[DISCLAIMER: This review didn’t run away from me so much as it sprinted. It is obscenely long, sitting at around 9.4k words after cuts.]

When I wrote my initial review of BG3 I swore that I’d probably just bench the game and come back in a couple years when the inevitable Definitive Edition launched. I was hoping to just put the game out of my mind and go play literally anything else that was installed on my SSD.

But, to tell you the truth, I struggled to uninstall the game. Even after my multiplayer game was put on indefinite hold due to a party member being admitted to hospital (they’re fine now), the game continued to haunt me. Both for reasons I’ll get to shortly, and because continued discussion with my close friends either revealed things I hadn’t considered or brought up new complaints that I agreed with but never really thought about.

Ultimately, though, BG3 haunted me because I had so many questions.

Were things unfinished? Or did I just miss them?
Was the class balance really that awful, or did rolling with Paladin and the default Origin layouts give me the wrong impression?
Did Acts 2 and 3 go too fast, or did I?
Was an Origin playthrough really going to change my mind?
Does the game have a lot of useless loot, or did I just miss it?
How bad is the game’s morality bias in reality?

And so many more. Eventually they ate away at me so hard that I decided to start a Shadowheart run and see how I truly felt about BG3.

To save you a potentially long review: It wasn’t pretty.

I will give Baldur’s Gate 3 praise for one thing, though, and that’s its excellent ability to mask its flaws by pretending to have more options than it actually has. A running theme of my original playthrough was picking an option and thinking “Hmm, I wonder what a lot of those other options did”. In this playthrough, I decided to pick more of them - sometimes via save rerolling.

While I was initially so positive towards the game that I labelled the gameplay as ‘a masterpiece’, repeated exposure and a significant replay have soured my opinion quite significantly.

Hilariously, I finger-wagged Wrath of the Righteous for adding too much yet praised BG3 for its reticence.

Anyway, BG3 has too many options and could’ve done with some significant cuts. No, really. ‘This game has too much’ is going to pop up a lot from here on out.

Yes, WOTR has a lot of superfluous gunk that is best skipped. The problem is that, despite BG3 having significantly less, the ratio of usable:worthless is roughly the same.

Especially on the spell front, my god. There are so many of them, and a startling amount of them are Concentration spells - meaning you can either use only one at a time or casting them will shatter your active spell. This doesn’t affect offensive casters like Warlocks or Evocation Wizards too much, but it utterly crushes defensive/support casters like Druids/Bards/Clerics and ESPECIALLY Paladins, whose primary means of attack (Smite attacks) more-often-than-not will break Concentration. Which is a problem, because even an Oathbreaker Paladin gets an excessive amount of support spells.

You could, for example, cast Shield of Faith. It’s a concentration spell that gives your target +2 to Armour Class. Very nice. Or you could caste Haste, which gives +2 to AC and an extra entire action plus Advantage on Dexterity Throws and doubles your movement speed.

You could also cast Compelled Duel, which forces an enemy to attack only you. Or, you could not waste a Concentration slot and instead cast Command; an extremely versatile spell with a number of options that can do basically the same thing in function but also *isn’t a Concentration spell.

You could use Magic Weapon to buff your weapon and get a significant offensive edge, or you could just use Divine Smite to do basically the same thing in terms of damage output but without breaking Concentration.

This is not a Paladin exclusive problem, either. Woe betide Conjuration Wizards, Clerics, Druids and Bards for their excess of Concentration spells.

I get the intent behind Concentration as a mechanic, it’s ostensibly a means to prevent people simply steamrolling fights by pre-buffing and then walking in with like 6 actions, 45 AC, and a movement speed measured in European countries… Except you can still do this. There are a number of buff spells, many of which are obscenely useful - Longstrider, Enhance Leap, Mirror Image, Feather Fall to name an early game handful - that can easily be cast before a fight for a massive no-catch advantage.
Sure, you could argue that it’s hard to see fights coming on a first run, to which I’d say that the game telegraphs fights very blatantly and anyone who’s even slightly fluent in the unspoken Language of Games will be keyed in immediately. That, and a character only needs a mild investment in Perception to detect ambushes from ten postcodes away.

As an aside: Concentration also feels needlessly restrictive in a game with so few spell slots as it is. Paladins again get hit with this hard, as Divine Smites devour spell slots.

The issue with junk options sadly isn’t restricted to spells.

In my last review, I gassed up BG3’s action economy and praised it for always letting you do something. You can do off the wall shit involving water + lightning, flammable surfaces, improvised melee weapons, throwing loose items in your inventory, shoving, aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaand it’s all useless.

I try to avoid optimizing the fun out of my games. I was raised on flashy fighters and my teenage fixation was Devil May Cry with a dash of God Hand, so the need to style on enemies is in my blood. But it’s a bit hard not to play optimally in BG3 because the fun options just do paltry damage. Yes it’s cool to batista bomb someone through a barrel, but that does at best 9-12 damage in an entire turn. Even by the end of Act 1, you can do so much better than this.

The addition of Throw, Improvised Melee Weapon and Shove seemed like boons at first, but they’re really not. Throwing a molotov will always be less effective than throwing a Fire Bolt cantrip that most casters can get, for instance. There’s some merit to using Thrown weapons, but we’ll get to the Ranged Issue later.
Improvised Melee Weapon is useless given the incredibly high stat requirement to use it against humanoids, its waning usefulness as early as Act 2, and the paltry damage it does if used with furniture.
And Shove… Fall damage is also utterly pathetic. Shove does have a meagre utility for repositioning enemies, but this is rare considering how much mobility even casual players will come into, and using it for instakills often means losing useful loot.

The real reason ‘improv’ solutions suck, though, is because normal attacks are just too good. Ranged especially. Most martial classes, even the ‘pure’ ones, come with a bow or crossbow proficiency that also confers respectable damage regardless of stats. While Thrown weapons are ostensibly meant to be used as the ranged option for physical damage dealers, they also suck compared to just… shooting the enemy from afar? Or hucking a cantrip. Unless you’re using the Strength Monk Tavern Brawler build, but that build moves so fast that I question your competency if you frequently need to use ranged with it.

As I was typing this review, I considered giving them some praise for the addition of Jump as an action, but then I really thought about it. All jumping added was some okay level design that’s immediately underscored by the buggy pathfinding, and yet another means for melee classes to ignore ranged by just doing a 20 foot leap towards the enemy.

All of this is bad on its own, yes, but the real problems begin to rear their head when it comes to the subject of leveling. In my last review I praised the game for making ‘levels feel meaningful’.

I now realise that was mostly me appreciating the crutch the game handed me as I was feeling out the systems.

Level ups in BG3 rarely feel meaningful, with the rarity being adjusted by classes.

Spellcasters enjoy a relative lack of ‘dead’ levels as they get spells and slots every single level. While levels 11 and 12 are as underwhelming for them as they are for everyone else (due to 11 and 12 being ‘buffer’ levels before level 13, which was not included in BG3), they do at least get some notable new toys to play with. They suck, sure, but it’s something.

Martial classes, however, often see long swathes where they get little more than an action which may or may not be useful, a passive trait that will 80% of the time be too situational to ever pop up, and then the monotony is broken up by a Feat. Again, again, this really hurts Paladins; they get so many Concentration spells that it would perhaps be less egregious if they only got proficiency in a skill and 16 extra HP.

Once the mechanics ‘click’, level ups soon go from being a monumental event to being countdowns for the levels where your build actually comes online. How could they not? In a game where the most boring solution will often reward you with 80 damage per character turn, getting some Always Prepared spells doesn’t mean anything. What good is Faerie Fire when Lae’zel can do at minimum 80 damage before targets can even cloak themselves?

The sole exception to all of this is Monk, a class which embodies another issue I’m going to gripe about at length later on: Content added later in development is so very detached from the rest of the game that it begins to feel like DLC in a Bethesda game which sticks out like a sore thumb.

Monk is obscene. It has numerous possible builds within itself, is one of the few (if not the only) class that can metamorph into something unique via multiclassing, and it also just gets everything. It can have useful spells that swiftly recharge on a short rest, it can get incredible martial actions that’re worth using over basic attacking (in part because they give you an extra basic attack), or they can just straight up become Rogue but better. 9 Open Hand Monk/3 Thief Rogue is one of the few builds I’ve tried that was sincerely fun.

Monk was also the last class added, and no other class has as much unique content or as much depth. The classes in general, actually, are pretty bad on both a gameplay and story front.

I also need to take a moment to gripe about Feats. In Wrath of the Righteous there’s about a hundred or so. Sure, a lot of them are boring and uncreative, but there’s always something you can take to benefit or augment a build. +2 AC when fighting defensively is boring, sure, but it’s something! That’s survivability, right there! Especially if you’re squishy!
BG3, meanwhile, has precious few feats. The vast majority of them benefit melee characters, with only a handful for ranged/magic users and some that are just plain useless. There is no real reason to take ‘Performer’ - which lets you use musical instruments, already a dubiously useful feature that embodies a problem we’ll get to soon. Sure, it gives you +1 Charisma, but you could also take.

[Drum Roll]

ABILITY IMPROVEMENT!

Ability Improvement is the ultimate embodiment of my gripes with BG3’s feats. It’s boring. It’s so boring. It’s the most boring feat in a list of like 20-30 of the most boring feats in the setting.

But it’s good. It’s really good. It’s a two +1s to any stat you want, or a single +2. Given the relatively high starting stats for classes (17 at most), the relative ease of consequence-free stat buffs, and the low level cap for stats (20 via feats, 30 from rewards/tonics), there’s no reason not to take it. Buffing your class stat buffs pretty much everything you can do, and the relatively homogenous builds available to classes means there’s not much reason to not buff the main stat unless you’re doing Strength Monk - again, the only time a class meaningfully deviates from its main draw.

The other feats, in comparison, are just utter faff and feel more like deciding which flavour of Monster Energy you want. Yeah, there’s tons and they all taste different but at the end of the day you’re functionally just choosing between four things: Proficiency in a thing, a linear stat increase, a dubiously useful situational perk, or something that’s just a total no-brainer. To be honest, most classes can get by just using Ability Improvement/Savage Attacker and either Mobile or Alert. That is, in order: +2 to your main stat, Advantage on every attack roll you’ll ever make that cannot be nullified, and either a huge buff to movement speed which is worth more than gold, or Initiative (letting you get off hefty alpha strikes).

Most feats might sound good on paper, but reality tends to crumple that paper up and throw it into a wastebin. Heavy Armor Master, for instance, promises to reduce all non-magical damage by -3 when you’re wearing heavy armor. Sounds great, right? In Act 1, it is!

For about an hour.

BG3’s core issue on the gameplay front is that it’s too rigid in its adherence to DnD 5e. This would not be a problem were it not for how fast the game scales. Much of what is ‘bad’ in BG3 is only bad because it’s in a videogame. -3 damage would be excellent in a lower stakes tabletop campaign where your two worst threats are “some guy named Greg who’s been stealing gnomes from Belfast'' and your DM’s ex-girlfriend whose untreated personality disorder means every diceroll might literally be your last.

But this is not a low stakes tabletop campaign. There are worse threats than Greg, and they frequently hit for double or triple digits. -3 is excellent against an enemy who will only do 10 damage, but in BG3 those stop appearing within about half an hour depending on your playtime.

What’s really infuriating about feats is that there is an abundance of magic items in this game, and even the shittier ones have far more interesting effects that would’ve made for a much better feat lineup. But no, death to pragmatic adaptation I suppose.

I’m gonna take a little break from kvetching about BG3 to point something out, though: This issue with classes and feats isn’t entirely Larian’s fault. It is their fault for blindly adapting 5e with no modifications besides the ones necessary for a videogame, but most of the actual issues lie with the fact that DnD 5e is just unimaginative dogshit which is - to be incredibly mean for a moment - moreso targeted to people whose perception of tabletop games is entirely shaped by Critical Role and funny DM stories on Reddit. I’d compare it to something like Hyrule Warriors, Prison Architect, Forza or Guilty Gear Strive; in theory it should be a good base for people to springboard into better and more thought-out entries within the genre, but in reality people just cling to it and never expand their horizons. And while BG3 does have many of its own issues, a fair share of them are ultimately present because 5e barely makes for a good tabletop system let alone a videogame.

Much of what I’ve said about feats applies to classes, too. You could pick Ranger if you wanted, but do you really want to? Are you really that hellbent on playing Worse Rogue? Oh, you want to pick Paladin instead? Okay, that’s cool… But do you really want to play Worse Fighter? Ah, you want to play Druid instead. Neat and all, but do you really want to play Worse Sorcerer? Bard? Is Worse Wizard really that appealing?

The answer for most people will be ‘yeah’, because this is a roleplaying game and I imagine the vast majority of people pick classes for the aesthetics and personal character flavour. Not me, though, minmaxing is part of the fun for me.

Wizards, Sorcerers and Warlocks get plenty of flavour to make them appealing and viable in their own right - even if Warlock is mostly an Eldritch Blast machine. Albeit, most of this is down to the game’s obscene fixation on magic. It very much wants you to be a caster, it wants you to use some magic even if you’re martial. The problem here is that Cleric, Druid and Bard don’t get much in the way of interesting or viable mechanics. Clerics are essentially just an awkward midpoint between Paladins and Wizards. Druid can shapeshift and Bard subclasses get spells that’re just diet versions of better class’ gimmicks, but that’s it. Their spellbooks are weak and wimpy, to the point that two entire companions (Jaheira and Halsin) kinda suck right out the gate unless reclassed.

Druid in particular sucks thanks to a problem which is multi-layered: Damage types. BG3 has a lot of ‘em; Piercing (divvied up into 3 subcategories), Fire, Lightning, Cold, Thunder, Acid, Poison, Necrotic, Radiant, Force and Psychic. Of these damage types, Fire reigns supreme. There are so many readily available sources of it than any other damage type, it’s scarcely resisted let alone nullified, and spells that deal fire damage are both incredibly convenient and incredibly strong. To a lesser extent, this also goes for lightning and cold.

Acid, Poison and Necrotic are utterly awful. A lot of enemies resist it or are outright immune to it, and their spells are either negligible in terms of damage or extremely costly. It’s the near-persistent resistances and immunities that truly make Druid a pain, though. This is, once again, a problem with the choices made in the adaptation. Larian wanted to tell a certain story with certain setpieces, no problem… At first. They also wanted to include lots of combat stuff from 5e, which meant that what they decided to adapt now had tangible consequences for some characters. Even putting aside Druid’s lackluster spellbook, 2 of its 3 subclasses are focused on dealing primarily Acid and Poison damage, which just makes them a waste.

If you have any familiarity with TTRPGs, you might still be thinking about what I said before: That some things in BG3 are fine for a tabletop session and bad for a videogame.

Anyway, let’s talk about ability checks.

In a standard tabletop session - and indeed, this game’s own multiplayer - characters will have different specialties. Your wizard may be able to bend the world’s magical weave to their whims as though it were an obedient dog, but they probably don’t have the charisma to console a grieving widow. That’s where the party member with the appropriate stats takes the stage. In BG3’s multiplayer, this is entirely intact. I rarely talk to NPCs in my main BG3 MP session because I am Smashman the Barbarian Who Smashes.. Our bard - who has 1 level in Bard and 7 in Warlock - does that for us.

In BG3 singleplayer, this becomes a problem. The Party as an entity will automatically do some things of their own volition; perception/arcana/history/whatever checks will roll concurrently and immediately with no input required. If you need something disarmed or unlocked, the game will automatically make the party member with the highest Sleight of Hand roll for it.

This is all on the overworld, however. In conversations, only the person who initiated can roll. As BG3 is a very Player-centric game, your main character will be the one doing 99% of dialogues, which in turn provides a very annoying issue with proficiency forcing.

BG3 is not a masterfully crafted RPG, or even a competently crafted one, so it lacks what I call “fail-throughs”; situations that can arise from failing a check that are unique in their own way and perhaps even better than succeeding depending on the circumstances. Here, it’s nothing but binary pass/fail checks that either skip some busywork or a fight. If you fail, you’re stuck with busywork and/or a fight. God forbid you have a charismatic character step up to the front, too, because there’s a lot of character specific exchanges in Acts 1 and 2 that you can miss out on. Especially as Shadowheart or the Dark Urge. I find this particularly jarring because it’s a problem that CRPGs solved as early as 1998… With the first Baldur’s Gate.

One thing I regularly castigate BG3 for is its slavish devotion to both tabletops and other, better western RPGs. This, I feel, really makes it clear as day. CRPGs as a genre tend to have a problem wherein Charisma and its associated diplomatic functions are so powerful that taking them is a no-brainer. BG3 is no different.

Unfortunately, BG3 is not confident in doing this. It offers you an absurd amount of outs; Stat-boosting skills which can be cast from a handy menu, no-consequence rerolls that you get by the bucketload, and tons of bonuses and boons all the way to the credits. It is, in many ways, afraid to let you fail.

Early on, you’re introduced to Long Rests. These cost 40 camp supplies, advance the plot sometimes, and restore all of your spell slots/class abilities. A Short Rest can patch you up briefly for free, but you only get two. The game sort of, kinda, maybe implies that long rests should be done sparingly? This is total hogwash though, you can find about 120 camp supplies immediately after the prologue. It is, to me at least, pretty obvious that the abundance of supplies across the entire game is a safety net for people who’re taking their time to learn the combat or just aren’t that great at the game. This is fine, there’s nothing wrong with this.

…Except, on Tactician - which doubles the amount of supplies needed for a long rest - there’s still far too many. Especially for those given to exploration or completionism.

That’s not my actual issue, though.

My actual bone to pick is that the system fucks with the narrative if you’re too good at the game. A bit like Hades, but more insufferable.

Long Rests are good at restoring spell slots, sure. If your party is a monk, fighter, rogue and warlock, then you can get by with short rests. If you’re also decently good at the game, or get lucky with rolls, you can potentially go a long time without using long rests! On my latest run, I only used about three in Act 1.

A very fun fact about Baldur’s Gate 3 is that it’s held together with strings, glue, a bit of prayer and also 4-5 invigilators making sure you don’t peek behind the curtain.

Abstaining from long rests - willfully or not - is a way to peek behind the curtain.

Many narrative events, be they main story related or companion related, are directly tied to long resting. These aren’t just fun side extras, they’re vital to the story being told and the companions within. It’s similar in egregiousness to Hades’ story, wherein you’re punished outright for being better than the game expects. You can, through deliberate or accidental avoidance of long resting, skip a lot of these events.

The game breaks pretty heavily if you do. It’s still clearable, but wow. Companions can skip entire conversations (which are still recorded as happening), Astarion can potentially forget to reveal his vampirism (thus costing him his bite ability), vital scenes involving the parasite can fail to trigger (thus costing you the parasite skill tree), so on and so forth. Even when these do fire, they’re often slammed together in inappropriate ways or delayed by a few real life hours.

Hilariously, you can potentially keep Gale without needing to skill check him into submission, should you choose to kill the refugees and druids. Just don’t rest! It’s easy!

Speaking of slaughtering the refugees and druids, though, it’s possible to stumble into an outcome to the first Big Choice that is either unfinished or was meant to be cut. For context: The first Big Choice of Baldur’s Gate 3 is whether you side with a grove of druids and the refugees seeking shelter, or whether you side with goblins and butcher them. I’ve kvetched about it in my original review, but did you know there’s a third option?

Zevlor and Mol, two tiefling refugees, will allude to stealing the Druids’ sacred idol to disrupt their ritual. Mol even gives it to you as a formal quest. Should you actually do this (ideally via having someone go invisible and nab it), it will trigger a schism and cause the Druids to fight the Tieflings. The Druids will always win, backing the Tieflings into a corner and slaughtering them to the last.

Doing this locks you into a weird Schrodinger’s Murderer scenario. The game flags you as having picked both options at the same time without actually resolving the choice. You still have to trudge over to the Goblin Camp and either deal with the leaders, or “kill” the tiefling camp by… walking in the front door and having Minthara proclaim victory. Interestingly, Halsin even has unique dialogue for this scenario that sadly never gets resolved because he disappears from the game world entirely in this situation.

What’s really interesting though, are the companion reactions. Shadowheart quips that the Grove owes you a great debt for saving them - despite them being dead - while Gale groans about it despite never confronting you or alluding to it elsewhere. Astarion never acknowledges it - or maybe he does? I don’t know. On the run that let me find this outcome, I grew tired of his Stewie Griffin impression and staked him. Wyll runs through some cut content voicelines with Karlach that reveal he was intended to not leave instantly if you slaughtered the Grove.

I bring this up because it is fantastically broken, doubly so if you opt to ‘side’ with Minthara and then immediately kill her, at which point you’re locked into that Schrodinger’s Murderer state I mentioned above. And yet, this is something the game directs you to do. It’s not something I just found while faffing about, it’s a quest Mol gave me. Keep it in mind for when I talk about the story.

First, though, I want to talk about alignment. Like everything, alignment was gutted in 5e and turned into a vestigial system; there for the sake of being there, really. BG3 omits it… as a mechanic.
But it’s still beholden to the ideas of the alignment system. If you have any familiarity with the setting and its alignments, it becomes abundantly clear that they’re still there but invisible, much like engines in Mechwarrior or ammo pickup in Payday 2. Sure, there’s no good or evil meter or even associated stats, but also it’s kind of conspicuous that the only Bronze Dragon is so Lawful Good as to be destructive. Or that Astarion becoming a true vampire very noticeably shifts his alignment out of Neutral. Or that, despite waffling and shuffling around the topic, every mindflayer you encounter meets one or more definitions of Neutral Evil. Or that Shadowheart, follower of a Neutral Evil goddess, gets noticeably and abruptly more selfless after converting to Selune - a Chaotic Good goddess.

There are narrative reasons for these, yes, but they have all the sincerity and grace of a parent insisting their son’s stained school shirt, chewed bottom lip and dilated pupils are due to migraines. It’s such a strange thing to observe after 5e bent over backwards to turn alignment into the kind of atrophied husk that excites some of my puppygirl friends. Especially after having finished a replay of WOTR, a game that challenges the rigidity of alignments in basically every other major scene. Larian probably thinks Prelate Hulrun was right.

Why bring this up?

Because at the end of the day, BG3 doesn’t feel like it was actually made with love for DnD or 5e specifically. Rather, it feels like it was made by people who liked the idea of DnD or maybe their specific DnD experiences, who then went on to make a game which is just a cheap rollercoaster ride for Faerun. A narrow hodgepodge of random elements from the franchise to make people gawk at for 60 hours. In a way, I’d argue that BG3 is made more out of demented DnD fetishism as opposed to any genuine love.

It’s one of those things that only comes up on replays, really. I think the first run is good at making the world feel bigger than it is, especially given the inevitability of you missing something. On subsequent runs, it’s very obviously an A-B-C haunted house ride where you can sometimes vote to go on a detour. There are no real memorable components to the overworld, just attractions. Look, there’s the Absolutist siblings! And the owlbear den! And the goblin village! And Auntie Ethel! And the Raphael bridge! And Gnolls!

But there’s no world. I recently reviewed Factorio, yet it’s this game that feels like a conveyor belt ride. In my last review I took potshots at Act 2 for pretending to have a hazard only to immediately hand you a key to ignoring that hazard, and in hindsight Act 2 is the game just admitting what it is. ‘Here’s a wrecked Land of Fuck, go explore Fuckland and see the sights!’, with the sights primarily being undead/shadow enemies and encounters that’re either tedious boss fights or a succession of dialogue checks. They are, at the very least, better tied to the overall story than in Act 1 or 3. Really, if I say anything about Act 2 is that it’s easily the strongest arc just for making the haunted house attractions actually tie in with the rest of the house. Which honestly gives it better interior design cohesion than my parents.

Act 3 is the worst for this, though, my god. 1 and 2 have the excuse of being in a frontier forest and a blighted hellscape. 3, though rife with cuts and rewrites and bugs, takes place in the Faerun equivalent to Glasgow. And, despite the massively increased population and higher density of NPCs and framerate dives and cut content, it still feels like a haunted house ride. You dart around a tenth of the titular city going from attraction to attraction, ticking off entries in a checklist so bloated that I have to declare it as fetish art when crossing the Canadian border. Not once does the game cast off the rollercoaster shackles.

Something else that’s been bugging me as I both replay BG3 and watch others play is that, honestly, classes aren’t implemented very well in the narrative. Dialogue and actions that should break a Paladin’s oath often don’t, and the usage of generic ‘Paladin’ dialogues for each oath means that your character will almost always be OOC relative to their oath. Even Oathbreakers are OOC, as they can still act as and be treated as a Paladin by everyone not named Raphael. Warlocks can frequently chastise Wyll for how silly he was to accept a Fiend pact with little to no attention given to your hypocrisy. It’s often a coin toss whether or not characters will mention a Druid protagonist even being one when appropriate. If someone mentions a lock or trap in dialogue, take a shot every time they allude to you being a Rogue. You’ll be stone cold sober. Don’t even get me started on Warlock and its vocations.

I normally would not hold developers to such tight standards. Gamedev is tough, I’m not insane enough to think they should account for every contingency or random combination of decisions the player might make. The reason I make an exception for BG3 is because it constantly pretends it’s accounting for things. Part of the hype wave from Early Access was caused by the game having responses for all manner of combinations and the general assumption was that the full release would be the same, but More. So with that in mind, every omission is a bit of a glaring hole, especially as they’re often common-sense omissions - weirder ones get accounted for.

One last addendum (because this segment has expanded 3x its original size since I started) I feel is worth noting is that the original level cap for this game was 10. It was later buffed to 12 to allow spellcasters to get Level 6 spells, but Larian has explained several times that it’d never go any higher because they just didn’t want to deal with the ramifications of 7th level spellcasting or anything above it. “We didn’t want to deal with it” pops up a lot in interviews around this game, which is also vexing considering how much faff the game has.

[I had a segment here about how bad customization was, but honestly it’s just a repeat of my prior gripes in the last interview with an added “I hate how boring the body types are”.]

Okay. 5700 words into this review.

Let’s actually talk about the story, and the characters that inhabit it.

When I first ran through this game, I had a lot of love for the tadpole infestation as a framing device. A lot of my earlier story criticisms were centred around “squandering a good premise later on”. I liked the setup, but the payoffs to said setup were unsatisfying.

Now, coming back to Act 1 several times, I’ve actually come to resent the story for immediately going out of its way to remove all sense of urgency without even pretending there’s anything at stake. Very early on, you are told outright that the tadpole in your brain won’t immediately turn you and thus there’s no real rush whatsoever. Despite vestigial dialogue from Early Access implying that engaging with the tadpole at all will doom you, this is a lie. There are no consequences for using it, and it is indeed just a cool skill tree you can gorge on with no issue or complaints. Lae’zel doesn’t even need to be persuaded to turn a blind eye; you can stand in front of her and ram parasites into your skull while she stares at you glaikit and uncaring.

This isn’t an issue exclusive to the tadpoles. Even in Act 1, you will be told an annoying amount of times that the Druids are this close to shutting off the grove and that you REALLY need to hurry before they succeed in their ritual. Naturally, you can take all the time you like. Even as you learn of a pending Goblin invasion, so long as you don’t speak to Minthara you can just meander around at your own pace. Characters are constantly urging you to focus on things; Raphael warns you not to meander, your companions beg you to hurry up and do their specific thing, NPCs give you quests and go “oh it is SO urgent people are DYING it’s almost OVER you are our LAST HOPE” only to exit dialogue and stiffly walk away while you pinch their healing potions with Astarion.

Now, I need to lay my cards out here: I like time limits, and I think completionism is a venereal disease. I think the real strength of videogames is that they offer experiences that other artforms literally cannot replicate, and a huge part of this is due to some games simply not letting you ‘see everything’ on a first run.

I don’t think BG3 would actually benefit from hard or soft time limits, though. Rather, I take hefty umbrage with the game constantly pretending to have any sort of urgency or time limit only to clap its hands and lead you down a trail of Side Shit. It’s telling that you can acquire a ring from a sidequest that’s meant to assuage symptoms of tadpole infection only to find out that it confers a small buff instead.

WHICH IS A PERFECT TIME TO TALK ABOUT EARLY ACCESS AGAIN!

I really need you, the viewer, to understand how much of a different game BG3 was before they bowed to complaints and made a worse version of DA:O, and I’ll start with that bloody ring.

As I’ve mentioned before, the Early Access version of BG3 was a much different, darker beast. Using the tadpole was an in-game taboo, would royally piss off your companions, and subtly accelerated your descent into becoming a squid. But there was a way to make it fuck off: A ring. The same ring you get that now confers a small buff. It required a short and at-the-time annoying sidequest, but it made that tadpole shut up and made the dream visitor fuck right off until you removed it.
That it was diluted so heavily in the full release (to the point where pursuing the sidequest actually enhances your tadpole powers) is indicative of this game’s massive tone shift, but it’s not quite as indicative as *Wyll.

Wyll in BG3’s release version is the noble son of Duke Ravengard. He is a kind and morally upstanding man who took a Warlock pact that massively fucked him over, but he’s still good in spite of it. He is the goodest of good companions. Mizora, his patron, is just a terrible creature all around with all the redeeming traits of the average Serbian war criminal given that she groomed a teenager into accepting a Warlock pact.

Wyll in BG3’s EA version wasn’t even a Ravengard. He was hinted to be an Eltan, and his dad was a rogue. While he was still the ‘Blade of Frontiers’, conversing with him and exposing him to Goblins made it clear that he harboured an intense darkness in his soul and was a bit too proud of himself. When faced with noncompliant Goblins he immediately resorted to torture, and had no qualms about hurting an innocent man for information. He saw himself as Robin Hood, but veered into The Punisher territory… But there was also an undercurrent of longing to his desire to find Mizora. Despite being his abuser (more intensely, since EA implied she’d sexually assaulted him) and openly scorning her, it was never clear if he actually did hate her.

Unfortunately Larian made the mistake of asking CRPG fans to empathise with a morally complex black man and thus they whined for years that he was “boring” (despite being, imo, the most interesting EA companion besides Gale), so they rewrote him entirely and gave him a new VA and didn’t even have the fucking care to give him as much dialogue as the other companions, so now he feels worse than even the non-Origin characters or Karlach - who only existed late in the game’s lifespan. I bring this up specifically because EA Wyll and EA Astarion were essentially the same character concept; men who affected a front that crumpled under duress and revealed a murky, complex interior. Wyll’s story just progressed in EA while Astarion’s didn’t.

In the middle of writing this segment, which was going to touch on how launch BG3 is painfully split between trying to be a dark fantasy story and trying to be ‘Dragon Age With Cocks’, Larian dumped out Patch 5, which among other things adds an actual epilogue and a way to recruit Minthara without carrying out a small-scale ethnic cleansing. The content present in both of these confirmed to me that Larian have opted to embrace Bioware’s legacy wholeheartedly, by treating their own work as a terminally unserious dating sim for 20-30 somethings who laugh at Virtual Youtuber fans but treat Astarion as though he were an actual person they know.

It’s an excellent jumping off point for my criticisms about tone, though. Marketing itself as a Dark Fantasy Epic gives me certain expectations and while I’ll praise them for avoiding the addiction to sexual assault which is omnipresent in American/West European Dark Fantasy, I have to dock them points for not actually making a Dark Fantasy story. Yes, the game is very gorey and a lot of sidequest characters get royally dicked over, but this is ultimately a story about a party of mostly heroic individuals out to slay an inarguable bad guy who is out to control all reality. Along the way, you can hit a button every now and then to do a dickish thing for no justifiable reason than “the option was there”.

If you’ve played BG3, think of your least favourite party member. Maybe it’s Shadowheart, with her initial snootiness and wishy washy morals? Maybe it’s Lae’zel, with her refusal to lick your character’s boots and penchant for dickheadedness? Maybe it’s Gale, with his emotional manipulation and habit of lovebombing people?

Whoever they are: They were better in EA simply by way of having worse character traits. The release version comes with a distinct sanding-down of everyone to make them more palatable to the Dragon Age crowd. Which, given how DA fans continue to talk about Morrigan to this day, isn’t entirely unreasonable. The end result though is that the party are, as a collective, insufferably good. Besides Minthara - who is very obviously your Lawful Evil rep - every single party member is ‘good at heart’, or just outright good.

The option is there to make some of them worse, of course, but as I alluded to in my last review and up above there often isn’t any justifiable reason for it. It’s debatably a worse case of protagonist-centric morality than the titles this game is blatantly ripping off. At least Dragon Age 2 bothered to provide reasons why you might turn Anders into a crazed zealot or Isabela into an amoral, selfish thief. Here, the choice is always “follow the logical conclusion of the character’s arc” or “hit the bad guy button”.

None of this would be an issue if each NPC’s worst traits were still present. Barring some leftover EA dialogue and early Act 1, everyone just softens up unless you hit the bad guy button.

I also need to take a moment to natter about how boring the companions are, having seen their arcs to completion around 5-6 times at this point. Call me reductive if you wish, but every Origin character is someone whose life growing up was defined by abuse (sexual, emotional, institutional, whatever) and whose personalities at game start are defined by grooming (for romance, for sex, for control, as part of a militaristic caste society, by a literal demon, etc). The resolution to these characters is always either them getting over it - with only your help, naturally - or becoming a dickhead.

The only material difference, besides (imo) cosmetic differences in dialogue is that Astarion gets significantly more Everything than everyone, which is best exemplified by the Dark Urge

I was hoping to put the Astarion favouritism off until nearer the end, but again the recent update put him at the forefront of dev time, quality and quantity so I am bloodsworn to kvetch. Most of what I’m going to say applies to Shadowheart too, but to a much lesser degree because she’s a woman and you know how fantasy fans are.

Astarion gets an unusual amount of shilling by the devs, to the point where it gets exhausting. He has the most indepth romance, he has the most interactions with the Dark Urge, he has the most dialogue, the most interjections, the most indepth companion questline - with the most outcomes - and is generally just given so much more than everyone else. In updates, he is always the focus. “You can kiss Astarion on demand” got more attention from Larian themselves than “Minthara, an entire companion, now works properly”. Hell, the old BG3 poster used to have every companion dispersed evenly and now it’s got him at the forefront. He’s also the only dex-specced party member in the game, so you’re stuck with him unless you want a Hireling.

I wouldn’t normally take umbrage with character shilling because, let’s be honest for a second, posterboys are exceptionally useful marketing tools and most big releases have one for sanity’s sake. My actual issue comes from the sheer neglect everyone else gets. Wyll, a companion who’s been around since very early access, has less dialogue than Karlach - a character who didn’t at all exist until earlier this year. Everyone else just has less than Astarion, which is impressive given that it’s Shadowheart who the narrative drops on you. I’ve noticed that a lot of this game’s most vehement defenders tend to point to Astarion’s story (which is just “sexual assault is bad… when it happens to men c:”) as proof that the narrative is high art while conspicuously ignoring the rest of the game’s narrative contents.

In a way, it amazes me that Larian managed to speedrun the Star Wars Pitfall - wherein a series starts off with a vivid and interesting cast of characters only to cross the event horizon and end up revolving around 2-3 (Skywalker/Kenobi) in the end. In EA, BG3 was a game about a party of fucked up people with a deep ugliness in their soul sat opposite all the beauty, and in the full release BG3 is a game with Astarion and some other people in it.

Also… This may strike some viewers as cold, but I don’t particularly care about the way sexual assault and trauma are depicted in Astarion’s questline. Both because all of the abuse is thrown up in one big box named “abuse”, and because the writers clearly think the players are fucking morons which results in several scenes where either Astarion or the Narrator tells you outright the exact ways in which his trauma affects him.
This in itself is not unrealistic; as heartbreaking as it is, the most damaged people I know don’t want for self-awareness and could probably deliver much the same exposition.
In writing, though, it often comes off as what I said before: The writers assuming players are morons. Which is doubly strange given Gale (my favourite companion) is a whole other beast, and the results of his grooming by a literal goddess are often present yet not explicitly commented upon. He’ll even deny it in the rare moments you do bring it up.

It’s all very… “Young adult novel tackling abuse”. Every time I see the ‘good’ climax to Astarion’s story where he declares that he’s “so much more than [Cazador] made him” and then stabs his abuser to death before sobbing, I wince a little at how juvenile it is. In the past it was ambiguous as to whether murdering Cazador actually helped, but sure enough the new epilogues confirm it ‘fixes’ him. Nauseating, I tell you.

I mentioned that Gale was my favourite companion and that’s primarily because he hits on the same notes, they’re just handled with grace. Gale is a deeply traumatized man who was groomed and taken as a consort by a literal goddess. A goddess who enabled his worst tendencies until they bore actual consequences, and then cut ties with him for both of their sakes.
He presents a jovial and jolly front, but said front comes with a habit for compliments-as-manipulation and guilt tripping because it turns out being well-read does not make up for serious arrested development.
Peer beneath the veil and you find a man who has a genuine, sincere belief that his death will be a net positive for the world, yet despite this emptiness and resignment to his fate he still nurses a nuclear anger towards his abuser and anyone like her that can be set off if pushed properly. His apparent ‘ego’ is also a front, because in truth he believes his only notable trait is his intellect and magical prowess; they’re the core of his entire self. Without them, what is he?

There’s a moment in Act 2 that’s incredibly easy to miss due to that act’s general pacing issues where he’s just outright depressed. When you poke him for a conversation, the first thing he apologises for? Not being the erudite and verbose speaker he usually is. It’s heartbreaking.

Most of that is just inferred, by the way. Unlike Astarion, Gale has precious few scenes that really expand on his character and I had to really dig to get some of them. That many of them were bugged and didn’t appear until patches 3 and 4 didn't help. Minthara is great too, but the developers are hellbent on leaving her unfinished so I can’t even go into an expository rant about her.

I’m going to take a brief break from dunking on the game to talk about a good part - though it is in service to dunking all the same.

Act 2 is fucking phenomenal. I’d say it’s the only solid part of the game’s story. There’s a solid villain with defined motives and an actual personality, a strong supporting cast, minibosses who act as narrative mirrors to the big bad, and several companion quests (Except Wyll, sorry) reveal their full stakes here. The studio’s art designers worked overtime for each of its various environments, deftly alternating between oppressive deathcult fortresses and regal yet foreboding enclaves with plenty of rotted quasi-medieval structures in between before eventually capping off in a horrific dungeon made of meat. While I’m still not too fond of the Shadow-Cursed Lands as an area to navigate, I think the entire thing is of infinitely superior construction to the acts it’s sandwiched between.
Special shoutout to Act 2 if you’re playing as Shadowheart, which is perhaps the only time in the game where the potential of Origin Characters as a game mechanic is ever realized. Dialogue changes constantly and your interactions with the major NPCs are often radically shifted to account for your character’s role and heritage. Shame it doesn’t last.

Act 2’s biggest flaw, sadly, is that its mere existence makes two already bad acts look even worse. With the primary exception of Act 3’s intro and final two hours, most of BG3’s plot in Acts 1 and 3 only occurs sporadically. It is a series of diversions, fetch quests and camp rests until Plot, and Act 2 really pulls back the curtain on this because the plot is progressing constantly. It’s difficult to wander around Act 2 and not advance the story.
The foundation of this criticism stems from BG3’s obsession with absolute faff. Taking a leaf out of DA: Inquisition’s book, a lot of sidequests and side areas are either contextless fights or an intro to painfully unfunny writing. XP in this game stands for both Experience and Excruciating Pain from yet another Whedonesque gag sequence. Normally I’d excuse this because the game gives you gear for suffering, but so much gear is caster-specific that my martial addicted self usually bins it.

There’s a conspiracy theory that Dark Urge - who starts as a Sorcerer by default - was the main character and ‘Tav’ did not exist, which is probably not true but is believable with how much gear is caster specific. If you are a punchman or a Barbarian, eat shit.

And the Dark Urge itself… Truthfully, I like it so much that I do wish it was the only option and that Origins were unplayable. The DU story is a tale of someone wracked with a violent compulsion that haunts them no matter what. If they fight it, it is a story of fighting tooth and nail to stop said compulsion as it grows in power, eventually threatening to make the DU lash out and kill their loved ones. If they succumb, it’s a story of a demented madman building a throne of murder from the bones of reality, for they are a Bhaalspawn and that is their birthright.
DU is, to my surprise, a surprisingly captivating tale because of this. There’s a lot more weight given to some moments, and parts of the game which are usually dead air are instead filled with advancements of the DU’s personal plot. Successfully fighting it and making it to the end feels earned, in part because it’s the only good-aligned path in BG3 which is infinitely harder than the evil path.

Aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaand nobody really responds to it. DU, much like the other companions, just doesn’t get as much unique dialogue as it should. As expected, Astarion is the only character to really get into conversations about the DU, with everyone else only really giving brief interjections or casual camp chats. In the good route you are literally murdered stone dead and brought back, and nobody reacts to it. It feels grotesquely incomplete, which is a disservice to BG3’s most interesting aspect.

Throughout this review I’ve alluded to “the plot” or “the story” and I’m sad to announce that there just isn’t that much to discuss on that front. The party get infected with mind flayer tadpoles, are manipulated by a rogue mind flayer, get told to wrest control of an Elderbain from the Dead Three’s Chosen, and then decide what to do with said brain once it breaks free. I am of course being reductive, but only slightly; the meat of this game’s ‘story’ is the companion quests and side stuff. Attempt to do the plot with Hirelings and it peels back just how empty the game is.
And, really, I think having the final villain be the Elderbrain is a bit too straightforward for a game that pretends to have depth with its various ‘twists’. Doubly so considering the Chosen are miles ahead of the brain in terms of writing, managing to deftly straddle the line between “big bad you absolutely must kill” and “sympathetic failure who has reasons for being like this”. Which gives the game more depth than Final Fantasy XIV, I guess.

The story can be made somewhat more palatable by picking an Origin, because it at least hoists some unique scenes on you as a means to let you play out a character's arc however you wish. This is, sadly, the only way to give Wyll or Karlach any depth, and I'm not about to award points for the game encouraging you to make up the good writing in your head - though it certainly worked on a lot of people.

I am nearly ten thousand words into this review, and the entire time I've been waiting for a moment to posit the "What is Baldur's Gate 3 about?" question to myself. Staring down at the last few paragraphs, I realize I don't even know. So deep are the narrative changes and so sloppy is the EA/Launch welding that I can't even speculate with certainty.

As we near the end, I do want to say that the voice acting is the game’s best aspect. Besides Neil Newbon (I’m sorry. He sounds like Stewie Griffin. I will not budge.) everyone else sounds fantastic. It says a lot that the main cast have relatively few works under their belt yet are managing to go toe-to-toe with legendary voice actors JK Simmons and Jason Isaacs, with the gap in quality being about a hair’s width. Sure, it’s really fucking annoying that the game has a cutscene for EVERY dialogue even if it’s incidental NPC one-offs, but at least it’s nice to listen to everyone. Shout out to Maggie Robertson for managing to make every line out of Orin’s voice sound hornier than even I could imagine. You rock.

Ultimately, this game’s ambitions hurt it the most. There is a vast mountain of cut content for this game, much of which was being shown off and played by the developers as late as three weeks pre-release. Endless rewrites, mechanical changes and changing staff are obvious in the patchwork, ramshackle product that released in August of this year. There is a clear attempt to make a modern epic on display here. To call this game a rough gem would be acknowledging that it is still a gem, and that’s not praise I’m willing to offer even faintly.
Towards the back of my 200~ hours in this game, I began thinking of something I read years ago while talking about Three Kingdoms China. I think it’s from Sun Tzu’s ‘The Art of War’?

There’s a limit to how far something can travel before it needs more maintenance, food and water than it can transport. This goes for animals, humans, and software too.

Baldur’s Gate 3 needed either more money, staff and resources than Larian had, or more realistic ambitions. The foundation required to support their ambitions just wasn’t there.

This game has already won a ton of awards, and will likely win even more in the coming year. For many people, it’ll be their first experience with Dark Fantasy and their views on the genre will be coloured by it. It’ll take five or so years for critical retrospectives to exist without getting shouted down by manic Astarion fans. Even now, all over social media, excitable gamers hold it aloft as an example of what games “should be”, and executives will nod their head and agree. It is, after all, the AAA way to launch unfinished and fix it later.

I have no satisfactory ending for this review. Which, given what game I'm reviewing, is apt.

[POST-SCRIPT STUFF STARTS HERE]

After posting this review, I lay down to rest my ancient back and primordial eyes, and I had a thought.

This game has problems with sex, Asian people and trans people.

Just to rattle them off without a script or proofreading:

1) Sex is treated weirdly, like Bioware's attitude but worse. It is a reward, something you get from engaging in the uncomfortably transactional romances or from doing sidequests. Alternatively, it's treated as a kink in and of itself, and that people who have it are freaky, which is very obvious with both Minthara and the fucking incest twins. Lastly, it tends to pop up as a punchline but in a very annoying way where it's the only punchline. There is genuinely an encounter early on where the '''joke''' is "haha look! Ugly people fucking!"

2) There just aren't any important Asian characters in this game, with the most prominent being a one dimensional baddy who is ultimately irrelevant outside of Astarion's questline and the rest being NPCs with one or two lines of dialogue. It really sticks out, especially given the undeserved praise this game is getting for representation. Hell, the Black characters aren't treated any better; Wyll is a non-factor thanks to Larian gutting him to appease whiners, and his dad is another man's plot token. Neither of them have any agency within the story, with Wyll always putting the fate of his dad in your hands. The playable cast is so fucking white too, my god.

3) Much of what I said up above applies to trans people, essentially confirming what I said last time. There are only a handful of trans NPCs, and there are no body options so if you decide to be a trans woman you're stuck with bolted on tits, and trans male characters are stuck looking buff as fuck because everyone in this game shares one of 4 body types. Sure, you could use one of the other body types, but faces are sex-based and there's an aggravating lack of sliders there's no real option besides femininity or masculinity. Fun! There's one major trans NPC who appears in Shadowheart's quest, but that's really it for trans people in Faerun.

I considered strongly putting together a long-form critique of this game, but the most damning statement I could possibly make about Final Fantasy XVI is that I truly don't think it's worth it. The ways in which I think this game is bad are not unique or interesting: it is bad in the same way the vast majority of these prestige Sony single-player exclusives are. Its failures are common, predictable, and depressingly endemic. It is bad because it hates women, it is bad because it treats it's subject matter with an aggressive lack of care or interest, it is bad because it's imagination is as narrow and constrained as it's level design. But more than anything else, it is bad because it only wants to be Good.

Oxymoronic a statement as it might appear, this is core to the game's failings to me. People who make games generally want to make good games, of course, but paired with that there is an intent, an interest, an idea that seeks to be communicated, that the eloquence with which it professes its aesthetic, thematic, or mechanical goals will produce the quality it seeks. Final Fantasy XVI may have such goals, but they are supplicant to its desire to be liked, and so, rather than plant a flag of its own, it stitches together one from fabric pillaged from the most immediate eikons of popularity and quality - A Song of Ice and Fire, God of War, Demon Slayer, Devil May Cry - desperately begging to be liked by cloaking itself in what many people already do, needing to be loved in the way those things are, without any of the work or vision of its influences, and without any charisma of its own. Much like the patch and DLC content for Final Fantasy XV, it's a reactionary and cloying work that contorts itself into a shape it thinks people will love, rather than finding a unique self to be.

From the aggressively self-serious tone that embraces wholeheartedly the aesthetics of Prestige Fantasy Television with all its fucks and shits and incest and Grim Darkness to let you know that This Isn't Your Daddy's Final Fantasy, without actually being anywhere near as genuinely Dark, sad, or depressing as something like XV, from combat that borrows the surface-level signifiers of Devil May Cry combat - stingers, devil bringers, enemy step - but without any actual opposition or reaction of that series' diverse and reactive enemy set and thoughtful level design, or the way there's a episode of television-worth of lectures from a character explaining troop movements and map markers that genuinely do not matter in any way in order to make you feel like you're experiencing a well thought-out and materially concerned political Serious Fantasy, Final Fantasy XVI is pure wafer-thin illusion; all the surface from it's myriad influences but none of the depth or nuance, a greatest hits album from a band with no voice to call their own, an algorithmically generated playlist of hits that tunelessly resound with nothing. It looks like Devil May Cry, but it isn't - Devil May Cry would ask more of you than dodging one attack at a time while you perform a particularly flashy MMO rotation. It looks like A Song of Ice and Fire, but it isn't - without Martin's careful historical eye and materialist concerns, the illusion that this comes even within striking distance of that flawed work shatters when you think about the setting for more than a moment.

In fairness, Final Fantasy XVI does bring more than just the surface level into its world: it also brings with it the nastiest and ugliest parts of those works into this one, replicated wholeheartedly as Aesthetic, bereft of whatever semblance of texture and critique may have once been there. Benedikta Harman might be the most disgustingly treated woman in a recent work of fiction, the seemingly uniform AAA Game misogyny of evil mothers and heroic, redeemable fathers is alive and well, 16's version of this now agonizingly tired cliche going farther even than games I've railed against for it in the past, which all culminates in a moment where three men tell the female lead to stay home while they go and fight (despite one of those men being a proven liability to himself and others when doing the same thing he is about to go and do again, while she is not), she immediately acquiesces, and dutifully remains in the proverbial kitchen. Something that thinks so little of women is self-evidently incapable of meaningfully tackling any real-world issue, something Final Fantasy XVI goes on to decisively prove, with its story of systemic evils defeated not with systemic criticism, but with Great, Powerful Men, a particularly tiresome kind of rugged bootstrap individualism that seeks to reduce real-world evils to shonen enemies for the Special Man with Special Powers to defeat on his lonesome. It's an attempt to discuss oppression and racism that would embarrass even the other shonen media it is clearly closer in spirit to than the dark fantasy political epic it wears the skin of. In a world where the power fantasy of the shonen superhero is sacrosanct over all other concerns, it leads to a conclusion as absurd and fundamentally unimaginative as shonen jump's weakest scripts: the only thing that can stop a Bad Guy with an Eikon is a Good Guy with an Eikon.

In borrowing the aesthetics of the dark fantasy - and Matsuno games - it seeks to emulate, but without the nuance, FF16 becomes a game where the perspective of the enslaved is almost completely absent (Clive's period as a slave might as well not have occurred for all it impacts his character), and the power of nobility is Good when it is wielded by Good Hands like Lord Rosfield, a slave owner who, despite owning the clearly abused character who serves as our introduction to the bearers, is eulogized completely uncritically by the script, until a final side quest has a character claim that he was planning to free the slaves all along...alongside a letter where Lord Rosfield discusses his desire to "put down the savages". I've never seen attempted slave owner apologia that didn't reveal its virulent underlying racism, and this is no exception. In fact, any time the game attempts to put on a facade of being about something other than The Shonen Hero battling other Kamen Riders for dominance, it crumbles nigh-immediately; when Final Fantasy 16 makes its overtures towards the Power of Friendship, it rings utterly false and hollow: Clive's friends are not his power. His power is his power.

The only part of the game that truly spoke to me was the widely-derided side-quests, which offer a peek into a more compelling story: the story of a man doing the work to build and maintain a community, contributing to both the material and emotional needs of a commune that attempts to exist outside the violence of society. As tedious as these sidequests are - and as agonizing as their pacing so often is - it's the only part of this game where it felt like I was engaging with an idea. But ultimately, even this is annihilated by the game's bootstrap nonsense - that being that the hideaway is funded and maintained by the wealthy and influential across the world, the direct beneficiaries and embodiments of the status quo funding what their involvement reveals to be an utterly illusionary attempt to escape it, rendering what could be an effective exploration of what building a new idea of a community practically looks like into something that could be good neighbors with Galt's Gulch.

In a series that is routinely deeply rewarding for me to consider, FF16 stands as perhaps its most shallow, underwritten, and vacuous entry in decades. All games are ultimately illusions, of course: we're all just moving data around spreadsheets, at the end of the day. But - as is the modern AAA mode de jour - 16 is the result of the careful subtraction of texture from the experience of a game, the removal of any potential frictions and frustrations, but further even than that, it is the removal of personality, of difference, it is the attempt to make make the smoothest, most likable affect possible to the widest number of people possible. And, just like with its AAA brethren, it has almost nothing to offer me. It is the affect of Devil May Cry without its texture, the affect of Game of Thrones without even its nuance, and the affect of Final Fantasy without its soul.

Final Fantasy XVI is ultimately a success. It sought out to be Good, in the way a PS5 game like this is Good, and succeeded. And in so doing, it closed off any possibility that it would ever reach me.

It doesn’t really surprise me that each positive sentiment I have seen on Final Fantasy XVI is followed by an exclamation of derision over the series’ recent past. Whether the point of betrayal and failure was in XV, or with XIII, or even as far back as VIII, the rhetorical move is well and truly that Final Fantasy has been Bad, and with XVI, it is good again. Unfortunately, as someone who thought Final Fantasy has Been Good, consistently, throughout essentially the entire span of it's existence, I find myself on the other side of this one.

Final Fantasy XV convinced me that I could still love video games when I thought, for a moment, that I might not. That it was still possible to make games on this scale that were idiosyncratic, personal, and deeply human, even in the awful place the video game industry is in.

Final Fantasy XVI convinced me that it isn't.

I will not mention Disco Elysium in this post.

Citizen Sleeper is a narrative-adventure game much heavier in the way of narrative than adventure. From the outset, you're given a handful of six-sided dice per day and told that you're allowed to spend them however you want in order to find your place onboard this ringworld station. Your start is going to be appropriately alien and confused, with you getting lost, and making mistakes, and taking hits to your very limited resources. As time marches on and more of the station opens itself up to you, you'll be given the opportunity to spend your dice on an ever-growing list of activities under the threat of time pressure. You can only do so much, the game warns, and your time is the most valuable resource of all.

This isn't true. You can do everything in one playthrough without any real challenge.

In fact, there's so much to do that your struggle is mostly going to be figuring out how to spend your off-days, when all of the NPCs who can progress the story wind up gating you behind a timer of arbitrary length before you can speak with them again. To be frank, I can barely remember most of their names. They all fit a bit too neatly into their archetypes — Good Dad with Cute Daughter, Hackerman, Gold-Hearted Gang Member — and you can kind of see where all of these people are going to end up hours before they actually get there. The story as a whole is too obvious for its own good.

This is a world where that which is moral is that which is correct. It’s a curious little foible I’ve noticed in a lot of these smaller-scale games with gestures towards socialist thought; pragmatism is dedicated exclusively towards villains, and idealism is dedicated exclusively towards the (virtuous) player character and their (morally unobjectionable) allies. You get a bounty hunter set upon you in the early stages of the game, and his entire deal is that he’s willing to not turn you in so long as you keep paying his bar tab. I was ready to dig in, pay up, and take the hits at the cost of buying my own freedom. However, you only need to pay once, because he gets so shitfaced after the first time you pay him off that he drops his gun the next time you see him.

You can give it back to him.

You can give the guy who has a price on your head his own gun back, and you suffer literally zero penalty for this because the bartender stole his bullets while neither of you were looking. He then gets kicked out and completely ceases to be a problem. In terms of pragmatism, giving a bounty hunter who’s coming after you a gun is a miraculously fucking stupid idea. But if you look at it idealistically, you’re refusing to point the gun at him because you’re not going to do violence unto violence, or something. The same thing happens again with the Killer AI; killing it results in your friend NeoVEND dying with it, while binding it eternally in a hellish loop from which it can never escape is the more difficult and thus more “moral” option, so NeoVEND gets to live.

There’s a long, long questline of exposing corruption on the station in the interest of getting your tracker disabled, and it seemed like the closest thing to a core path that the game was offering. There’s a timer constantly ticking down to warn of hunters being set upon you, with the final and most dangerous one taking something like 24 cycles to complete; an in-game “day” is counted as one cycle, so this is an absurd amount of time. I managed to get the tracker disabled with about 16 cycles to spare. And just like that, my body was no longer considered the property of my owners. They wouldn’t come looking for me, anymore. I was free. I could live out the rest of my days onboard this station in my little apartment that I made, hanging out with my stray cat and moving crates all day to buy fungus bowls and stabilizer shots while helping out at the greenhouse commune.

I was satisfied with that, but the game told me that I wasn’t. If I wanted to see credits, I was going to have to either figure out a way to leave the station right now, figure out a way to leave the station eventually, or destroy my body to live in the cloud. The credits rolled for every time I insisted on sticking around — three times in total, four with the DLC — and it wasn't hard to get the feeling that I was overstaying my welcome.

Uh. Why?

No, seriously, why? The Eye is a decent place with good people who I just sunk tons of time and resources into helping. Why leave? Why even think about leaving? Where am I gonna go? A different station, somewhere else, to do it all over again from scratch? Why should I forsake my body and go full computer when we’ve made the point time and again that Sleepers aren’t just programs, and are in fact the sum of their parts, tangible or otherwise? I know that the game needs to end, because a story can’t go on forever, but why like this?

I suppose this was a common complaint, because the DLC addresses the problem by tossing in what you could charitably call an actual endgame scenario, and what you could less charitably call rocks fall, everyone dies. I'm not sure how many people here have ever read a fanfiction as it's being published — don't be shy, I know it's a lot of you — and the conceit of the expansion has that same essence of someone on AO3 writing their responses to reader comments directly into the story. There's no impetus to ever actually want to leave the Eye? Add one in ex post facto! There are far worse things you can do with your narrative, but there's something about saving your actual ending for extra content that betrays some development struggles.

Speaking of, Fellow Traveller needed to get Gareth an editor. I know it's the absolute peak of being a Melvin to complain about a game having typos, but there are a lot of them in here. Like, grammar and spelling mistakes which are consistently wrong. Count the number of times that quotation marks close without punctuation at the end. Characters will use homonyms rather than the words they're actually shooting for to amusing effect, as seen in the phrase "make hole". It's sloppy. I get that writing this many words is hard, and it's just as hard to leaf back through it all to make changes, but I've seen way more people complaining about this than I haven't. Very few people care about spelling mistakes as much as I do, so imagine how rough it must be for them to notice.

But I did still like Citizen Sleeper, and maybe that's why I'm being harsh on it. There is something here that I think could have been outstanding, but it's a little half-baked. The DLC doesn't seem to have helped it much, if at all; when you're loaded to the gills with chits and meds and scrap, the game devolves into just slotting dice into the square hole until text appears. It drags. Ironically enough, for something that's "tabletop-inspired", this would probably work a bit better with a human GM and players at a table, rather than between one person and a computer that has no sense of whether or not its wasting your time. At least your game master has to keep to a human schedule and will thus hurry you along to the juicy bits.

The Sleeper is no Harry DuBois, but at least they're not Kay from fucking Norco.

6 stages of enlightment:

1. dp is bad

2. dp is so bad its good

3. dp is good in a genuine way, despite the controls and graphics and everything else besides the story and characters being bad

4. dp is good in a genuine way.

5. the endgame and the final bosses are bad for reasons relating to how dp treats its characters in need of the most crucial care, with the turn of events throughout being too dumb for its own good. and in retrospect the sequel may have only made it obvious that swery is not all that great of a writer, as far as the main stories around his protags and major supporting characters in general goes. every other problem with the game that has been talked to death about, i really dont care. the scale of greenvale and the scripted lives of its residents remind me that swery is a genuinely good director/designer if nothing else (not to ascribe too much credit to him over others). york in this game is a neurodivergent king and im not interested in anything to the contrary. the lynch comparison is inevitable even if its a little overspoken, and you can say that swery's attempt to translate the humanity of loss that made twin peaks what it is yielded mixed results, at the very best, of dp's climax. but expressing mundanity in the weird is dp's greatest asset; its more self-aware in its camp than it will get credit for, and it is always sincere in its ambitions to make the player become accustomed to both the socially oblivious weirdo you play as and the people of a pacific northwest town that is not so far off from him in their own quirks. and i think it does have some humanity in its more understated moments, particularly the series of sidequests that kicks off after talking to anna's mother, or from talking to certain character once they are arrested. even if there is some kind of auteur excess type ugliness to be found underneath the "ugliness" of the gameplay that is truly not as bad as its made out to be, sometimes monotonous and something to just get out of the way wrt the combat sections at worst imo--it can never detract from the passion within this game i feel when i am simply in it, without any flair or tonal whiplash to disturb that. a lifechanger for me that, in all the ways that really matter, still mostly deserves that title.

6. tee hee (executes a mathematically perfect 90 degree turn with a flick of the e-brake, blowing off the police investigation YET AGAIN to collect [Right Hand Bone] while york feeds me tremors movies trivia bc im about to starve to death) yay!

more than anything else, the silver case is one of the most endearingly cool games i've ever played. every change of the interface the reflect the themes of the chapter at hand, every swing-for-the-fences plot beat, every gruff toothpick-sucking one liner, every new order song title drop, everything we're shown and just as important the deliberate anticlimax of what we're NOT given and NOT shown - it all blends together to create this early masterwork that's still every bit textbook suda51 as killer7 or no more heroes, but so much more subtly grounded (in comparison) to any of his succeeding work i've played.

there's a deliberate feeling of monotony and repetition in the world and gameplay of the silver case that becomes an essential part of its narrative - whether it reflect on the beeline nothingness that is the life of tokio morishima, the scale's juxtaposing shift which grows literally larger but equally smaller and more intimate... there's just this grinding, menial feeling to all of the tasks and days gone by in the silver case. it feels as if nothing really happens until the right pawns are on the board and properly in play. you learn to love basically every person in this game to the point that you look forward to the next mundane conversation with them; you anticipate morishima going home and talking to red, or getting cyberbullied on chatrooms by teenagers, or the ballbusting stakeout chats between kusabi and sumio. so when even the slightest change occurs, it's going to take your heart for a spin. it's by design.

one of the other fine juxtapositions of the silver case is its dialogue, one of the finest localizations i've ever seen. everything about the silver case feels deliberately plastic at first; you're thrust into the world of hardened police officers spouting badass quips and insults - it's almost pastiche. the one-liners will stick around, the cool designs will stick around, but ultimately the story becomes that of broken, aging men who are being asked to examine their world and how it really works for the first time. the story of tetsu kusabi - potential candidate for my favorite character in ANY video game - carries this idea home the hardest. it's the story of a man pure in his mind of absolutes and superlatives essentially waking up for the first time, seeing the world for the pollockian quagmire of intentions, reasonings, and deliberations it actually is. the silver case is a game about hearts and minds connecting in the looming presence of y2kism, a story about the old guard and the new world on the horizon. i'll get more into the thematic underbelly of this game at a later date, because this is far from the only piece i want to make on this game - but its core structure and analysis of the dotcom era, masculinity and what we define that as, grief and trauma, isolation and abandonment, it all rings pretty true now as it did in '99, and i daresay this game even tackled concepts that it would take 2 years for mgs2 to get to earlier and perhaps equally as memorably. i see a lot of influence on death note down the line too, and as far as contemporaries, i'd say silver case is like 1/3 cowboy bebop, 1/3 ghost in the shell, and 1/3 serial experiments lain. it's memorable, powerful, important stuff.

the silver case’s ultimate resolve is pretty simple - the mysteries, the secrets, the twists, it’s all a load of bullshit anyways. it existed in a moment and that moment is gone. it’s in the past. the only way you're going to push through the pain, the grief, the trauma, the anticlimactic goodbyes, the old flames, the words left unsaid, the last memories of people and places you can't ever go back to or relive, is to simply refuse that darkness which cultivates in your past to manifest itself anymore. you have to grow and reflect and move on to become your true self. you HAVE to kill the past if you want to find that first ray of light; hope for yourself, hope for the future.

"Seize that fucking light, Akira."

THE SILVER CASE COMPLETE.
FLOWER, SUN & RAIN IS COMING...

🌕 Dreams Never End
https://youtu.be/WS1X0EBlQ3Y

Despite being so much more ambitious than its predecessor in the scope of its ideas, this game's incessant reluctance to meaningfully explore them combined with an absolutely abysmal resolution makes it another disappointment. It's interesting— the way TGAA2 disappoints is very different from TGAA1. With the prior game, I just didn't feel it had a lot of compelling ideas at all. But its sequel is the opposite: the amount of unrealized potential this game contains is absolutely immense.
Susato has great setup in case 1. She seemingly has to confront that her society's restrictions on her gender and occupation prevent her from making meaningful change, fighting back against this by shedding both those perceived roles and proving her worth in court. In the end? She stays resigned to her assistant role forever, with a line in the epilogue suggesting she still ties her self-worth entirely to how well she can perform her societally expected role. Anything resembling setup for her never actually mattered.
Sholmes has great setup all throughout the game. He's frequently invasive and manipulative of other people, with this seemingly being built up as a conflict between him and the protagonists over how irreverently he treats the cases he's involved with. In the end? The conflict is solved by Sholmes telling them he was doing it all for the greater good, and it never gets brought up again, even if the logic he uses to justify himself borders on absurd and completely glosses over half the things he does. No character flaw for you!
Yujin has great setup in case 4. He fully admits to Ryunosuke that he's been a neglectful father, not paying enough attention to the emotional needs of either of his children, and merely distracting himself by going on adventures in London. He promises he'll explain everything. In the end? He explains nothing, and the game basically forgets this was ever a problem past the one time he spoke about it. The last case simply has him going on more wild London adventures with Sholmes, while Ryunosuke affirms he has "the most wonderful family in the world".
Stronghart has great setup in case 5. He explains his entire ideology. It's incredibly morally complex, it ties into the game's criticisms of nationalism, racism, and the media's desire for public spectacle, and it sets up a truly fantastic dilemma that Ryunosuke has to face. In the end? Ryunosuke refuses to even engage the tiniest bit with it. He proclaims that the TRUTH is the most important thing, that Stronghart has no ground to stand on because he's hiding from the TRUTH, and utterly ignores all nuance in the dilemma through arbitrary moralizing.
Every single one of the game's potential deeper meanings are sidestepped in favor of an agonizingly basic 'good vs evil' plot. And nothing exemplifies that more than the deus ex machina at the end of case 5, when Ryunosuke's saved by the same higher power he was just criticizing. It feels completely arbitrary what the game decides is good or bad.
TGAA2's best characters are almost exclusively the side characters in the earlier cases, who aren't propped up to serve a grand moral point, and instead feel like real humans with interesting and layered personalities. Case 2 is the game's best for that very reason. My opinion on this game is similar to my opinion on T&T: full of ideas that could make for an excellent story, but too afraid to ever meaningfully commit to those ideas. It feels like an unfortunate trend with Takumi's Ace Attorney games.