So , after spending some time on the game I wanted to write this . Wanted do it for quite some time , but was too lazy .
Pretty fun game overall , unfortunately it's heavily unfinished and there are a plently of half assed things , I will make a short overview of them .
Firstly , exploration is ASS . Although there is aught to be found all over the world it's mostly consists of generic consumable/craft items that aren't worth a damn . Sometimes you can find equipment , but merchants always have items with much better stats . Despite that , I felt the urge to see what the world looked like , but needless to say that this feeling quickly wears off , and later it becomes annoying running back and forth stumbling upon the ever respawning monsters . Although the map doesn't look big , the world doesn't feel small , because of character's movement speed , big thanks for port crystals and eternal ferrystone .
Graphics are alright ( for a ported game ) the only thing that annoyed me was draw distance , it wasn't rare for me to see people appearing out of the air right in front of me . Soundtrack is mostly good , but there are not a lot of memorable compositions , but still I really liked some of them .
I want to refrain from commenting on the plot and story too much . It's the aspect where the rush of development striked the hardest , a lot of things lack detail . Grigori makes a drammatic appearance at the beggining , doesn't do shit until the end of the game , Julien appears to be involved in some shady business than gets involved in conflict with Mersedes , admitis that he was doing some moves , but no explanation provided on what did he do and how Mercedes found out . No explanation to salvation background and Elysion in general , the romance is half-assed in general . And personaly to me the whole cycle thing in the end seemed kinda random , almost like writters decided that they needed more implication to the story . To me dragon's dogma would've looked fine as a generic "The hero kills the dragon" story , but whatever .
Now to the combat , the meaty part of the game . This is such a massive section , that it will include several other aspects . One of the major problems with combat is bow dominance , but it's not that bows are overpowered by themselves , several factors contribute to this . First of all you MUST exploit enemy weakness , there is no way around it in this game , if you don't do that your damage will be heavily reduced , a lot of the enemies have weakspots in hard to reach places and either require you climbing on them or waiting for them to expose , while bow users can rain arrows at any moment from afar , putting themselves in a much less dangerous position than melee . Magic users are hampered by wonky aiming and significant delay ( casting ) before they can attack , bow users have almost zero delay between their attacks and manual aiming is very responsive . Secondly , it's easy to deal with flying enemies when you have access to ranged combat , much harder when you don't , another point scored towards archers . Third , magic users HAVE to utilize elemental weakness of the enemies ( see the point above ) which results in additional running to the tavern to change skills , this becomes much more annoying in BBI where you can only change skills with the help of Olra , and again bow users don't have to deal with this problem , their skills are "equip and forget" . And the last one , although not directly conserning bows , all classes that can use bows have the best mobility in the game , they can roll , double jump , cancel their actions , while other classes are much more limited in movement , this becomes especially noticeable when you are playing casters . The only thing casters and melee users can provide over archers is knockdown/stagger which is quite a big thing , but not big enough to compete with the advantages the bow provides .
The pawn system , I think the idea of it was interesting , but in the end I don't like how it works . Pawns just won't perfrom well , I've tried using the same vocations as the pawn , tried inclination potions , tried exploiting weaknesses as much as possible and I only achieved an OK performance . I've seen some amazing things pawns can do , but how people came to such results I don't know ( click spoiler for examples ) . I wouldn't call pawns useless , but it's sad to see them acting poorly when you know they can do it MUCH better .
Next thing is class balance , it's shit . The only classes that worth anything are : strider , ranger , assassin and fighter . Take a note how ALL of the bow users made it to the list . Some people might say "Lol faggot , my mystic knight instagibs death with stone forest , sorcerer is a walking aimbot machine of doom and magic archer is the king of BBI ". Well yeah , mystic knight and magic archer are pretty strong late game classes ( although I would say that even in the late game knight is weaker than archers in ranged combat and loses to the fighter in melee ) , but they are very gear and stat dependant and the amount of time you have to grind for them to become effective is pretty scary , while the classes listed above are strong from the beggining and are still good in the late game . About sorcerer , I honestly don't understand how can anybody enjoy magic in this game , because of the horrible fucking delayed casting ! You have to stand still for fucking eternity to cast one spell , even with wyrmking's ring and articulacy augment it still takes a lot of time and you are forced to stay there , praying for the enemies to not touch you, even if some random goblin sneezes on you , your spell will be interrupted , of course you can run around and spam holy bolt , but that's kidna lame , have you really chose a socerer to play a second rate aimbot archer ?
Now , why I listed strider , ranger , assassin and fighter ? Strider hands down is the best class in the game , to prove this I will first take a look at assassin and ranger . Assassin is good with daggers , his ability to combine them with shields and recieve both damage and speed boost is very strong , his masterful kill allows you to punish anything and everything as well as avoid any melee attack . But the assassin is not as good with bow and his sword skills are there mostly for fun factor as they are weaker than dagger analogs . Ranger is a one button hero , all you do is spam tenfold flurry , a very strong ability , but that's all that is to the ranger , he's also the weakest dagger user in the game . Now strider , strider is a menance with both bow and daggers , his only downside he can't snipe like assassin and ranger , but that doesn't mean shit . Fivefold flurry and downpour volley still hit for a lot of damage , if you equip the ring for halistorm volley you can even outdamage the ranger , you can also play with fracture dart to mess up enemies weak to fire . His skull splitter is one of the hardest hitting melee abilities in the game and with the ring it easily takes place in top 3 . Also strider is the best climber in the game as you get a significant boost to climbing speed by just selecting strider vocation . And fighter has his way mainly due to dragon's maw ability , thanks to it you get a lot of invulnerability frames , MASSIVE stagger/knockdown power ( can even easily drop gorecyclops to their knees ) , the damage isn't that great , but this thing has a pretty big radius , thanks to this move you can lock a lot of enemies and expose them to your party . Despite him not being a damage monster a fighter really has a lot of defense: he wears the heaviest armor in the game , dragon's maw alone makes you an invulnerable ventilator of doom , hindsight strike hits almost as hard ( if not harder ) as dragon's maw while also providing you with invulnerability and high stagger/knockdown power , you can also utilize perfect blocks and divine defense ( not recommended though ) to become a true juggernaut .
Some people might ask "Why does this matter , the game is so easy it doesn't matter what class you are playing" . Yeah unless you go to the BBI , that's where the shit gets serious . The enemies recieve MASSIVE boost to their defense , attack and health . If you beat Grigori and thought it was ok , than know that , on BBI every "boss" type enemy has more health , attack and defense than him . That's where you begin fighting for every bit of damage you can get and class imbalance really shows . Fortunately , people of Grancis invented rusted , AIDS infected weapons that make any enemy not immune to torpor a joke , so you can still make your way as long as you have enough damage to kill them .
P.S. Fuck Ur dragon . This is the most badly designed enemy in the whole fucking game . Pure melee classes are fucked , you can kill him as pure melee , but that's like pulling your eye out of it's socket through your ass with your broken arm . The fucking thing jumps around and spins in circles constantly making it hard for you to aim . And sometimes he flies to the tower where you can't even properly damage him and there is no way to make him go down except waiting and if you hide , he flies away forcing you to restart the fight . WHAT THE FUCK ?! What kind of idiot designed this shit ?! Talking about bad design , the retard that made golems ( both of them ) was surely desperately looking for a way to get analy raped by his boss and the game community .
Game of 2016 of course .
