Had I only known how lethargically tedious everything in this galaxy sized sandbox was, I would not own it. But I do. I bought it day-0 and clawed my way to the goal of the storyline. It was a lather, rinse, repeat experience. I reloaded it when the "Beyond" update dropped and played it several hours. It was a gather-ingredients-for-shampoo, build-a-bathtub, lather, fabricate-a-bucket, go-to-the-well-and-draw-more-water, rinse, transfer-unused-soap-to-secondary-inventory, and repeat experience. The game has grown to be more complex, but in my opinion, the depth of experience is still extremely superficial and very unsatisfying. A very broad, but very shallow game, like a puddle of water.
Pathfinder is what happens when a game system is designed to be played in "min-max" mode. Basically this means game mechanics above story or everything else, with player characters that are ultra specialized in very niche things. To make the game challenging, therefore, even the most mundane of obstacles must be barely obtainable by application of some olympic level statistic or skill. Poor you if your adventuring party is deficient in some capability. Stack on top of this a repetitive card-based, resource poor, "choose the least terrible set of options" kingdom-building meta-game and you have a forced recipe for save scumming. Coming to the rescue are reduced difficulty setting choices, but they feel like they sound: something lesser than the full experience. To be honest, I did not deviate from normal except to eliminate some settings that would simply cause me to reload the most recent save (e.g. party character death ... yes, I am a cretin). Sometimes the game shines with puzzles or obstacle solutions available via the environment or dialogue. I found the game favors the player character who picks a lawful or good alignment, but is very tolerant of letting their party do whatever ... The main plot-line is not traditional and deals more with capriciousness than protagonism. The voice acting in English is mostly ok with some actors extremely overwrought and emotionally monotonic. Some of the text and dialogue is obviously written by someone challenged by English spelling and sentence structure. The combat, especially at the higher levels and with usage of haste, can be overwhelmingly busy. Some spells that should be able to be cast on a location with an area of effect, must instead be cast with a player or enemy as a target. As far as I can tell, once these are initiated, if the target moves, the area of effect does not move with it. Until used to it, this "feature" can result in some wasted resources. In summary, fun but looooooong ... and tiresome.
I wish I could get my money back. I put 4 hours into it and cannot stand the interface. I wish I could get my time back ...
A fun but tedious dungeon crawl. By the end of the game you will have defeated a veritable planet full of denizens. It does give a sense of perspective in that you will encounter the tail of a dragon in one location on a map and come face to face with the owner of the tail at another location. Some enemies go toe to toe with you while others run around, forcing you to chase them.
