So I love my old games. You may or may not see on my record I have hours gushed into the Might and Magic series 3-8; you might see I have hours in the Quest For Glory series; you won't see them but I have hours put into the Wizardry games too, at least 1, 2, 3 and 5. But this, 'the ultimate successor' it is not. It's got an ugly art style-- most character portraits seem AI-generated, and while environs look kind of nice, the enemy sprites start having re-uses (not even palette swaps, just straight reusing the sprite) literally right away, like in the same zones they first appear. They're not ultra-pretty either, we're talking amateur-in-MS-paint levels of design. The sound is generic, and that's ignoring the 'Might and Magic' effect of monsters repeating a sound file over and over (looking at the Brigands). Then I got into the game. The very first encounter I ever had in Grimoire was against three beetles-- 'Cophrophages,' I believe 'poop eaters' translated-- who began routinely one-shotting my party members starting with the Warrior and Berserker I'd placed in my front line. I must have done something wrong, I thought. And so was a constant wheel of discovering no, in fact, this game is just totally okay throwing these encounters at you right at the start. This is on top of a system that's only somewhat detailed. I read the manual but I guess I didn't read enough because I kept running into battles that would flatten my entire party. We're talking start game, form party, take six steps-- bam, TPK. Look, I don't know who this guy is or why this MS-paint mess of cobbled-together assets took 20 years. None of this looks like it was made 'with love' or 'care' or anything but some kind of spiteful drive to just sell the game. The only possible, plausible excuse I can find for this taking 20 years is that the developer was simply that woefully incompetent. I own it, and it cost like $2 on sale, so it was 'worth' it. But I wouldn't ever dream of paying full price.
