Divinity: Original Sin 2 - Definitive Edition

So, to clarify first, there are to perspectives out of which I could write this review. The first one is the one, in which I just picked up a game for 18 bucks, and honestly - it was a fun game. The second one is the one out of which I finally played a game everyone (from press to friends) told me, was the best RPG made in a long time. I will write my review out of the second, meaning I will compare it to DA:O, Witcher 3, Both Pathfinders and FE:Three Houses (Which in my opinion were the best RPGs, of the last years). Also note that lite spoilers might be included in the review. Also note that I will not comment on combat alot, since I play RPG's for story only. The Good: -It's incredible, incredible polished -Zero Bugs discovered -Graphics, and amount of detail is great. -Fully Voice casted, and great voice actors. -A lot of way's to get creativ in the interaction with the world (teleportation, combining abilitys, using the enviroment) -Great abilitys in general -The best romance scenes, I've seen in a RPG so far. The Bad: -The story did not catch me - it's solid, but predictable, sometimes pushes you in directions, that did not feel natural to me, and progresses to fast. Also there is this divinity typical humor and over the board cartoonish evil (Ego Draconis had it too) which I do not like, since it creates a fun, entertaining, light hearted game, instead of a serious, epic, adventure. -Except Fane, the companions are quit clichee, quite simple minded black&white and there quest feel quite forced and linear. -It lacks an aligment system, and being evil doesn't make a lot of sense in context of the story, and doesn't really have influence on the story except the very ending. It's a heroes journey. -The game world altogether is quite small and and it only took me about 70 hours to do every side quest i discovered and main story. Conclusion: A really fun game, with is entertaining but not epic, polished but somewhat lacking in depth storywise. About 78/100

Hmm... This is a game that is basically one long riddle. If you like games that you have to find a specific answer or strategy, then this game is for you. If your like a variety of strategy's to defeat any situation, this game is not for you. This is kind of an annoying figure this next puzzle out. You will spend hours trying everything you can think of to solve a situation then give up and look on the internet, lol. Of course, then you discover you lack the spell, item, or prerequisite to solve it. Prepare for another hour or two of trekking back to some oddball place to get whatever you needed in the first place. Pretty slow overall , so be ready for that also. So what is good about this game? Well, the artwork if beautiful and game mechanics work well. Huge about of classes and mixtures of classes abound, so lots of replayablity. Voice acting and such were good although your choices often don't matter. Conclusion...This is a game for people who love puzzles and meticulously crawling through everywhere to find little suprises hidden throughout the game. If you like alot of fighting and action, pick up something else, save yourself time and money.

The graphics are great, the world is very beautifully made. I like the spells and the fact that you can make any combination of classes in one character. The mirror is great, so you don't have to use console like in some older games to change class etc. I don't like the linearity of the game, the fact that you have different worlds/towns (levels) as you progress and cannot return. It's very Diablo-like actually, but turn based, I've always felt Diablo was half arcade :) I've a feeling I'm passing levels to get tougher monsters and that's it. Combat is nice, although it's a bit repetitive after you make a good party and get the hang of it. Maybe I should change the difficulty level. I actually enjoyed better while my party was not well balanced :) The items are boring, you linearly pick up higher levels as you progress. There are too many, and after some time they started tiring me, as nothing special happens with new items, except having more armor or a bit higher bonus on some stat or whatever... Music is very good, congratulations to the composers... After some time the game became a bit boring and too linear, I remember having the same problem with the Witcher, which I didn't finish also.. I've come to the Nameless island (level 3) and I think I'll stop now and finish the game in a few months or so, or I won't... I don't dig the story actually, although you can see they did put effort to make it so extensive. Or maybe I'm just too old :) P.S. It crashes every once in a while (I'm playing in 2020) Now when I wrote it all down 3 stars seems too much :) but still 2 i too low...

I expected this game giving a lot of freedom of choice going into it, regarding how to tackle problems. It doesn't, which I'm generally fine with. I play a lot of "Metroidvanias" and they're all masters at imposing natural barriers to progress. This game can't even pretend it gives players freedom. I tried killing the lizardman NPC early in the game, and I succeeded. Guess what? He just comes back later in the game, pretending nothing happened, still throwing the same mockeries at you (he's so strong and you're worthless). Wait, I just killed you, why are you here? The game needs to keep its stupid narrative of calling players worthless going, so this NPC has to stay alive. A natural way of making this possible is to simply make the NPC too hard to kill, strengthening his message of you actually being worthless (rather than you beating him to a pulp which invalidates his message, yet still making him repeat it over and over without any idea of what I did to him). Making him such a high level that he can't be killed is a much more natural way of keeping him alive than to just resurrect him to pretend players from going off the intended narrative tracks. Just... trash, it's sad to say. Secondly, the 'chapters' in this game serve to prevent players from returning to past locations. Pretty much, chapters are there to make areas feel like levels, which hurts the idea of a living, breathing world. I know games that do chapters in a much more natural way. Mother 3, Terranigma, even Paper Mario. In Mother 3, chapters provide opportunities, not hindrances. You get to play as a different character, which blocks off some parts of the game, only to open them all up in the next chapter. Nothing is lost. This game doesn't benefit from its chapter-based structure at all. It doesn't make you switch characters (for obvious reasons, it's a character-driven RPG. It's all from your character's point of view). It only makes stuff inaccessible and less open. Bad experience.

Overall, I enjoyed D:OS2. I didn't play the first game, but this one was easy enough to get into. It has a chiche story arc, where a lowly prisoner is destined to become a god, much like the Baldur's Gate and Elder Scroll games. The gameplay mechanics are logical and fairly easy to learn, and the 4 party members that I had were all well scripted and fun to play. The game actually has very good writing and narration. It's pretty and has solid (mostly British) voice acting, and the music and sound effects are quite nice. Baldur's Gate 2 is still the gold standard for party-based fantasy RPGS, but this one is in the same tradition and does it justice. The problems of D:OS2 can mostly be overlooked, but a few of them wear on you after a while. The game doesn't give you good clues about where to go next in some of the quests or what to do. Thus, you'll either spend hours pointlessly wandering around or have to do some searching online for answers. This especially becomes more common toward the end of the game. Relatedly, the in-game journal becomes a bit of a mess by the late game and isn't quite useful at keeping you informed or directing your actions. The game has several puzzles, and a few will stump you (again, back to searching online for answers). The difficulty level can spike in certain fights. Either you will have to spend hours grinding levels and equipment to win them later or you can reduce the difficulty level in the main menu. I did the latter; grinding has never been fun to me and is a sign of poor game design in my opinion. This is a long game with lots of quests and things to do. If you don't mind using a walk-through guide occasionally and dealing with quite a bit of reloading of saves on the higher difficulty levels, then there is some fun to be had here. Definitely worth playing if you can buy it at a discount and have the time and patience to get through some of the puzzles and harder fights.