Realms of Arkania: Blade of Destiny (Remake)

No. You didn't install it wrong.

I have never played the original, and I'm sure this version must be quite accurate to the original - to its detriment 1) As other people have pointed out, the game is in German by default. 2) There is no manual provided. 3) There are no instructions, manuals or guides in-game to explain things: As such, I didn't make it past character creation. What, for example, is the difference between a "magician," a "witch," and a "sorcerer?" I have no idea. Allow me to compare to a GOOD remake: The Bard's Tale Trilogy. That provides a full manual in-game, as well as plenty of tooltips, explaining character classes, mechanics, spells and their descriptions, anything you could want or need to figure out how to play the game.

I tried an original 1992 version first in 5 years ago, but I gave up after a few hours, Now I surely enjoy this remake version, but still even this version took a certain amount of time to get used to. Once you did, you would understand how the game universe in Arkania is unique and well-made. As other reviewers warned, the game needs much more patience than modern cRPGs at the early stage, mainly because you have to pay attention to every action you take in order to survive (not only combat, but hunger/disease managements in camps on the journey) with a lot of saves and loads. There are many types of threats in natural encounters too, so you are easily tempted to judge too early, "(even in this remake version) the game is not balanced properly". After a few levels, however, there will be a moment you feel much more comfortable, or "making sense". This remake version was basically still faithful to the original's difficulty level, but fortunately, it has more modern in-game features which help you to lower the difficulty in indirect ways (such as a feature to turn on/off disease concepts, hunger managements at any time). Likewise, it is encouraged to consult in-game help contents from time to time. The ruleset is more convoluted than D&D, and it is often hard to guess how to max out damages, success rates, etc. Fortunately, the remake version includes this information even as tips available on mouseover. For me it looks a bit unfair that in terms of user reviews it still sits at the lowest rank even after the reputation has recovered over the number of modifications. English translation is barely passable, but otherwise the game itself works, and do not have critical bugs any more (Though you would find such reviews when you do some random search, those are mostly in time of the early release, so do not feel discouraged so much from those reviews.)

This is supposed to be the 2013 remake of a 90s game. It feels and plays like a game from around 20 years ago, not 10. Very clunky and very janky. The main issue is combat and skills. Your characters are quite simply, dreadful at everything they do. From combat to casting spells. The miss ratio is staggering. I lost most fights due to the constant misses. Even with aggression levels set up high boost their chances, they were most likely hitting 20% of the time. Skill use and spells like wise had very high fail rates. As a result spells rarely got cast. Healing was rarely done. You could kill your own party trying to heal them after combat. I barely managed to get 4 rooms into the starter dungeon before this got on my nerves. Sometimes nostalgia is best left in the past. Save your money and give this one a wide berth.