This game is clunky AF. The camera angle is frustrating and limited. The tutorial leaves much to be desired. Even with online tips, the gameplay is unnecessarily complicated. The inventory is just broken, and the combat... is so busted. One wrong click and you have to reload from scratch because there is no coming back. This game punishes acting intuitively, you have to just guess wrong 100 times, then finally do what the game will let you do. Also there are only 2 female characters, which is a poor effort.
0 stars.
Having played through the game about 5-6 times, I can say with all honesty this is the best game I have ever experienced. BG3 does not even compare in terms of depth and complexity of the story.
Here it is entwined in lives of all characters, same story from so many different perspectives giving you a feeling that the world is not so black and white, but a hundred shades of gray. Your decisions really matter, your companion choice really matters, and the story changes and adjusts to the tiniest things you do.
Truly a replayable immersive masterpiece.
Oh and did I mention combat? It's a blast! Incredibly open to strategy and tactics at higher difficulty levels. Creativity and high ground for the win! :)
I am sorry to say, I really cannot recommend this game for people like myself.
It is everything the first game was, and much much more. It is beautiful, the writing is funny, characters interesting. Everything is top notch... expect combat.
You might have heard people talking about the difficulty problems, and for me they are inexcusable. On tactician mode (the default difficulty, therefore normal as far as I'm concerned), fights just get so ridiculously hard. The dependency on the levels is stupid. Example, you start in a fort, cannot kill anything without some difficulty, 2-3 characters dying. Then, 2 levels later, you come back, and sweep the floor. That is just silly. In the first act it was frustrating, but I pushed through, you get who you need to kill in what order and it is fine.
That is, until the second act. The game just breaks there. Wherever you would go, the game would just throw a too difficult challenge for you, and you had to turn back, try some other way. At the end, there were 5 "paths" I could take (quests to finish, roads to explore) and the game itself told me in 3 of those to turn back because the enemies were too strong. And I was level 10 already, enemies were level 12.
Excuse me, but I do not have the time to repeat 30 hours of the game with different characters, just because you did not design the difficulty properly. And, lowering the difficulty just makes the game too easy, and there is simply no challenge.
So, if you are one of those people who are fine with either no challenge to your game, or want to spend hours barely progressing until you are so powerful nothing can kill you (that is, until the next act), this will be no problem. I am not one of those people.
I would like to say that I wasn't a big fan of Original. The first game had boring and or slow pace storytelling. Quest tracker for Original Sin was non-exiting and the party members were forgettable, to say the least. However, Original Sin 2 was much better in my book. Yes, the quest tracker was awful, but it was easy to follow. So let’s get down with this review of Divinity Original Sin 2.
Pros:
Plotline: The storytelling is more engaging and fresh to play with. I never felt bored or tired of the plot of Original Sin 2. The story was dark and mature, but it has good humor from the supporting cast that it feels natural to listen to. All of the party members have their own agenda to reach said goal in the game. So it’s was important to talk and be nice to your crew. You never know when you might need in the end.
The world is alive: The actions and moves you take the world of Divinity Original Sin 2 will be remembered in some way of fashion. From the people of Fort Joy, all the way to Arx will treat you differently on how you act. So don’t take the world in Original Sin 2 for granite.
Free Range Customization: From the moment you start the game. The game gives you a full range of how you want to play the game. If you want to be a tank with a side of magic you can do that, if you want to be a Wizard, scoundrel or maybe both you can do that. There isn’t class built, but the freedom to do what you want to do how you want to play it again simple as that.
Combat, Persuasion and other paths: In the game, combat is more flushed out and more Innovative than the first game of Original Sin but this time around the choices that you want to do in combat it does matter, before and or after combat. Lockpicking persuasion trading with characters and for their on gameplay mechanics holds Value to what you do in the game alongside comment.
Cons:
The Music Forgettable: I didn't care too much for the music in Divinity original sin 2. I kind of felt it was distracting from the game itself or the story because. There will be times where the music would overlap and or cover up the dialogue in the game. Yes, I did turn down the volume for the music but it does linger in at times. When that happens. The player is taking out of the game’s plot.
Roughly 80% of Side Quest is Boring and Pointless: For the majority of the side quests in Original Sin, 2 are either boring, pointless, and downright both. The first act in the game didn’t have this problem but in the second third and fourth act, the problem is very clear and annoying. For example, you are looking for eggs for a mother hen and that has no bearing on the main story arc or pretty much it's not fun. Another example is when you reach a very complex Puzzle in 4th act.That's like a tip of the iceberg on how bad the side quest missions become because these puzzles are all connected to a 4 part long floor puzzle. This is where the side quest mission is now part of the main quest. It's like it's just more point is b******* if you had to go through just to get to point A to point B. The game isn't really good at mini puzzles attached to a quest. This is where the game becomes boring or pacing becomes a sloth-like speed. If the sidequest mission isn’t dealing with the party members, your character, or something to do with the main story. It’s a pointless journey for the player.
The Ending Underwhelming: This might be a nip trick or the exhaustion of doing all those floor puzzles to get to the main meat of the game and the ending. However, The ending didn't feel satisfying to me because. The ending will give you some little glimpses of here and there, what you did in this section but nothing else. The party members are given a long, but short paragraph after endgame. All those choices and moral choices you did in the game didn’t matter in the end.
Overall: I love the game and I’ll go back to play it again. Is Original Sin 2 the next Witcher 3, Persona 5, and Ys VIII in this age of RPG? No, but it’s damn near close to it. So my ranting for the game is Badass Son. Original sin 2 excels in character customization is awesome, epic party members, World building is great. However, the game does fall flat at the ending and the side quest and music department.
Divinity: Original Sin II is among the finest RPGs I've played. I only discovered it this year.
I see a number of negative reviews here, and I have no idea why anyone would rate this poorly. It's original, smart, and definitely for the thinking gamer who demands freedom to explore and smart, tactical challenges in their battles.
The game's strengths are in the excellent character writing, the creative design to offering surprising, varied combat options, a very stable platform, and an interesting approach to spells/skills/classes that is logical but different and original in approach to your average dragon and wizard game.
Most of the game runs in real time, and a player is free to explore as he wants, or take on various tasks and quests, in most any order. The enemies don't scale, so the player needs to carefully judge what they are taking on before throwing themselves into something well over their heads. This need for consideration and the lack of hand holding makes the game several pegs of brainpower over most games of this ilk.
You can play alone or as a decent sized party with a large variety of skills. The game takes into account elevation and the game is excellent at offering cover from objects and clouds from spells of various sorts. I'd say that this attention to tactical detail- placement of your party members, knowing what weaknesses your enemy has versus your own strengths, is the most wonderful thing about the game for me.
This makes for a delightful, fresh game I keep coming back to.
The character "races" are different than normally encountered, and anyone can be any mix of anything, which is also fresh and innovative. There is no "normal" party of warrior/cleric/ thief and mage that you have to build- you aren't stuck in that rather cliched trope at all.
I really could not be more delighted, and I am quite excited for Baldur's Gate III by this same team.