VI and VII are two of the very first RPGs I played. Since this was back during the primary school I didn't understand much and had to use a guide most of the time. Even with it, it took me and my sister two years to finally finish VI (properly, since this game had two possible endings and first time we kind of accidentally triggered the bad one :D). What to say. It may be old, it may be clunky by today standards, it may be illogical or utterly unhelpful at some places, but those flaws are easilly surpassed by the incredible amount of immersion you get if you just overlook them and enjoy the game. VI, despite its age, is "almost open world(" ( think large interconnected maps with separately loaded interiors ) in full 3d (you can use Fly spell, even in combat), there is large variety of monsters and items, shops have opening hours, store keepers get grumpy when you don't buy anything, ships and stables have weekly schedule, your party members can (and will) get tired, scared, weak, poisoned, cursed, old, insane, dead and eradicated, your armor and items can break, there is a sort of pilgrimage granting permanent bonuses if you visit the proper shrine in proper month and much more, but finally, this game also sports what is possibly the largest dungeon in any RPG made to this date... and you can call down rain of meteors on whole hordes of enemies. VII took all that, added different races to your party and more diversified classes (only some can reach GM level in some skills), alchemy, more kinds of enemies, ID of monsters and also Archmage - quite enjoyable card game you can play in taverns across the world for money and artifact, if you win in all of them. If you don't mind old-school, this series, especially parts V through VIII are still one of the best RPGs ever made.
Another take on the classic Prince of Persia, this time with beautiful cell-shaded visuals, great looking environments and packing what is in my opinion one of the best game soundtracks ever created, made by Inon Zur & Stuart Chatwood. Running, jumping through and exploring the beautifully created environments is quite satisfying as well as purifying each map node, however, if you're completionist, there is a fair amount of backtracking involved since some of the paths are inaccessible until you get the required skill. As other reviews mention, combat is somewhat long-dwindled, even with standard enemies, but there's not too many of them. Unfortunately, Ubisoft being Ubisoft, this game has DLC that is supposed to contain, among other things, the epilogue for the story, but it was sadly never released on the PC because of "business reasons".
After seeing the game on my flatmate's PC I gave this a try, however, frustrated, I simply had to uninstall the game after spending close to 5 hours in. Controls and camera behavior are the main culprits: - everytime you get near some obstacle you can climb on (and also if it's only a ledge or a rope) camera moves close, but while it is zoomed in, your controls also change from th classic "forward is where camera is looking" to instead "where your character is looking" in that moment. That's disorienting, especially when you flee from a tight situation (which you have to do rather often). You can't disable this in settings and there's no mod for that (I've looked). Also, there's a weird mouse sensitivity jump once this happens which only adds to the confusion. - there's another sensitivity problem - even though your settings show that sensitiviy while running, sneaking and in meelee is set the same as when aiming, it doens't seem to behave like that - moving mouse while aiming is waaay slower, so you spend a lot of your precious "bullet time" orienting yourself properly before you can really start aiming your bow. - whoever thought and designed the on-screen mouse-click tooltip for blocking and attacking should really reflect deeply on him/herself and probably return his/her UX degree. Because it suggests exactly the REVERSE buttons it is supposed to. - "last chance" minigame also has major UX problem - you have to use a separate key (interact) to actually succeed in it, not the mouse click once you managed to get the cursor inside the circle... with mouse. - Nemesis system is nice and refreshing idea but chance to being ambushed while battling another captain is way too high and the game just loves to throw a deadly meelee + ranged(+poison arrows) combination at you right from the start. You have no way to block the arrows and even when battling one captain. he usually has several orcs with him as support and can call for more. So imagine fighting two of them.
