this game to DnD, people who are very familiar with the lore of the Forgotten Realms, either from playing the tabletop games, or the first BG games are gonna have a field day with this game. There are so many references to stuff you’d know from them, it’s like being given a nice little treat fairly frequently. And Larian absolutely NAILED how a campaign that involves Illithids a decent amount should feel. From the epic scale of the plot to the general tone throughout the story, they just did an excellent job handling one of my favorite fictional monsters.

The character customization is another HUGE draw. It’s DnD, the game people have been playing in their minds for decades pretending to beat up epic monsters for decades. Of course it’s not without its flaws, but saying that you have a “wide amount of options” when thinking about making a fun character is an understatement. There are so many fun ways to beat the ♥♥♥♥ out of your enemies in cool and creative ways, and that’s before we even think about multiclassing! Of course Larian knew this would lead to choice paralysis and let you respecc your character for a small gold fee, so you don’t feel too bummed out if you think you’d much rather be playing completely differently. The way items work is REALLY smart in this game too. Pretty much everything is a sidegrade, you’re always reading the descriptions of magical items to see what kind of effects the gear has, and if it’ll work better for your character than what you’re currently using. I like this system a LOT more than the leveled items in DOS2. It felt like I was practically throwing out all gear and replacing it every level, because the increase in stats made your gear feel irrelevant, FAST. Towards the end of the game, I was constantly comparing passive buffs and active abilities on all my equipment. You might hang onto an amulet for most of the game because it lets you use a great spell every short rest, or you might replace it in 15 minutes because you found something that gives JUST the right passive buff for your character.

The combat is maybe my favorite part of the game. The way Larian designs their combat encounters just really works for this kind of game. The way enemies engage with the nuanced combat system and environment is sure to make you really slow down and think. It forces you to understand what sort of buff the boss’s minions are applying to him, and how you can use the environment and your own abilities to make the fight unfair. You will NOT make it very far in this game taking fair fights, and this is a big part of what makes it so engaging and replayable. As every party comp will want to solve things differently, as will every player! They definitely threw more than a few combat encounters at me that made me wish they’d bought me dinner first, but hey, that just made me feel that much more satisfied for outsmarting them once I figured it out. I will most certainly be back SEVERAL more times to explore this ludicrously content dense game(seriously, there’s stuff to do everywhere, and once you get to the city proper it feels like you can’t even cross the street without bumping into a cool questline) both in coop modes, as well as just single-player on tactician difficulty.

As for things I didn’t like? It could definitely go for some quality of life upgrades as far as party management goes. An auto-formation while walking around would be nice, as would a way to manage all your companions' inventories at once, as would a quicker way to add or remove people from your active party! I do think a lot of the NPCs are a bit too horny, it genuinely feels like I have to beat most of my camp off with a baseball bat if I'm only interested in one of them. Also, you gave JK Simmons a role in your game, but he hardly sounds like JK Simmons!! Lean into that, I want to hear that man get mad! Demand to speak to your manager! Do you know who he is?!?

Divinity: Original Sin 2 is a great RPG with a stunning amount of depth to its gameplay that is hard to learn and hard to master. I will highly recommend it if you are the type of gamer who enjoys and appreciates putting a lot of time and thinking into: character builds, strategic battles, juggling multiple allies with different skillsets, and how all of your different items and equipment can be used to give you the edge. I will recommend against this game if that doesn’t really sound fun to you, or aren’t looking for a pretty long game. DOS2 is a very long game, with a ton of stuff to get through before you end up seeing the credits. IMO the story is pretty generic, but very solid throughout the whole game. The characters aren’t anything that great, but a lot of the dialogue you can have with the different members of your party can be great and quite funny at times. And I did find myself more and more invested in my companions' arcs the more stuff we got through together. The game is also FULLY VOICED(yes!) and has a great soundtrack, both of which add to immersion when playing.

One of DOS2’s greatest strengths, besides the very in depth combat system, is its collection of quests. Each area of DOS2 is quite large, and somewhat intimidating to explore. But I found it extremely satisfying to poke around town, striking up conversations with NPCs, jotting down little notes in my adventurer’s log, and watching my map expand following leads given to me by these NPCs. Then eventually watching my adventurer’s log dwindle down to a couple little things as I slowly kept completing quests and knew I was ready to move on to the next area of the game. Yes, this is a pretty generic feature of an RPG, but I thought DOS2 did a really good job of making it extra satisfying by making each area of the game an isolated box from the rest of the game. Once you decide you want to move on to the next area, you can’t go back to the previous ones. This forced me to play differently from how I normally do, and really made me want to soak in each area and really felt like I’d taken it all in, since I couldn’t just jump ahead on the main quest then run back and do some of the side quests I skipped earlier. The game does a really good job mixing self-containing quests in each act, as well as quests that deal with longrunning plotlines, and ends up giving you the epic feeling of having done something really grand in the later acts of the game. Even if the story beats are, like I said earlier, fairly generic.

In many RPGs, it’s often helpful to have the attitude, “If I feel too weak, I’m probably too low level for this fight, I’ll come back later” but in DOS2, it’s helpful to also ask yourself, “Am I thinking of the best possible way to use the terrain and my full team’s abilities to make this fight as easy as possible?” before you determine yourself underleveled. DOS2 is a challenging game, and expects you to be the correct level while also very intelligently using the game’s mechanics to your full advantage. It also becomes fairly obvious that DOS2 expects you to go through each area doing quests in a certain order, as some quests will be balanced around the lower levels of an area, while others will be balanced around the higher levels of an area. While this makes sense, I often found it quite challenging to tell which quests are on which end of the spectrum. There are also not really enemies you can “grind” for xp if you feel stuck, most of your xp will be from doing quests. This proved to be fairly frustrating at times for me, especially at the beginning of the game when I was still learning how the mechanics of the game worked on top of not really being sure which order I was supposed to do stuff in, and led to me spending a lot of time wandering around the map finding different enemies to get dunked on.

DOS2 has some mechanics that are awesome in theory, but end up feeling kind of weird when put into practice. The game has a “rest” mechanic that just feels kind of weird because it lets you be full health all the time, instantly, when you’re out of combat. You can even slap a bedroll into your hotbar and mash the hotkey while you’re running through a tunnel filled with traps to just top yourself off as you’re frequently taking damage. While, yes, I liked being able to rest up after every difficult encounter in this game, it felt like a weird system with no cost for using it when compared to Larian’s more recent CRPG, Baldur’s Gate 3, where you had to spend resources to do a long rest, and could only do so from your camp. The fact you could get better reputation with a trader was a cool idea, but the fact that it’s PER CHARACTER makes you be very careful which character you’re using to talk to the shopkeeper, and limits you to have a specific “trading guy” to get the best trades possible. I have somewhat mixed feelings on the ability to completely respec your character at the hub, as many times as you want, and for free. I definitely liked the idea of being able to do it, but I disliked the idea of feeling obligated to do it to respec into a certain social skill. You can quickly find yourself locked out of entire questlines if you don’t have high enough persuasion combined with a certain attribute. Or find yourself locked out of a really cool item if you don’t have enough “loremaster” points to identify what it is. Failing a persuasion or lockpicking check in a tabletop game works because the game master can still find a way to move the story forward. But in DOS2 I would find myself having to reload saves or respec characters just to not gate myself out of content. It would also be nice if you could adjust how quickly the computer played the animations in combat. Combat encounters frequently got to be large groups of NPCs, and you could find yourself talking a very long time just to do a few attempts on a fight if you’re struggling with it.

While it looks like I spent more time talking about stuff I didn’t like, I can definitely assure you that these complaints didn’t bother me nearly enough to detract from having a great time in this game. I felt like time was FLYING by as I was playing, even if I had a decent amount of mechanics I wasn’t a huge fan of, and found the beginning of the game very frustrating. I will definitely be back to do another run to challenge myself on high difficulties, as well as try new builds, and explore different companion characters questlines. I highly recommend if the game looks fun to you and you don’t mind sinking a lot of time into an epic adventure :)