The following is a transcript of a Youtube review which can be viewed here: https://youtu.be/62UVeiLrMIc?si=jNluQ-ZqpGalOlvG

I’ve been thinking about video game progression a lot lately. Way of the Samurai’s odd structure has been a big part of that but the Archipelago multiworld system has also really captured my attention. Both of these gaming experiences require the player to be far more active in seeking relevant progression, be it determining which clue they should follow-up on in Rokkotsu Pass or assessing what their current loadout allows them to achieve within the multiworld. When presented with a choice in either setting, familiarity goes a long way to selecting the best path to follow. I know which locations open up to me whenever I get a hold of the Monarch Wings, but I have no idea if finishing Dona’s haiku with the omelette line actually makes a difference. As far as I can tell it just makes Dona assume Japanese people suck at poetry. Unlike Archipelago, Way of the Samurai isn’t randomised upon game-start - it isn’t a roguelike or anything - instead Acquire have designed a game that revolves around the player making a big decision once an hour, then following that thread to its conclusion. And for some, a branching narrative adventure where small differences in action have a butterfly-effect impact that lead to different outcomes for the story overall is the Platonic ideal of a video game story. For others, Way of the Samurai looks like a cynical attempt at getting the most amount of game for the lowest number of assets. Whichever the case, the game’s structure is totally unique and absolutely makes it worth revisiting today.

Released in 2002 exclusively for the Playstation 2, Way of the Samurai is a 3D action-adventure game that follows a travelling ronin as they stumble into the end of an era. The Rokkotsu Pass is undergoing a rapid change of governance - whether the people present know it or not - and the player is allowed to navigate the upheaval in a broad number of ways. Whenever the player transitions between scenes the day advances slightly and, depending on the time of day, the player can catch and participate in a variety of events that inform how their adventure will end. Will they fight this crew of troublemakers, ignore them, or maybe attempt to get involved in whatever they’re up to? If things don’t quite go to plan, the player might end up helplessly tied to the train tracks or even recruited as cannon fodder in an upcoming battle. The game features three major factions in the Rokkotsu Pass that are all willing to accept the player as a member on a whim. There’s the Kurou Family, the current top of the hierarchy; a de facto dictatorship who shake down the villagers in the valley for protection money and resources, then there’s the Akadama Clan who have recently moved into Rokkotsu Pass with the intent to dethrone the Korou Family and take control of the region for themselves, and finally the villagers who live in the valley; most of whom have been chased away by the two gangs but a handful are still present and trying to scrape out a life amidst the chaos. The player is free to join and oppose any and all of these groups, leading them through a variety of circumstances with compounding effects. Way of the Samurai also boasts a complex sword-fighting system with 40 different weapons and over 200 attacks, which seems ridiculous and kind of difficult to understand, but most aren’t necessary and some might even be exclusive to the PVP fighting mode. Or maybe they are useful on higher difficulties, I don’t know, I just wanted to see the different stories.

At this point I would normally provide some kind of biography for the developers to help set the scene. Something to introduce the real main character to this narrative, because games don’t just emerge from the ether and install themselves onto 2001-gaming compatible hardware - someone had to make them. But I’ve run into a bit of a problem: Acquire’s strange online presence. The company was founded in the late 90’s and quickly made its way onto the Japanese stock exchange, where it was then acquired by a larger company, and then later sold to another media conglomerate while forming partnerships with other game developers along the way. Not only is the history of Acquire obscured behind language barriers and corporate acquisitions, but at some point a bunch of false information made its way into their online profiles throughout various databases, including things like western names being credited for work that was most likely done by a Japanese person, as the credits in the game would suggest. In a similar vein, I would’ve thought it appropriate to write a bio for the Archipelago developers who have done some tremendous technical wizardry to have created such a robust, generation-spanning machine. But much of the project’s early history is mired in sour politics and the egos of people working on a similar but separate computing marvel. Not only that, but the vast majority of game compatibility work within the Archipelago project was done by community members. Talented and determined individuals who just had to bring randomised Landstalker to the masses in a way that also adds cooperative multiplayer. I don’t think I’d be able to do justice briefly covering so many incredible people who have delivered to me my favourite multiplayer gaming experience of all time, but I am going to gush about it all for a bit.

You can only really play your favourite game so many times before you start to forget what made it so special in the first place. The deeper one’s familiarity with a world the more likely exploring becomes routine, most enemies turn into annoyances, and the story eventually grinds to dust. I love Hollow Knight and I’ve played it a lot, but I haven’t really touched the vanilla game in a couple years. I know where to go and where to avoid until later which means Hallownest’s wonder and mystery are gone. Until Silksong comes out. Randomisers help to restore some of that mystery while also requiring creative routing through a part of the world that probably hadn’t been designed for the player’s current mobility tools. Combine all of that with Doom’s items, randomised Minecraft recipes, and a Super Metroid playthrough and suddenly it’s all new again. The Dung Defender’s stinky charm doesn’t drop from the ceiling of the room after he gets Team Rocket blasted into the distance, this time it’s a BFG, or the bucket recipe, or the 80th pack of missiles. The system even saves the multiworld progress so one player can load up a playthrough of all 56 currently supported games and even throw in 15 extra playthroughs of Kingdom Hearts 2 because you just love Donald Duck so god damn much you fuckin’ lunatic Disney-adult maniac- and Archipelago will let you log in and out whenever you want. But it’s also possible to play simultaneous multiplayer too! Colloquially known as “sync games,” a group of players hop into a voice channel and communicate which items they need and when so the other members of the group can go collect them. And with the right settings most groups can get a full multiworld done in around 2 hours, which is crazy! It genuinely breathes new life into some of my most played out games and I seriously cannot recommend it enough. The website has a list of every compatible title and I’ll also put a link to the Discord server in the description in case you want to try it out and craft your own stories. But now, back to drudgery.

Aside from the ronin’s death and the ronin just leaving on their own, there are six endings to find within Way of the Samurai, which itself is a bit of an illusion. I’d argue that there are only two significantly different endings that don’t just change when each major character is killed. Every storyline is only an hour long and none of them are that special or interesting individually, so I’m not spoiling anything of any consequence. The first ending I found and I think the most natural path to follow would be siding with the villagers in the Station. When the player enters the game world the very first event they’ll come across is the attempted kidnapping on the bridge. Stopping to rescue Suzu momentarily swerves the Kurou Family related paths, since Tsubohachi won’t let the player enter their territory after this confrontation. Winning the battle isn’t necessary since Dona will save Suzu if the player fails to, and surrender only detours the player slightly provided they manage to convince the passersby to untie them. After some relatively unimportant posturing between the various clans in the area, the player convinces Suzu, her grandfather, Dojima the blacksmith, and Dona to follow them out of the Station and then the credits play. This is probably the ‘best’ ending where all the sympathetic characters get to live, but it’s massively underwhelming. It takes an hour to convince four people that maybe they should leave the Rokkotsu Pass, and then they do. The other paths all end with the ronin and a buddy from the Kurou Family or the Akadama Clan or both dying honourably at the hands of the Meiji army who have come to annex the pass into the government’s territory. I skimmed over all of that because, despite there being a really easy and obvious way to add depth to the characters the player will meet over and over while seeking out different endings, every single person in this game is paper thin. Dona wants to be a samurai and marry Suzu. Suzu is a damsel in distress and acts only as a prize to be won. Dojima is just some dude who watches stuff happen and that’s basically it. He used to be in the army so he knows there’s a government spy among the Akadama people, which if he didn’t know would mean this entire character lives to be the blacksmith and nothing else. The Akadama Clan wants to take over the valley from the Kurou Family because one of their leaders is the child of Tesshin, the Kurou leader. Like, that’s it. The Akadama have no more motivation or pivotal conflict besides that. Tesshin wants to sell land to the government but the government agent flakes on the deal and decides to take it violently instead. The game holds this stuff back like these are valuable pieces of information that alter how the player is thinking about these people. Like the player is going to become more sympathetic to the Kurou after learning that they want to sell their old steel mill to the government. The Akadama Clan could just want territory with residents to extort, using the word “revenge” hasn’t made that motivation more meaningful. And since the conceit of this whole game is following storylines to their conclusion and then picking up a new one on the next run, I think it’s a huge problem that none of the characters are written all that well and that the stories themselves are bland and forgettable. If this were a roguelike then the weakness of the narrative wouldn’t be such an issue - Way of the Samurai’s combat could be the star of the show instead.

The combat system in Way of the Samurai functions in a similar way to the first Tekken game, of all things. With a drawn sword and an enemy in the ronin’s sights, the player’s movements are restricted almost to a 2D line with the option to sidestep. Different attacks are triggered by specific inputs which not only depend on the type of weapon the player has equipped, but also requires the ronin to “learn” them by trying to do them in battle. They never get more complex than two or three inputs, but that’s still in line with the original Tekken movesets. All these attacks don’t really change how the combat flows which is why I said they weren’t overly necessary earlier. Different attacks don’t combine together so any attack that lands does its damage, then the combat resets to neutral. The more impactful combat mechanic is pushing and pulling the opponent to cause them to stumble. I didn’t notice any visual indicator for the player to tell whether the enemy was susceptible to a push or a pull, but with enough trial and error I was able to figure out which enemies were push and which were pull. Picking the correct option causes the enemy to enter a brief period of vulnerability - allowing the player to get an extra hit in. The defender can also push and pull their opponent, keeping this layer of interaction even throughout the more passive moments in combat. The advantage gained from pushes and pulls can be decisive and it naturally goes both ways, but a problem arises when the player loses too many of these interactions and is killed. The ronin’s death is considered an independent ending, regardless of the tasks the player completed beforehand. And because the game recognises an ending has been reached, any save data from the previous run is deleted to allow the player to start over again. So if the player pursues a thread all the way to the final showdown and gets unlucky or makes a mistake or can’t find enough vegetables to eat to heal up, that entire hour of progress is lost with no way of getting it back. I didn’t die too often, but if I was going to die it’d almost always be right near the ending I was chasing which completely killed my motivation to play and then I’d turn Way of the Samurai off. Eventually I did see all the endings and all of the models in the game, which are okay. It’s a PS2 game but the palette is very bland.

This game was released in 2002, the year of Vice City, Metroid Prime, and Morrowind, and while it lacks the scale of these games, Way of the Samurai’s visuals are at least on par with the top of the pile. Prime does have phenomenal style and direction over Acquire’s game, and I think having Tommy Talerico on board definitely contributed to Prime’s tremendous overall presentation, but I think we should probably stay on topic. Way of the Samurai’s character models are solid and the combat animations are great all around - a genuine achievement. Animation outside of combat is often a bit wooden and sadly never gets as action-figurey as stuff like Rune, so it’s just kind of boring to watch. And most of the environments are plain and boring too. The PS2 can handle much broader palettes and there are even examples of Japanese forests with a greater range of colourful plants and even some totally necessary god-rays. The rest of the Rokkotsu Pass is in decline and generally abandoned so the muted colours are appropriate, but why the Korou Family live in a big pit in a drab little house is very strange considering they’re supposed to be shaking the villagers down for all of their riches. Is the palette being used in a metaphorical way to signify the end of this era of Japanese history, the colours literally holding onto a time that ceases in this very moment? Or did Acquire just go for drab colours because that’s how you make things look more realistic? It makes sense for the Akadama clan to be based in a rickety old barn or something, and their mansion is sort of run down, but it’s hard to even say if that was a deliberate design choice or if the game just looks like that. And don’t get me started on Kitcho’s design. It’s a badass ‘fit but it cannot be historically appropriate. Kitcho standing there in his black jeans, string vest, and killer jacket while the ronin runs around in his kimono is a weird collision of fashion that I’m kind of into. But Kitcho might just be the real time traveller here.

Way of the Samurai was Acquire’s first game on Playstation 2. It was also the third game the company ever released and it was their first not to be specifically focussed on stealth. The video game industry was doing very well during the early 2000s, with Sony’s new console becoming one of the most ubiquitous electronics in homes worldwide. There was plenty of money to be made developing video games, and Acquire had shareholders to satisfy. My cynical brain wants me to say that Way of the Samurai was made to stretch a relatively small budget into a video game with enough content to sate consumers and make out with the highest yield for the company’s shareholders. I think many of the combat animations were either made during Acquire’s time as a motion-capture company or for their Tenchu games. That would explain how the combat can look as smooth and natural as it does, while the conversation scenes have characters’ heads swivel around like they’re owls. All of the environments are small, lacking in detail, and are reused often. I don’t think there’s anything necessarily wrong with reusing assets to make a game - I’d encourage it, actually - just something about the way Acquire has done it gets my cynicism going.

Ultimately, I think Way of the Samurai tried something really interesting and unique, but this first attempt doesn’t quite live up to the strength of the idea. RPGs that divide narratively based on whatever choices the player makes are already compelling enough for players to regularly replay games just to see what else they could do - designing an entire game around that should be a recipe for success, but Way of the Samurai lacks compelling events. I don’t need to see the two sides of a dude pushing a pram through the wilderness, neither eventuality is that exciting. And the short runtime makes discerning between events that lead to particular endings difficult. The Meiji government soldiers are always going to show up at the end no matter how effective a negotiator the ronin is. Overall, I don’t think Acquire are happy with how this first game ended up and I’ve seen that the rest of the series expands a lot on this first attempt, which is good. But it’s also a shame, for me I mean, because when do I ever play sequels?

This next game is some wild tactics thing.

The following is a transcript of a video review which can be viewed here: https://youtu.be/-qajdeYdJdA

Wanted: Dead is an anomaly within the modern video game market. The game wasn’t created to dazzle people with a phenomenal presentation, it isn’t some avant-garde break from typical action gameplay, and the narrative doesn’t go anywhere a video game hasn’t dared to go before. Instead, what makes Wanted: Dead stand out is Soleil’s unique game development philosophy. Similar to games like Axiom Verge, Dusk, and Disco Elysium, Soleil made a game in a style that is no longer catching the attention of the money-men who control the big studios. Wanted: Dead adheres closely to Soleil’s signature style: it is an over-the-top action game with elements that would be right at home on the Playstation 2. I can imagine that description alone can be enough to convince some players to go out and give the game a shot, but I can also understand the concerns this could raise in others. “Looks like a PS2 game” is a frequently used pejorative term nowadays so it’d take something really special to convince those people not to immediately write Wanted: Dead off. Soleil has used many modern game development techniques to deliver an experience that wouldn’t have been possible on that old hardware, while still holding true to a lot of the conventions from the time - which I think is a good way to summarise this game. The player uses swords and guns and grenades and chainsaws, they roll around and parry enemy attacks - which makes it a soulslike - there are boss fights, long, linear levels, tons of stylish kill animations, 80s music, minigames, weird character designs, and a lot of funny cutscenes. It might share many of these features with other games, but the combination is distinctly Soleil’s own. Wanted: Dead is basically an Extermination redux which is exactly what the world needs right now. But, since this game wouldn’t be filled with purchasable cosmetics or offer the publisher some means of selling the players’ personal information, Wanted: Dead’s budget was remarkably small, and that lack of funding is very apparent throughout the game. There are a slew of technical issues that are detrimental to the experience, then there are a few gameplay segments that would probably have been left out had the studio been playtesting more thoroughly, and then the game’s difficulty balancing could have benefitted from some extra time for refinement. With all that said, however, I don’t think this is a bad game, and the air of negativity surrounding it is completely unearned.

A while back I played Devil’s Third, the infamous WiiU game that was brutalised by professional reviewers at the time. I liked it quite a lot - the cutscenes made me laugh, the gameplay is solid, and Ivan is a character who deserved the trilogy that the developers had been dreaming of, but it was far from flawless. The developers’ inability to secure a publisher and target hardware put a big dent in Devil’s Third that I’m happy to overlook. I definitely attributed far more of Devil’s Third to Valhalla Game Studios than to Soleil which has ultimately proven to be incorrect. Devil’s Third and Wanted: Dead are very similar games but Valhalla had no hand in the latter. And now I’m questioning what Itagaki and co even did. Both games feature similar third person hack-n-slash elements, cover-shooting, party mechanics, a war criminal main character, and ambiguous world-ending stakes that are kind of trans-humany. In one game there’s synthetic humanoids, in the other there’s Joe Rogan clones. I think the mechanical differences favour Wanted: Dead overall, but I laughed a lot less. Whether this was due to having played Devil’s Third first and thus I was ready for the kind of wacky nonsense Wanted: Dead contained, or if the humour just doesn’t quite land as well is something I can’t really pin down. But at least the parry-counter system is cool.

As the player makes their way through Wanted: Dead’s linear levels they’ll frequently be presented with a new batch of enemies to fight. Pretty much all of these enemies are some form of humanoid, but the variety of guns and armour values they have force the player to interact with different enemy types in different ways. When entering the first level the player is shown the two guns Stone has been issued; not so subtly prompting them to try both out during the upcoming battle, which demonstrates to the player how the rifle and the handgun will be used. The rifle facilitates a cover-shooter gameplay style where the player can post up behind chest-high walls and play whack-a-mole with the enemies that are also hiding in cover. It’s the same cover-shooting we’ve all seen before but I was more than content to click on dudes throughout both playthroughs. If you wanna get spicy there is a range of other guns to grab from defeated enemies that include things like grenade launchers, shotguns, and LMGs. The selection isn’t gigantic, but I think every forageable weapon fulfilled a unique role, which is great. The handgun is more a component of the hack-n-slash gameplay. It’s mostly used as a parry: whenever an enemy’s attack shines a red danger indicator, pressing the handgun button interrupts the attack and stuns the enemy for a short period. There’s also a super the player can use to stun a bunch of enemies simultaneously and then watch as Stone dashes around to each stunned enemy, performing a brutal kill animation each time. The super is charged by landing melee swings with the sword, which was the primary weapon I used throughout the game. Stone only ever learned 2 combos when she was taught how to swing that sword, resulting in a melee combat system that is extremely simple. The sword has its own parry too, though, activating the parry can be done by simply mashing the block button until the parry triggers; no additional complexity or skill requirement is added. I don’t think the melee combat being simple is necessarily bad, but it means relying a lot on the enemies to offer interesting and exciting gameplay moments. Enemies that also need to be engaging to shoot at from across the room. It’s a fine line to be walking and I think Soleil just about pulls through in the end, but not without some severe compromises.

The enemies in Wanted: Dead belong to one of three factions, though the synthetics are exclusive to a single level, and the gangsters show up once more after their level concludes. The vast majority of the enemies belong to a mysterious private army or police force (?), they’re equipped with a wide range of guns, and generally have enough armour to take a few hits. The standard gunner enemies are surprisingly active: they move from cover to cover while attempting to flank, and if the player is close by they might charge in and have a kick. They’re solid at the very least, which also applies to the ninja enemies. These come in three colours and all of them have a lot of health. And the white ones have way too much health. Stone is also horrendously ill equipped to face off against another sword wielder and gets absolutely destroyed by a single mistake. Their inflated health pools also caused every battle that mixed gunners and ninjas to inevitably end with a handful of ninjas refusing to go down, which did get tiresome through the last few levels. There’s one section in a series of alleyways with like four white ninjas back to back that ends with a miniboss encounter against two black ninjas with no breaks or checkpoints at all. The runback to these final ninjas can take up to 10 full minutes because Stone refuses to open the door to their arena if any other enemy in the previous alleyway is still alive. The number of enemies in this alley doesn’t even change if the player chooses normal or “Japanese hard” difficulty, and “Japanese hard” difficulty isn’t even selectable until after the player finishes the game at least once. Putting aside the strange name, I couldn’t really figure out what about the game was altered by selecting this difficulty level. There’s still a black ninja in one of the earliest rooms in the first level, enemies with grenade launchers can still kill the player in a single hit, even the bosses seem to be around the same level of challenge. I hit a few troublesome areas on my first normal mode playthrough that I didn’t struggle with at all on the harder difficulty. Clearly I had learned how to play the game and understood how it wanted me to approach these challenges, but I went from spending minutes bashing my head against what seemed like a brick wall to breezing through effortlessly the second time around. The only real stopping point during my Japanese Hard playthrough was that ridiculous alleyway I mentioned before, and a couple of the boss fights.

There are five boss enemies in Wanted: Dead, with the spider tank making a repeat appearance toward the end of the game. The tank is the only boss that isn’t a melee only encounter so its reuse isn’t egregious or anything, and the rematch has a whole second tank skittering around. Unfortunately, it’s the weakest of a fairly disappointing showing of bosses overall. All the player really needs to do is kill the human enemies, take their explosives, and shoot them at the tank until it dies. They roam around the arena and shoot at the player almost lazily. The main cannon deals enough damage to kill Stone in one hit, and if the player happens to be standing in the tank’s path when it charges they can expect to die instantly too. So the fight is extremely easy but sometimes you get vaporised or flattened and have to start over. I like the tank’s visual design, though, and the battles against it are a cathartic flurry of audiovisual effects that manage to make the boss seem exciting in the moment. The rest of the fights are all against humanoids with a unique capability, almost exactly like Devil’s Third bosses. The first of these is the rebellious synthetic leader August, whose three phase encounter is gruelling when compared to the spider tanks. This fight takes place in an empty public swimming pool, which I think is a cool concept for a boss arena, and August’s first method of attack is to stand on a ledge above the pool and shoot a grenade launcher at the player while some regular synth enemies try to tie the player down. Killing most of the regular enemies or shooting August enough will cause the fight to transition into the second phase. I like that the fight is adaptable in this way since the player gets to decide whether they want to clear the synths out of the pool before August hops in himself. The second phase sees August switch to an assault rifle while patrolling the arena, which isn’t quite as interesting as the first phase, and his pinpoint accuracy is probably a bit much considering how long this fight can go on for. Eventually he puts the gun away and resorts to hand-to-hand attacks which would be trivial to overcome if the player had any bullets left. Things get weaker when it’s time to fight Kolchak. I’m a massive fan of invisible enemies that the player tracks via some environmental detail, so fighting this cloaking sniper on a rainy rooftop should’ve been awesome. Sadly, the fight is easily won by just waiting for Kolchak’s red warning trigger to appear and stunning her with the handgun. And she spends a lot of time cloaked looking for an opening to attack, but it’s possible to track her and land hits while she won’t fight back, pushing the fight to the second phase where the cloak starts to malfunction. Kolchak tries some new moves after this point but they aren’t any more effective than before. Then there’s the Mr. Holiday encounter. This guy has appeared a couple of times during the ending movies of some of the previous levels but I don’t really know him or get much of a sense of what he wants. He seems to be Richter’s second in command but what that means is difficult to discern. So it's a huge surprise that when the boss encounter begins there are two Mr. Holidays in the room. During the first phase both Holidays share a single health bar, and they play off of each other very well. One takes the melee role and the other hangs back and shoots. It’s a shockingly well-balanced encounter, but I have no idea what Holiday achieves by killing Stone. I do not understand what he’s talking about or why he “feels nothing”. The second phase is also a solid duel against an opponent with similar moves to the player. Holiday isn’t as flashy as the other bosses, but all in all I think this fight is pretty good. The final boss is Richter, who I guess is the main brain trying to take down Stone and her squad. He has a weird lightsaber and the power to summon a rainstorm, and he can heal too, but Richter isn’t an especially active boss. I found plenty of opportunities to slash at him a lot and he’d just sit there and take the hits. I also discovered that spamming the sword parry whenever he started his standard combo would give me a lot of successful parries which would drain Richter’s invisible posture bar. It isn’t an easy encounter and there wasn’t anything offensive going on or whatever, but the moment Richter fell into the darkness was hugely anticlimactic.

So that might have seemed like a spoiler but it definitely isn’t - the truly interesting part of Wanted: Dead’s narrative is trying to decipher what’s actually happening - which is why I’m going to talk about the game’s presentation first before we get stuck into the real meat here. Wanted: Dead looks counterintuitively cheap and expensive. The character models and textures are impressively detailed but the animation work doesn’t maintain the level of quality. The combat animations are great, and sometimes the movie animations are just as good, but other times the arm movements are strangely jerky and the faces seem overly wooden. I also think the lack of particles and screen effects cause a lot of the movies to look empty, like the characters are in some kind of vacuum. Fee Marie Zimmerman’s performance as Stone is mostly solid, but a lot of lines could’ve used another read. It’s tough to have so many different accents converge in a language that isn’t the writers’ first so some of the things Zimmerman has to say aren’t exactly friendly to her Swiss accent. The sound overall is genuinely really well done - there’s just these occasional hiccups in direction and implementation that stick out. Like, why are the gangster’s voice lines so strangely mixed? Why does the karaoke singing go on for the entirety of 99 Red Balloons? And the tonal whiplash I got from the karaoke segment had me in the ER. But then Herzog tells an awful joke in the elevator and the performance is perfect.

The game opens with blonde Hannah Stone in a tiny cell being recruited to the team by a mysterious red light. Things flash forward to the crew eating at a diner where the nearby TV reports on Dauer Synthetics’ stock price decline, as well as a report on Dauer’s violent response to protests in Baghdad. The footage on the TV during the protest report looks just like the Dauer building the crew are sent to at the end of the scene, so I initially thought the team were being sent to Baghdad, but they actually never leave Hong Kong. The whole opening scene is really strangely written. Lots of awkward lines back to back. The Dauer building the first level takes place in is being attacked by a mysterious force who are there to steal American bills. Why would they want this currency when they’re already equipped with unmarked guns and high end armour? And according to Doc, the soldiers sent in to steal the cash are untraceable. Who are these guys? What are they doing? It’s an intriguing premise - despite being kind of difficult to follow - but these questions are never answered. Instead, the crew are sent down to a park to deal with some troublesome Synthetics who are refusing to comply. This is where August is introduced, and instead of capturing or killing him, he manages to escape on a helicopter - with a little help from another Synthetic named October. The team takes October to be interrogated and learn a few things from her, and Doc makes his own discovery as well. October says her memories begin when she woke up in a bodybag, and the implants she has covering her body are primarily used as a means to punish insubordination. Stone had heard this “woke up in a bodybag” phrase before, and I think it’s probably the most pivotal part of the narrative overall. Dauer Synthetics’ business has been either reanimating corpses to be used as their “synthetic” workers, or they’ve been kidnapping and memory-wiping people instead. Stone seems to also be affected by whichever thing Dauer is doing which is shown in the 2D animated movies. These scenes don’t add much to the game for me; the artstyle shift is completely inconsequential and the stuff about Stone’s lost family doesn’t expand her motivation meaningfully - people don’t just do war crimes for no reason. If Dauer is reanimating dead people and selling them as “synthetic workers” secretly, then it would make sense to me that Richter and Mr. Holiday have been employed to stop Stone from figuring out what Dauer is doing, by force. The company is clearly powerful enough to do this - they run the police force that Stone and her crew of war criminal officers work for - but then how can the company’s stock price be in decline? If they are law enforcement, with a private army and private police forces and literal zombie slaves, wouldn’t they just subsume all other governments into the company and be the de facto authority? Why are they playing by the rules? And why would it matter if their police force discover the origins of Dauer’s synthetic workforce? This is like everybody’s dystopia. Nobody wins, not the company, not the public, not even the children.

When I decided what the thesis of this video was going to be, I did what I always do: I started writing and cutting and rewriting and recutting and hoping that eventually through persistence I’d be able to come to a satisfying conclusion. But this time I never had the epiphany that I was expecting to have. I created this document back in November, after first playing through the game in October. It’s now almost January as I finish writing this script and I have only just come to the realisation that I’ve been searching for. I had just finished editing out the stammering and poor line reads from the voiceover when I realised I had never read the About page on Soleil’s official website. Part way through the segment titled “Message”, below a picture of who I presume is Takayuki Kikuchi, there’s a smoking gun that answers all. “We… develop action games especially focused on the "good feeling when you press buttons" and the touch and feel sensation that is the primal appeal of computer games.” Wanted: Dead was designed to have good buttons. The player is primarily supposed to enjoy making their character do stuff, and the rest of the game is made to reinforce that philosophy. It’s so simple, and it’s so extremely obvious now. All the screen effects during combat that are totally absent during the movies, all the weird lines back to back, the narrative’s lack of coherence or a clear point, even the way some of the bosses are designed, it’s all secondary to ensuring that the player gets to enjoy doing cool stuff. And I’m here for it.

It’s nice to finally have an answer for why this game is the way it is, and while I enjoy the game for it’s quirkiness and fun gameplay, Wanted: Dead still has problems. The rhythm game sections are much longer than I think anyone would care for, that one alleyway is way more demanding than the rest of the game, and the narrative makes next to no sense at all. But it’s honest. And I’m happy to see that the Steam reviews have recognised the honesty. Soleil just likes PS2 games, and so do I. I like them so much, I’m going to be playing a real one for the next video.

The following is a transcript of a video review which can be viewed here: https://youtu.be/RdnLNoOkP3E

One of the worst crimes that can be committed in a tabletop gaming environment is murder - naturally - but powergaming is up there. Even the idea of disregarding flavour, immersion, and any other role-playing activity in order to exploit the game’s rules as efficiently as possible, often to the detriment of the others playing the game, can get people quite upset. I used to hear this stuff all the time back when I was attending 40K tournaments - despite those clearly being a competitive environment, and an unlikely place to find flavourful games where the Dark Angels player doesn’t have 37 Fenrisian Wolves on the table. But in more casual contexts - and especially in regards to tabletop RPGs - I can completely understand why aggressively optimising the rules of a game earns as much ire as it does. The primary objective of one of these games is to facilitate a collaborative story-telling adventure where the destination is tertiary to the journey at hand. Games like Dungeons & Dragons have rules to guide the players toward an objective, but they also require a Dungeon Master to participate who is at liberty to ignore those rules whenever they choose, since the point of the game isn’t to spend hours decoding some masterful puzzle or flicking through rule books with a dictionary on hand just in case, the point is to have fun with your friends. Unfortunately, people’s schedules don’t always allow everyone to play together on a whim but since these games have rules and were popular enough media properties on their own, adapting them into video games for the solo player was an instinctive substitution. Except this presented a bit of a dilemma: should the video game adapt the rules verbatim or should it instead try to adapt the spirit of the game? Whichever their choice, the subsequent video game would regularly divide fans. Bending the rules to favour a friendlier adventure for players would go over well with casual fans and beginners, whereas adhering strictly to the source material pleased the long-time players and the harcore audience. At the turn of the millennium, both groups had plenty of games to be excited about. As the 2000’s crept on, however, the closures of Black Isle Studios and Troika Games gave developer’s pause. Clearly these games weren’t selling well enough, and many big players in the RPG market switched their focus toward the larger customer base of casual and beginner players. Upon noticing the void this move left behind, German video game developer Radon Labs saw an opportunity to give the spreadsheet enthusiasts the game they wanted, and in 2008 Drakensang: The Dark Eye was released.

Drakensang is a relatively standard PC role-playing game, reminiscent of titles like Baldur’s Gate, Neverwinter Nights, and Icewind Dale. The player picks a class, they can find additional members to join the crew, all of these characters have a wide range of stats and equipment to upgrade, even the combat is similar - using a real-time with pause system, though Drakensang’s version is a bit unusual. There are quests, dungeons, boss fights, light puzzles, and even a coherent plot full of ancient prophecies and rebirthing gods. Narratively, Drakensang is doing nothing new, and many of the characters and environments adhere to the western fantasy standard. But these aren’t the reasons to play Drakensang. Unlike those games I mentioned earlier, Radon Labs did not create another game based on Dungeons & Dragons, and they had a particular audience in mind when designing much of their game. As a German company, the tabletop role-playing system the developers would’ve been most familiar with was The Dark Eye. It is an aesthetically similar game to Dungeons & Dragons, but there are a number of mechanical and philosophical differences that separate the two. While both have combat and conversation mechanics, Dungeons & Dragons is more focused on providing a robust combat experience, while The Dark Eye contains more tools to resolve disputes verbally. Talking with enemies is also incentivised by the game’s punishing combat system. Characters in The Dark Eye will never be strong enough to defeat an enemy in a single attack and being outnumbered is almost always a death sentence. These characteristics have been replicated well within Drakensang. Combat encounters can very suddenly spiral into defeat and many big fights can be avoided through stat checks and investigation. Conversation isn’t quite king - by no means is this Disco Elysium - but among the fantasy RPGs that Drakensang positioned itself, the player can achieve a lot more by investing in those conversational traits. That being said, Drakensang is not a one-to-one adaptation of The Dark Eye’s tabletop rules, and I’m unsure if that is necessarily a bad thing.

First published in 1984, The Dark Eye is a fantasy role-playing game originally created by Ulrich Kiesow. Kiesow had been working as a translator within his company Fantasy Productions, and was contracted to translate both Dungeons & Dragons and Tunnels & Trolls in 1983 before Kiesow embarked upon his own original project. The Dark Eye’s first edition sold very well throughout German and French speaking countries, as well as the Netherlands, and Italy and a second edition of Das Schwarze Auge would see release in 1988, followed by a third in 1993. The fourth edition of The Dark Eye was the first to be translated into English and it was that 2001 edition which formed the basis of the system present in Drakensang. Like many other tabletop RPGs, The Dark Eye makes use of dice, a character sheet filled with a variety of stats and other useful information, and a dungeon master - who is referred to as the “Highlord” which is fun. The Highlord guides the collaborative story the group is creating together, requesting players make Attribute tests whenever they attempt any actions, playing the role of most minor characters in the story, as well as occasionally fudging the rules here and there to ensure the players are enjoying themselves. There are 16 different Physical Talents, 8 Social Talents, 7 Nature Talents, 18 Lore Talents, a handful of Language Talents, and multiple pages of Artisan Talents that players may mix and match at their preference. Demonstrably, Kiesow wanted players to position their characters as experts in specific fields and to allow the Highlord opportunities to integrate that expertise into their campaigns. There are still plenty of Combat Talents, weapon proficiencies, magic capabilities and the like, but the idea that knowledge of popular board games, heraldry, or tattooing could be the key to progressing a situation is uniquely compelling, I think.

Maintaining this gameplay experience was always going to be difficult when adapting The Dark Eye to a video game form, and Radon Labs had to rearrange, remove, and refocus the game in order to make it work. Previous adaptations of tabletop RPGs were often centred heavily around the system’s combat and Drakensang follows that pattern. The Dark Eye’s combat system isn’t its main focus, but that doesn’t necessarily mean that the combat is underdeveloped or bad or anything. Most of the weapons and spells from the 4th edition rulebook are present in Drakensang, as well as a range of other magic spells and physical actions that aren’t part of the tabletop game’s base rules. I have to assume that all of the hit chance, parry chance, damage rolls, resist chance, and all of the other combat stages are handled the same since it looks like they are, but there aren’t any rolling dice to be seen. Since Drakensang puts such an emphasis on combat, the example professions from the rule book that wouldn’t grant the character any combat abilities aren’t present, but the number of classes the player can choose from at the beginning of the game is more than enough to overwhelm anyone. I’m sure any Explorer or Messenger players will be able to find something to enjoy amongst this list of professions anyway. Another significant change to The Dark Eye experience is how Drakensang confines the player’s actions. Tabletop RPGs are relatively cheap to produce and the grandiosity of a continent spanning campaign is extremely easy to implement; it’s just putting words on a page and letting the players’ minds fill in the gaps. Radon Labs couldn’t possibly account for this level of scope so their game limits the player’s ability to resolve all of its narrative conflicts. To me, this is acceptable, it would be immensely unreasonable to expect the scale to match, and the way things are implemented in Drakensang at least give the impression that the campaign’s Highlord just isn’t presenting many opportunities to use all of a player’s skills. A character might have a decent cooking skill but the Highlord never gives the players an opportunity to cook anything so the skill goes unused. Basically every tabletop adaptation is going to be this way, so Drakensang isn’t an outlier.

Up to this point, it doesn’t seem as though Radon Labs have made any big deviations from the norm during the development of Drakensang, and it’d be easy to see why their game doesn’t have the legacy of the games they were clearly inspired by. Other than the game’s rules being based in The Dark Eye, Drakensang’s most identifiable feature is its balance and difficulty. There’s a single difficulty level which has been meticulously constructed for the player to contend with throughout their adventure. There are a finite quantity of enemies in each of the different zones, and even within a single zone the player will find challenges they won’t immediately be able to overcome and they’d be better off trying something else first. A little ways in, a guy asked me to help clear some rats out of his basement, and I had been fighting some rats earlier, so, sure, it should be fine. What I didn’t know was the big rat at the bottom of the basement was designed to perfectly counter my team. I didn’t spend 24 hours fighting this boss, but there is 24 hours of footage between my first encounter with Mother Ratzinsky and her death. This kind of thing is pervasive throughout the whole game and I don’t recall any other game where the player has to drop out of a side quest part way through and return to finish it half a game later. Even encounters against normal enemies can force the player to follow a different thread for a while so they can power up a bit before pressing on. In a more narratively focused game I could imagine this constant interruption to be rather frustrating, so it’s fortunate that Drakensang’s story isn’t particularly special.

There is some narrative promise within this game, but I don’t think the story ever really amounts to anything worthwhile. It isn’t a bad story - things aren’t so bad that it detracts from the experience - but Drakensang’s narrative definitely leaves a lot to be desired. The game opens with the player receiving a letter from their friend Ardo. Ardo seems to have stumbled upon a shady conspiracy and, fearful for his life, asks for some muscle to come to Ferdock and back him up. So the player travels to Avestrue, a small village on the road to Ferdok. Avestrue acts as a sort of tutorial staging area, which is good because the Ferdok guards are refusing to allow anyone else to enter the town. There’s a serial killer currently at large and the guards are wary of travellers who may be in league with the killer. In Avestrue the player can meet Rhulana, Amazon warrior and potential party member, as well as Queen Salina and Arch Mage Rakorium, sponsors whose word would allow the player entry to Ferdok. Both Salina and Rakoirum are significant characters later on and I think the game does a respectable job introducing them. Salina’s task for the player involves ascending a nearby mountain to look for her boyfriend, Dranor, who seems to be making a deal with the scaly, green devil. This guy is weird. I got the impression that he was going to be the main villain, or at least a high ranking member of the evil faction’s army or something, and he kind of is, but also not really. He matters until he doesn’t. Once the player manages to gain entry to Ferdok, they discover that the letter arrived too late. Ardo has been murdered, and nobody has any idea who the murderer is. After following some information up, however, the player is able to determine who the murderer will be targeting next and the hunt begins. The killer makes their move and the player chases them throughout Ferdok’s sewers and alleyways before eventually cornering them in the city’s library. It turns out, the culprit is a noble, and he is using his wealth to fund a private militia whose purpose is to assassinate prospective chosen-ones, preventing them from being chosen, buying time for the other members of his cult to resurrect a dead dragon. At this point I was absolutely on-board with this narrative. There’s so much intrigue and potential, and even though there is a chosen-one story at play here, the way it had been handled up to this point was great. The last person the dragon cultists wanted to kill was this apprentice librarian; is she going to be the chosen-one? Would it be the player’s task to accompany the librarian to all of the different locations she needs to get to so she can prevent the return of the zombie dragons? Maybe she’s a fifth party member who can’t leave the team like the player character.
These possibilities are put on the backburner for a short while as the player is directed to the temple of Hesinde, the goddess of wisdom, since deonts of Hesinde are devout historians. They would likely have some information about what the chosen people were actually tasked to do. After helping clear the amoebas out of the temple’s library, the deonts are able to reassemble a magical, golden statue of the Dragon Oracle. The statue rises into the air and recounts the last time it was awoken. 78 years have passed since it was last assembled, and this is the tenth time the statue has been activated in total. The Oracle then names the player character as the next chosen-one and tells them to go out and collect a bunch of magical items without a clear purpose. This was… heartbreaking. All of the game’s potential just melted away so that my petty burglar character could save the world from evil wizards and immortal dragons. Her combat capabilities were nowhere near up to the task. Her whole skillset revolved around sneaking into a place, stealing something, and then sneaking out again. How could this character possibly defeat a dragon? The rest of the game tasks the player with completing a scavenger hunt before the evil dragon cultists can, and I can only be happy that the side quests are as good as they are. Choosing whether to side with a group of witches or a marauding band of inquisition forces, helping the townspeople of Tallon resist the goblin incursion that ends in a full-scale assault on the goblin camp with the town guards, or deciphering Aurelia’s alchemy recipe which went a direction I was not expecting it to go. This is a big game and I’ve only really scratched the surface with these examples. It’s certainly a shame that the main quest became so cliched and uninteresting, but there are a few hints toward the end of the game that suggest Radon Labs may have been running out of time.

In terms of presentation, Drakensang compares favourably to many of the blockbuster titles that were released alongside it in 2008. The character models are distinctive, the environments are lively, and the music is solid from front to back. Conversations with NPCs can be a little dry since Radon Labs didn’t bother with a complex facial animation rig and settled with mouth flapping and expressive body movements instead, which I think is a better choice for the time. This is bound to age better than those robotic automated conversations, in any case, but it is a bit impersonal. I also think the game’s palette is quite unique. The world is vivid, sunny, and warm, and there are colourful flowers everywhere. In the caves there’s always some moss or algae slathered over the rocky walls, or there’s a bunch of glowing mushrooms giving off a greenish light. I really like the way the fog layers are used too. Not only are they used to make the caves gloomier, with the air thick with steam and spores, but the fog is also tinted orange and used as haze to bathe rooms in sunlight, or a white fog washes out the terrain in the distance. It adds so much richness to the game’s environments, which are already impressively detailed. I think I should reiterate: Drakensang came out in 2008, these textures should not be this high res. Fallout 3 came out a month after Drakensang, and Bethesda spent almost half of Drakensang’s total budget on the Fallout licence alone. Radon Labs pulled off something truly incredible with the visual presentation. But then the game’s soundtrack kicks in. Yes, there’s a lot of strings and horns and it’s all very typical fantasy stuff, but it sometimes gets weird. I like it. It’s a shame that a lot of the voicework doesn’t quite hit the same highs as everything else. Some of these line deliveries don’t seem directed at all, which is odd considering just how few spoken lines there are. Characters will say the first text box aloud, and then nothing from then on. This works for and against the game. Some of the performances are really good so it’s a shame they talk so little, but then other performances are horrible, so at least the player doesn’t spend too long listening to the weaker performers. Similarly, the combat audio varies in quality. Sometimes the enemies sound great, the music swells and the fight is accentuated. And then there’s the fight against the wounded dragon. I spent a while trying to decide what this sounds like and I couldn’t come up with anything. Whatever this is supposed to be, it doesn’t invoke “dragon” in me. Which is strange because the dragon cry in the final movie is pretty good.

The player’s party can consist of no more than four characters: the player character, and up to three others who the player can meet as they progress through the world. Each character has a level and they earn experience points throughout their journey as is expected in any RPG. They also have a wide range of stats that influence their Base Values, Weapon Skills, Talents, Abilities, and Spells, but they do so in a way I was unfamiliar with. Instead of simply reaching the next level and being handed a bunch of skill points to assign, the player directly spends their Experience points on their stats, with the character’s level controlling the caps those stats can reach. So, for example, at character level 15 Gwendala the Elven Spellweaver can have a maximum of 19 spell levels in her Balm of Healing spell. What does that mean? This is about to get a bit hard to follow, and I can only apologise. A character must already be attuned to magic in order to learn to cast spells at all - there’s no way to force a character to learn magic if they didn’t start with magical capability. In order to learn Balm of Healing, the character must meet or surpass the requisite Cleverness, Intuition, and Charisma stats. They will also need a minimum of 10 Astral Energy to cast the spell. Okay. Balm of Healing restores 2D6 Vitality points (health) plus the spell modifier multiplied by five to the target. It may also remove up to the modifier number in Wounds from the same target, which is a mechanic we’ll get into later. The modifier is a number shown below the spell’s icon which the player can change at any time, though increasing the modifier also increases the cost to cast the spell. The maximum modifier is determined by the spell’s level. So with Balm of Healing using a modifier of 4, Gwendala must spend 14 Astral Energy to cast the spell, then 2 six sided dice are rolled, which returns an average result of 7, then the modifier of 4 is multiplied by 5 for 20, and the final effect is the target is healed 27 health on average. Fortunately, there aren’t modifiers on every spell and combat abilities don’t have them either, but those are a whole other mess of stat modifications and dice rolling. The big takeaway from all this is Drakensang is willing to tell the player everything. The player will know exactly what level they need to reach to pass a threshold, and they’ll know exactly what each spell will do and why. At the same time, there are so many other places to put points that the player will be swamped with options whenever they decide to level up. I don’t know how thorough Radon Labs were with adding Etiquette and Streetwise checks, but I did find Constitution checks and Alchemy checks in conversation which was cool. And the back half of the game was a breeze with high Perception, Dwarfnose, and Lock Picking talents, though they didn’t do much to alleviate the difficulty of the combat encounters.

Combat in Drakensang can be very interesting and exciting, but it can also be a frustrating slog. The game uses a real-time with pause combat system while simultaneously using a lot of turn-based features and mechanics hidden beneath the real-time stuff. The player is able to issue tasks to their party in real time; sending one character to battle a specific enemy, telling others to cast spells, use items, among other things, but those tasks aren’t just carried out instantly nor do they take a small period of real time to complete, they take combat rounds. Balm of Healing doesn’t take 3 seconds to cast, it takes 3 combat rounds. To me, this seemed really strange at first, but the deeper I got into the combat the more I understood why Radon Labs chose to handle combat in this way. Combat in The Dark Eye is a call-and-response type system; the attacker makes a to-hit roll, the defender chooses to make a dodge or a parry roll, then there’s a damage calculation roll, followed by any armour effects. If the units in combat weren’t synchronised to a global combat clock, these call-and-response dice rolls would be next to impossible to understand. Fights would all be moshpits where an orc could parry an attack from the flinching dwarf he just clobbered, and the player wouldn’t be able to react accordingly because the animations couldn’t possibly sync with the actions. It’d be like an autobattler with ridiculously complex rules, totally incomprehensible to a casual observer. Another consequence imposed on Drakensang’s combat by this is that the system can’t process area-of-effect spells. There needs to be time to display the call-and-response effects so a big explosion spell hitting multiple targets at once wouldn’t work. They did try to add one AOE spell, which is funny but functionally useless. If the enemies aren’t standing in exactly the right locations when this attack goes off then Forgrimm takes a few swings at nothing. Despite this, there are still many locations where enemies will swarm the player and there’s nothing that can really be done about it. Combine the large enemy populations with the lack of a taunting ability and you get some extremely irritating encounters. Enemies just love to rush the squishy backline wizard, though that was probably my fault for giving her a bow. There were a lot of cases where the number of enemies was just too high so I had no choice but to cheese my way through. Sometimes my method would involve hiding the wizard way in the back and bringing her into the battle after all of the enemies chose targets I liked, other times I’d take direct control and run the entire length of the countryside, hoping my teammates running behind me could hit the enemy whenever it turned. There aren’t too many encounters like this, but the worst one came right before that wounded dragon fight I mentioned before. While ascending the mountain toward the dragon’s lair, groups of harpies would spawn up ahead and path back down the hill toward the party. Harpies aren’t especially strong or healthy in Drakensang, but they have a special ability very few other enemies possess. Whenever a party member’s health reaches zero, they gain a Mortal Wound which prevents them from fighting. Mortal Wounds can be healed but only if the party is out of combat. Characters can also gain a Mortal Wound if they have 5 regular Wounds, even if they’re at full health. The player can use this mechanic to kill enemies with lots of health really quickly provided they have some means of dishing out Wounds. Harpies also apply Wounds in combat and man did I get unlucky a lot. On paper, I think this is a solid mechanic that makes sense if the enemy has a low chance to apply the Wound or the enemies that can apply Wounds are few in number, but a group of 8 to 10 harpies Wounding as often as they do is sadistic! But it comes so late in the playthrough that I expect most people who make it here are the ones who were always going to push on to the end.

Radon Labs was a German company and Drakensang basically runs in a proprietary engine from 2008, so technically things are on the decline. The game is very stubborn on startup - it often refuses to show the player the intro movie at all and constantly minimises whenever the player tries to click on the window. My method for resolving this was pretty simple, but I’m not sure if it’ll work for everybody or if I did some sort of miracle. Upon launching the game I’d click on the program window, hit alt and enter once to set the program to windowed mode, click the program window again, and then hit alt and enter again to go back to fullscreen. I had to do this every single time I launched the game, but it wasn’t a big deal. As far as other technical problems go, I think there were a few times where I saw the German text appear in a text-box, and I couldn’t resolve the farmhand hostage situation peacefully because one of the pigs the goblins wanted refused to move like the others. And there were the occasional instances where characters would just endlessly run into walls. And the skeleton cyclops fight is total bullshit but that’s not really relevant to this section. My biggest complaint about Drakensang is the strange distribution situation the game is in. Drakensang and the sequel are both for sale on Steam and GOG but not in Australia. All of the game’s original publishers are defunct and BigPoint only made and maintains the spin-off MMO, so it’s hard to say who’s even selling the game at this point. The only way I was able to get my copy was by buying a key from a third-party site, and as far as I can tell nobody who was even tangentially involved in the production of Drakensang is getting paid for it now.

I liked Drakensang for the most part. It’s an interesting system to play with, the presentation is tremendous, and there is so much to do. The game stumbles a bit toward the end, but the vast majority of the game is a solid experience. I think it’s worth playing if you’ve already exhausted those classic turn-of-the-millenium RPGs, though Baldur's Gate 3 is probably a better use of your money. That being said, this is probably one of the more guiltless pirates of your life.

Drakensang forced me to pay attention to it. I had to be alert to the next potential combat encounter and ready to act at all times. There are thousands of tiny decisions to make constantly, within and without the game’s combat scenarios, and I could easily imagine a perfect team exists on some long-forgotten spreadsheet somewhere. If the purpose of an art piece is to make the viewer think about it then Drakensang’s combat system alone is a work of art. The rest of the game is good, but the time I’ve spent thinking about particular arrangements of enemies far outweighs how long I thought about Avestrue’s golden wheat fields or how willing I was to transform some stranger into a toad because a witch told me to. The game penalises your Charisma stat if you smell bad so you need to keep soap on you in case you need to wash, but I’m too busy trying to concoct a way to kill this really big rat. I feel like I’ve just overcome one of the most granular video gaming experiences I’ve ever played and I did it all because a magic statue is actually a direct telephone line to a cyclops blacksmith who wants to retire from blacksmithing. I’m exhausted. I’m gonna go play something mindless to recharge.