cncz
Best RPG area ever
It's simply an ok batman story and it suffers from a lot of the pitfalls of 2000s adventure game design: excessive linearity, tutorials to cover up unintuitive game mechanics, unrewarding collectables, etc. But it makes up for a lot of that with some fluid combat and an overall great toolset for your character that, yes, makes you feel like batman.
Excessively creatively told walking simulator story, although ultimately just sad with less substance than I would have liked
2020
Un-fucking believable. Easily the best RPG ever made, especially considering I didn't have too high hopes going in due to my overall apathy towards the first 2 and how much I hated playing divinity original sin 1 (I will certainly try 2 after this though). While almost every one of the all-time classic RPGs end up compromising on same gameplay aspect this has EVERYTHING cranked up to 11. Story is fantastic[+1 vs divinity], character and companion plots are impactful and extremely interesting [+1 vs Baldurs gate 1 and 2], combat rewards creativity [+1 vs every JRPG] (although I would advise against tactician on a first playthrough, I quicksaved more than I liked since my party wasn't too optimal), the amount of choices in quests and the amount of times RP decisions actually paid off in them is unbelievable [+1 vs bethesda], and all this is done fully-voice acted and motion captured for a runtime only matched by underrail and some of the bethesda titles. Play it.
Narratively pulls off a player's partial descent into evil very well, but the quests themselves are pretty dull and at this high of a level there is a simply unfortunate amount of micromanagement to do in fights to the point that I actually threw in the towel at the final boss. Will possibly review later after grinding through watchers keep and actually defeating the final boss with an overleveled character, but for now I just wanna play BG3 after going through 110 hours of this in a month.
This review contains spoilers
A dramatic improvement on BG1, higher level characters have the durability and spell slots to give you plenty of much-needed options in combat. The world is also a significant improvement, with the freedom offered in the opening chapters giving you plenty of interesting things to do, and I felt as if every option (and there are plenty in this game's side quests) had a good reward.
Where I take issue with the game is that it once again slips up a bit in the finale, while not quite as frustrating as BG1, it felt a little anticlimactic if anything. Up until chapter 7, it feels like the game is willing to dump you in massive 10+ hour long exploration bits before the plot beats where you get some phenomenal world building and freedom to do little side tasks, a great example being the drow city. But compared to that, tracking down Irenicus amounts to three single room dungeons where you fight enemies you've seen before and ultimately end up feeling a little cheated out of a truly epic conclusion to an otherwise fantastic adventure.
Where I take issue with the game is that it once again slips up a bit in the finale, while not quite as frustrating as BG1, it felt a little anticlimactic if anything. Up until chapter 7, it feels like the game is willing to dump you in massive 10+ hour long exploration bits before the plot beats where you get some phenomenal world building and freedom to do little side tasks, a great example being the drow city. But compared to that, tracking down Irenicus amounts to three single room dungeons where you fight enemies you've seen before and ultimately end up feeling a little cheated out of a truly epic conclusion to an otherwise fantastic adventure.
Overwhelmingly mediocre experience, while the combat is significantly improved from late game baldurs gate (except a final boss that is almost unkillable on core rules difficulty thanks to some unmentioned damage resistances to weapons that just weren't available as campaign loot) thanks to a generally more well-equipped party with more spells to handle edge cases, almost everything else is a huge downgrade from base Baldur's Gate. You spend 80% of this campaign trudging through nothing but forests and caves fighting fairly predictable groups of enemies with an absolutely railroaded uncompelling plot that leaves the player with a severe lack of agency and a severe frustration at how dumb every npc is. Frustration also roughly sums up the level design, I counted 8 times total where the main challenge of a fight was avoiding my party getting stuck on each other walking through each other since the devs put in 2 person wide corridors before the fight room. Even for a dungeon-crawling combat fanatic like me I can't recommend this just because everything else is so weak.
2007
You would have thought adding a parry counter and dodge i-frames would fix the combat loop but they seem to have compensated for it by adding in about 3 times the tolerable amount of enemies to the point that around halfway through every fight becomes a dull 10+ minute ordeal of holding block and waiting for 2ms openings to chip away at the enemy with parry counters or light attacks. Also the story is significantly weaker than the original.
2020
A surprisingly engaging team strategy experience that doesn't suffer from the horrendous bloat of other mil-sims
2013
A "hard" game that at it's core it leaves literally zero room for error, essentially making it into a memory game over any actual skill. Not fun.
2023
AAA gaming is so dead there's no shot in hell Nintendo could have ever even approached this level of quality if they put the entire GDP of Japan into a new Warioland game
2021
Ok wait what the hell is that 4th ending
UNBELIEVABLY jank, even for the time. Definition of trying too much, guess it worked for 2000s people
2022
Even after all this work this game still needs a mountain of UX upgrades before I'd consider it worth playing regularly. You can't even pan the camera smoothly.
Youtuber bait boring trash