It's hard for me to complain too much about my issues (glacial combat speed, massive RNG influence, questionable class balance) because I still mostly had a good time with this game. Early on it's a multilayered resource management game; proper attack placement and spell management is necessary both to avoid falling victim to attrition, and to make sure you don't spend so much money on healing that you can't afford the next set of gear. Once your party becomes strong (and rich) enough to break this dynamic, it shifts into a globe-trotting dungeoneering adventure more focused on labyrinthine dungeons, trying to blow through encounters as quickly as possible and not falling prey to that one encounter that can stunlock your entire party if it feels like it. It’s satisfying to realise that you aren’t actually in as much danger as you used to be, that your fighter can hit multiple times for some reason and blast any enemy into low orbit when they feel like it, and that there’s nothing stopping you stuffing 99 potions in your back pocket to make your white mage really sad for the rest of the game. The stripped-back presentation and story lets these mechanics bring your own personal triumphs and failures to the forefront as the driving narrative. Even something as simple as watching one of your party members hit level-ups a bit slower than everyone else can call back to that one time where they got instakilled or stunned for eight turns in a row three dungeons ago.

While I didn’t find the game incredibly engaging once the earlier parts were over since the combat itself never gets any more interesting (or faster), it's still hard not to respect it. Almost everything weird, dissatisfying or ‘loose’ makes a whole lot of sense if you consider there’s a good chance it’d be one of the first RPGs you played if you had it back in the day, and was likely designed around that idea. The fact that I was measurably underleveled despite fighting everything I saw is uniquely interesting if considering that failure could have been intended in its design - losing characters and running back to revive them means gaining more experience on everyone else in the process. And while it’s not a particularly hard game - speaking as someone who *was* measurably underleveled - a lot of the friction it threatens is probably far more present for someone playing an RPG for the first time. While I can’t say if the whole ‘built for new players’ assumption is actually true or not, operating under it makes the game come off as extremely confident in how it can make itself approachable without compromising the experience it's trying to provide. It’s a beginner-friendly game built to be able to onboard people into a simple RPG system, but it’s still a heavily player-driven adventure with a lot of room for failure and discovery.

It's been a journey of give and take: whenever I was really in the flow, it always managed to find a way to snap me out; and whenever I was losing my grip, it always found a way to yank me back in. Every great aspect of the game had its evil antagonistic clone that wasn't *equally* bad, but powerful enough to hurt the game's stronger points. Each great and charming character obscured by a slurry of aggravating witnesses, with humour that at a moment's notice can swing between genuinely funny and aggravating to even mash through. The great drama, spectable and flow of the trials broken by how abruptly they can grind to a halt when they demand the use of details from earlier conversations that have absolutely no record in the moment. And the compelling stories, themes and character arcs numbed by all my problems dragging me out of the experience as they grew harder to ignore.

I'm happy to concede that some of this stems from my own personal problems. I'm not incredibly attentive and my memory isn't very good, so a lot of the details I forgot might have been easier to keep track of for others. For similar reasons I felt like I had to push through most of the cases in one day, which naturally led to a lot of fatigue especially in the longer cases. Problems that started out feeling small but only got larger and more gnashing as I pushed through, to the point where even as I was watching the (probably really good) climax to the trilogy, I couldn't shake my resulting lack of investment and the feeling that I only finished it up out of obligation more than anything else. All that said, I did have more fun with the games than I'm probably letting on - I think the fact that I cleared three of them despite my brain's impressive resistance to everything these games expect from you speaks for itself.

I was a bit hesistant to post this considering most of it is dedicated to me talking about how challenging I found the silly lawyer games on a highly personal level but I don't think it holds any less 'merit' just because of that. We can try to ignore and talk around it but ultimately our own personalities and preferences are going to affect how we view and engage with anything, and that goes as much for my highly-personal musings as much as somebody else's ostensibly 'objective' review. Besides, I think stupid people deserve a voice as well <3

At risk of beating a dead horse, I think the weakest part of Path of Radiance is easily its relatively low difficulty. To preface, this is from the perspective of a series veteran (“awakening babies” get to call ourselves vets now, how lovely) with a very intimate understanding of what’s ‘good’ in these games, but I started playing with 35% increased enemy growths, later bumped it to 55% and I still felt like I was cruising through most of the mid to lategame chapters. A lot of those chapters lack any sort of pressure to threaten your strong units or to push you to move faster (the latter camp usually being enemy thieves that a good mount can easily reach) and boil down to being very sluggish ‘fields with enemies’ that let you tackle them as risk-free as you want. Combined with how high growths are and how BEXP lets you blitz even further ahead of the curve and I think most of the game lacks bite even when the enemies are boosted to the point where they border on unfair. It has a lot of interesting things going on in theory - side objectives for BEXP, forges being limited to one per chapter, some cool gimmick chapters late on (CH22 is just a pokemon strength puzzle and I kinda love it) - but the game never has quite enough friction to bring out its own potential.

But the draw of PoR mainly comes from the strength of its writing. The majority of the character writing is very realistically grounded in the game’s settings and situations. Every support and base conversation is lovingly woven to bring out subtleties of the cast’s personalities, worldviews, personal struggles, dynamics, their growth or lack thereof. Their personalities are strong but not exaggerated (for the most part) and the interactions are full of little remarks or conversations that feel unexpectedly resonant or meaningful. It’s a lovely cast that’s very difficult not to fall for. While the story itself has a large focus on Fantasy Racism and does stumble a little into its trappings (primarily its tendency to categorise all Kilvans in one particular way), its angle towards it feels very carefully-written and used in a way that attempts to earnestly explore attitudes towards prejudice. It uses its depictions to present the importance of uprooting systemic oppression and breaking the self-perpetuating cultures of hatred that it brings, and how vital it is to do so despite how much of a Herculean task it is in reality. It all further feeds into a broader theme held up by scenes beyond how it presents discrimination - how understanding and righting past wrongs is vital to be able to truly move forward and make meaningful change or growth. It’s the *honesty* of all its explorations, more than anything, that I found so unexpectedly disarming.

It caught me off-guard with how much I ended up liking it, but it’s really easy to see why it’s so beloved. If you don’t mind it being slightly defanged on the strategy end, it’s a lovely, warm and charming game that’s surprisingly confident in its writing.