18th April 2011, 5:10 PM
I finally beat it a few days ago. There's no in-game clock, so I can only guess how long I played, but I'd be surprised if it was less than 40 hours. Probably 50.
This is a good game, bordering on a great game. It's packed with content, has some interesting characters and plotlines throughout its length, and has a combat system that is deceptively deep. It also beats Dragon Age at the "making a fantasy setting with elves and dwarves that isn't painfully derivative and boring", by dealing with the dark side of fantasy [race wars, poverty, magical experiments gone horrible wrong, and the madness spread by the delusions of men in high places] and wallowing in the filth and mire of the Middle Ages that inspired what we consider to be modern fantasy. Despite your best efforts, not everyone gets a happy ending.
The cutscenes are stiff and awkward, the voice acting is often flat, and the dialog animations are repetitive and sometimes inexplicable, yet it somehow managed to pull me completely into the world and provide me with a story that I actually wanted to see the conclusion to. In part this is thanks to the locals, which are varied and range from rank sewers to poverty-stricken slums to idyllic rural towns, which you will soon become quite familiar with thanks to constantly traversing them from one quest to the other. And speaking of quests, there are hundreds here. Long main quests with winding stories and side quests that deal with everything from being the town's dog catcher to delving into the lore of this world. Anyone who loves doing quests in RPGs will certainly find plenty here.
The game does sometimes get a bit squirrelly with the combat, throwing fights at you that are downright brutal and having you fight through swarms of annoying enemies that just love to hit you with Stun spells. There's also the issue of "Pain" a status effect that enemies through the last couple of chapters bring out in full force, a status effect which totally paralyzes your character for about five seconds as the enemies surround you and wail on you. More than once I want to grab my monitor and smash it against the floor. Combat is a problem in the last chapter and epilogue and you do little but fight for around 4-5 hours straight, making it become tedious. Yet the depth of the combat does still shine through despite, giving you two different weapons [for humans and nonhumans] with three different fighting styles, along with many other side-weapons that can be useful for certain situations, as well as five different spells that are quite necessary, and a slew of potions and compounds that can give you the edge you need in any number of battles. They could have simple gone the route of some many other Euro RPGs and simple handed you a cookie-cutter action-RPG combat system, but that didn't. It doesn't always work, but I like that it's something different.
It's got its faults and has a number of areas that definitely could have been improved upon, but that doesn't stop it from being the best Euro RPG I've played and one of my favorite RPGs of all time.
In other words: imma got hype for Witcher 2.
This is a good game, bordering on a great game. It's packed with content, has some interesting characters and plotlines throughout its length, and has a combat system that is deceptively deep. It also beats Dragon Age at the "making a fantasy setting with elves and dwarves that isn't painfully derivative and boring", by dealing with the dark side of fantasy [race wars, poverty, magical experiments gone horrible wrong, and the madness spread by the delusions of men in high places] and wallowing in the filth and mire of the Middle Ages that inspired what we consider to be modern fantasy. Despite your best efforts, not everyone gets a happy ending.
The cutscenes are stiff and awkward, the voice acting is often flat, and the dialog animations are repetitive and sometimes inexplicable, yet it somehow managed to pull me completely into the world and provide me with a story that I actually wanted to see the conclusion to. In part this is thanks to the locals, which are varied and range from rank sewers to poverty-stricken slums to idyllic rural towns, which you will soon become quite familiar with thanks to constantly traversing them from one quest to the other. And speaking of quests, there are hundreds here. Long main quests with winding stories and side quests that deal with everything from being the town's dog catcher to delving into the lore of this world. Anyone who loves doing quests in RPGs will certainly find plenty here.
The game does sometimes get a bit squirrelly with the combat, throwing fights at you that are downright brutal and having you fight through swarms of annoying enemies that just love to hit you with Stun spells. There's also the issue of "Pain" a status effect that enemies through the last couple of chapters bring out in full force, a status effect which totally paralyzes your character for about five seconds as the enemies surround you and wail on you. More than once I want to grab my monitor and smash it against the floor. Combat is a problem in the last chapter and epilogue and you do little but fight for around 4-5 hours straight, making it become tedious. Yet the depth of the combat does still shine through despite, giving you two different weapons [for humans and nonhumans] with three different fighting styles, along with many other side-weapons that can be useful for certain situations, as well as five different spells that are quite necessary, and a slew of potions and compounds that can give you the edge you need in any number of battles. They could have simple gone the route of some many other Euro RPGs and simple handed you a cookie-cutter action-RPG combat system, but that didn't. It doesn't always work, but I like that it's something different.
It's got its faults and has a number of areas that definitely could have been improved upon, but that doesn't stop it from being the best Euro RPG I've played and one of my favorite RPGs of all time.
In other words: imma got hype for Witcher 2.
Sometimes you get the scorpion.