To clarify, with "not THAT well written" I mean it's not the best writing in any game evahr by a mile. I still thinks it's good mind you, but unless you think overly verbose worldbuilding is the be-all end-all of quality, I wouldn't barely even call it top tier.
I started off quite well. The setting is unique enough (especially for CRPGs, which tend to be utterly generic in these aspects) and it's not every game you play a grey tattooed (supposedly, the graphics and art do a shite job on conveying that) zombie chatting away with a floating skull. You are amnesiac however, but even the sun has spots of shite on it.
I also liked the fairly subversive mood it started up with. Most zombies are just lurching around (again, supposedly they're a helping hand, but I never really saw them do anything) and you don't really gain much from killing them. You can, of course, but the focus overall is on dialogue and storytelling, with the dialogues themselves almost seeming like a puzzle. Holy shit, it's like the CRPGs managed to take a step forward in 30 goddamn years of stagnation!
After getting out of the mausoleum though, the goodwill I had just started pouring out of every vein. Suddenly I was in "generic impossibly rough fantasy village #10000000000" and the plot just fucking stopped. I'm serious, from getting out of the Mausoleum and meeting Pharod is a third of teh game with nothing happening! There's no plot progressions whatsoever! I guess you meet a companion and can learn some backstory in a fairly tedious (although the writing was strong enough to actually make it good) "repeat the same dialogue option x10 my WIS is 19 *****". But that's about it. Meanwhile you're constantly assaulted by a neverending stream of suicidal thugs who apparently think they've got nothing better to do than attack the only armed people in sight. They don't even attack the merchant, just the seven foot undead zombie ************ with an axe bigger than his head. I guess you're just too swole to control and they got provoked.
Following the meeting with Pharod the game actually start getting good, like really good, like "holy moly this really is something!" Sadly, this streak of genuinely fantastic writing (the slow revelation of your past incarnation and your history with your companion is brilliantly done. Although it begs the question why they show such devotion to you when you're such a complete ****, but whatever, it's fine) comes to a such a schreeching halt after the meeting with Ravel I wonder if the lead writer either died, or was fired and someone else took over, because oh my Christ it got terrible.
So after the infamous meeting with Ravel (and also the fairly banal and uninteresting question that isn't really what the game is about), we're teleported into the middle of some fuckoff desert town while Ravel get's killed by some villain we've never seen before. The narrative yet again comes to a screeching halt as we must complete five boring and stupid bitchquests before the asshole NPCs will even allow us to continue the story, and that when things start to get really retarded.
Apparently this "resistance movement" will just accept any asshole to just come in, immediatly hand him five seemingly important bitchquests (with no supervision) and when he's done, just hand him the key to the cellar in the fucking Inn which leads to a dungeon leading to a prison? What the fuck is that? Then after the absolutely worst segment in the game (anyone who can say the game doesn't force you into combat can suck a fat cock here), you finally meet him! Yes, him! The man you've been searching for for the past five hours! The dude himself! THE GUYS WHO MIGHT FINALLY maybe give some vague directions about where you're meant to go next...oh...no...
What follows is storywise definitely the dumbest part of the game. It's so obvious the budget ran short and they had to edit with a fucking meat cleaver, but it's still so awful I can't really believe people let the game get away with it.
So the angel says "oh I don't know shit", aww gee whiz thanks ravel you old ****. So Trias just send you to some other dude who might know something, so you just step though two portal and you're insantly there, atleast Trias can teleport me where I actually need to be. So I talk to him AND THE FUCKER DOESN'T KNOW ANYTHING EITHER! Ok, fine, it's a really obscure thing I need to find, plus he's atleast a modestly funny character, so I can forgive him. he tells me to talk to a pile of skulls that might know the location AND THEY DON'T FUCKING KNOW EITHER! RRRRAAAAAAAAUUUUUUSSSSSS! WHAT THE FUCK IS THIS?!
So yeah, the skulls are just fucking clueless, instead they're like "oh hey you know that guy you talked to, did he give you his surname? No? Oh, well you see, it's trias The Betrayer, yeah, he does that a lot." So I go back AGAIN to Trias occupying some town with chaotic shit I really don't care about whatsoever, so I whoop his ass, and finally, after like fifteen hours of meaningless wankery and filler the plot can continue. Well there's some bollocking to do first in the Mausoleum, but it's actually related to the plot so I don't mind it too much.
Then we get to the ending, and while it does resolve the story in the most generic way possible, unlike most video games it actually is a resolution, amazing.
I'm sorry for this being such a rant, but the last third of the story is just so unbelievably terrible for a game that gets this much praise for its writing, and to add to that, there's many more flaws as well.
The dialogue is way too verbose. it's not even "flowery", like Shakespeare monologues, but just overly complicated and awkward to read and doesn't really seem like something people would actually say. I also wish they'd adopted some form of other descriptive prose than "generic nerdy DM", adopt some beautiful goddamn language ya sods.
Oh, and the alignment system is so unbelievably terrible it's impressive they even tried crowbaring it into the games story. Turning "the eternal struggle" into some retarded "order vs chaos", where people can literally be described as good, neutral or evil. It's not even relevant to the main narrative so i don't even know why they bothered.
I don't want to end on a too negative note, so let me just say when the game is good, it's goddamn excellent. It's way of interweaving bit-by-bit of unchronological backstory is both mysterious and compelling. And I was genuinely hooked for a good fifteen hours between Pharod and leaving Ravel, and not many games manage to hook me like that. As it stands I probably even would call it the best written RPG played (it would be rivaled by the Witcher games, if only they had better resolutions and overall character arcs) and it is almost top tier. But the flaws just seem incredibly overlooked, and it really doesn't hold a candle to Silent Hill 2 or games of that caliber. Still glad I played it, though.
I started off quite well. The setting is unique enough (especially for CRPGs, which tend to be utterly generic in these aspects) and it's not every game you play a grey tattooed (supposedly, the graphics and art do a shite job on conveying that) zombie chatting away with a floating skull. You are amnesiac however, but even the sun has spots of shite on it.
I also liked the fairly subversive mood it started up with. Most zombies are just lurching around (again, supposedly they're a helping hand, but I never really saw them do anything) and you don't really gain much from killing them. You can, of course, but the focus overall is on dialogue and storytelling, with the dialogues themselves almost seeming like a puzzle. Holy shit, it's like the CRPGs managed to take a step forward in 30 goddamn years of stagnation!
After getting out of the mausoleum though, the goodwill I had just started pouring out of every vein. Suddenly I was in "generic impossibly rough fantasy village #10000000000" and the plot just fucking stopped. I'm serious, from getting out of the Mausoleum and meeting Pharod is a third of teh game with nothing happening! There's no plot progressions whatsoever! I guess you meet a companion and can learn some backstory in a fairly tedious (although the writing was strong enough to actually make it good) "repeat the same dialogue option x10 my WIS is 19 *****". But that's about it. Meanwhile you're constantly assaulted by a neverending stream of suicidal thugs who apparently think they've got nothing better to do than attack the only armed people in sight. They don't even attack the merchant, just the seven foot undead zombie ************ with an axe bigger than his head. I guess you're just too swole to control and they got provoked.
Following the meeting with Pharod the game actually start getting good, like really good, like "holy moly this really is something!" Sadly, this streak of genuinely fantastic writing (the slow revelation of your past incarnation and your history with your companion is brilliantly done. Although it begs the question why they show such devotion to you when you're such a complete ****, but whatever, it's fine) comes to a such a schreeching halt after the meeting with Ravel I wonder if the lead writer either died, or was fired and someone else took over, because oh my Christ it got terrible.
So after the infamous meeting with Ravel (and also the fairly banal and uninteresting question that isn't really what the game is about), we're teleported into the middle of some fuckoff desert town while Ravel get's killed by some villain we've never seen before. The narrative yet again comes to a screeching halt as we must complete five boring and stupid bitchquests before the asshole NPCs will even allow us to continue the story, and that when things start to get really retarded.
Apparently this "resistance movement" will just accept any asshole to just come in, immediatly hand him five seemingly important bitchquests (with no supervision) and when he's done, just hand him the key to the cellar in the fucking Inn which leads to a dungeon leading to a prison? What the fuck is that? Then after the absolutely worst segment in the game (anyone who can say the game doesn't force you into combat can suck a fat cock here), you finally meet him! Yes, him! The man you've been searching for for the past five hours! The dude himself! THE GUYS WHO MIGHT FINALLY maybe give some vague directions about where you're meant to go next...oh...no...
What follows is storywise definitely the dumbest part of the game. It's so obvious the budget ran short and they had to edit with a fucking meat cleaver, but it's still so awful I can't really believe people let the game get away with it.
So the angel says "oh I don't know shit", aww gee whiz thanks ravel you old ****. So Trias just send you to some other dude who might know something, so you just step though two portal and you're insantly there, atleast Trias can teleport me where I actually need to be. So I talk to him AND THE FUCKER DOESN'T KNOW ANYTHING EITHER! Ok, fine, it's a really obscure thing I need to find, plus he's atleast a modestly funny character, so I can forgive him. he tells me to talk to a pile of skulls that might know the location AND THEY DON'T FUCKING KNOW EITHER! RRRRAAAAAAAAUUUUUUSSSSSS! WHAT THE FUCK IS THIS?!
So yeah, the skulls are just fucking clueless, instead they're like "oh hey you know that guy you talked to, did he give you his surname? No? Oh, well you see, it's trias The Betrayer, yeah, he does that a lot." So I go back AGAIN to Trias occupying some town with chaotic shit I really don't care about whatsoever, so I whoop his ass, and finally, after like fifteen hours of meaningless wankery and filler the plot can continue. Well there's some bollocking to do first in the Mausoleum, but it's actually related to the plot so I don't mind it too much.
Then we get to the ending, and while it does resolve the story in the most generic way possible, unlike most video games it actually is a resolution, amazing.
I'm sorry for this being such a rant, but the last third of the story is just so unbelievably terrible for a game that gets this much praise for its writing, and to add to that, there's many more flaws as well.
The dialogue is way too verbose. it's not even "flowery", like Shakespeare monologues, but just overly complicated and awkward to read and doesn't really seem like something people would actually say. I also wish they'd adopted some form of other descriptive prose than "generic nerdy DM", adopt some beautiful goddamn language ya sods.
Oh, and the alignment system is so unbelievably terrible it's impressive they even tried crowbaring it into the games story. Turning "the eternal struggle" into some retarded "order vs chaos", where people can literally be described as good, neutral or evil. It's not even relevant to the main narrative so i don't even know why they bothered.
I don't want to end on a too negative note, so let me just say when the game is good, it's goddamn excellent. It's way of interweaving bit-by-bit of unchronological backstory is both mysterious and compelling. And I was genuinely hooked for a good fifteen hours between Pharod and leaving Ravel, and not many games manage to hook me like that. As it stands I probably even would call it the best written RPG played (it would be rivaled by the Witcher games, if only they had better resolutions and overall character arcs) and it is almost top tier. But the flaws just seem incredibly overlooked, and it really doesn't hold a candle to Silent Hill 2 or games of that caliber. Still glad I played it, though.
