My oh my. That review is just begging to be deconstructed.
the first NPC you meet will be Morte, a floating obnoxious skull who can't shut up. He'll fill you in on the basic and vague elements of the plot and provide some amusing lines (which aren't so amusing anymore after he becomes useless as a fighter half-way through the game).
Um. Yeah. Morte. "Useless as a fighter". Except for being essentially the perfect tank. Right.
After a bit of dialog (that'll take you at least twenty freakin' minutes to traverse if you're thinking about the responses you want to give)
Here he's referring to the initial dialogue with Morte, and this actually hints that he -did- play with at least the original Restoration Pack that restores Morte's more complex opening dialoue, cause without it or my UB, his initial dialogue is pretty linear. Either that, or he's a complete moron. Cause even the more complex dialogue doesn't take "twenty freakin' minutes", the bare bones dialogue you get with the original game shouldn't take you five.
Spell effects, while pretty, are flamboyant and fill up nearly the whole damn screen, some also tend to pause the game and force you to glare at an agonizingly slow spell effect that gets old after you've been forced to sit through it through the tenth time.
Alright, fair enough, yeah, sometimes I'd stop using certain spells just to avoid the spell effects after having seen (and liked 'em) a dozen times. Course, the NVidia graphics problems may have had a lot to do with that too.
To add more to the hatred, Planescape is incredibly linear. You'll be going through areas as the story guides you, and there's usually no deviation. This means you're going to be stuck in some areas for a good portion of the game (the Dead Nations can kiss my ass).
Uh, it's kinda weird to bitch about linearity and then end up cursing an area of the game that -can be skipped altogether because this is a part of the game that ain't linear-. And cripes, it's not like it's hard to get out of there.
Planescape's developers at Black Isle must have noticed that it's pointless to be anything other than a mage (the quest to undergo training as a mage is one of the most unbelievably atrocious and horrendous fetch quests in the history of ANY RPG)
I'm seriously tempted to post the Captain Hyperbole pic here, but I'll save the space. I kinda liked the quest, actually. It was written particularly well, and it had the whole Miyagi "Wax on, wax off" "Why the hell are you having me do these pointless tasks, oh, now I get it" feel to it, which was kinda cool. And if he really hates it, well, he -can- become a mage via about three other trainers in the game without any sidequests, but then he'd just have to do it later.
Dak'kon also has the only bit of backstory that is actually fully fleshed out an resolved with the Nameless One
Translation: I was too stupid and patting myself on the back for hating this game to actually ask Grace about Morte being a mimir, which would've unlocked that whole "actually fully fleshed out" backstory of his.
You see, the balancing in Planescape is atrocious. I found myself getting butchered by the same boss over and over (Trias) because of his incessant use of the cheapest spell ever created. With a single cast of Bladestorm, he could effectively kill a good quarter of my party.
Compare this to the last boss who is total cake, and you have a whole lot of moments where you wonder what the developers were doing.
Sometimes it feels like the enemies the developers intended to be cannon fodder instead come out as impossible road blocks, whereas the major battles with the plot's most pivotal characters tend to be incredibly easy.
Okay, this totally doesn't make sense. He thinks Trias was supposed to be -cannon fodder-? It is true that TO was too easy though.
Actually, overall I can't blame him for not liking PS:T's combat, though I hope I have improved it at least somewhat (the "your party can run five to eight times faster than anything in the game" thing was just whacked). But "Trias is too hard, waaah"... make up yer mind, buddy. I'm not about to bitch about the only decent combat challenge in the game, and even then I don't think he was that hard. I do wonder if he just skipped doing all the quests in Curst that weaken Trias, in which case, he's just an idiot.
Torment feels like it's all over the place when it comes to difficulty.
I disagree. Unmodded, it was pretty much all too easy.
Improving your actual usage of weaponry is restricted to isolated and hard to find trainers. Sometimes these bastards will only teach single paths of weaponry, and since being a mage is the only plausible option, it's a pain in the ass to scrounge around for people late game trying to improve your skill with daggers so that the Nameless One will cut people deeper while swinging his little butter knife around gayly.
Flat out bullshit. There's no weapon trainer in the game that doesn't train all weapon types, though some will train all skills better than others. And the best trainer in the game is frankly almost -too- accessible, and makes all future trainers pretty pointless. Seriously, I would've rather had the five point trainer guy in Curst, cause as it is, you wind up not getting to train five points in anything until you come -back- to Sigil, at which point the game's almost done. Anyway. His bitch here is just completely wrong.
The stupidity of bitching about a non-existent spell (Entangle) has already been pointed out. Well done.
Most of this stuff isn't too obvious, although all of it is dialog oriented. You don't get more or less evil for attacking random people or other species on the street,
Wrong. It sure does. Maybe not in -all- cases, but in quite a few it does.
and it isn't effected when you steal junk.
True. Would've been cool if it had, but oh well. Take away what he was wrong about in the first part of the sentence, and would this have been a reason to bitch all by itself?
What makes this so stupid is that if you snap their neck you become more evil, if you just kill them in normal combat without speaking to them at all or without them being hostile, nothing happens. Nada. What's more evil? Attempting to kill someone after you realize they might call the guards on you, or attempting to kill someone just because they happened to be walking around? Madness!
He's wrong -again-, you do not get more evil for snapping their necks in dialogue. It's certainly valid to feel that you -should- get an evil alignment hit in both cases, but what he's bitching about is an inconsistency that isn't there.
I found characters getting stuck behind things all the time, buildings would cover up characters and sometimes I'd search for long ass times just trying to find where the Nameless One had another attack of amnesia and decided to shamble off.
Really?
Really? Wow. Simple-ass interface > Reviewer.
I can't complain about Torment's sound. It's okay enough
And he then proceeds to complain long and obnoxiously about it. I think he's smoking crack here... PS:T is an audio feast compared to virtually every other game out there.
Maybe we should just chuck the complexity and hardcore gameplay of the venerable Gold Box titles.
Er. Dude? I've been replaying 'em, and while I do much prefer turn-based combat, frankly, the gold box games weren't all that complex. Fireball everything until you can cast Delayed Blast Fireball, then do that. That covers PoR-CotAB and SotSB. Pools of Darkness gets a -little- more interesting than that in maybe two or three small areas, but that's about it.
In his "Cons", he -again- bitches about "too many worthless PC's". Considering he considers Morte to be "worthless", that's pretty idiotic. It was also kinda funny when he says: "Quite frankly, the only NPCs you'll ever need are Dak'kon, Morte, Nordom, Fall-From-Grace and Annah." Oh, -only- those? Cause that's "only", like, over 70% of the available NPC's, and enough to fill out the party.
"Poor character development"? No, moron, you just didn't -find- it. "Sucky soundtrack"? Kiss my ass.
My opinion of the review: This guy got pissy about some legitimate gripes (like combat) and decided he was -going- to hate the game, and just started to make up all sorts of complete bullshit to defend that position. Pretty lame.
Qwinn
