I appreciate the Wizardry series and have beaten 1, 5 and 8 as well as the PS2 one. This title is considered to be the best Wizardry by many RPG gamers, some say the best RPG ever. Despite several previously failed attempts, I finally gave it another shot. This time I got off to a great start, had a plan for my party, and built them to kill everything except for crazy superbosses, I made it to the final dungeon. But that's where my patience came to an end. The battles aren't the problem. That dungeon is designed to be annoying with its hidden buttons and large amount of warps. Problem is, the rest of the game is more of the same. New players... without guides and walkthroughs, you WILL get stuck. Many times. For instance... just getting into the final dungeon requires answering an obscure riddle. This riddle came from a sphinx that gives you an item... but only after the player somehow figures out that the item received way back when at New City has to be placed in a very specific place. The game got to a point where I had to refer to the walkthrough constantly to proceed because I was missing some obscure important item hidden behind that well-hidden secret wall. This isn't clever. It's not fun. It's not even rewarding. Competing NPCs was an interesting idea. NPCs often go into cities and dungeons and raid the final chest, somehow going through secret walls and locked gates. They'll run into you fairly often, which can be annoying, but will sell you map pieces. Most of these merely provide vague hints. Eventually, I bought the maps from them and ended up letting the NPCs do whatever afterward. The combat is odd. My Lv. 22 characters inexplicably fell victim to sleep and paralysis spells/attacks far too frequently. Spells could be bothersome. Even with spell descriptions, I still don't know what some of them do. It's not explained or known exactly what multiple casts of Enchanted Blade accomplishes, for instance. I've seen enough.
I wanted to love this game. The concept is incredible. The story is quite dark, very appropriate all things considered. The detective work, while basic, is a pretty nice change from the usual RPGs I play. I approve of the NPC interaction. However, I will not be finishing this game. As much as I love the NPC interaction is about as much as I despise the combat. 80% of this game is played in combat. I'm mostly into turn-based RPGs, but I'm no stranger to real-time, and I'm not above reading walkthroughs for assistance, so I don't believe the problem lies with my own personal ineptitude. The main problem with Inquisitor is that the "easy" difficulty is simply not easy. I'm spamming potions on Easy at a rate that's just blasphemous. The difficulty levels should be as follows: Awful, Brutal and Ridiculous. Started to play the game on the Brutal difficulty, and about 10 hours in I finally realized I'd best try this game on Awful instead. My character (the Paladin, sturdy as can be) survived longer on Awful, but my followers had about half the HP that they had on Brutal, thus died at the same regularity as they did on the Brutal difficulty. I made it to the second act. About halfway through this act, I found myself attacking foes more often with seals than melee weapons for the sake of survival. After hacking open a chest, I was bum-rushed by several ghost-type foes, and the result was predictably certain death. I had seen enough. If the easy difficulty was more like the "Story Mode" difficulty some games have, this is a five-star game for me, all day, every day. If combat were turn-based, and foes were fewer in number, allies greater in number, this game may even have been amazing. Alas, the potion-spamming and the frequent character deaths have me regretting my purchase and time spent on this game. I rate 3/5 for the story and incredible concept.
