Ulasan terkini oleh Space Pirate Yara

Disclaimer: My enjoyment of this game is held against the fact that I backed this game on kickstarter and have yet to receive my physical copy.

Wrathfinder is mechanically an improvement over Owlcat's first pathfinder computer game. You can move around in three dimensions, rotate the camera, and the map scale has taken a turn for the grand. You meet a dragon within moments of finishing your character sheet, and the game wastes no time showing you what's at stake before throwing you into the thick of it.

It's just a shame that the characters lack depth. Given that the story is more or less DOOM in a medieval fantasy setting instead of Mars, the characters don't need much backstory. You know why your party members are here, and usually you'll be able to figure out what makes them tick without putting much thought into it. Some of them have weird circumstances, but the hellmouth does its job of keeping the party from squabbling over their differences. Usually. One character gives you a pragmatic argument for not needlessly endangering some fledgling warriors that are otherwise going to get in over their heads, but then it turns out everything they said was a lie, and they're good at playing people. This is a GOOD START. Punching the player with a betrayal of trust is how you introduce an antagonist.

But then if you pull out your knives and show her how you deal with betrayal, she just gets to escape and plague you another day. It really sets the tone for what to expect out of the party: alignments really are the word of god here, and you have another party member trying to hide hers... while she's just casually mean to people for not conforming to the conventional beauty standards of a half-elf. Again, you don't have to think very hard about your entourage. There's not much to the antagonists, either: you are here to kill the demons, maybe hold hands with a demon, or become the demons. Likewise, the people with you have to make a choice as well, but your player-character is the one who has the most direct impact.

The other problem with Wrathfinder is the unnecessary amount of meat on your adversaries. I won't disparage a game for having an unwinnable boss fight that is clearly unwinnable when it's early-game and your adversary has 20 witch levels and 40 AC, but when that character has cutscene powers to stop you from disrupting her evil acolytes (effectively an "I win because I'm the GM and I say so"), it detracts from the fun. From that point onward, it's pretty much a guarantee that you'll run into monsters that you need to munchin your way to victory over. Spell Resistance is everywhere when you're dealing with high level things like devils, and sometimes you're just stuck with a foe that can only be beaten by moving your melee units into flanking position, tripping the target, and casting Evil Eye every turn to make them susceptible to being hit. And sure, it's something that happens when you've got a DM that puts their parties through the grinder, but it really kills the fun when everything comes to a halt because the last monster on the map refuses to perish but simply leaving the battle is not an option.

And sure, story mode exists, but if I'm going to do that, then why am I even bothering to play pathfinder? There is probably a medium that exists between "you are encouraged to optimize your party and make a power build" and "effortless steamroll," but the story just isn't grabbing me enough to put in the time to find it. On that subject, the devs have put a lot of work into giving you options for building your character. You have alternate flavors for every class, and many classes to choose from, up to and including several hybrids. You get mounts and you can armor your animal companions. You have archetypes that can cast with alternative stats. First Edition Pathfinder's greatest strength is just the sheer versatility you can give almost any class to build a unique character, the devs have done a great job of giving you those options, and that's before you even get into the mythic paths that determine how the story unfolds.

The Tirabades are pretty cool. I will always support a paladin that lacks the crusader zealotry and is nice to the rogue. Seelah and Sosiel are great, and this is coming from someone who usually goes out of her way to avoid interacting with divine characters. Really, almost all of the party members are cool, and you get some nice Shelyn and Desna themed stuff from this game, whereas the previous Owlcat pathfinder game favored Sarenrae and painted a poor image of Shelyn. You'll usually be in good company on your demon slaying quest, and if you aren't, you have other options for backup minions.

Really, it's a decent game. A lot of work went into it, and the fact that I never received something I dropped two hundred spacebux on (even two and a half years post-release) isn't the developers' fault... but the spyware might be. My problem is also that I came in here expecting there to be more than just demon-slaying. At the end of the day, I just can't bring myself to enjoy killing the demons, because it turns out I am the demons.

But even demons still get to dream.

There is a bit of a learning curve, but the feeling of riding by somebody and swinging a blade takes a long time to get old, and when it does, you learn to get off your horse and grab a polearm or a maul. Calradia is a pretty big place, but most of the people aren't very memorable. The only people who seem to have anything at all to talk about are the nobility, and even then they aren't very interesting unless they've drawn their swords. ("Must we dance again, Emir Tredian? You do recall how this ended the last few times, do you not? Oh, is that supposed to change now that you're no longer a Count?")

But that's all okay, because it's not just in the desert that nobody remembers your name. There's thousands of mountaineers, sea raiders, wild horsemen, and forest hillbillies just ripe for feathering, and when you tire of that, there's peasant levees, soldiers, and even a few kings as well. They're all a bunch of butt-wipes, just like actual royalty, but the game lets you get in on the same action.

You could very well call this game Sim Knight, if another company out there wasn't likely to get their lawyers ready in response. You control a knight, and ride around doing knight things: looting villages, looting bandits, putting criminals to the sword, rescuing villages, trading goods, delivering food to failing villages, selling brigands to the professional ransom-brokers, protecting trade caravans from banditos, banditing on the trade caravans, getting into tense hostage negotiations and screaming matches over the fate of some nameless farm girl with the cutest freckles before ultimately wrecking your glaive over some mounted kidnapper's neck. You even get to siege castles and storm the walls with your buddies. There's a bunch of different equipment loadouts for you and your troops, you can issue commands in real-time on the field of battle, or you can just have everyone charge because your squad of ninety knights is built to wreck everyone's face in on the field.

But most importantly, there's crossbows. <3

Crossbows are amazing and they can punch right through a blue-blood's platemail and while they don't work as well in the rain, that is FINE because crossbows are just so good when the weather's nice that there needs to be a time when you should switch to a different weapon. There are very few things more satisfying than sinking a crossbow bolt into a bunch of men-at-arms' helmets as they try to scale a staircase or a ladder to get into your house, but one of those things is having friends with you doing the same thing. Sure, you could be an archer instead of a crossbowman, but the amount of training you'd have to sink into Power Draw and Horse Archery to make that viable could be put into other things, like engineering, or surgery, or the ability to train twenty peasants into proper marksmen in a matter of days, because you're going to need replacements.

Sure, the game opens up with a "disclaimer" about how life is harder if you're a girl or a commoner, and that the world is a little bit sexist, and maybe there's a little bit of truth to that because not as many people want to fight under the command of some nameless wench when there's plenty of proper lords with banners to stand under, but that doesn't matter. 'Twas not by your own hand that you were given flesh, but what you choose to do with your life is what gives it meaning. Sure, some people'll make fun of you for grabbing the sword off some drunken lout that attacked you in the tavern, but it is by that sword that you can trounce these snot-nosed princelings in a duel in front of their sisters, their wives, their parents, and their children. Oh, they'll cry about how it's seen by the courts as a hot-headed thing to do, and they'll bear a grudge over getting slammed into the mud where they belong, but you get renown for doing so and that's all that matters.

By the bi, there's mods out the wazoo for this game, and even without mods you can still modify the base game because everything's in notepad. Does the viking conquest campaign make you miss having more skill points than you could possibly know what to do with? Just export your character, open up the notepad file, and give yourself whatever you need. Don't want to be limited to seven troops when you're storming bandit hideouts at a high level? Just find the number that controls the cap and raise it to, I'unno, fifteen? Tired of Calradia? There's people who've created entire maps with their own castles. Sick of men professing themselves as "your most ardent admirer" while your face is covered in the blood of their soldiers? There's a mod out there that allows you to elope with the daughter of some crappy nobleman and upset her entire family, just like in real life. But unlike real life, this actually gets the guys to stop trying to bark up the wrong tree.

Now if I could just find the jester that keeps sending letters to that dastard Harlaus about the stores of butter that are being slathered upon Olaf's chest, perhaps he would stop bringing his buddies over. Or... OR PERHAPS I COULD JUST GO TO PRAVEND WITH MY BUDDIES! We can waylay Count Margarine on the way!

Laggy. Controls not always responsive. Good variety of games to play, but if your resolution isn't amazing and your eyes aren't the best, you're gonna be zooming in and squinting at a lot of stuff while other players want you to hurry up. I tried to ask a mod for help in chat once and the cloud people reached out from my computer monitor shouting to CEASE YOUR INVESTIGATIONS AND JUST POST ABOUT GETTING BANNED FROM CHAT FOR BEING PRO-LGBT.

THE CLOUD PEOPLE DO NOT INVADE YOUR HOME THROUGH YOUR COMPUTER MONITORS, NOR DO THEY ASSUME CONTROL OF YOUR BODY BY ENTERING THROUGH THE NOSTRILS TO GAIN ACCESS TO THE BRAIN. CEASE YOUR INVESTIGATIONS AT ONCE.

First Impression Review: Save file is two hours and forty minutes in and I've only completed the first dungeon. That said, I've played the NES and GBA versions. Final Fantasy 2! If you're here and willing to spend 10bux on this, you either already know what you're getting into, or you're in for a rude awakening.

Final Fantasy II was originally a NES game, and I'm still surprised they managed to cram as much plot as they did onto the NES cart. The plot wasn't that in-depth, mind, but they still had the story on there. The story, by the bi, is basically Star Wars. Yes, Star Wars. All of it. Somehow the creators predicted even the sequel movies back in the early nineties when this game originally released on consoles. I don't know how they did it, but somehow they did it.

You play as a group of four war orphans when The Empire overruns a castle somewhere on... this single continent that somehow wraps around the entire world. Bad stuff happens and the kids try to run away, but The Black Horsemen have horses and aren't taking prisoners or letting children escape. Somehow everyone miraculously survives the game, but when you play through the first battle, it's demonstrating that one character is in the back row. The fight is over in a single turn in this version of the game. In previous versions, it took two turns because enemies couldn't target the back row until everyone in the front row had been defeated. In this version, as with most FF games using this combat style, characters in the back row merely take half damage from physical attacks.

This... is problematic. Most people are going to try to play the game traditionally, using their full party to the best of its ability. As kind as the game is to let those who've played it before know it's changing the rules, there's a bit of a problem with its take on the experience system. For those not in the know, FF2 uses a sort of proto-skyrim skill system. Attacking with swords raises your sword skill, strength, and accuracy. Using magic raises your MP and the stat that governs how effective you are at magic. Raise your levels with swords to attack more than once per turn. It's pretty neat stuff.

The problem is, to raise your Evasion levels (which is necessary in order to dodge attacks from enemies that get more than one attack), you need to be targeted by a lot of attacks. Like, an obscene number of attacks. An amount of potential incoming damage that you should not expect to find yourself facing if you try to end random battles quickly. Playing the game normally, everything should be fine through the first dungeon. The boss at the end, as well as the monster lurking in the treasure chest just beyond him, will be a challenge, but it's not impossible. It's the point where you start facing enemies with multiple attacks that you're going to get in trouble. I've yet to get that far myself as of this writing, since I'm only a few hours in and spent the last forty minutes of that 2:40 on my save file just going toe to toe with the enemy soldiers just hanging around Castle Town.

They still drop the Toad tome. I don't remember the Captain fleeing mid-battle on the NES version, but you can get the best spell in the game right after training in the first dungeon. The Toad spell is amazing in this game and it's part of why I love FF2 so much in spite of all its flaws. You can turn most enemies into a toad. You can turn boss units into toads. You can turn The Emperor into a toad! ...in the NES and GBA versions, anyway. I haven't tested that in this version.

Now, for all the love I give this game, it has its flaws, and those flaws are hard to miss. The encounter rate borders on suikoden IV-V levels of ridiculous, and it's only made worse by the designers placing a bunch of dummy rooms in each dungeon that contain nothing but an increased encounter rate and probably an ambush. And, just in case that wasn't frustrating enough, most of the chests you're going to find contain nothing significant. By the time you reach The Tower, or The Dragon Cave, you're likely to have run out of things to buy that aren't consumables, but you'll still find chests with negligible amounts of money in them. But, you've got to know what's inside, no?

At least you don't have to worry about the diminishing inventory space that made the NES game an exercise in travelling light for your expedition. This isn't the only Quality of Life improvement present in this version of the game, by the bi. You don't have to worry about your spell stats dropping when you use an attack, so feel free to let your magic-wielder attack every once in a while. Or often! Give your black mage some white magic! Spice things up a little bit! Heck, maybe even do what I do and just leave two of your starting characters dead and run the game solo with a little bit of everything! This game spoils you for overpowered character building options, but if you don't know what you're doing, it can be downright cruel.

If you're a beginner, spend some time in the starting room and get to know how your stats work. I assure you, you'll want to have your Evasion skill leveled up, not because it makes you nearly invincible, but because you'll be facing enemies that have life-drain on each attack that drains for a flat percentage of your health and heals themselves for every bit of damage they do to you, and other enemies just have insta-petrify if they can land a single hit.

My only real complaint so far is that they took out all the skeletons that used to be in the place where you rescue the townsfolk of Salamand. I get why they did it; it was some morbid imagery. But I miss the little stuff like that.

Oh, and I guess they probably fixed the bug that lets you turn the final boss into a toad. I'll complain about that too, unless I get that far and am still able to turn him into a toad. Then I'll take it back. Also, what the heck is up with Firion? I just noticed Firion is good at make-up. Is Firion trans? Is that why we can't switch Maria into the lead spot for the lamia seduction scene in any of the non-NES versions of this game? I mean, it's weird, you don't have to be trans to get seduced by a lamia, but most people who get seduced by lamias are either trans or furry, and Firion isn't the one who talks to beavers....

It's fun. Unbalanced, but fun. Actually, taking Balance out of the equation is probably what makes it fun. How many RTS games do you know where you only get three factions and there's not really much that sets them apart? The factions in this game have completely different playstyles, advantages, and disadvantages. Knights have good cavalry, but electricity and flyers can make their lives hell. Anything that isn't elven has access to siege equipment, with Dark Dwarves getting the cool stuff. You can be snake-people, plague-bearing abominations with hydras, Conan The Barbarians, minotaurs, Undead Humans, Knights, Humans-that-aren't-knights-or-barbarians (they get mages but are kind of boring), fey-cretins, grossly misinterpreted orcs (it says those units are kobolds and gnolls, but they do not look like it), and daemons for maximum edge in case DarkSpiderElves wasn't edgy enough.

Your hero unit can be of a race separate from the Faction you play as, and you can make Dumb things like a daemonic paladin, or a fey Dragonslayer, or you can play an archetype straight. It progresses like an RPG character, slowly growing in power as it wins fights. Advancement is simple enough to be done mid-battle, and if you're a trickster, you can use the lairs on maps that spawn NPCs that are hostile to everyone at regular intervals to farm EXP for you or your troops, or destroy them to release a Very Powerful Unit close to an enemy base.

The graphics are two dimensional, polished-up versions of the original game's sprites. So, they're dated. Not to the point that you should be unable to tell what you're looking at (in most cases), but enough to have that constant air of cheesiness about it. But the cheese is good! Most of the time, anyway.

The campaign is more RPG than RTS. You're sailing on a ship when a Portal To Hell opens up on some island, and it turns out something is trying to escape the portal in order to go wreak havoc upon The World, and for some reason it's your job to stop it. Bland stuff, nothing really groundbreaking in terms of plot, but it's fun for what it is. Just watch out for when the campaign randomly decides to throw a lvl 75 hero at you when you're barely lvl 20.

It's important to switch on Compatability mode on any computer that isn't a complete dinosaur, and maybe downgrade the version a bit to the last ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ release if you aren't digging the setup that got released here that is riddled with text popups about how your buildings are being converted that'll make you wonder if a thirteen-year-old modded this for the re-release. Easy enough fix with the proper files.

My only real criticism apart from some of the design oversights is that, if you want to play as a female, your only real options are humans or elves. No lizard women or daemon women, no zamby women, no plaguemonster women, no minot- wait not having minotauresses kinda makes sense. I've seen Kung Pow: cows are either OP or have a glaring weak point. There is no middle ground.

Vee's Rating: It's as good as any generic fantasy is going to be, but with knight-druidesses and their harems of dryad-chicks and crazy fiery salamanders and succubi. Good cartoon, dumb fun, would watch more of.

Who is Melody?

What is she trying to escape?

Where did she learn to fly?

Why does she fall sometimes despite her ability to fly?

Is she really a girl? What if she isn't?

Why does the protagonist wear such skimpy, skin-tight outfits?

Who let the bronies add mods? Why have they not been purged? HOW DID THEY ESCAPE?!

I have so many questions!

<Vee's Rating> It's pretty. I would tap the wrong button, break a chain, briefly turn greyscale and wear revealing clothes while jamming to my favourite tunes all over again just to be in Melody's company for just a little bit longer, but this tale has no ending. Melody can never truly escape. Not even death can save her.

She can never Regain Control.

I loved Disgaea when it was on PS2. That probably had more to do with my age and environment than anything, but... actually, I should start from the beginning.

Disgaea is a strategy-rpg from an era in which the market wasn't flooded with them. It was originally on the PS2 console, standing out among very few other titles of its time as a "niche" genre, and it came with a story that satirized anime and RPGs in general. You play as Prince Laharl, heir to the throne of The Netherworld who has just awakened from a two-year nap to find out that his father is dead and any of the vassals who aren't completely lazy have just up and split without a word. It is a story of betrayal, rampant theft of lesser demons' fortunes, mockery and defamation, and all the other fun stuff a childish cartoon character can get away with.

It is also a story partially told in an annoying high-pitched voice or three, which is one of the things that got me to never watch very much anime. I do love a good spoof movie though, and Disgaea fleshes out its characters a bit more than what I've come to expect from video games. But that might just be because video games since Disgaea's publishing just don't have a protagonist that isn't a blank slate very often.

There are countless ways to achieve an objective in a given battle. You might want to just murderize everything as quickly as possible, or chain up combos for bonus points, or destroy the coloured terrain for bonus points / damage potential, or just move on to the next floor without another thought. In Disgaea, you have *options.* Swords are the game-favoured option because this is an RPG, but axes get some much-needed love as well. But, with all the good things Disgaea has to offer, there are just as many things to make me hate it.

The repetition is painful. You're going to hear the same voice-clips every time a character attacks or uses a skill. When you use a skill, you're going to see the same lengthy animation that might cause slowdown depending on the particle effects. And then, just to make things as over-the-top and nonsensical as the story, the grind from one level to the next is obscene.

As a player, you are generally expected to be able to field ten units to a battle. But, you start under-equipped and the amount of kills needed to recruit units that aren't garbage-tier to fill party vacancies borders on ridiculous. And as your units get stronger, they unlock new character classes (which must also start at first level). And as you progress through the story, your party will need fresh (expensive) equipment upgrades.

Constantly.

As entertaining as the story is (and it gets a few genuine chuckles here and there), the story grinds to a halt every now and then because your party needs to catch up to the new enemies in terms of power.

And is it a decade after I first played this that I realize that this was the prototype model for "casual gaming." Sure, you might think you're hardcore because you've sunk in enough time to defeat the secret bosses and collect all the achievements, but at its core Disgaea is a game meant to be played casually. Battles only take a few minutes to get through, and you can save and heal up after each one. The story ties everything together to legitimize the game itself, but progressing through the story requires time spent slogging through maps you've already cleared for EXP. It's unnecessarily padded out, and even then it's more than plausible to finish the game at lvl 100. The secret content requires characters with several thousand levels under their belt though.

In the Steam version, you get Pleinair as soon as you start the game. She comes with a decent accessory and a weapon that costs roughly 2,000 (currency), and has a boost to her HIT and SPD stats that will make people who play the game drool. Also, bunny-bombs. Neat little addition.

Also, Etna has a new voice! Just in case Flonne's squealing wasn't annoying enough, now you have a pre-teen trying to be an edgy demon-girl instead of an actor who understood subtlety... but maybe subtlety didn't fit the theme of Disgaea? Somehow the Japanese voice-acting is less screechy, but I've yet to reach The Humans on this version.

Etna's story mode is also interesting, but the grind is not only worse but punctuated by starting at first level with only a few prinnies as backup. The story is shorter but the level advancement covers a much broader gap.

And then, just to screw with anyone who might want a go for nostalgia's sake, they took out that silly J-rock track that played in the original's fight with Maderas. I know it was a cheesy track, but it was good cheese.

But nostalgia's bad for you. Sometimes you gotta learn that lesson the hard way.

<Vee's Rating> Kung Fu Foxy With Big Boobs solves all your problems in-game but reminds you of why you wear clothes that don't draw attention to your chest every time you go out in public!

My parents said I should go out an make some friends. I came home with my hair dyed purple, and tied into a ponytail with the prettiest pink ribbon. Somehow dad was the only person who noticed it, and when he voiced his disapproval I hit him with a baseball bat. I hit him with a baseball bat six times! I guess you could say he had it coming.

Then the same thing happened when I booted up this game, but with an actual sword. And farting was involved.

Still haven't succeeded in catching the dragon.

Never played before, but know a bit about Second Edition D&D. Friend insisted I experience it, so I played.

Made a character. Fighter/Mage Male Half-Elf Multiclass. 3d6 in order, no "adjusting" stats because that isn't how rolling works. 78 total stat points, 09 strength, 14 intellect. Core Rules difficulty. No reloading after failing to scribe a spell.

The plot can be summed up as Everybody Wants You Dead: The Game. You live in a monastery and your wizard foster-father just starts freaking out one day and telling you to pack some stuff because we're GTFO-ing. Somehow a couple of extremely incompetent goons made it into the monastery despite the entrance fee being "you must donate a book worth A @#%&load of money," in order to kill you, for... a 200 gold bounty? Maybe lower? Whatever the case, they aren't getting a good return on their investment, mostly because their nonmagical daggers are flimsy.

So you leave, then Big Armored Guy shows up and kills Wizard Dad. Your little sister shows up to help you because it's boring in the monastery, but apparently Wizard Dad just doesn't care about her because he fully intended to leave her behind. Then you meet your replacement parents and learn that all the iron in the region is messed up somehow and it's probably your fault, because of... reasons? Oh, and more "assassins" try to kill you while the bounty notices they carry show a steady increase in price. None of these fights can be avoided by not telling the people trying to hunt you down what your name is. The option to wear a cowl and avoid people should exist, but whatever. The game must be close to twenty years old at this point, yeah? I'll cut 'em a little slack for that. Game / programming limitations and all that.

Throughout my journey in "The Sword Coast," I've encountered a female chicken that gets turned back into a male human, an old male hermit extolling "the joys of being a woman that one summer" when a wild surge hit him, a group of "amazons" who are really just female adventurers trying to murder you for the reward money, more chances to belittle female adventurers for looking so gosh-darned cute in their chainmail bikinis, a bard who tells women they belong in the kitchen making cupcakes, and a radfem who treats men as unnecessarily horribly as the men in the setting treat women. You also have the opportunity to tell one of the new characters "lololol make me a sandwich" in response to her saying she's having the time of her life adventuring.

The writing and setting are completely sexist, and the cast of companions is BORING. Except Minsc. Minsc is kind of hilarious, but once you get tired of the same few lines he gives out, he goes from "entertaining" to "we get it, you have a pet space hamster and that's half of the entire basis of your personality."

The only time most of the main cast ever speaks up is to react to reputation changes or comment on your surroundings. There's generally a line for certain characters referencing the fact that you're in a city, or you're in the woods, or you're in a dungeon. And sometimes two companions will interrupt a traveling session to fight to the death. Seriously. The only party members that even bother speaking about something else are the ones that were added in the Enhanced Edition, and the sexism from the old game is still visible in dialogues with Neera. And normally I'd probably say something about Neera being completely self-centered, manipulative and unlikeable, but 1) that also applies to a lot of other characters, and 2) she's a wild-mage. Wild mages are supposed to be chaotic, catty, and fun, and Neera is all of these things.

Dorn is single-minded in his obsession with vengeance against those who betrayed him, and if you take him on as a party member you don't really get the option not to ask about his powers and not get an answer when he forces dialogue, but... the writing is lazy elsewhere too. Also, what would you expect from a Blackguard? They're "evil but not chaotic paladins," so Dorn makes a lot of sense as a character.

The game just oozes magical items though. You get a magic belt almost as soon as you leave the monastery, the new characters come with their own magic weapons (with Neera's staff being a bit hazardous for her to wield in combat because it might be her that gets burned), some encounters just drop amazing weapons for such a low level party, but it looks like longswords and zweihanders are the favored weapon in this game, just like so many other RPGs. You can even grab a set of elven chainmail (read: armor that wizards can cast spells in without penalty) and magic rings that increase the amount of spells you can cast/prepare per day by a large amount. And if you've got a wild mage in the party, casting through Nahal's Reckless Dweomer with such a ring turns that character into a completely overpowered powerhouse.

Baldur's Gate is such an easy game once you know how the game interprets the 2nd Edition (Best Edition) ruleset that I wonder why there are easier difficulty settings than the one I chose. "Normal," which is apparently the default setting at character creation, penalizes the damage enemies do. It should be called "Easy," but there is also an "Easy" mode where enemies are penalized even further and player characters get a +6 bonus to all their rolls. And *then* there's "Story Mode," where the player's party literally cannot die. Ever. It reminds me of the DOOM difficulty setting known as "I Am A Wimp."

And yet, with all this rampant sexism and magical weirdness, so many reviews on here are complaining about the game being full of Social Justice because the expansion has a minor non-evil transgender cleric that can be encountered. Or there are complaints concerning "They Changed It, Now It ♥♥♥♥." Or that multiplayer doesn't work. But who plays a computer RPG for the multiplayer? Why is that even an option in the game? I thought multiplayer was what tabletop D&D and MMOs and Shooters were for. But whatever, obviously multiplayer Baldurs Gate appeals to somebody, or it wouldn't be in the game.

But, the interface is easy to make sense of. Not giving commands to the party when enemies appear isn't a suicidal tactical option because the AI generally knows how to handle itself. People with bows engage enemy units without input from the player long before said enemies can close in for melee. Melee characters move to engage nearby foes, and move on to the next foe when the one they're attacking gets hacked into chunks. Sometimes they get hung up on pathfinding, but telling them to attack the next target generally fixes that issue. And, for all my issues with the writing and the boring plot that was probably a lot more interesting in the late nineties (when RPGs weren't flooded with the "special snowflake protagonist who's descended from a god or a dragon or is Destined For Greatness that the player must customize from the ground up" archetype yet), it's a pretty solid game.

It's certainly a lot more entertaining than Neverwinter Nights, even if you do run into Mary Sues like Elminster, The Doctor, and Drizz't Dro'Urden. At least here you get the option to murder such characters in cold blood! And for what it's worth, the game also serves as sort of a history lesson in gaming culture.

This is the sort of video game that led to the birth of the kinds of people who threaten female video game developers in today's age, but it's also a sign of evolution in the industry regarding the treatment of female characters in RPGs. But, it's also evidence of stagnation in video game storytelling, because in all the time that's passed since the release of Baldur's Gate, the majority of RPG protagonists are so, so very bland because they follow the same cookie-cutter design process.

Baldur's Gate isn't really my kind of girl, but I've taken worse ones to bed.

Race The Sun is a fun game, but the story is kind of lame.

~Plot Spoilers Below~

You are James McCloud, an ace pilot of futuristic aircraft that is stranded on a planet of monstrous gigantic insectoids and humanoid settlers that are in the middle of being bombed by attacking forces. James is stranded because his son (from an inter-species relationship I guess??) got into a fight with his racing rival, and with a cry of "FALCOOOOON PUUUUUUNCH!" his starship was destroyed.

Fortunately, James finds a replacement very quickly thanks to the help of an eco-friendly scientist that has created a very fast spaceship, which McCloud needs in order to survive the harsh nights of this world because he hasn't had the chance to adapt to this new atmophere. The ship is fast, but its weakness is that it relies on solar energy. Further complicating matters, James McCloud has yet to completely adapt to the planet's atmosphere, thus he must Race The Sun if he has any chance of surviving for long enough to be transported to the next stage of the F-Zero Grand Prix.

The ship can be customized with several decals and augmentations. The augmentations allow James to Drive Faster, Jump, Obtain power-ups from further away, Warp several meters directly upward to avoid a collision, and store more instances of the jumping / collision-deterring power-ups. The decals are cosmetic, but you can pretend they make you go faster. There are also portals into worlds unknown on this planet: some lead to space, others lead to Underland, computer motherboards, or other trippy places for a mushroom samba experience like no other.

Just watch out for crumbling buildings, mutant caterpillars and combat frogs, and drone airstrikes from the black queen's empire.

<Vee's Rating> This is the best crossover of Star Fox, F-Zero, and Battletoads that I have ever played <3