Regalia: Of Men and Monarchs - Tanks seriously suck

This is another generic kickstarter game. Tactical TBS game, "comedic" storyline, pathetic main character, it basically checks every generic criteria for a kickstarter game these days. What makes this different from the others is that its actually fun to play. I was in awe at how fun this actually turned out to be. When I saw the trailer for this game I thought I was watching something from Wakfu, a tactical TBS MMO. The artstyle was similar and combat looked similar. Then it went into detail of everything else the game had to offer. Town building, choose your own adventure quests, personal bonds, multiple party members with unique skills, and a whole bunch of shit. I was hooked in and gave it a try right away.

Before we get into the details of the game we need to talk about the story and the main character. What is up with the sudden influx of loser protagonists. You start the game as Kay, a whiny punching bag loser who ends up being the heir of the House of Loren, the next in line to be king. You along with your two sisters, the younger Elaine who is a giant bubbly airhead and the older Gwendolyn, the grouchy haughty sister who is probably the only competent one of the family. She is basically in charge. Then there is Griffith the family servant/bodyguard who is all about justice, honor, and all that garbage. If this was another game he'd be the stereotypical main character. I know people want to avoid being generic heroic manly protagonists but now that there are a lot of loser protagonists it isn't very unique anymore. Either way as you progress the game the characters all grow. Kay actually isn't that bad compared to the beginning. The only issue I have with the main cast is you don't really see Elaine or Gwendolyn do much. They don't help you in combat and they're only around doing behind the scenes stuff. You don't even get to raise personal bonds with them. I'm not talking about incest or other weird shit but siblings definitely don't get along all the time.

What the hell is a personal bond. They are basically the social links from Persona. Every character has their own schedule at where they will be and what they will be doing. You can look up the calendar to see if they are available to hang out or they are away on leave or on a break. Spending time with someone will take an entire day. Since there is a time limit in the game as well as a set schedule, you should try and plan out in advance what you are doing. Monday I'll talk with Griffith, Tuesday I'll talk to Theo, Wednesday I'll hang out with Haksun. Then I'll go dungeon crawling on Thursday for 12 days. Shit like that. There are over a dozen people you are able to bond with and each person has 5 levels to their personal bond. Acquaintance, Buddy, Friend, Confidante, Admirer. Each level requires bond exp gained by spending time with them, picking the right choices in adventures or events. For example choosing to loot dead bodies during an event will drop your personal bond with several characters. These bonds all give bonuses depending on the person. Party member bonds will unlock skill morphs and skill traits. Personal bond with NPCs will usually give a bonus like extra DLC, Dilac the currency for the kingdom, gained from all sources to allowing the crafting of better gear. They will also unlock skill perks. This is a very good way to improve your team's fighting prowess. Your only gear is a weapon and 2 relics and leveling up adds small stat boosts. Each level will unlock a skill perk slot. Skill morphs change the effect of the skill in some way, usually for the better. They can take from 1 to 4 perk slots to use. While skill perks are just stat increases like damage boost, bonus accuracy, and like skill morphs also take anywhere from 1 to 9 slots. You'll end up with a max slot/level of 20 so pick and choose wisely what you want.

Outside personal bond you also have to manage your kingdom. Usually through the form of completing kingdom quests. You are given the time limit of two months to complete 5-7 kingdom quests. These can be done in any way you like. Constructing buildings is a kingdom quest, as is building bonds with many people. Crafting, fishing, you name it. Then there is the dungeons. Outside of the kingdom are a wide variety of dungeons. These take days to travel to and clearing out the dungeon will usually take a week or more. Inside the dungeon you have little action blocks you can progress through. A sword block means its a fight, an exclamation point is a choose your own adventure section, two speech bubbles is a rest area where you can resurrect fallen teammates. You must progress through the dungeon in order from block to block. If your teammate dies inside a dungeon they cannot be used again until you find a rest area. You cannot backtrack to a previous block so if you had to go though a rest area to another and someone died after then you're fucked. Hopefully your others can carry the slack. However the game is lenient, you can restart a battle with no penalty if you fuck up. Dungeons also have varying difficulty, from easy to moderate to difficult. Dungeons also need to be cleared in order like the dungeon blocks. You cannot do the dungeon behind the ones in front of you until you fully clear it. So the later dungeons in the far corners of the map are the hardest while the ones immediate to the castle are the easiest. However that is not the case as sometimes you find moderate level dungeons locked behind difficult ones. The game is well balanced if not a little easy near the end. Start off you might find yourself dying all the time and trying to get over the hump from easy to moderate dungeons will take awhile. But as soon as I unlocked the blacksmith and got a few bonds for skill perks it really started snowballing in power and I had no more problems with the game. You will still die if you fuck around and mess up. Its not walk in the park but you really shouldn't have any problems if you're min maxing your characters.

Combat is tactical turn based strategy. There really isn't much to say about it. There are a bunch of monsters they attack you, you move around the map in little cells and attack them and you win. You can bring up to 6 party members with you in a party and deploy 4 in a single battle. You can check the elements of enemies or skills to see who you should bring or replace for certain fights. A lot of ranged guys sniping you down? Don't bring fucker tanks, send in the assassins and destroy them. Bunch of fire trolls? Don't bring Aliss shes full fire, bring in Theo and have him rain ice on them since they have no ice resistance and will die in two hits. You might be thinking, what only four people at once in a single battle thats so little. Think about it, Final Fantasy Tactics only allowed you four to five people at a single battle too and everyone was fine with it. Each character comes with 5 skills that can be morphed in some way. The final one is always an ultimate with a long cooldown and cost authority points. Each turn you gain an authority point that can be saved and use for ultimates or used for a second turn, letting you move in kill someone and get out with an assassin or needing the extra turn to kill an opponent at low health. Its very flexible and is part of why the combat is so fun. Every character you have in unique, not just in personality, but their roles all differ from each other.

Kay - He is probably the strongest character in the game. He is the only healer. At the start he may feel weak. but once you get his skill morphs in he's the most powerful character. He has command, which can either Shield an ally for 20% of their health or Mark an enemy preventing the target from dodging. This should be morphed asap to ignore line of sight letting you heal allies while hiding behind walls and other safe spots. There is no way to heal in the game other than gaining shields which are permanent. He has a pistol shot and a basic slash attack, pretty garbage. Then he has the banner which gives all characters a 30% chance on the start of their turn to gain empower which is a 25% damage boost. With skill morph that chance becomes 100%. This thing should be dropped whenever its off cooldown and is the single strongest buff in the game. His ultimate is a 60% shield, and when morphed becomes 100% and reset all cooldown on the target to 0.

Griffith - The tank. Pure physical damage. He is slow, his attacks are weak, all he does is single target damage and he has a long range single target taunt. There is really no point using him after the initial few stages as he gets completely overshadowed by everyone. He does get a charge that lets him run in quicker but he just dies because he can't kill the enemy fast enough before he gets killed. His ultimate is even more trash. Its basically an execute letting you do bonus damage on targets below 40% health on a single target. Just no.

Signy - The assassin character. Shes probably my favorite character and one of the strongest. At first she ends up dying really quickly but later on her dodge gets so high that she becomes tankier than a tank as well as having the mobility and damage of an assassin. Her basic attack is a leap attack that does 60% of your weapon damage. It looks really weak at first until you realize that the leap hits all adjacent cells next to her. When morphed lets you ignore line of sight letting you hop over walls to assassinate targets and pounce out when done. Its both a strong mobility move and a good AoE move. Whirlwind does 90% lightning damage to all adjacent and diagonal cells next to her and apply sundered. Lowering their defense by 25%. Empower is a self buff that boosts damage and movement speed. When skill morphed this skill doesn't take a turn when you cast it so you can empower run in pounce into a pack of enemies, whirlwind, then pounce out. Savage roar does pure AoE damage, ignoring shields and causes enemies to panic. This forces them to run away. Her ultimate does 4 high damage hits to random enemies within a huge AoE. Its a good AoE attack and if the target is alone, as very powerful single target attack. Great debuffs, great damage, great AoE, great mobility, best overall character.

Aliss - Fire mage. Shes not amazing but she does have one skill that can make or break her character. She suffers from severe accuracy issues and until you have skill perks to boost up her accuracy you'll find her weak as shit. Her basic attack is a fireball that chains to nearby targets. This will also mark them causing them to take bonus fire damage from Aliss. Its a very weak single target nuke for 60% of attack but once you can start chaining two three and even four enemies at once the damage adds up really fast. Inferno is a big 3x3 cell aoe burst but the main power comes from blazing barrier. Its a firewall you can put down that when enemies walk though take 50% of your attack in damage. Since AI in this game can be stupid you can strategically place it so all the enemies must walk though the wall from end to end to get to you and you can watch them walk through the wall go "oh shit I'm on fire, then walk backwards and burn themselves to death one by one. Its broken beyond fuck and the only reason I use her. She has a fire shield that reflects damage for a turn and a summon for an ult thats meh.

Levant - Another tank. I hate tanks in tactical TBS games. My strategy is always to kill before you get killed. He's better than Griffith defensive wise but honestly what is the point of a tank. He can leap around the battlefield with his skill and he takes up 4 cells meaning he gets stuck in narrow passageways and move at the pace of a snail. He sets up walls and his ultimate is a full map one turn silence. I would call him the worst character in the game if he didn't have slightly more utility than Griffith. He does shit for damage though. Avoid.

Theo - Ice mage vampire. He has the best mobility in the game in that he can teleport anywhere within range of his movement squares. His basic attack has long reach and deals pretty significant single target ice damage that applies Victimized. Batswarm is a weak AoE that applies Blind. Captivating Gaze is a single target nuke that applies Silence. Seeing a trend here? Pure harvest does 50% + 40% for each debuff on the target in pure damage to everyone on all adjacent cells next to him. Can be skill morphed to be 60% damage per debuff. This is fucking disgusting damage. But the weakness is he has to be next to the opponent and he's squishy as shit. If your team has a lot of debuffs you can easily blow up someone in a single shot with the skill. His ultimate sucks though as it picks one random effect and applies it to every enemy in the battle. Basically letting you use Levant's ultimate if you really wanted to. Overall solid character.

Diego - Physical damage archer. His damage isn't too bad and he really needs to stand at max range to gain overconfidence from his main attack. Depending on the distance you get more overconfidence, up to 6. His other skills will do effects based on how much overconfidence he has. He has a strong low and poison but neither are very powerful effects. He's really not that bad but is overshadowed by the two mages and the other ranged character.

Grenn - Stealthy assassin character. Why pick him if Signy exists. Really what is he good for? Almost nothing. He can stealth and his basic attack applies poison but poison is really annoying against you but really useless against enemies because they die too fast for the poison ticks to do much. He has a bunch of debuffs that do no damage so there really is no point in using him over Signy. Pretty shitty.

Esther - Engineer character. She's odd but powerful. You can drop turrets that can tank and do damage. Set them to self destruct for big AoE damage and stun. Her basic "attack" is tinker which lets you buff an ally or buff your turret. She gets a stun grenade for big AoE damage and push back. And when I mean big I mean biggest AoE in the game. Her penetrating round attack hits an entire line with unlimited range for 150% physical damage. 50% less for each target. It looks strong until you realize you rarely hit more than one target in a line. Thats where skill morph comes in and changes it to a single target sniper shot dealing 250% damage. Thats stronger than Griffith's ultimate and can be used every other turn with unlimited range. Usually one shotting enemies. What the fuck. Her ultimate is the aeon clock that stops time and lets her move around and do shit without ending her turn. Pretty crazy strong. She is only available if you side with Shedu in diplomacy.

Henrietta - Lordemar's representative. I picked Shedu so I can't get her.

Mifune - Samurai Dwarf tank. Fuck not another tank. Tanks suck ass. He moves slow he hits for no damage and he is a pure piece of garbage. Every turn he gains a Laido stack and each Laido stack lets him perform an attack. This can be saved up an unleased all in one turn for pitiful damage since he is a tank. Don't pick him. Only available if you side with The Empire.

Valen - Pirate elf prince. Alfheimr's representative and probably better than Mifune but I don't know because I can't get him.

These are your party members. They are all pretty unique and you can build them in whatever way you want. Make them tanky with perks, boost their damage, their move speed, go full sniping team. You can beat the game with any strategy you want except mass tanks. I hate tanks.

There are a few issues to this game though, a few bugs here and there and the diplomacy options being completely garbage. Diplomacy lets pick an ally between two different nations and you get 4 chances per alliance. You need to ally with one faction at least 3 times to unlock the character but you really have no idea who you are unlocking, who your allies really are and why you are allying with them. It felt added on for the sake of adding it in and does nothing to help the game. The other party members and NPCs you get don't interact with the main story because you are able to avoid picking them up if you want to by not triggering their event. Which means its just the four of you throughout the whole game and the rest of the people are just there when battle happens. It also doesn't expand on Elaine and Gwendolyn. Voice acting is a little off sometimes for some characters but overall pretty good. There are a few bugs that lock up the game in battle I've encountered but not really replicated. It makes you restart the battle and thats when you find out the drop rates are RNG. If you don't get good gear you can never go back and farm the dungeon again. You have to craft at the blacksmith but the best items are found.

As you can tell, after typing all this shit that I really like this game. I was looking for a game with diverse classes and tactical TBS and I stumbled almost accidentally onto this gem. Unfortunately the game was released without full content and the developers have said they will patch the game after release. They also said the game will take around 30 hours to play and I finished my play through in about 20 hours but I've only done around 70% of the dungeons and missing a bunch of personal bonds. Once I go back and finish them it should be around 30 hours, which is more than you can say about other shitty kickstarter games. If you like tactical TBS games do not miss this one. Its filled to the brim with fun.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WFQmu5HlTJY

Torment:Tides of Numenera - BILLIONS OF YEARS!

I have not played Planescape Torment. I just need to get that out there and anyone that played or is planning on playing this game should probably stop comparing these two games. Its a spiritual successor, its not the same game, and its never going to live up to its predecessor. The biggest problem people have with this game is its not Planescape Torment. The game is based off the Numenera tabletop game universe, which takes place BILLIONS OF YEARS into the future. Instead of Planescape Torment's "What can change a nature of a man?" its instead "How much does one life matter?" This theme unfortunately makes zero sense and we'll get into that later. Its a narrative driven game where you can talk your way out of any battle if you are good enough at it. This also means combat is the biggest shit stain on this game and anytime you fail a skill check you want to restart because sitting through combat makes you want to jump in front of a truck. Yes its one of these type of games.

Lets look at the universe of Numenera for a second. This game takes place "a billion" years into the future. We need to stop and think about this for a second. A billion may sound like a small number when you say it out loud. But this is an astronomical number in life and evolution. The earth itself is only about 5 billions years old and life started only 3.5 billions years ago. Life evolved from single celled organisms to land life in 3 billions years. Within 200 million years they evolved from amphibians on land into dinosaurs. These lived for several hundred millions of years before going extinct. It took 66 million years from the time of dinosaurs to the time of humans. Humans only evolved 200 thousand years ago. Human civilization only begun 10 thousand years ago. You're telling me billions of years into the future, everyone is still human and look exactly like the people today? People still live in mud houses on the side of a cliff and everyone has the same moral standards as people today? That architecture and design still look the same as today? They tried to explain it all by saying its currently the ninth world as in 8 great civilizations before the one in the current game have come and gone and currently everyone is living in a medieval like civilization. What the fuck? This basically is a medival fantasy game that uses "technology" instead of magic. It uses Authur Clarke's famous third law, "Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic." Instead of shooting fireballs you're shooting esoteric bolts. Instead of casting heal you use innervate which channels esotery into their bodies and cleans them of wounds.

Now we have the billions of years rant out of the system we can start looking at the world of Numenera. The world of built on the ruins of ancient civilizations. Every now and then you can click on an object and shit will happen. Sometimes nothing will happen and most often than not, it is completely useless. Why have all this cool stuff around when they do absolutely nothing. In fact the main storyline has almost nothing to do with any of the technology around. The main story is short and garbage but there are plenty of side quests that are somewhat interesting. There are some pretty interesting ideas in the game like the house of empty time where homeless children, though the keeper is able to be adopted by another family in another time frame. You could be adopted 600 years into the future or into the past. Or something like the Anchorage and the lore behind it. There is a lot of interesting stuff if you look for it, unfortunately none of that is in the generic main quest.

With technology and future shit out of the way we can focus on the main storyline. Some time ago someone discovered a way to to transfer his consciousness from one being to an artificial body and was called the changing god. Whenever the conscious is transferred out of the previous body, a new consciousness appears and takes its place. These people are known as the castoffs. You are the newest castoff of the changing god and you basically travel the world trying to figure out what to do. And by world I mean three maps. The first area you are at is the biggest, then it gets smaller as the game goes on. If you just follow the main quest you can probably finish the game in a couple hours. Doing every side quest took me about twenty hours to complete the game. Most of the time was wasted running around doing nothing trying to find quests. The other half is talking. This game has a lot of text. Do not play this game if you don't like reading. Its a whole lot of text with a whole lot of nothing. They can drag a description on for paragraphs yet you learn nothing about the character. If fact you rarely learn much of the people in the world. They are sort of just there and you sort of just walk away before stuff happens.

Not expanding on things really hurt the game. Like you meet a group of Nanos in a bar who fight the the Adversaries, a group of beings that traveled through the bloom, a multidimensional living creature that opens maws across dimensions, composed of pure thought and are in constant combat with the Nanos in an invisible psychic war. You show up you do a few quests and you leave, you never really learn that much about them and they never show up again. It was interesting but it was over much too fast. This also includes the Bloom, its a huge living creature that has maws extending to different dimensions and the living beings in the world of Numenera use it as a way of travel as well as a home. However the maws are not permanent and many groups of people get lost in different worlds. New maws are also always constantly being made which require different foods to open. Slaves are sold to feed the maws who will only eat certain things. For example, one maw will only eat guilt and after the feeding, the person will sometimes stay alive, but lose their ability to feel guilt. Upon eating something, the maw will open leading to a whole new world. Like this thing is fucking awesome why isn't the game expanding on this. Am I the only one who thinks this multi dimensional creature the size of cities just biding its time at our doorstep is a threat? Its such a powerful entity that the sorrow can't even reach you inside the bloom. Except when suddenly plot holes appear and it could reach you.

The main story is shitty. You are chased by the sorrow, a monster that chases the changing god and all its castoffs to kill them. Really? You're going to call it THE SORROW!? What kind of shitty name is that. The sad part was the original name was called The Angel of Entropy. Basically its a creature that ignores space time and is angry at you and your siblings. Why? Because of the tides. Its wiped out civilizations because of the tides and its after you because you, the changing god, and all your fellow castoff siblings are tied to the tides. What is the tides exactly? Well its the currents of urge and emotions that flow through humanity's collective psyche. Its never really expanded on other than its a power thats shared among you all. It has the ability to affect people around you based on the colours of your tide. Its basically a reputation system. The tides are as followed:

Blue Tide: Represents wisdom, enlightenment, and mysticism. It is the Tide of people whose goal is to expand the mind and the spirit.
Red Tide: Represents passion, emotion, action, and zeal. It is the Tide of people whose goal is to live in the moment, to experience life to its fullest, or to follow their heart wherever it leads them.
Indigo Tide: Represents justice, compromise, and the greater good. It is the Tide of people who view life's difficulties from a broad, global perspective rather than an individual one.
Gold Tide: Represents charity, sacrifice, and empathy. It is the Tide of people whose primary goal is to help others, especially at the cost to themselves.
Silver Tide: Represents admiration of power and seekers of fame. It is the Tide of people who seek to influence the lives of others or who actively seek to be remembered.

Almost every choice you make in the game will shift your tides, and it shifts very quickly. You can even have two dominant tides if there are two high ones instead of one very high tide. For example I started the game with the blue tide because I kept asking questions about the world, but as I started doing quests I gained gold and turned into blue/gold tide. Eventually I did a bunch of quests that jumped me so far ahead that I turned into full gold tide. By the end of the game I was back down to blue/gold and ended at that. However, from what I've read theres only like a couple of NPCS who will mention anything because of your tides. That and the ending which is similar to Mass Effect 3's notorious ending. It looked like they wanted to do something with the tides but never got around to it. This holds true to almost everything in the game.

Onto the worst part of the game, the combat. I have never seen combat in a game this terrible before in my life. It is turn based with the most horrible UI I've ever seen. Combat design in this game is to put as many enemies as humanly possible on the map and each one takes forever to move. The next is to add consistently respawning enemies or enemies that will keep joining in the fight. A single turn of combat can take minutes, a entire fight could take ten to twenty. Like what the fuck? The good news is you can skip most of it by cheat scumming. Usually I'm too lazy to bother with that but when the alternative is the equivalent of sitting through an Adam Sandler movie I would rather retry over and over until I got it right. No matter what you do, there are several fights where you cannot avoid. Most of them involve the Sorrow and the Sorrow are the worst fights. It takes forever to appear and walk, and then it will spawn Sorrow fragments every turn which is another enemy that takes up time during combat and the entire time is spent running away so enemies eventually fill up so much of the screen you can take a shit and come back before your turn is up. When your turn is up though, you usually can't tell where the fuck you are going. Sometimes the circle for how far you can move disappears entirely. So combat becomes a game of clicking as far away as possible then clicking closer and closer and closer until you can move then hoping the enemies don't spawn new ones and waste five minutes of shuffling around before its your turn to run away.

There is a lot of potential in the game and it was obviously unfinished. A lot of the things promised on kickstarter never made it into the game, although they have said they are working on a new patch to add in one of the removed companions. I wish they expanded on more of the lore and side quests instead of the dumb main story quest that is over way too quickly. More areas to explore would be nice too instead of the three maps we gotten. Combat would have to be completely remade because what it is now is a piece of shit. Is this game good? I would say its passable if you ignore the combat. Its not the greatest, but some of the side quests, characters, and lore are interesting but they just sort of end abruptly. The ending also ends abruptly and completely shits over the theme of "How much does one life matter?" by giving you the power to choose the fate of the world. All of them involve the death of many so there really isn't much of a choice.

Conception 2 - Persona meets child making simulator

This game sucks. When I first heard of the title I thought it was some kind of porn game but after hearing people talk about how its a persona clone and is actually pretty good I went and looked it up. This thing looks like a giant ripoff of persona from the social links, to the ui, to the combat, to the dungeon crawling, and even the music. Only difference here is instead of making friends with others to strengthen your persona and summon stronger ones, you make friends so you can "classmate" with them and make children.Yes you're probably going what the fuck and I don't blame you. I said the same thing out loud when 5 minutes into the game you meet someone and the priest tells you to start classmating. Yes I hate that term too. Other than this the entire game is basically a bad ripoff of persona.

I started this review with this game sucks and I'll repeat it again. This game sucks. They tried very hard to copy persona but didn't realize what they are actually copying. Each "day" you get 3 hearts where you can talk to the 7 heroines each represented by one of the 7 virtues. Talking to one of them will raise their affection slightly and there are 7 bars. Each bar is locked behind one dungeon each represented by the 7 deadly sins. Here is the issue, there is no time limit like persona where a big bad monster is coming every full moon nor is there someone trapped in the shadow realm waiting to die. There are no days where you cannot enter the dungeon because of a school event or there is no fog. No in fact there are no time at all. So why the fuck can you only talk to 3 people a day and then have to go back to rest in your bed for the next day is beyond me. So the majority of the time is spent navigating the menu going to sleep talking to a girl then going back to sleep. There are random events you get and you answer a question and their affection and mood goes up. Only problem here, unlike persona mood doesn't really matter because your not limited by time. It doesn't even matter what the mood of the heroines are because its almost impossible to fuck it up. So both mood and limited hearts is a completely worthless mechanic added in for almost no reason.

The point of raising affection is because when you have higher affection, you'll get stronger children when you classmate. And by classmating its not exactly sex as its just the male shooting his star power into the woman's star womb and a starchild gets born right away. There's also the sailormoon silhouette thing where they do sex poses and moans but its totally not sex! They are affected by the level of you and the mother with higher level parents giving the child better stats and higher maximum levels. They can also be different classes, some are gender locked, some are hidden classes, some require items. Which brings me to another point. This game is fucked up. I wanted to get a mercenary class and kept classmating but kept getting girls. Mercenary is a male only class so I ended up having to toss away tons of children. Same thing happened when I wanted a diva class and kept getting boys. Even more annoying when you have a full bar of affection, you have to classmate to advance the story but I don't want children right now. I'm still leveling these children and the new ones being born can't be saved for later because their stats will be shit once I finished leveling the ones I am using and the mothers level increases as I grind in the dungeon. So toss them away again. If only they let us advance the heroine bars without forced classmating. There's also this part later in the game where you have to perform classmanting with two other guys and the scientists create some artificial womb for you guys to get children and you have a gay orgy and some children were actually born. They ended up dying within 24 hours and everyone is all sad and like what the fuck. Why is that in the game.

Before we get further with all the children and classmating and all that shit we need to first introduce the people in the game and the story. Basically dusk nests appeared in the world and monsters are being spawned and children from the age of 16-18 are blessed with magical ether energy from the star god so they can fight back. The higher the ether count the higher your rank and two S rank disciples can classmate for a 1% chance of conceiving a child. They gathered everyone with the star god brand and put them in a school for them to fuck and fight all day long.

God's Gift - G.G. for short. You are called god's gift because you are filled with a monstrous amount of ether energy that lets you enter labyrinths without danger. With your super ether it also means you have a 100% conception rate with any S rank girls so you get a harem of them there to make children for you. What the fuck.

Fuuko - The first girl you meet she's the normal girl who is so normal she's kinda boring but not really. After meeting the other heroines you wish for normal. Basically all she does is swim and eat croquettes nothing special.

Narika - Another girl in your class she is the super shy student council vice president or something. Soft spoken, super shy, and blushes every other sentence. Warning though, later on you realize shes a yandere and tries to stab you with a knife. "Why do you talk to Fuuko when you have me? I will gouge out your eyes so you can't see another girl. I will cut off your tongue so you can't speak to another girl. I will cut off your ears so you can't hear another girl. You are mine, all mine." I'm not fucking kidding.

Ellie - The little sister childhood friend you almost forgotten who died when you were kids and got resurrected by the church and became a zombie assassin. I wish I was joking. That's her entire character she is a super happy cheerful little sister but have a darker side to her where she goes around murdering people for the church. I don't know about you but I really can't stand little sister characters. Even less if shes a zombie and an assassin.

Ms. Chloe - Your teacher who is actually only 1 year older than you because shes a genius and skipped grades. Yeah what the fuck right? At least give us someone older but no the game has to keep everyone within 16-18 years because only they can handle ether energy. Anyways blah blah blah she becomes an idol and you become her manager somehow and her singing can cure diseases and mend broken bones blah blah. Boring ass shit.

Serina - Haughty senior who is slightly tsundere. She has a huge complex about her short height and how successful her sister was when she was a disciple at the school. She's pretty likable and not very annoying. Kind of on the tame side after seeing all the other heroines though. Constantly having fights with her sister then later on gets a magic spell that lets her transform into a "tall busty beauty" from a kiss from you so you end up having to kiss her all the time to help her transform and enter a beauty pageant. Its not as bad as it sounds.

Torri - Eccentric super genius who talks in monotone with no emotion. She's odd but not in a bad way. Nothing too special about her shes just normal outside of her eccentricities. She does build planes from scratch and golems and send them flying and shit. Loves birds, tries to be a cicada, stands in the pouring rain all day because of a promise, walks around naked without being embarassed, tries to fight monsters alone because you said you wanted world peace and almost dies, and a bunch more shit. Although you do have the same feeling with her as you have with Ellie. She feels more like a little sister than a heroine. And you know how I feel about little sisters.

Feene - Foreign girl with blond hair blue eyes and talks in really weird formal speech. She's ok but they try to hard to hammer in the fact that she's foreign and shit. Shes all about justice this justice that justice everything blah blah blah.

Clotz - Fuuko's childhood friend. You classmanted with him and he helps you guys out when you're in the dungeon as the radio guy. Similar to the characters in persona who never actually fight but is always giving hints and talking through the radio.

So yeah these are the people who are going to help you fight in the dungeons. What is annoying is you can only bring 1 heroine with you and 9 children. So you will be forced to grind each heroine individually until they are high enough levels to have good children to power up your team. This is fucking annoying and grindy. Luckily if you are playing the steam version it comes with all the DLCs so you get a rare mob called Saggita on the final floor of dungeons. If you pick up the quest to kill them but never turn them in then the mobs remain golden so you can easily scout them out and kill them. These guys give like 3000 exp each and comes in a pack of 3 while normal enemies give like 30 exp each. What the fuck? Basically strategy is skip every pack of mob you see in a dungeon and go down to the bottom floor then hunt for these. Kill them and tp out and come back in to the same floor and repeat until you are leveled up. This is fucking boring. Near the end I pretty much gave up because the dungeons get so fucking large. 15 floors of 30 rooms each is way too much to explore for a game with shitty combat. Well combat isn't bad but its all just spamming your strongest skills since there is no time limit so you can always leave the dungeon and come back at the same floor when you need mana anyways. And its not like mana potions are in low supply. There's even an autocombat button you press and it does all of this for you. They know the game wasn't about the combat. That said bosses are stupidly easy and boring. Unlike persona's giant health sink hour long boss fights, the ones here ends in one turn. All bosses use the same skill, dusk release which is a full party aoe attack that does moderate damage. That's it. From the first boss to the last they only use one attack and you can blow them up in 1 turn if you're decently leveled.

So if combat sucks, if the social links suck, then what about the story it has to be good right? Nope! Not even close. It the most generic and mediocre bullshit save the world story that every shitty mindless developer makes. Monsters suddenly spawn 20 years ago and all the kids start fighting. Why? who gives a fuck. Then there's an evil corporation who wants to harvest the power or some shit and people start turning into monsters and what the fuck. So you use your powers to make children with all the girls and then you and your army of kids go into the dungeon and fight them.There are basically two short cutscenes before a dungeon opens up and you go in there and spend the rest of the time farming. After you beat it, two more short cutscenes, talk to all the heroines to raise another bar of affection, classmate, do two cutscenes with each of them, then do 2 story cutscenes and enter the next dungeon. Repeat until its over.

The classes in the game are interesting but the problem with having a lot of classes is most of them end up sucking. But they did a good thing in that when you bring children with you they travel in a pack of 3. 3 groups of 3 will make up your team of children and you with a heroine makes up the 4th group. Different classes in the groups will unlock hidden group skills so even if Bulleteer is the strongest gun class in the game, you're not going to get full potential unless you mix it up with a say Gambler or Ether Sniper. The stats of the child is determined by the mother. For example, Feene has a lot of attack and defense but low speed and technique. Torri has a ton of speed and Serina has a ton of technique but no attack. If you are making an Archer class you should pick Serina since Archers use technique for their damage while a Paladin class should be on Feene since they are tanks. That means to get the most of all the classes you'll need to level up the mothers so their stats will be better. What if you want a shitty Archer could you just go Feene since she's the highest level? Nope! You must reach certain stat thresholds before you can create a class so since Feene's children's growth is mostly into defense they will never be able to make an Archer no matter how much you level her. The mother will also pass her element down to the child. For example, Torri's children will all have the wind element, Serina's children will have fire, and Feene will have dusk. So having all your children be one element may be good when you're fighting against one you are strong against, but as soon as you meet water enemies with a team of 9 fire element children you'll start crying. Some weapons can change the element of your attack, but your defense will always remain. Casters will always learn spells based on their element. So Narika's children will always have earth element spells.

Now comes the more complex stuff. Later on you are able to perform trimating when you get heroine affection high enough. Any heroine with 5 bars or more are able to trimate with each other. Trimating lets you pick two heroines and create a child with bother their stats and one of their elements. You're probably thinking you can just mix Feene with Torri for a child with both great defense and great speed but it doesn't really work that way. Those two are probably the worst mix because it averages out both mothers and they grow into some weird shitty average child with no specialization. Trimating is a trap that people fall into because they think they can get away with a low level mother and a high level mother to make children not easily available to one mother. Lets use the Archer example again. Say your highest level mother is Feene and Serina is at level 1. When you trimate the max level of the child will be low and the growth of the archer will have weak technique, lower defense and attack and even lower speed than normal. Archers want technique for their damage and since their growth is so low once you leveled up they will be doing shit damage. Sure you'll be able to hit the threshold for an Archer but its going to be a giant burden character not able to do shit because you handicapped yourself. Archers don't care about attack, or defense really since they're not going to be tanking like paladins are. These stats are completely wasted. Mixing say Torri with Serina might be better because Torri is all about speed by sacrificing some attack you get to move at incredible speeds. What trimating is good for is unlocking thresholds of special classes early on. For example you might get an Astromancer or Dungeoneer unlocked but no one is able to pick it because no one can hit the threshold, trimate and you can make one. These two classes aren't as specialized in stats so you can make an average child as one of those classes. Trimating also lets you get different elements on classes that are usually focused heavily on one element. For example Serina's Archers will always be fire, but if you trimate with Serina and Torri you'll now have wind element archers. Since Serina also has earth element defense you could have wind element attack, earth element defense archers or fire element attack, non elemental defense. Its surprisingly complex and probably the best part of the game.

Classes are good, choice is good, but it all ends up being more grind. After basically finishing one dungeon and unlocking the next bar of affection for the heroines, its time to get rid of all your children and get a new batch of powered up children! Your child hit their level cap of 13 and now you make a new batch which are level capped at 28. After clearing the next dungeon they most likely hit their cap again so you make a new batch with a cap of 51. But I unlocked a new class I want to make it but oh no I only leveled Ellie but I want to make a Warlock. If you try to make it with Narika you'll get a child with like a max level of 17 or whatever level Narika was. Now you have to go back to level the mother, then you make the child then level again! So once again its back to grinding level 1 children. This shit is boring. Every once in awhile you will get a genius child, marked by a star on their stat screen and a giant star aura around them in dungeons. Genius children get better stats and have a max level of 99. You might be thinking, I have a genius child I'll just keep him forever! NOPE. If only it was that easy. The stats of your child is based on the level of the mother. A level 4 mother with a genius child will not be as strong as a normal child with a level 40 mother for example. Sure you can grind to 99 but so can a genius child from a higher level mother. The game is also limiting you to 3 genius children at a time so you'll need to get rid of them before new genius children can be born. By getting rid of them I don't mean killing them off because that's just cruel. You send them away to become independent by helping out the city. Each child will contribute exp to raise the level of the city which opens up new shops or upgrade shops with new stock so you'll always want to send them away when they don't need them. Higher level children contribute more exp but since there isn't a time limit in the game you can just make thousands of level 1 children in one sitting and send them all away to max the city level anyways. Once again they didn't think shit through.

Is this game good? No its not. If you want to play a good game try Persona. Persona 3 isn't the greatest but Persona 4 is pretty good. One thing that this game does well is that it gives me a new appreciation for Persona. Thanks Conception 2, at least you have that going for you. It has potential but it doesn't know why exactly they copied such and such from Persona.

Witcher 3 - Candle lighting simulator

The Witcher 3 is the third and final game of the Witcher series. Its based off the popular polish series of books known as Witcher which focuses mainly on Ciri. However the game's protagonist is Geralt, the sort of father figure to Ciri. Why you ask? Well Geralt is a womanizing monster slayer for hire which sounds more interesting than Ciri, the little girl who was kidnapped, raped by bandits, saved by Geralt, taken to train as a witcher, being the daughter of the Nilfgaardian emperor who wants to fuck her and create a child of prophecy, and travelling through multiple worlds to stop the wild hunt. The game isn't a retelling of the book, its a continuation of the story where the book ended. In the book, Geralt has already died, but was revived in the game and suffers amnesia.

To quickly sum up the story of the first two games, spoilers incoming, Geralt wakes up without his memories at Kaer Morhen, home of the Witcher school of the Wolf. There he meets his fellow Witchers and a sorceress called Triss Merigold. Triss claims you two are in love and then suddenly a group called Salamandra attacks and steals the secret Witcher mutagens used to create new Witchers. Then everyone separates to hunt them down and you end up at Vizima where you meet your old friends the bard Dandelion, and drunken dwarf Zoltan Chivay. Here you do odd jobs while hunting Salamandra and eventually end up wiping them out and while collecting your reward from King Foltest of Temeria you accidentally saves him from a Witcher assassin. That concludes the first game.

The second game, you reluctantly became King Foltest's bodyguard because no one says no to a king. While attacking a castle King Foltest was killed by a Witcher pretending to be a blind monk. You were captured and thrown in the dungeon for being suspected of being the king slayer. The king slayer has been going around murdering multiple kings. In the dungeon you meet Roche, the leader of the Temerian Blue Stripes. He busts you out if you agree to help him find the king slayer. If you pick no, you get shot in the back by a crossbow and die so you have to pick yes. There you sail to flotsam where the local leader has you do odd work for him and you end up having to capture the leader of the local terrorist group called the Scoatail called Iorveth. They are fighting for the freedom of all non humans that are constantly subject to racism. The game surprising will split into two based on who you choose to help. Roche, or Iorveth. Roche focuses more on the politics of the northern kingdoms, while Iorveth focuses more on the king slayer and the Lodge of Sorceresses, a secret organization of the most powerful sorceresses, many advisors to the kings of the northern kingdom, and their plot to assassinate the kings. Either way the game ends when many of the kings are killed, the northern kingdom in shambles Kaedwen, Aerdin, Temeria were lost, and Redania ends up taking in all the land they used to occupy. The lodge was found and a witch hunt started to kill all magic users and Nilfgaard from the south taking this chance to invade the northern kingdoms.

NOW THAT WE GOT THAT SHIT OUT OF THE WAY. You might be going this is a lot of fucking shit to take in. And the developers thought of that. Instead of calling it Witcher 3, they changed the name to Witcher: The Wild Hunt. Technically its still Witcher 3 but the trailers will never mention the 3 and the number 3 becomes slash marks on the screen that still looks like 3 but becomes more like a design than an actual number. This is because they don't want people to be overwhelmed to start a game like the Witcher 3 and expected to play the first two games of the series. This is partially why Dragon Age Inquisition was called that instead of Dragon Age 3. The game does a really good job letting you catch up and learn everything of what happened in the previous game through cut scenes and quests. However, if you want to, you can read through the game's ingame Glossary. Its as big as Mass Effect's and it will explain everything and everyone you've met. You don't have to read it but it will give you additional information if you wanted to learn more. Another thing is the ability to pick your choices from the previous games if you wish to personalize Geralt's quest more. You don't need to fucking sign up on a dumb website and spend 5 hours doing that shit like Dragon Age Inquisition. No, a Nilfgaardian Officer will ask you a series of questions for book keeping purposes. How you answer these questions will affect the game.

The main difference from the first two games is that Witcher 3 is an open world game. I am not a big fan of open world games. I always end up wandering around too much doing side quests, forgetting main quests, and then quitting the game after dicking around for a couple of weeks on side quests. However since this was a Witcher game, my expectations for this game was through the roof. The game turned out better than I ever could have expected. However there are still many issues that the game suffers from. We will get into that later. But first to focus on the open world. The game is split into several large areas. White Orchard is a bit smaller and is a sort of tutorial area. After completing your first contract quest you are then thrown into the main storyline where the emperor of Nilfgaard orders you to find Ciri for him. There you are free to explore 3 areas, the swamps of Velen which are currently being governed by the bloody baron and the three crones, the free city of Novigrad which is neutral to the war but mostly taken over by Redania, and the islands of Skellige which are home to the viking warriors. These three areas are much larger than the one you see at White Orchard and they are somewhat level locked but not entirely.

You are free to roam anywhere at any time. To get into Novigrad you will need a pass which you can get from completing the questline in Velen with the bloody baron or buy a pass from a shady merchant. You can even sneak in if you like, which was exactly the way I first got in. I jumped into the river and swam my way in. Skellige however, requires a boat and it costs 1000 orens you get to which is a hefty sum early on in the game. Unlike other open world games, the monsters don't scale with you. The quests, the monsters you see are all set at a certain level. You could find a level 30 quest early on when you're level 8 and you will have to wait until the end of the game to actually go back and complete them. While Velen is the lowest level of the three zones it also contains some of the highest level areas so be careful where you search. If you don't save often while exploring you might accidentally stumble onto high level enemies that kill you in one hit sending you way back to your last save point. While quests don't scale to your level, items that drop does. This is one of the most annoying things to have to deal with. Say you are level 18, and you do a level 26 quest. The reward is a sword but it scales down to level 18 so you can use but now you are missing a good weapon that you could use when you reach 26 rather than a useless shitty sword you'll replace by doing a equal level quest.

The opposite isn't true when scaling items. You could be over leveled and skipped out on the main questline. After going back much later the NPC hands you the sword wielded by the old king of Skellige, the legendary sword handed down in his family for generations. He entrusts this sword to you to help battle the Wild Hunt. You reluctantly accept something of such value but once you look at it in your inventory you go what the fuck? This thing is still level 19 and the bandits on the road are dropping level 26 swords. I don't want this fucking garbage. So much for being a legendary sword. Scaling items are out of whack in this game. There are many times where I am doing a high level quest only to be rewarded with a lower level item. While other times, a lower level quest rewards me with a much higher level item that I cannot wear until much later. However, the majority of the time you're getting so many swords that are relics, named swords but in multiples. I've found at least 3-4 copies of almost every sword in the game and they are all at different levels depending on when I found them. You'll end up selling everything and finding an upgrade is a pain in the ass. you'll keep getting low level swords until suddenly a level bumps you over the edge and you start getting swords that are much higher level than you. The best way for upgrades, however not the easiest, is to craft them but that requires you to search all over the world in obscure places to find them. I found a level 37 sword recipe in a unmarked shipwreck in Velen. By the time I finished the game, I still wasn't high enough to use it so it was completely wasted.

Open world and scaling issues aside, the game's story and characters are great. The world isn't pretty, people are not going to go out of their way to help you. You are not a hero, you are not saving the world, and you don't say no to kings. I like it better this way. You are just a nobody. A witcher is a hated profession but a needed one. People will tolerate you only long enough for you to complete a contract and then tell you to piss off to the next place. You are not all powerful, you don't have godlike abilities. You may be a Witcher, a mutant with enhanced reflexes but you still fall victim to monsters, mages, and highly trained soldiers. You specialize in monsters, people can still take you out. In the war torn lands, you will see people murdering, robbing, raping, torturing, and doing all sorts of stuff and you can turn a blind eye or try to help. You might think helping is the right thing to do but it really isn't all the time. There is no black or white only different shades of evil. That person you saved on the side of the road could've been a murderer or rapist. You help one person only for him to come back and murder the entire town with his crew. Or you stop some humans from harassing an elf only to have her call you out on your bullshit. You're not doing it for her, you're doing it for yourself. She still has to live with them, while you walk away feeling good about what you did. The choices you make usually do not affect anything right away. Its many hours later, after many quests have passed that you realized what a mistake you made and how you fucked over everything and it was probably better not to have gotten involved after all.

While a lot of quests make you throw up in your mouth a little bit. Seeing people dragged away, tortured and raped with nothing you can do to help them. Some quests are funny and/or entertaining. You can't have the entire game be dark or everyone will get depressed. The quests with Ciri are uplifting and even the romance is interesting. When you lost your memory, Triss pretended to be your lover so you would sleep with her but once your memory returned, you threw her away because you're supposed to be in love with your old lover Yennefer. There is a love triangle here and Yennefer is a little bit, well a lot ticked off at the whole situation while Triss is genuinely apologetic of what happened. See these two are friends, and in the book Geralt has always been with Yennefer. She is manipulative, arrogant, and incredibly demanding. While Triss lets you do whatever you want as long as you love her. The times you talk to Yennefer you can't help but go "holy fuck this woman is pissing me off."But you cannot hate her because you can really respect her straightforwardness. She knows what she wants and you better do it for her or there will be hell to pay. Whatever you do don't piss her off. When she threw the bed you and Triss used out the window you can ask her about it and she will tell you she doesn't want to talk about it. If you press on she goes "You want to talk about it? Ok how about for the last year while I was going around looking for Ciri you've been shacking up with my friend." You can pick "I lost my memory" as an excuse like what I did and she responds with a "Well I lost my patience," and summons a portal behind you then kick you in only to teleport you high above a lake where you fall into and have to swim back to shore and spend another 5-10 minutes to run back to where she was. Triss is the safe pick where she will love you no matter what you do and is boring.

Anyways I'm just rambling on now. Basically the story is great and you aren't expected to save the world. No that is Ciri's job. When she goes on to stop the white frost you can say things to her but she'll just respond with, "What do you know about saving the world, you're just a witcher." That fucking sums up the entire game. Its not an epic story of Geralt doing great deeds. The Witcher books were short stories that focuses on Geralt's adventure. Think of this as Geralt going on small adventures in the books. You don't have to take on the fucking hellspawn, or stop the reapers from invading the galaxy, you don't become the dragonborn and rule the world, no you just look for Ciri, and act like a father figure to her. How you act will affect her future. Does she become the empress of Nilfgaard? Or will she reject it all and become a witcher like you. Some people might not like this though. Someone I know was mad that he could not affect politics, he didn't want a game where he couldn't sway the kings, he wanted a power fantasy where he could rule the world and do whatever he wants. If you want that, try another game.

Now that we got through the good shit, lets talk about the annoying parts of the game. Combat in this game isn't as great as the storyline. Its still fun but the ability points you get when leveling up are a little lacking. You have three trees that focuses on sword combat, magic, and potions. The potion tree is really shitty. I honestly would not advise anyone to put points into it. I mostly focused on magic. While magic doesn't mean you stop using your weapon, it means the spells you weave in between your attacks do a little bit more. The majority of the skills are just increase damage by 5% or such in the tree with 5 possible points into it. Once you add more points into the tree you unlock more. I would rather it be like Witcher 2 where you had less skill points but each point changes something dramatically instead of just doing slightly more damage. In combat you will automatically lock onto an enemy. If you want to turn around and run because you accidentally stumbled into a high level area, Geralt doesn't turn tail and run he will keep looking at the direction of the monster and start backstepping even if you turn your camera around. This can get you killed. You have to spam your roll button to get away far enough that you cannot lock onto the target. Jumping any kind of distance higher than your ankles will break your legs and take huge amounts of damage. I don't get it, you're a trained witcher and you fall off a box and take 50% of your health. God forbid you trip over that hill. You end up dying and having to reload back at an old save. I honestly died more times from falling than from monsters. Hell I eat so much food to regenerate my health only because I can't stop myself from taking fall damage everywhere I go.

The camera and Geralts controls are really finicky. I'm not sure if its because I'm using a controller but a lot of mouse and keyboard players also noticed these issues. There was a patch that claimed to fix these issues but it really didn't. One issue is turning Geralt around sharply or near a door/object. Geralt will start running in circles crashing into everything. You can't just turn. You will run forward, the camera will turn and then Geralt turns around but by that time you already over shot the door and is now stuck on the other side. Climbing up ladders is the biggest pain in the ass because of where you have to stand and how stupid Geralt moves. Then there is the whole candle shit that pissed off a lot of people. The developers put a bunch of candles everywhere because it makes things look pretty. But when you're trying to loot a box and there happens to be a candle on top of it, you'll end up lighing that candle and blowing it out over and over again. They put these candles everywhere. Like is this a candle lighting simulator or a fucking witcher game. Why are there so many candles everywhere. You'll need to fidget the screen around until you can click whatever is under the candles. This can get pretty tedious. While the patch I noticed helped a bit but its still a pretty prevalent issue considering how many candles there are in the game.

Honestly I can keep talking about this game for way more because this is how much I enjoyed this game. This is the best game I have ever played and it will probably remain that way for a long time. I don't see anything coming along that will top this. Despite the small problems, it really isn't a big deal compared to the rest of the good. If you are a lover of RPGs, do not pass this game up. It may look intimidating because you haven't played the first two but its really not needed to play the third. The game does a really good job of this. Its not like Mass Effect 3 where you magically end up in a prison and some meathead guy shows up and the game expects you to have played every DLC and read every comic.

Dragon Age: Inquisition - Human race is master race

After knowing how bad Dragon Age 2 was, why would I ever want to try the third one? I've been asking myself that question every single time I write another one of these. Like Dragon Age 2, it has the same questionable writing, human race bias, shitty romance, and major plot holes. And like Dragon Age 2, it also has almost nothing to do with darkspawn. Isn't the reason for Dragon Age to exist is because of the blight? An army of darkspawn led by the archdemon, a dragon, and the gray wardens that stand against them. Its like imagine if Nintendo releases Super Mario Bros 4 and there was no Mario, or Luigi, or Bowser, or even the mushroom kingdom. Instead you play as a random guy called Wolfe and he goes around doing chores for random people and the game ends like that.

Like the first two Dragon Age games, this one is heavily human biased. The first one is not biased as much. You can play all races and there was a good representation of all races. Romances however, is only humans and elves. David Gaider, lead writer of Bioware states "I don't find dwarves attractive and I generally hate them so I won't write romances for them." Its not word by word but it exactly what he meant. So the only romances you have in all three of the Dragon Age series are humans or elves, with the exception being Iron Bull for DA:I. Most of the romances are locked out unless you are human or elf too, with the exception being Iron Bull. In DA2 you were only able to play as a human too, and the story centered around humans. DA:I, although you could play any race, mostly centered around humans too. I played a Elf and I have to point out that all the mage gear are locked out for me. I found a robe and it says "Human trained only." What the fuck is human trained? You fucking racists. My mage is sitting around with level one gear while the entire party is decked out in level 10 gear. How the fuck do I find gear that fits Elves?

So human bias aside, its nice that you are able to play as any race again. Even the Qunari is available this time around. The story focuses around you randomly showing up and causing the big bad guy's plan to go wrong and blow up the sky. You somehow magically stole his powers and are able to close the rifts that ripped across the world causing demons to travel through from another dimension. Then people started calling you the Herald of Andraste. Next thing you know the inquisition started and you have to go around closing rifts while the mages and templars are fighting each other and everyone else. Sounds very Dragon Age right? One thing I do like is the war room. You basically have three advisers that you can pick for certain missions. Should you send your spymaster to deal with this mission? or send your commander? Different advisers will give different results, and rewards. The missions are updated in real time. So if you look at the clock and its 4pm, the mission says 4 hours. You can fuck around with side quests for four hours or turn off the game and come back at 8pm to continue the mission. Missions also cost power to unlock, which is gained from side quests. Which brings us to another issue.

There are way too many side quests. I don't mind doing side quests if they are interesting. Like Skyrim I could wander around until I find something interesting and suddenly I'm exploring some ruins and find some quest. The majority of the quests I've seen you get from running across dead bodies on the floor or an NPC asks you to hunt ram for meat. The bodies always have a note and it always either leads to a loved one, a random chest, or to the killer. After coming across the hundredth body you start to wonder what the fuck you are doing in this game. This is boring. I don't want to go scavenger hunting for corpses. I want to fucking continue the story. Then head back to the war room and start a mission. I spent 7 hours fucking around with side quests in the first zone and barely finished a quarter of the area. I gave up and used all the power I got saved up and continued the main story. I opened up 3 more zones but I haven't bothered going there. Whats the point its just boring side quests that does shit for the main story. I don't want to fucking hunt bodies. But you have to because the power cost for mission start racking up quickly. What a way to pad game length. Side quests aren't the only thing you can or have to do though. You can claim landmarks or areas by running up and slamming a flag onto the floor like manifest destiny. A settler camp? a village? some castle? FUCK THAT. SLAM THAT FLAG DOWN. Its yours now. By claiming stuff you gain influence. With influence you can level up the inquisition rank and get more bonuses.

If you played the previous Dragon Ages you'll find that the combat in this one is more like DA2 than the first. Its more actiony and you focus more one one character while the AI controls everyone else. Unlike the second one though you can swap to the mode the first one uses. The one that gives you an overhead view and preplan out commands for the team. However all this is unnecessary because the AI is clearly balanced around playing a single person and having your three other teammates ram into the enemy with their faces until they die. Perhaps in the hardest difficulty you may need to plan things out. For this version, combat is mostly about holding down your autoattack button. If you are on PC that is the right mouse button, which is also the camera button. The camera is janky and chances are you'll end up fucking around with how you perfection positioned it by targetting an enemy. That is where you go to the options, plug in your controller, and select gamepad mode. Now things are looking better. You can use the right analog stick to position the camera, the left analog to move and the right back button to attack. This game feels like its intended to be played on a controller. However playing on the controller the jump button and the talk/action button is the same one so you end up hopping around when trying to open doors or get the attention of an NPC. Back to the combat, your mana or stamina pool is very small but it regenerates very quickly. A simple fire spell drains 80% of your mana so the rest of the time you are just holding down the button shooting ice shards from your staff. Every 10 seconds or so you click another button and hold down that autoattack! At least make it a toggle or something. Another thing I need to point out is that healing skills are removed from the game. There is also no natural regeneration. The only way to regenerate health is to drink healing potions. At the start you are able to carry 8 of them and they are automatically refilled everytime you go back to town. This is a giant pain in the ass. Its impossible to completely avoid damage so you're constantly going back to town. Whats worse is if you're like halfway into a dungeon and you're low or out of healing potions. Do you spend 20 minutes to walk back or you carry on and reload when things go wrong.

Exploration is a pain the ass from the issue mentioned above but there are more. I've mentioned how bad the quests are but getting to where you are supposed to get to is a pain in the ass too. The map screen is an ugly piece of shit where you can't tell what is what. Is this a mountain? Do I climb up somewhere? Is this underground? I'm supposed to find someone/something but the quest shows a giant ass circle, am I doing this right? One thing I have to point out, what is the fucking point of a jump button when there is nothing you can jump over. You see a rock in front of you and you decided to just jump over it instead of wasting a second to circle around. You jump get stuck, try again, get stuck, fiddle around and give up and walk around the damn thing. You just wasted a minute of your time. What the fuck is this piddly jump. Your feet barely lifts itself off the ground. You want to try climbing a hill for the quest? Don't bother jumping it doesn't do shit! The only way to climb up a fairly flat hill is to find the only path available up. Basically don't bother jumping just circle around stuff and pretend anything that's not flat ground to be an obstacle. Some quests appear on the mini map as a big purple circle meaning that the objective is somewhere inside there and you have to find it yourself. Its usually not that hard to find but I find it funny how big some of the circles can get. Its three times bigger than the town you were in and all you wanted to find was a NPC. Other quests are so long and tedious you look at it for one second and go "fuck this shit." Collect 8 caches hidden around all over the zone. Can you spread them out more? I find wasting 30 minutes traveling around on a single side quest very enjoyable. You do get a horse near the start of the game by doing a side quest. However the horse is slow as shit and you're constantly getting on and off to fight random enemies on the field or picking up stuff you run by. If it gets hit it magically disappears into nowhere and you have to resummon it again. Wait for it to show up, and then get back on. I find that the horse slows me down more than the tiny bonus speed it gives when you hold down the run button while mounted. Yes you need to hold the analog button down while moving to get it to run. The last issue I have with exploration is that the areas are badly balanced. You never know what is too high level until you die. The entire area of the zone could be level 4 but this single camp in the middle of it is super high leveled that one shots you the second you start combat. You run around kill a few monsters and gear drop for levels 8 and above. What? I'm here too early?

I haven't gotten very far into the story but so far its the same Bioware style writing. Everything is black or white and into the extremes. For example, during the mage path on the main quest, spoilers ahead, you basically get three choices. You free all the mages from the circle (pisses off your companions), you basically make them into your slaves (pisses off your other companions), or you basically leave them to their fate and die (pisses off the rest of your companions.) It uses the same chat wheel circle where the top right button is the nice response, the middle right button is the neutral response and the bottom right button is the rude response. This can also translate to good and evil choices as well. Do you give a man all your money with the top right button, or do you kill him and all his family and feed it to his dog with the bottom right button. One thing though, is when talking to romance-able companions is that a heart button will appear on the top left occasionally. This is like a get out of jail free card when it pops up. You're arguing with Cullen about freeing the mages when you are at the point where there is no way to move on without dropping his reputation for you, you click that fucking button. You can go from murder, death and angry arguing to "you're so handsome blah blah blah" and then you get bonus reputation. These buttons always show up at the oddest times. What kind of person in the middle of talking about enslaving mages suddenly decide to flirt. Its also the most awkward responses too. The only companion romance that seems interesting is Dorian, the gay Tevinter mage. He's a little arrogant but he's the least awkward of everyone. While Cassandra will babble on like shes stupid, Josephine will completely misinterpret, Greywall will tell you that you shouldn't pursue him, I want to puke when I talk to the racist Cullen, Sera is a pain in the ass, Solas hates me because I'm too elfy for him, Iron Bull doesn't give a fuck about what you are, and Vivienne the worst character ever. She completely hates my guts because I helped the mages and hates me because I'm a elf mage and its just been a huge hate war. I like to point out that you cannot kick companions out after recruiting them with the exception of Sera. I don't know what makes her special but from all the comments I've read about her and hundreds of pages of discussions about her. I can see why people really hate her and they gave us the option to kick her out.

This game is a mess. I'm not even trying to pick out the worst parts of the game because this is the entirety of the game. Everything about the game is bad or lacking in some way. I hold this game to high standards because I'm comparing it to the original Dragon Age and to other open world games like Skyrim. The thing is I really liked Dragon Age Origins. I wanted this game to succeed but it let me down more than Mass Effect 3 did. The game never jumps out to wow you its just mediocre. Everything feels generic and some of the decisions made for this game are questionable. Instead of making it an open world and filling it up with the most boring quests that makes grindy MMO quests look amazing, they could focus more on polishing the main story. The open world is just padding anyways.

Lords of Xulima - You Missed Your Attack

What is Lords of Xulima? I had no clue when I saw this name. There was no review sites talking about it, no one on any major forums knew what it was but apparently there were some random people praising this game. What better game to try than some nameless game that some random people tell you to. First of all I want to mention that this game is very old school. Like Might and Magic X Legacy level of old, and you know how much I hated that game. So what makes this different? For starters, its not fucking boring, and there is an actual story to the game.

When you first start the game you are brought into the character creation screen where you have to make 5 additional party members to your main character, Gaulen the Explorer, a unique class. You can choose their portraits, name them, pick a god and then that is about all you can do. There are 9 classes you can choose from and you can pick the same class if you like. You can have a team of 5 mages no one is going to stop you but you won't get very far. Your party has a formation. There are 8 slots in the party screen, 4 in the front row, and 4 in the back row. You cannot place a member in the back row if there is no one in the front row. Melee attacks cannot be used in the back row unless they are using a polearm. Melee classes are naturally more durable so you are going to put them in the front rows anyways. The usual teams are 3 melee and 3 in the back, or 4 melee and 2 in the back. After you have all this done its time to start playing the game.

When you enter the game you listen to some text on the screen. I want to point out this is probably the worst voice acting I have ever heard. Worse than Persona 3's robot voice acting. I know this is an indie game and they probably don't have the funds for professional voice acting but I can still criticize it. Its so awkward that you can't even follow the story. When you finally finish the back story you start off at a beach where you ship capsized on. Its a top down game and you move by clicking your mouse on the location and your character will walk towards it. The biggest issue about this is that there are two speeds in this game. SLOW AS FUCK or FAST AS SHIT. When I first started I didn't know you had a "run" toggle. I limped around at a snail's pace until I realized you can press the Alt key to toggle run. Running makes you go faster, but drains your food faster so there's no difference between walking or running. Just hit the fucking Alt key and play the game. However, there is a problem. If you're running you usually can't see whats ahead of you in your vision. There is a fog where everything is blacked out except  the vision near your party. So you could be running around and suddenly stumble into a pack of high level monsters. You fucked up. Now restart the game.

Before we get into monsters and combat and such lets focus on the world map first. You have a food meter. This is reduced by walking/running around the world map as well as camping. You can camp anytime as long as you are not near hostiles. You may rest for 4 hours which will clear most wounds, 8 hours which will clear fatal wounds, or rest until full. Get used to this screen because you'll be clicking the camp button after every single battle. EVERY SINGLE BATTLE. Food can be gathered from bushes or trees on the world or bought at the Food NPC. Food is cheap but you'll be going back to town very often to restock because of camping in the wild. Enemies show up in two ways. In dangerous areas they will randomly attack you. But usually you can see the monster on the world map, if you mouse over them you can see their aggro circle. Walking into that circle will automatically start combat. Different monsters have different sized circles. You can also see what their party consists of and there will be a difficulty description such as Easy, Balanced, Difficult, Titanic. Difficult is doable with a well built party. You may lose a few party members during the fight but you can do it. Titanic is the highest difficulty I've seen so far. Going into these battles will basically wipe your entire party in a single turn. This can get annoying when you are forced to go through areas where its a fucking maze full of Titanic monsters. You have to slowly walk through by avoiding aggro circles. So you have to keep mousing over them to see their area and taking a step or two. If you have run on you'll end up dying a few times. And just to make it worse during the mazes you cannot save so you'll have to go back to the beginning every time. So this is finally a time for walk, but its so fucking slow. So you take multiple tries by overshooting your step or waste your time walking slow as fuck. Either way it both takes way too long so pick your poison.

In combat enemies have a party with the same formation setup as you, 4 slots in the front 4 slots in the back. Melee can only hit targets adjacent to them. With the exception of spears where you can hit one slot further. This means you can poke an enemy from the back row or poke an enemy hiding in their back row when you are in the front row. A melee on the corner slot cannot attack the enemies on the other sides. So you must be thinking, lets get some range and not worry about this formation bullshit. Unfortunately there are no archer type class. The closest you have are bards and thieves. Bards are buffers, they don't hit hard at all, and thieves are built to be front liners with daggers or swords. Bows are pretty shit and no one uses them. The exception is Gaulen who could use bows but he's the sturdiest character in the game so you want him in the front row. Not just as a tank but because he's the weakest character in the game and you might as well use him as a meat shield. So bows are out so I guess its up to magic! The three pure casters in the game are the Mage, the Cleric, and the Divine Summoner. The cleric is a healer so it doesn't have any damage. The Divine Summoner is basically what it sounds a summoner. Once you drop your summons you don't do anything. So I guess its up to the mage. They must be good right? Well to be honest, they are great when you first start. Spells have a 100% accuracy, they can hit any target anywhere, and they hit hard. However once you get to mid game you'll get into a big issue. Your PP drains in just a few spells. You can literally cast 3-5 spells before you run out and is are forced to drink a potion or stand there doing nothing. At least your damage is high for now. When you reach late game your damage starts petering out and your PP costs are so high you run out in 1-2 casts. So this is a game for melee! Melee characters start off with the most pitiful damage in the game and the worst accuracy I've ever seen in any game. You miss your attacks 75% of the time and against fast enemies like wasps expect a 10% hit rate at best. You can see the % when you mouse over a target. However once you get over the hump that is early game you start doing more damage than mages without the limiting factor of PP and you can actually take a hit. Some classes are also really shitty and worthless. Balance is a big issue.

Leveling is very old school. There are 5 attributes and every level you can spend one point in two of them. Strength increases your damage, Constitution increases your health, Agility increases something I don't care about, Speed increases the frequency of your turns, and Energy increases your PP. Basically the only stats that matter are STR, CON, and SPD. You only want enough Agility to wear weapons. Stack the crap out of speed so you can move multiple times before the enemy moves once. Energy sucks because you get 2 PP a level so say you are level 80 and you put one in it every level that is 160 bonus PP. That may look like a big number but you have to remember high level spells cost 200 PP a cast. You also get 5 skill points to drop into a pool of like 40 different skills. Each one takes like 80 levels to max out. The skills include stuff like different weapon masteries that increase accuracy/damage when using that weapon or Learning, which increases the % of exp gained. You might be wondering why you want that. Its because enemies don't respawn. Once you kill them they're gone forever. Even the ones that randomly attack you. Once they die they don't come back. There are many spells to learn as well depending on your class, skills that increases critical chances, non combat skills like Perception that lets you detect higher level traps, Exploration that slows down food consumption when walking, to Mercantile that increases money made from selling. Depending on the class the points required will be different. For example you want Gaulen to learn lock picking you need 3 skill points per level. On a thief, that same skill is only 1 skill point per level. Its overwhelming at first and you have no idea what to do, but its fairly straightforward after thinking about it. Just make Gaulen learn all the non combat garbage and be a meat shield and have the rest of your party learn combat skills.

Overall the game while having a few issues, is quite fun to play. Its not particularly difficult if you have a decent party. I had a Barbarian, a Thief, two Mages, and a Cleric as my party members. I haven't run into any problems so far. The story writing isn't bad. Its quite enjoyable but be prepared for some fairly bad voice acting. Give it a try if you like old school RPGS but don't expect a perfect game.

Divinity: Original Sin - No one has as many friends as the man with many cheeses

No one has as many friends as the man with many cheeses. Did you read that? Let me repeat it again. No one has as many friends as the man with many cheeses. One more time? No one has as many friends as the man with many cheeses. Now you're sitting here going what the fuck is going on. Well that was what I said when I first stepped into the market place and this sentence would repeat itself every five seconds. I don't know who the voice actor for the NPC is but I'm sure he's having nightmares now haunted by the monstrosity he has created. This game is a cheese simulator. You go around town listening to NPCs trying to sell their cheese and cheese products.

To be serious, this is probably the best RPG I have played in years. Its very old school but at the same time its been updated with the more recent quality of life changes in video games. Remember when I talked about Might and Magic X? I said it was old school but it was also very outdated. This game you get the same old school feeling but it feels like a game made in this decade. Its an isometric sandbox RPG with tactical turn based combat. It can be played single player, where you control both main characters, or played in Co-op where each player controls one of the main characters. This is probably the coolest thing. You can each get your own henchmen or companion and customize your own character/inventory and then wander around the map. One person can be doing a quest, while another person can be in a dungeon fighting a pack of monsters. There are also decisions where it can affect both characters. For example, you come across a pack of bandits you can kill them or let them live. Each character can pick a decision and if you both disagree. You can try and argue against each other to reach a conclusion. This also affects your personality for example you want to help someone the other guy wants to kill them. You will gain a point in altruism while the other guy gets a point in heartless.

I know what you're going to ask next. What if I don't have any friends. Well don't worry! Larian made AIs for people like you. You can preset a personality for your characters or you can set nothing and just RP both of them yourself. The game also comes with two unique companions and a bunch of no personality henchmen. There will be more companions added later on as only two were shipped with the launch version of the game. So all in all, even if you're not playing co-op it will be enjoyable. But if you can find someone to play with you it will change how the game feels dramatically.

You start the game by customizing your character. There are many skills and talents to add and its pretty hard to run out of options. There is so much to pick it makes your head spin. I saw a talent called Pet Pal which lets you talk to animals. I knew I had to get it. Who wouldn't want to talk to animals!? It does exactly what you think it does. And yes dogs talk exactly how you think they'll talk. You then go into town and try to solve the murder of Councillor Jake. There are a variety of ways depending on how you want to do it and what skills/talents you have. If you have Pet Pal, you can talk to his dog who will tell you to bring items to him for him to smell if it smells like the murderer. Or you can break into houses and steal their stuff and do it that way. Or you can murder everyone in the town because you're an asshole! Its really up to you.

Combat is fairly difficult at first. It doesn't help that you don't know where to go at the start and can accidentally go into an area too difficult for you. You will die often and die a lot. Eventually you start getting more skills and you are able to fight on somewhat even footing. One tip to remember to win you every battle. Disables are better than damage. If you can do a disable versus doing big damage on an enemy that turn, use a disable. Enemies have resistances but almost every enemy can be disabled by a spell. Summons are also great, if not game breaking. There are plenty of quests, a lot of dialogue, and tons of secrets to find. When the game said it has over 100+ hours of gameplay, it wasn't lying.

The game isn't all sunshine and awesomepuffs. For example, the cheese vendor would not shut up. Going into the marketplace is like blowing your ears out from a hundred people shouting at the top of their lungs to get you to buy their cheese. If you're too far from your friend during co-op you won't be able to hear their conversations with NPCs and won't be able to contribute to arguments. If you want to change major maps like teleport to your homestead, you need both people standing near each other to jump dimensions. The world is split into four major maps with lots of sub areas in each one. Only one person can be talking to an NPC at a time. However, talking to NPCs will force them to turn towards you, moving their cone of vision so someone else can swipe something off their desk while you distract with conversation. Inventory is extremely messy and most of the time you have no idea if this item is important or not and it sits there taking up room because if you lose it getting it back will be a bitch.

If you like RPGs this game is for you. If you like tactical turn based combat this game is for you. And if you love the heck out of co-op games. Do not ignore this and go get it right now.

Bastion - Fuck the Narrator

I don't know why this game is so popular. It was an indie game that no one had heard of that suddenly gained a ton of popularity. The developers seeing that it was getting a lot of attention started dumping into ads. Next thing you know everyone is talking about this game. All the game is, is a shitty action RPG with neither a lot of action nor RPG. You're some nameless kid walking around smacking the shit out of these ghost things minding their own business with the most boring weapons and combat.

Basically the game involves you wandering around on floating platforms on the sky. Most of the time they will drop down as you get near the edge of a platform. The art style isn't bad but the world seems tiny. I know its supposed to be small because the world exploded and all that's left of civilization are on thee floating platforms. If it takes like two steps to reach the end of a platform, its too small. You also get to fight with a melee weapon and a ranged weapon. You don't have many choices so you pick the one that is the least shitty to play with. None of the weapons feel fun to use. The last slot you can use is a skill. It could be a melee skill, a ranged skill, or even a skill that isn't tied to a weapon, like a summon. Combat is just brainless mashing and nothing really feels special about it. From the first minute into the game to the middle of the game, you're still smacking the same stuff with the same hammer in the same platforms in the same world with the same narrator being an asshole.

One thing everyone praised is the narrator's voice. Some claimed he is better than Morgan Freeman and everyone knows that just isn't true. He was so popular they even have a Dota2 announcer pack using his voice. What the hell? I wasn't a fan of the narrator nor his "humor." First of all, why the fuck was he being such a dickhead sending you around fighting then saying something along the lines of "Yeah I'm just using the kid, so what." I haven't finished the game but I don't know what the big deal with the narrator. Everyone shitting in their panties about his voice and saying the reason this game is good is because of him. Maybe its because the rest of the game just isn't fun and they are desperately trying to grab onto something to like.

The combat is repetitive, the story is weak, the narrator is annoying, and the kid who although is somewhat interesting doesn't do shit for the game. The art isn't bad but the level design is pretty shitty from a gameplay perspective. I don't play games for art, I play games for gameplay. Any kind of art is bonus like Child of Light.

Jeanne d'Arc - An Anime Butchering

For some reason this game was getting a lot of praise. People really liked it and considered it a really good Tactical TBS RPG with a decent storyline. Well those people lied because none of it was true. The game is loosely based off of the story of Joan of Arc. And by loosely I mean the only thing in common with the story is their names. For those not familiar with the Joan of Arc, basically you are playing the game as Jeanne who finds a bag off a dead guy in the forest and inside it was a magical bracelet that told her to fight the English and when demons started attacking the town she put it on the bracelet then transforms into a magical shining warrior with magical armor and killed off the demons. It turns out the demons are being controlled by the English and you must save France by killing all the English/Demons. What? That doesn't sound like Joan of Arc? That's too bad I did try to warn you. However I really wanted to give this game a shot because it was made by Level-5, the creators of the Dark Cloud and Rogue Galaxy series and the more recent Ni No Kuni.

This game has a lot of cutscenes. If that is your thing then you probably wouldn't be bothered with it, but having to sit through long boring cutscenes isn't my idea of fun. If I wanted to watch a movie then I'd watch a fucking movie. The thing is, if the cutscenes were actually interesting then I wouldn't be bothered with it but when its like five minutes of scenery then finally a guy appears who fucking looks like a Disney villain, but everyone is oblivious. Like the first person you see has a pale ghoulish white face, wearing a giant black pointy horned hood, with black robes and long bony fingers with long painted fingernails and talk in the most asshole way. You know this guy is evil. He wants to save the king and then does some evil magical ritual that takes like another 5 minutes to set up. Then all of a fucking sudden from nowhere an old guy pops up and starts attacking evilwizardman with a sword and then gets his ass kicked in less than a second. Then the cutscene is over and you move over to Jeanne in a town wandering around then suddenly evil demons attack. Oh god this shit won't stop. Long story short, the cutscenes are boring, the voice acting is bearable at best, and the story is just ridiculous.

Combat itself is simple, like any Tactical RPG really. Attacking enemy from the sides or behind deals more damage, attacking with an element its weak against will hit harder, etc etc. Only problem I find is that stuff hits really hard and you die often and your characters outside of a few do almost minimal damage. So the strong get stronger and the weak remain useless. Well you only need a few good people to win battles anyways. Every battle has a time limit. EVERY SINGLE BATTLE. You have to finish the objective in say 18 turns or you lose. So you're always rushing. Beat the big boss guy, get to the exit on the other side of the bridge, survive for 18 turns, etc etc. This basically forces you to charge stupidly into battle just to get there faster rather than setting up. Fighting bosses basically has you sacrificing your weaker members to stall for time on the other enemies while your strongest ones goes over to beat up the boss before the timer runs out. Ones where you need to reach the other side? Yeah fuck that just run you don't have time to stop and kill. If you do you lose the game anyways so keep running and a few will die but eventually you'll get there.

Outside of combat there is basically nothing to do. You can walk around the world map like Final Fantasy Tactics. Revisit old areas where you fought and it either becomes a town or a field. You can grind exp or buy items. There are no classes and everyone can only use one weapon they started off with. Jeanne can transform into a magical warrior once every battle for a limited amount of time and is stupidly overpowered. The only way to win is to have her transform then run across the map killing half the enemies all by herself then have the rest of the party move in to clean up. Later on you're supposed to meet more magical bracelet wearers but I've only gotten one other guy and he looks evil already. Evil mascara and talks like an asshole, I'm 99% sure he's going to betray me at some point.

Its not the most horrifying game ever. The combat is pretty boring yet very annoying because of the turn limit. This coming from someone who actually was ok with the dumb combat of Rhapsody. But that game has charm this game has nothing. You can't possibly like any of the characters. Everyone is either really mopey, a giant jerk, or just plain useless. I hate Jeanne. And I hate Jeanne d'Arc. The storyline is the weakest part of the game. It makes absolutely zero sense. You randomly show up at a war camp and tells everyone to attack the English and the generals are like fuck off little girl go home. Then some asshole evil mascara dude starts talking in his boring monotone evilguy voice and tells everyone to attack and they do and then you charge in and kill everyone and then you're like they'll listen to me! Then you got an arrow into the chest. The generals don't give a shit about you and your friends are "worried" about you now because you're all hurt and shit. Then the other guy gets some like some evil magical powers and cures you with some black mist and he falls sick because he's evil or something. I need to stop trying to make sense of this game. Basically, don't play it.