Planescape Torment has too much emphasis on combat over story and role-playing. There, I said it, and I will back it up with my experiences playing all the way to an endboss I couldn't defeat or talk my way past. At the end as a level 12 fighter, I thought Intelligence of 17 would have been enough to "story mode" my way through the game. Obviously not. Got stuck fighting against the endboss because despite doing as many side quests as I thought, I still could not talk my way out of a fight. If I keep running away from the final boss, my character regenerates health so slowly that running/striking/running again becomes impractical. I have to load an old save all the way back to where I was in Sigil, redoing hours I already did, focusing on buffing my character in a game that is supposedly not about stats...? Many might respond and say, you need to be higher level, have more buffs/weapons/armor etc., i.e. focus on making the character more powerful... Doesn't this just prove this game is literally all about stat grinding? I didn't get stat-buffing tattoos because I was "role-playing" the game. I don't have tattoos in real life, so my Nameless One mirrors how I would act and didn't get them either. If I had known it was all about stat-buffing, I would have gotten tattoos for my character. "Sidequests" weaken a boss in Carceri. No one ever mentions these "sidequests" are hiding behind literal armies of monsters overruning Carceri, i.e. the catch-22 of having to be a paragon of combat to get to sidequests to weaken a boss so you don't have to be a paragon in combat. So it seems to story mode the game, you have to focus on buffing intelligence and wisdom stats. Not different from focusing on buffing stats for combat. I wish I had known this game was so focused on stat-buffing... PST, with its hyped "reputation" of emphasis on story over combat, requires more needless grinding than other RPG's I've played over the past 20 years.
