Well, I reached chapter 4 tonight and I thought I'd share my impressions of the game so far.
The highpoint of the game are clearly the visuals. It's been a while since I played a game that looked as gorgeous as this. It’s got a pretty unique visual style, it’s very polished, has a lot of detail and it shows it has been made with a lot of care. I really love the visuals and I’d love to see more games done with this style. If I were to nitpick something, maybe it would be that the characters sometimes contrast too much with the environment but it’s just a very minor grievance, irrelevant. And probably the fact that at the camps it’s hard to distinguish the buildings you can interact with.
Let’s start nitpicking now the combat. I don’t get it. On paper it sounds like a good system. I always loathed the fact that in most of the games you could have units at the verge of death that would perform the same as if they were at full health, making tactics outside of the focusing and picking them one by one subpar. This game tries to fight that making the strength of your character, the damage he can deliver, equal to his hit points, and to give your characters a layer of defense they also have an armor stat, independent from the strength. This system is good to move the game away from the focusing one character part and moving it to one where it’s a lot more important weakening all your foes so they don’t deal too much damage to you. But outside that I don’t really understand the combat, and I think it’s because it lacks a bit of tuning. Most of the time (if not all) it’s better to ignore the armor and go straight for the health pool with your heavy hitters , so you can cut your enemies effectiveness in half, if you even botter trying to reduce your enemy’s armor so your weakest characters can deal some damage, chances are the enemy will go instead straight for the strength, leaving you weaker and rendering that armor advantage you got virtually useless. I’m far from being a good player, but I had no problems whatseoever with the fights going full berseker, distributing the damage, mind you. I think the combat has a good philosophy but is flawed without some tuning, making, for one, armor a bit more relevant.
Outside of the combat we have some micromanagement of our party, in the form of supplies and number of members, but this is largely irrelevant. It’s very barebones and seems nigh impossible to fail at this part of the game. The other part of the game comes managing the events that will pop up during your travel, à la King of Dragon Pass. These are well done in the sense that they add a lot to the atmosphere of the game, you are constantly trying to make the best decision for your party, and you can lose one of your characters just by making the wrong call, or losing a number of your followers. Unfortunately they aren’t very fleshed out most of the time and it will end up feeling like a gamble, where you don’t really have any control on the outcame. Sometimes you’ll want to make a question which will be a decision in itself, so you have to roll the dice with the sparse information they give you.
The same happens with dialogues and the main events of the game. You don’t really have any choices to inquire and get some more information, leaving the consequences to a simple gamble (and there are some stupid consequences, like the one mentioned by some posters of the fire archer).
The story itself is quite nice. You aren’t told everything and you’re left instead trying to figure some things on your own. This adds to the general atmosphere of the game which is the other strong point of the game. The events that develop during the game, the decisions you have to make, all add to the sense of despair that gives the game from the very beginning, where things start wrong and keep going worse. This is where the consequences of our events add to the atmosphere, making your losses seem worse than they really are. On the other hand, the choices and consequences were heavily marketed and it fails at that regard. You can’t alter the storyline in any way, which is a fucking shame since the way the game is managed it has the perfect structure to make it posible. Sure, you can lose a minor character, but who cares, they aren’t even fleshed out, you don’t get to really know anyone outside of a pair of questions.
It might seem like I’m not enjoying the game but I’m certainly am, I like the visuals, I like the story, I like the feeling of uncertainity and the gaming part it’s fun, if too simple for it’s own good. It has a lot of flaws but the potential for a better game is there.
Also, fuck, that turned out longer than I expected.
