I have a love hate relationship with this game.I tried to finish it four times, before I was able to get to the end of the story. Mainly because it always failed to keep me interested. After 4-5 hours there is nothing new in the game, and I always got fed up with the seemingly endless and pointless conversations in it. And the combat system makes the actual combat a chore instead of fun. The outcome of individual battles mostly depend on how you distributed skill points. And if you go the wrong way in the skill tree by the time you realize it you're f*cked. And you end up with a bunch of useless spells and abilities, and a completely ineffective team. Twice I had to restart the game from the beginning, because I reached a point, where I simply could not defeat the enemies, my team was just too weak, no tactical superiority could help. In battles I felt more like a spectator, than anything else. Too much depends on the squad's skills compared to tactics.

Thanks to this feeling of helplessness the game is more annoying than relaxing. In battles you can either tell your squad members to stay put, or allow them to move around freely, but neither works well in practice. If you let them roam free, they break away and run into the scores of enemies like they have a death wish. If you stop them, they simply won't attack at all most of the time. The only solution I found is to micromanage all squad members, who to attack, where to move, and when. This means literally bringing up the tactics screen every two seconds and issuing new commands to everyone. Otherwise you can bet someone will do something stupid, like leaving a half dead enemy and attack another one with full health. You can't prepare for even half of the eventualities with the tactics menu, because there are only so many instructions you can give to a character before they start contradicting. Tactics are allright, for non-combat spells and abilities, like healing, but not for combat. If you give them too many instructions they'll jump around doing nothing, because too many conditions are met at the same time. They'll never finish anything.

For example I can set up my mage to use a lirium potion when it drops bellow 10%, but there are a hundred other factors to take into account if it's really needed or not. For example if there are no more than a few enemies, then it's a waste. And you can't make tactics dependent on complex conditions. So your squad will always perform at a compromise. and not to the best use of the resources and their abilities.

I had another big issue with the game. There is just too many special abilities and spells, so many in fact that you can't even fit them all on the quick menu. But if you want to survive you must use all abilities all the time as soon as they're available. You can't just select the best abilities and use those exclusively, because everything has very long cooldown. Some abilities can only be used once during a battle. And you can't win by using basic moves. So you just keep shoving everything you have at the enemies, and hope that by the time you threw everything at them, some ability you used before can be used again. I would've preferred to have only a few special moves, and much more passive skills that are always active.

Speaking of annoying, I don't consider myself a casual gamer, I finished dozens of games, many on the hardest difficulty. But in this game I had my hands full even on easy. There were a few battles where I could only depend on luck and a dozen retries. And I can't even say that the game is hard where it needs to be hard. The important battles and bossfights really are easy on easy difficulty, but there were a few side quests, where I encountered almost unwinnable battles on easy difficulty. I can't even begin to imagine how to win those battles on hard difficulty.

But enough of the negativity, let's speak about what's good in the game. Like the story, and the multiple endings, but most importantly the multiple beginnings of the game. This one is really good. Depending on what character you select, you get a completely different origin story, and a completely unique "family" quest that's there through the game. This makes you want to try with every character. If only it'd be interesting enough to finish the game with each one. I finished the game in 24 hours, but it felt more like 80, because of the boring parts, and repetitive annoying fights. I also liked the graphics.

I only have one more complaint, but it's not specifically to this game, but to all rpgs. That your character's attributes don't affect their looks. A character with 10 strength looks the same as one with 50. For example in oblivion you even get remarks from npcs if you have a high strength attribute, but you still look the same as everyone else.

+

  • Atmosphere
  • Story
  • Characters
  • Graphics
  • Multiple backstories dependent on your character choice  


-

  • Fighting
  • I never got any use of money in the game. There isn't a single merchant in the game that would have anything remotely useful, or if he does have something it costs so much that by the time you have the money for it, you already have much better equipment.  
  • Boring conversations with npcs  
  • Your character is mute  
  • Repetitive gameplay  
  • Not balanced well, some parts of the game are extremely difficult even on easy.  


I'm not going to say that this is a bad game, but it's not what I'd call great either.

graphics/realization: 8/10
story/atmosphere: 9/10
gameplay/controls: 2/10

overall: 6/10