After about fifty hours I think I’ve seen enough to conclude that everything I like here is stuff that I can get more fully formed in previous souls games and everything that’s new and unique here is actively subtractive from the experience.

I could write a lot here but this game feels like it’s been discussed to death already and honestly I just want to stop thinking about it.

I’m like 30% of the way through a Dark Souls 1 character on my switch. Might get back to that.

I wasn’t always a Final Fantasy II defender, but upon revisiting the title a couple years ago for the first time since I was a young teen I was shocked by how smooth that game actually goes down. Like most games the internet latches onto as eternal targets, it’s not actually that obtuse, not actually that difficult, doesn’t actually require an outrageous amount of planning and self-flagellation to excel at. Sure you COULD min max your party by hitting your own characters for hours or whatever, but there’s no real incentive to do that, ESPECIALLY since all of the remakes of the game significantly sand down the rough edges of the NES original. When I look at Final Fantasy II on its own merits today, I see a game that tried a lot of interesting stuff and succeeded at a lot, with beautiful presentation and ambitious, successful storytelling…but I also see a game that was already constrained by the fledgling expectations imparted by its nascent brand. I’m convinced that that game is as rejected as it is in large part because it’s just, y’know, it’s not what Final Fantasy feels like, even in a day and age where what Final Fantasy feels like is entirely ephemeral, and even though it did much more to define the look and sound of the series than its predecessor by far. So what does Final Fantasy II look like if it gets to be the game that it truly wants to be? If we give battle designer Akitoshi Kawazu the keys to the kingdom and put him in the chairs of director and designer and (co-)writer, really just let this guy who is clearly ambitious and hungry and ready to do it, just go nuts?

It looks like The Final Fantasy Legend, or Makai Toushi SaGa, one of the most enchanting and definitive debuts I’ve ever played. This game, it must be said, whips ass. Everything about Final Fantasy II is here and much more intense. The famous and hated stat increase system is back, but now siloed to one of three character classes and seemingly much more random in its effectiveness and distribution. These guys, the Mutants, can only equip half as much stuff as a normal human, but the tradeoff is they can do magic and innately learn special abilities, which appear randomly after battles based on the character’s unseen level, and disappear just as randomly and just as often. It created a great push and pull where I had to make the choice between armoring up my initially quite fragile Mutant party member more or sacrificing a couple of those equipment slots to give her some equippable offensive magic, because for about the first half of the game that’s by far the most effective combat shit you have, and you never know when their flame ability might just disappear and be replaced by a counterspell, or a useless poison ability, or even an elemental weakness instead.

These choices make up all of the game, a constant push and pull of resource management that is at its most dire in the early goings when money is tightest but never completely fades away. Human characters don’t level up at all – they only increase stats by purchasing a small variety of potions from shops that will upgrade strength, agility (all weapons scale off of one or both of these stats in various ways, occasionally weirdly), or HP. They have double the equipment slots of a mutant, but they need that stuff because they never get abilities, can’t use magic, and their defense stat is entirely dependent on their gear. The third class is Monsters, who are simultaneously the simplest and most complex class to manage. They only have their innate skills to work with and can’t learn new ones or equip anything, but when you kill guys in fights, sometimes they leave behind MEAT, and if you have a monster character EAT THAT SHIT, they’ll turn into a DIFFERENT monster. The game doesn’t ever explain any of this system or how it works to you and I didn’t look up the mechanics of it, so as far as I can tell it seems to be based on your monster’s hidden level and a pokemon-esque intersection of monster types interacting with each other in various complex ways behind the scenes (there is actually a LOT of obvious pokemon DNA in this game, it’s very clearly a huge influence on those). Not knowing how this works, my monster was probably the worst guy in my party for most of the game but by the end I had lucked into some combinations that were getting him some sick forms and abilities, it’s really just fun to see what you’ll get next. I highly recommend playing a monster blind.

Compounding all of this is how much the loop of this game revolves around the grind for caaaashola. Everything has a numerical durability, everything. From your swords to your spells to your psychic powers to your monster’s tail swipes, every possible action in the game will have, at absolute most, fifty uses, and frequently as few as ten or twenty, often even lower than that. For natural abilities topping off is as simple as resting at an inn or, for monsters, devouring a fallen foe and/or transforming, but for equipment there is no recourse but to simply Buy More Shit, and, hopefully, Better Shit. Couple this with the way human characters’ developments revolve entirely around buying them increasingly expensive potions and the economy becomes a much more important part of this game than most. This does mean there’s a lot of grinding in FFL, especially in the early game, but there’s also an emphasis on precise resource management that’s not so severe in most JRPGs. It’s a vibe akin to my perennial fave Dragon Quest 1, where you really have to be certain that you’re ready to strike out again before you leave the vicinity of your current safe zone, because getting caught with your pants down far from a town is the only situation where the game will REALLY punish you. And the stakes ARE high – each character comes with only three lives, and aside from the leader of your party who you select at the very onset of the game, if they die three times they’re dead for good. You CAN buy more hearts for characters but these items are the most expensive thing you can purchase for the majority of the game, and it’s obviously better to just not put yourself in a situation where you need them. That means not only keeping on top of your resources but also your stats, as much as is possible and it’s within your control. There’s a lot to juggle in FFL, so even though the combat is pretty simple and often unchallenging, I never felt disengaged from the experience.

It helps that, although I do think that all of these systems and the ways they interconnect are a ton of fun, they are supported by an incredible world, presented beautifully. A mysterious world constructed around a gigantic tower, one that houses myriad other worlds, all menaced by the same demiurge. These civilizations are all strange and beautiful, as notable for their mundanity as they are for their weirdness. This is a world of species parity, where cannibal monsters share towns with human characters, feeding you the same canned NPC dialogue. An early quest has you hooking a small-time king up with a slime villager (who reciprocates his feelings but is being threatened by a local bandit leader, who maybe you kill with your GUN that it's not unsusual for you to have in your medieval fantasy town) and later you find that they’re happily married and expecting a kid. This is just part of the fabric of life here, entirely unremarkable, and when you later find a plane within the tower where a race of gargoyle men has enslaved everyone else it’s bizarre and terrible and everyone is really fucked up about it.

And they ARE fucked up about it! Something that separates this game from many others on its platform and even in its time generally is how talkative your party is. Not just your main guy but everyone in the party has spoken dialogue in story scenes. The simple decision to just flag different characters to speak the dialogue rather than just one general voice or your lead person lends them a lot of character. There’s an implication that Party Member 3 is the subject of one of the three kingdoms in the starting world the tower springs from based on their familiarity in dialogue with the king there. Party Member 2 is noticeably more downtrodden and pessimistic than the others but no to a degree that they will dissent to action, just enough to vocally not want to give a shit about the philosophical underpinnings that begin to become obviously important to the quest the longer it goes. ALL of your guys have a fierce sense of justice but in a funny hotheaded way. In more than one encounter they cold-bloodedly execute defeated villains who are begging for their lives, or start bar fights for no reason, because he man, you shouldn’t have been a shitty bad guy if you didn’t want to get beheaded by us, or you shouldn’t have acted like a tough shit if you didn’t want to start shit. It’s funny and charming and just MORE character than I was expecting from such an early Gameboy game, something that’s been true of practically every element of it, from the depth of the mechanics to the verve of the characters to the color of the world itself.

The tower itself is eldritch in the true sense of the word: uncanny, impossible, vaguely sinister, and moreso these things the higher you climb. The worlds contained within become stranger and more foreign with every step, from sunlit islands hiding undersea kingdoms to a world in the clouds terrorized by a sky-demon and his gang in their flying castle to literally just post-apocalyptic Tokyo with all of the strange implications that implies. This nuclear wasteland and its inescapable, invincible, wrathful fire demon that stalks you across the world map until you can gather the tools and sacrifice the friends necessary to neutralize its defenses is not the ultimate revelation of the game, only one more step up the staircase. Each of these main scenarios is unique with a thoughtfully constructed narrative device and a creative main quest objective that goes beyond just following a the right pathways until you reach the boss and being strong enough to kill it. That Tokyo section even ends with what I can only describe as a Gameboy-tier setpiece climax on a bullet train, it fucking rules! There is SO much ambition packed into these ten hours.

Even the standard Kawazu shit that people hate works here, imo. Stuff like the healing pools you come to rely on in between towns in the transitional floors in the tower being frequently fake as you get higher, or hitting a room where all of the floor tiles have been replaced with stair tiles and not knowing which of them will actually end up being stairs lends itself to the uncanny wrongness of the location. The classic Wizardry-ass, AD&D-esque traps and puzzles do a good job of adding color to the world but they don’t meaningfully harm you if you’re adequately prepared for exploration; they’re more like fun pranks between you and the designer than cruel gotchas. It’s all tuned very well imo, and I feel like I can say this with some authority because I DID beat this game in under ten hours without a manual or looking anything up on the internet. It’s just not that demanding if you’re willing to meet it halfway.

That’s all you really need to do with Kawazu, is something I’m learning. This game has a lot to it, and it IS, on purpose, more challenging to get a handle on than most of its contemporaries. But it balances that high barrier to entry with a deep and varied playground, and it balances the complexity of the mechanics with combat encounters that don’t really pick up in difficulty until well into the back half of the game, even as it’s fairly hard to get to far ahead of power curve. If you can stick it out there’s a truly magical world waiting for you here. I didn’t even mention the music holy shit! One of Uematsu’s early greats. Guy was knocking it out of the park for this weird little Gameboy game. That’s how much I loved this, I FORGOT about the absolutely SLAM DUNK-ASS music. This game rips ass, WHAT an opening statement for a series. The bar is SO high.

Despite my fondness for world-focused crpgs of its lineage and the pleasure I take in kitschy 80s fantasy settings, I had never completed Baldur’s Gate before. I’d given it a few earnest tries, a couple of them hours long, but it wasn’t until now that I was properly tuned to be comfortable with older PC gaming interfaces after a lifetime of console comforts, or probably interested in the slow rhythms of this particular chunk of faerun countryside.

I think a lot of people get to the character creator and see that there’s no active auto-level tool for your party members once you recruit them and get intimidated by poorly explained, unintuitive mechanics and the sheer depth of choice on display across your up to six guys, probably not helped by how actively you’ll be juggling them during combat if you want to keep your mages and ranged people alive especially early on. I know this had happened to me. The fact of the matter, though, is that all of the dice rolling and calculations and rules lawyering being handled behind the scenes by the computer smooths that stuff over considerably, at least on the normal difficulty setting. Perhaps my familiarity with tabletop games and rpgs gives me something of a skewed perspective but I feel like as long as you pick a lane and slap your points into it consistently, it’s hard to go wrong permanently here, and it almost never puts you in situations you can’t back out of to prep or re-prep for.

And the reality is that combat in AD&D at low level, where this game spends most of its time, is a pretty simple affair. There’s an interesting curve to it all here you start out SO unbelievably weak that there is an interesting tactical challenge to just getting through fights with like, Two Healthy Wolves or That Include A Mage At All, because you have SIX HIT POINTS and Imoen has FOUR and you’re both specced to be thief adjacent and this is NOT an ideal setup we gotta get some friends FAST dude. Then towards the endgame they’re confident enough that you know what you’re doing and have a wide enough toolset and the beef on your guys to work through stuff that encounters can be constructed in more interesting ways through combinations of monsters and enemies and mages with varying skills and abilities, and those encounters swing the combat back to really cool shit. The Problem then, is the very long middle stretch of the game, levels like 3 – 6 (in a game where you start at 1 and the cap is either 8 or 9, I ended at 7 and saw conflicting sources) where you are mostly just fighting groups of really boring identical enemies; a room full of kobolds leads to a room with MORE kobolds in it leads to a room with a few kobolds and a mage. Then it’s onto the spider area. Then it’s onto the bandits and hobgoblins area. There’s not much spice to 90% of the game’s encounters, at least on the normal difficulty, especially because you can rest to refill health and magic almost anywhere and at any time, and the only tax on that is random interruption by small groups of enemies before you can try again. There are a small handful of timed quests in the game but outside of those very brief windows there’s no reason to ever be caught with your pants down. The only thing you’re ever sacrificing is time. So after a while I just flipped it to easy difficulty because making these fights go a little fast just seemed more appealing for the level of engagement I was at. Based on my final playtime vs other peoples’ and the shock of my friend when I told them how long it took me to finish, I would estimate this move shaved literally like fifteen hours off the game. And I don’t regret it! I flipped it back every now and again for big fights and felt satisfied. I’m sure there’s more depth to the hardest difficulties but that’s just not who I am.

Busting the game down to Easy doesn’t feel like much of a compromise because as much as the culture around this game and its sequel is based around crunching numbers and debating party composition and class balance and shit like that, I always also got the impression that the real tactics-fiend dungeon crawler’s games were in this one’s sister series Icewind Dale, which as I understand it are way less focused on narrative and way more focused on cutting guys. The interesting thing about Baldur’s Gate, then, is that I wouldn’t say it’s a particularly story heavy experience either? What this feels like is a robust mechanical simulation of what it’s like to play second edition D&D, and it’s hugely successful at that, but while it’s really good at setting the table for adventure and providing little vignettes for your party to wander through, there’s not much substance to these characters themselves, or much depth to the choices you’re allowed to make throughout these scenarios. Which would be completely fine if you transplanted everything in this game onto a table with a real DM who could react more naturalistically to stuff you say and do than the restrictive options you’re given here, and a party of real friends who could fill out these characters with responses to events as they happen, rather than “hey here’s a paragraph of what I’m about when you recruit me and I will never speak again outside of my combat barks.” So despite the wonderfully goofy writing of the rest of the game, the characters at the heart and souls of it – your player character and their companions – feel really hollow compared to everyone they interact with.

Despite my complaints this is both forgivable and completely fine. Forgivable because this is not only Bioware’s first game but rather famously the first game anyone at the company had ever worked on, and with that in mind the scope on display and success of implementation within that scope is outrageously impressive. And it’s fine because the game is so much more about vibing than it is about the actual plot or characters, even if I think the plot itself is rather good, but we’ll get around to that. If 90% of the combat in this game is boring low stakes encounters where you mostly just mob guys until they’re dead as long as they don’t have a caster, then 90% of the Story Content in the game is just walking around the muddy countryside talking to anyone you run into, and sometimes they ask you to do something and sometimes they just have one dialogue box of information or colorful dialogue or sometimes they have nothing really at all. Maybe you find a weird circus to fuck around in full of sinister games. Maybe you’ll get pickpocketed. Maybe you’ll meet somebody famous on the road and give them a hand with a group of bandits. Maybe you’ll lie your way past an assassin sent to kill you. Many, many times, you will swiftly and immediately be hit with a game over death you could not possibly have seen coming and it will be funny every single time. It’s hard to really talk about this meat of the game even though it’s the stuff I look back on the most fondly because it’s all so ephemeral. Brief encounters that come and go with the wind as you trek through relatively anonymous fields and woods and hills. Individually all of this stuff is extremely shallow, but it overwhelms by sheer volume, and it is sublimated into the game’s overall relaxed, rural atmosphere.

This pleasantly languid pace works in favor of the main quest as well, where after some rumblings of great prophecy you’re cast into the world to futz around doing essentially whatever you want at largely your own pace as your party slowly uncovers the world’s most patient and economically specific evil murder god conspiracy. While the ultimate roots of the game do trace back to a shadowy evil cult manipulating city-states behind the scenes to start a bloody war whose corpses will power their arcane ritual and bring glorious hopeful purpose to their child of prophecy, Baldur’s Gate is a game where you go from level 1 to level 8 so that stuff really barely comes up at all in this game and instead, perhaps uniquely among all video games of this ilk, you REALLY get into the nitty gritty of investigating the cult’s front operations. The way they’re taking over all of the mines in the countrysides surrounding the city of Baldur’s Gate, their conspiracy to monopolize and short all of the iron production in the region, how that links to the political machinations of multiple trade organizations and WHY this child of evil prophecy would want to do all this shit when if he was just after power there are other, easier ways to get it. He is already powerful, surely there’s more to it, and there is! But for most of the game this simply doesn’t concern you. What DOES concern you is tracking down guys who are like eight rungs down the ladder from the top, managing hired bandit gangs that harass people and tracking down the dudes who might know the dudes who might know where the guy who operates the mines are. THIS is the good shit.

Which is not to say that the game can’t do full on RPG ass intrigue shit either, even if the scale is smaller than gamers might be accustomed to. It hits pretty hard when, after 75% of the game is over, you actually do have to go to Baldur’s Gate itself for the first time and it’s massive, a city nine screens big when no town has ever been more than one until now, full of multiple skyscraping businesses and mansions, merchants and taverns. It’s overwhelming, a little bit even after you realize there isn’t actually that much to do here outside of the main quest stuff. Unlike the rest of the game, npcs here react to events in the plot too, there are times where the status quo changes radically and people have new things to say. Towards the end of the game, going around town and gathering intel from townspeople is essential to finishing the game and it feels more organic than similar interactions in any game that inherits this one’s will. I don’t think it 100% nails the writing on all of the big stuff but it’s entirely unassailable when it comes to characterizing the world, maybe the best to ever do it.

A big part of what makes the Big Story Beats of the game fall a little flat is your place in it, and the way Bioware is still clearly getting their sea legs on how to handle player choice and consequences here. There are often only options to express that you are a Nice Person or a Mean Person and no matter what you do or say most interactions end in a fight. It’s not universal but it’s a large enough majority to feel disappointing compared to the complexity of interaction in some later infinity engine games, or even some moments in early 3D Bioware games, which the dialogue in this has more in common with.

Big spoiler for the big twist in Baldur’s Gate incoming! Okay here it is: They do try to paper over this inevitable violence with the script in that, as is mentioned in the most comically nonchalant reveal I’ve ever seen in a game, your character is the child of Bhaal, the previous god of murder, who for reasons only known to people who cared about the larger lore of d&d in the 90s, lost to time, is dead and whose essence now seeks to ascend in one of his many many mortal children. So there is some implication by the game that you get into all of these fights because on some level, liquid snake voice you enjoy all the killing. Or if not that explicitly, then at least the killing is an intrinsic part of your being in a way that is abnormal, and the amount of murder you find yourself doing is unusual even by the standards of a D&D adventurer. This COULD suck shit and indeed is a Stock Video Game Twist that will be annoyingly deployed in countless games including Baldur’s Gate’s own loose descendent KOTOR 2.

I’ll say though, that I think it works here, really well even, not just because Baldur’s Gate was deploying this twist, if not on the ground floor then at least on floor two or three, but also because the WAY it’s deployed is gracefully fit into the world the game has constructed. Rather than a crude gotcha on the player, it’s used here to characterize their avatar and introduce the philosophical underpinnings that the EXTREMELY FUNNY FREDERICH NIETZCHE QUOTE THAT OPENS THE GAME EVERY TIME YOU BOOT IT UP suggests is the ultimate theme of the series. Because while you do get the choice to play however you want and the game does seem like it will accommodate your play, I do get the vibe that it’s designed with a Good-Aligned Player Character in mind, and if you do play that way than this twist introduces a really great conundrum. It’s your nature to be a murderer. You have spent your entire free life doing a LOT of murders. How do you turn that into a defiance against the idea that your fate is to be someone overtaken by the essence of cruelty, as the villain of the game (your brother) has? It’s something that only gets to be touched on lightly here because the god stuff all comes in right at the end of this one, which ends super abruptly right afterward, but I really really hope BG2 and Throne of Bhaal follow through on this idea because it has the potential to be a lot more than a justification for shallow writing.

Since I finished the game I’ve gone back and reloaded a few saves and poked around in the expansion area, been extremely unimpressed with Drulag’s Tower (sorry everybody I just don’t care about this combat, even though the xpac stuff is mostly endgame tuned and is comprised of a lot of cool fights; the narrative hooks aren’t there). Even though I felt like I got a complete experience with my original playthrough, I was happy to keep poking around the areas I hadn’t seen, the stuff I hadn’t fully explored. This little game with like 30 map screens is stuffed with so much interesting, innocuous shit that I feel like I could keep going back forever, finding all these weird little encounters and never get bored with them, even as I’m bored with a lot of the individual elements of the work. It’s pretty magical; even though I’m really excited to see how the second game can flesh out the writing and deepen the characters and complicate the quest design, I know from experience with all of the games inspired by this one that there’s nothing else out there that emulates The Vibes on display here. A truly remarkable, singular work .

I don't want to go too hard on this game because a lot of things I ended up disliking about it are because a lot of the things I found frustrating here are due to it being based on D&D which I think is, largely, the antithesis of fun. So, things like THAC0, or the garbage alignment system, or obtuse/unclear stat systems aren't really Icewind Dale's fault. I can, however, call out how the game doesn't really offer any help if you're unfamiliar with those systems. The vast majority of things in the game don't have tooltips or details to read and the manuals (which don't come with the Steam version! I had to find the GOG version's manual!) don't have anything to help with this either. So, in the frequent case that I was confused about something, the solution was to go google it. I guess the expectation was that back in 2000 you'd either have your 2nd Edition rule book laying around and look it up there or you'd know what forum to go to to find your answer. Don't know how to remove "Chaos" or whatever? Well, too bad. Go look it up. Hope you know where to look! They had the option to put a lot of information in the game itself (both in the initial release and in this Enhanced Edition) and chose not to. It made a tedious experience that much more tedious when I had to frequently alt-tab out of the game to look things up for every other encounter (and not even always find an answer because Icewind Dale seems to be not terribly well-documented, especially compared to other notable CRPGs of the era).

So, with that aside... I still didn't like this very much. It's an immensely tedious game that asks you to constantly wrestle with every bit of tedium and clunkiness and if you manage to do all that you're rewarded with an immensely bland and generic narrative. I found large swathes of this game to be actively unenjoyable and unfun.

The way combat is seemingly supposed to work in this game is that you engage a group of enemies, they wipe the floor with you, and you load the game to figure out what the best approach for your particular party is. At first, I was okay with this. Combat was a series of fun puzzles to try and solve and once you get a wide enough array of tools at your disposal, it starts to become easier to deal with all the things the game can throw at you. But after hours and hours of saving and loading for just about every encounter, it really wore me down. It's just a tiresome loop to put up with for the thirty-ish hours it took to get through the game. On top of that, I found a lot of the encounter design to be very lacking. It seemed like there were largely two types of encounters here: a massive mob of simple enemies or a smaller group of enemies that have some more difficult aspect to them (resistances to particular damage types or strong spells, things like that). Occasionally, they throw a third type at you: a large mob of simple enemies that also have some stronger enemies behind them. It is, again, fine at first but becomes pretty boring when maps are just the same couple encounters repeated a dozen or so times.

Something that makes all that worse is that this game is clunky. I like to think that I'm pretty willing to put up with a lot of Old Game Jank and will cut older games a lot of slack when they don't have all the smooth sleek experiences of modern games but Icewind Dale really tested my patience in that regard. It feels like every way this UI/UX could be clunky, it is. Managing your inventory, casting spells, even just moving your characters around. The pathing AI was a pretty major source of frustration for me because it meant that I was constantly pausing in combat to micromanage each party member's movements but it felt like it hardly mattered because sometimes their AI routine would wrest control away from me and go do their own thing or other times they'd get inexplicable stuck on a wall or an ally or on nothing at all and they'd just sort of vibrate in place instead of doing anything useful.

And, hey, speaking of those party members, they were a pretty major disappointment for me too! When I saw that it gives you a full party of six pre-generated characters, I made the assumption that they were Actual Characters with stories and companion quests because that's how the vast majority of CRPGs work. But it turns out that, no, they aren't anything. They're just as empty as your own created character is. They get a little paragraph of backstory but there's no connections to the areas you go to or the people you meet. They don't have any goals or ideals or motivations or anything. This was extra weird to me seeing as the Icewind Dale games are basically a follow-up to the Baldur's Gate games which do a pretty good job of having interesting companion characters. (Side note that, yes, those games are by a different developer but you'd think maybe Black Isle would've taken note of what Baldur's Gate did well and try to put that in their game, y'know?)

And, hey, speaking of disappointing writing, the actual main plot of this game is some of the most empty, vapid, dull, tabletop adventure writing I've ever seen. There are a couple interesting tidbits here or there in this but the vast majority of the narrative is intensely dull. You're a group of adventurers who headed North in search of the vague idea of "adventure" and got caught up in chasing down some evil that plagues a village but the evil is always somewhere else and then, oops! it turns out the evil manipulated you into doing a thing for them and now you have to continue chasing the evil down to have a final confrontation. So much of this feels like they were stretching for time. There's so little actually important events in the story that it feels like they crammed in as much filler as they could to fill out the game.

It's not completely devoid of good ideas but most of what I did have any positive feelings for is buried pretty deep or not really engaged with. I think it's very interesting how this game pretty frequently reminds you that there were lots of people already living in the area before a bunch of humans moved in to start the Ten Towns and that y'all are extremely not welcome here you fuckin' settler scum but then the game doesn't really do anything with that. You can't do much to criticize or push back on the idea that because the Ten Towns exist everyone else just has to be okay with land being stolen out from under them. It almost feels like they stumbled backwards into it on accident and that's why they only sort-of address it. I also liked this small sub-plot about elves and dwarves fighting a war against orc but eventually falling because they were deceived into thinking they were being betrayed by each other. It wasn't anything terribly original or groundbreaking but the way it delivered that narrative by telling you one thing, suggesting the truth via some notes, and then revealing the actual truth later was significantly more interesting than almost anything else in this game.

I found that a lot of this held true for the DLC/expansion Heart of Winter as well. The narrative was nothing special ("hell hath no fury like a woman scorned" except the woman is a dragon) and the encounter design was the same but with ice monsters and yetis and shit. At least that one was short.

The Trials of the Luremaster DLC/expansion though is truly awful. Apparently, they only did this one because people complained that Heart of Winter didn't have enough content to it. And you can tell because a lot of it feels like it was made under duress. So much of the encounter design feels actively hostile to the player and downright mean. Most of the puzzles they ask you to solve are either dead simple things that are barely even puzzles or obtuse bullshit that the game seems to expect you to trial and error your way through. And there's barely any narrative to it, either. I made it about 90% of the way through it before the hard-as-nails encounters wore me down and I quit because absolutely nothing I had seen made me think that last 10% was going to be worth my time. Just some atrocious game design on display here. The only part of this that was remotely amusing was that one character's dialogue is, essentially, saying that adventurers like you are a bunch of greedy assholes who just want to travel to places to loot them for all they're worth.

I didn't particularly enjoy my time with Icewind Dale. I kept expecting to find something about it that I'd like and at least be able to point to and say "the rest of it may be kinda shit but this one part is worth it!" but I never found that.

CRPG's have made a major impact on me recently. I never got to play a lot of these in my formative gaming years because my PC was utter garbage, I could barely run Math Blaster. But now with a lot of games getting remakes or re releases on modern systems, or with great services like GOG, I'm able to go back and play the classics like this one. I personally think I prefer this to the first Baldur's Gate, which seems to be it's closest counterpart. I think the fast pacing of Icewind just caters a little better to my style. It's also nice that the games simply hold up by and large, even compared against modern interpretations like Divinity or Pillars of Eternity these games still play wonderfully and the only major downfall tends to just be in the menu departments. Small issues for me, if you happen to have a Switch I can't recommend the Enhanced Editions of this, Baldur's Gate 1+2 and Planescape Torment. If not then GOG puts all these games on sale for a couple bucks like once a month so keep an eye out, especially if you are an RPG nut like I am.

Beaten: Aug 10 2021
Time: 20 Hours
Platform: Switch

Well, it's the last of the 2e infinity engine games. This one's core design is something you don't tend to see in western CRPGs much anymore. This is a dungeon-first game, with almost none of the exploration that characterized Baldur's Gate, nor the story heft of Baldur's Gate 2. Honestly, it reminded me most of Planescape Torment.

Now that might be a weird comparison, since Planescape is known for having almost no combat, and Icewind Dale is pretty much combat front to back, but hear me out: Planescape and Icewind are games that compliment each other better than nearly any other set of games. They're distillations of the Infinity Engine's systems into two pillars, storytelling and action. In Icewind Dale's case, the "action" side of things, we have near-pitch-perfect dungeon design, encounter design, and the perfect amount and style of world-building to tie it all together

The dungeons lean more on the side of interesting layouts than maze-like, which is definitely for the best. You feel like you're exploring caverns and decrepit buildings, rather than sweeping back and forth through something that was designed to be disorienting. They can be big and complex when they want to, but for the most part that's not where the interest is. Instead, the encounters are where the focus lies.

The encounters in this game are a thing of beauty. Every time you get into a brawl, it feels very tight and well thought out. Even the bosses are manageable for the most part! When there's a group of enemies, they're fragile enough for an area spell. When there's a tough one, it's beatdown time. When that doesn't work, try some other spells. It's a game that calls you to adapt your strategy over the course of the game, but doesn't seem too interested in frustrating you for not realizing that. You'll be able to tell when you're doing something wrong every time, and more often than not you'll have time to adapt. Granted I was on easy mode, because I'm Bad at these games I love so much lol, so it's safe to say it can be more punishing at higher difficulties if that's what you want.

Those two were largely what I expected. Icewind Dale is known as the combat-heavy Infinity Engine game, and it definitely lives up to that. What I wasn't expecting was the world outside of the dungeons to be so fully realized!!!!

From the small town where the game opens all the way to the last minutes of the game, there's a wealth of characters to talk to, to learn about the game world from. Every place you go feels like it has history, and when you talk to the people there (some of them are even mid-dungeon!!!!) you get to piece together that history. Different cultures tell of long rivalries with others, and the other cultures have their own side of things to learn as well. The way I'm saying it might seem a little basic, and sure it's not as outwardly complex as many rpgs tend to be, but the depth on display here, the texture of the world beneath your feet, it's intoxicating. And in that way only Black Isle (and obsidian lol) know how to do.

I wouldn't start your crpg journey with this game. Hell, even if you've played more modern games, I wouldn't play this before Baldur's Gate. There's not much in the way of a tutorial, and you can and should make your own six-character party when you start. That being said, if you like the other Infinity Engine games but want more content, more rigor, and more of that sweet sweet Black Isle writing, you'd be doing yourself a disservice for skipping this one

Edit (2023)
I originally wrote this in a salty mood. Now I still think the dungeons aren't particularly fun - they're nice when you're not super stuck or dying to a bat - but I like the jank ambition of OoT a lot. And the atmosphere is still great. And all the npcs and little item interactions are great .. I sort of wish they'd try making this scale of Zelda again, but with the better design knowhow of 2023.

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In summary: https://twitter.com/han_tani2/status/1529794146617421824

(Edited to add some positive things about the spatial concepts of the dungeons and towns)

Would you put a health bar into a 3D block / hidden object game, so if you die at the end of three puzzles, you have to redo all of them? Probably not!

Now imagine that there was a game that did this - and in fact, it sold well - not only that, but it became so unimaginably popular, that its idea - adding a health bar to a 3D puzzle game - became considered 'good practice' in thousands of games, and in fact, this game went on to have dozens of sequels with the same idea: put a health bar in a puzzle game.

Ocarina of Time strikes me as absurd. Having played through the water temple, there hasn't been a single truly interesting idea in any of the dungeons. The base mechanics are so flat and uninteresting - imprecise combat (even with the Z targeting), finicky auto-jumping, slow climbing, a camera that almost always points into the ground, and the need to walk slowly everywhere. When the atmosphere and setting do work, it feels more like a welcome distraction against the task of trying to play through the game.

Every room in OoT boils down to:

- Get oriented, see the obvious thing you need to do, and then do it.
- Sometimes doing it is hard: you might die (often from an enemy that's incidentally in the room, and not the conceptual focus of room puzzle), you might fall and need to re-do rooms. Sometimes it's slow and boring: you need to push a block around some ice.

(One room in the Water temple carefully makes you shoot a water-level-changing crystal 5 times to make it through. Nothing about this idea is interesting, the solution is obvious from the get go!)

Or worse, it might be a combat room, where you're subjected to a camera and combat system that's impossible to aim with, with enemies whose design concepts tend to be "invincible 90% of the time, maybe vulnerable in a weird, awkward window".

Every dungeon is dozens of these rooms stitched together, in a way where it's easy to miss a key you need, only to find you need it later - after completing 10 minutes of boring puzzle rooms. Then, you get to backtrack, and do the boring puzzle rooms again.

In this way, OoT feels like it was a 2D Puzzle game on paper, naive concepts hackily translated into 3D with a combat system grafted on.

Each new item you get is a failed answer to 'how do we make this interesting?' Pointing your bow around the room, bombing a dodongo, equipping the iron boots over and over. These new items are never fundamentally interesting, they just create a new paint job for a switch sitting on a ledge.

To OoT's defense, I think it succeeds with interesting spatial setups and dramatic pacing (deku tree web, etc, water temple water level) but the moment to moment execution of how you traverse those setpieces just really doesn't work. It's super cool to think about the process of climbing to the ceiling of the Fire Temple, but it's kind of shrug when you think about the moment to moment process of getting there.

The layout of the world is cool (on paper), it's just a slog to walk across. Likewise with the execution of the towns like Zora's Domain or Goron City - they're neat to be in, up until you need to Do Something.

If you knew exactly what to do and when to do it (to avoid backtracking or costly dead-end-investigation), I think this game would be a lot more tolerable. I can see why it became people's favorites if you're intimately familiar with it - breezing through dungeons and slowly making progress is actually a little fun.

Unfortunately (for this review) it doesn't make sense to review something in such a context of having played it 10 times...

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In some ways, OoT fundamentally feels like a mix of Hidden Object games, the puzzle genre, and even mystery games/JRPGs. It's less a visionary step into 3D than it appears, it's more a hackjob of genres whose saving grace was the production value, hang-out-vibes and atmosphere.

It's very easy to get stuck or lost in the sections between dungeons. E.g., stopping the goron and waiting a minute for it to uncurl, in order to get into the entrance to the Fire Temple. And it's all hampered by slow movement and easily getting disoriented, making what might be a fairly straightforward puzzle into a nightmare.

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What angers me about this game the most is how much Nintendo - and nostalgic developers - doubled
down on the travesty of mechanics the game has. Having a terrible core moveset, tons of stupid items with one-off uses has become 'good practice'. You can probably find a dozen youtube videos on what makes OoT's dungeons "work". None of the fundamentals here are 'good' - they're merely passable ideas that can become palatable through fancy art or story design.

To me, every game reproducing these ideas feels like a child-like grasping at recreating the magic of childhood favorite. And they ironically miss the point: what does manage to work about OoT is NOT those fundamentals of bad puzzles and combat and poor level design, it's the atmosphere and tone, it's the fun of uncovering a dungeon.

Even future Zelda games do this. I don't know how they became so fixated on this uncomfortable mix of tedious puzzles and sloppy action.

Most of what is required in OoT to progress the game is at best calmingly repetitive (it can be fun to breeze through a dungeon and slowly uncover its treasures), and at worst offensively tedious.

What's good about OoT is the strange NPCs, the quiet little subplots on how parts of the world change over time, the random horror, the way you can kind of just hang out and roll around in it. The sense of inhabiting a grand myth. But even that, to an extent, feels cheapened by a story that's too willing to make everything you do as an adult easily fix every single problem. The Kokiri Forest comes back to life! All the Gorons are safe! Zora's Domain melts!

As far as Japanese Anime story set-ups go, Young Link's stuff was not bad. But the follow through in Adult Link's repetitive romp through dungeons, at least through the Water Temple, feels like it's just going through the motions.

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Here's my thing: I'm the Rick Astley of JRPGs. I never give them up no matter how much they may be letting me down. My 'played' page has its share of RPGs that I absolutely detested but soldiered through anyway, through a mix of Fear Of Missing Out and feeling like I need to have experienced the entirety of an experience to judge it properly, with a bit of Plain Old Fashioned Stubbornness thrown in.

I started playing Vagrant Story on the back of my fifth playthrough of Final Fantasy Tactics (gotta set it up with the Ivalice connection), and was immediately awestruck by the gorgeous graphics that pushed the PSX to its absolute limits, the stellar translation that was sorely lacking from FFT, and the near-perfect cinematic quality that seemed to be the platonic ideal that earlier Square titles like FF6 were striving for. Never would I have imagined that this was the game that would break me!

This game has mechanics on top of systems on top of subsystems; I've played games with obtuse mechanics before, but Vagrant Story is particularly bad at teaching you how to play it. I'm aware that there is an in-game manual, but it's way too much information and the game's early stages don't push you to learn the mechanics in an organic way. The idea of a pure dungeon-crawler with no shops and the only tools at your disposal being what you find and what you craft is sound, but again the crafting mechanics are so obtuse and so irreversible that you can so easily hose yourself at any point with poor crafting decisions and end up in a situation where none of your tools work. And equipment is so influential to the point that it stifles strategy - you either have the right equipment and steamroll the enemy or don't have the right equipment and get stuck poking at a mook for ten minutes.

But the aspect of this game that really made me bounce off it was how soul-crushingly tedious it was. Yes, the load times and spell animations are inexcusably long, and yes, there is endless menu-hopping to be done to change your setup every time you meet a new enemy. But it goes a lot deeper than that: the totally-unnecessary limited inventory necessitated an storage box system which is of course extremely tedious to navigate and which you also inexplicably have to save every time you use. Even something as simple as getting your bearings takes way too much time to do because you need to enter the map menu in order to see the compass directions! This tedium bled over into the bread and butter of the combat as well, with the Risk Bar increasing whenever you attacked, forcing you to either use consumable items to bring it down (which remember, you can't buy because there are no shops), or.... to wait until it goes down on its own.

I really wanted to love this game, but in the space of a week I dropped it three times, talked myself into giving it another chance three times, and realized on my fourth attempt that I was at 20% map completion and completely burnt out, and I just brought out the white flag.

There is absolutely plenty to love in here. Depending on what you value in your RPG experience and your level of tolerance for specific types of bullshit, this game could very well be one of the best games you play, and justifiably so. As such, this is probably the only 1.5-rated game on my list that I would recommend every RPG fan at least give a fair shot!

No other game has had the impact on my life that Ocarina of Time has. This game captured me so much that, at eight years old, the Official Nintendo Player's Guide became my constant companion, the covers now tattered on the edges over years of reading and carrying it around.

I pored over the pages and fell in love with the concept art, then fell in love with the idea of being the person who draws those images (not understanding until later that those people are called concept artists). So from the time I was in elementary school all the way into my freshman year of college, I dreamed of being a video game concept artist because of Ocarina of Time. This game inspired a dream, which shaped the course of my life and what I wanted to do with it until I decided to pursue a different career path.

The concept of time is one that I grapple deeply with and one that seems to come up a lot in games and other media that I particularly enjoy. I never seem to have enough of it in a given day to do everything I want to do. And, like many people, I feel that as I'm getting older, the days are getting shorter because time seems to be moving faster. The people I love are getting old or are gone now. Like Sheik tells Link outside of the Forest Temple, "The flow of time is always cruel." It's a quote that's always stuck with me and one I've thought back to a lot in recent years.

Generally speaking, Ocarina of Time left a mark on me. The feeling of loneliness and solitude that permeates the game is one I've never really forgotten, and one that resonates strongly with me. I've played plenty of games where the protagonist has to go it alone, but nothing captures the feeling of the quiet stillness of riding Epona across the expanse of Hyrule Field through the night, as it fades into dawn. There's an underlying sadness in these moments — perhaps unsurprising in a game about seven years of lost time and the death and destruction that happened in those years that the hero was powerless to stop — a sadness that feels very human and relatable.

I don't need to go into how great the gameplay and puzzles are in Ocarina of Time. There's a reason this game has been named the Greatest Game of All Time and earned countless accolades and top spots on lists of the greatest games ever made. It left such a massive mark on the industry that it continues to inspire and influence games today — but that also means that I likely wouldn't be saying anything new or unique if I were to jump into an analysis of the game from a purely gameplay perspective.

Instead, I think it's more meaningful to reflect on how important this game is to me, and how much it's shaped who I am and the games I like to play. It's perhaps unfair to hold games up to Ocarina of Time in comparison, as there is nothing, in my opinion, that could possibly come close to being its equal other than Majora's Mask. So it's better to just enjoy every game for its own strengths rather than putting it up against the impossibly high bar that Ocarina set.

The character designs of Link, Young Link, Ganondorf, and Zelda in Ocarina of Time are so iconic at this point and their influence so strong that Breath of the Wild had to go with a total departure of color palette and costume for Link and Zelda to get away from them. (Which is a shame because they don't look anywhere near as cool as the Ocarina designs.) It speaks to the enduring legacy of Ocarina of Time on the franchise, one that Nintendo should be embracing rather than constantly trying to downplay or get people to cool on.

I haven't replayed Ocarina of Time in years because I don't want to get tired of it, but I've been getting the itch lately to finally go back to it. If you don't have a tube TV and an N64, I'd recommend playing it on the Wii U Virtual Console, especially if you've never played it before.

And if you've never played it before, do yourself a favor and play it.