Divine Divinity

a classic

This aged surprisingly well! Bumpy start with some finnicky balancing, but then the game opens up and you can clearly see that these are the same devs that went on to make Divinity Original Sin and Baldur's Gate 3. The sheer freedom, the character building with skills not being restricted to classes and a ton of systems to make your build feel unique, with charms, attributes, random loot. The Diablo-esque CRPG combat with the tactical pause, where you have to really ponder what to do next to avoid dying. There's dozens of unique and fun quests, there's charming and weird NPCs. Plot is simple but sort of endearing for it, it's very tongue in cheek while having some neat ideas in there too. The voice acting is goofy but weirdly fitting, even with some particularly bad offenders that just made for funny moments. There's definitely some bad too. The balancing is off, game goes from hard to really easy as you progress, especially if you build your character properly and do some side quests. The quests themselves, while fun, are often as unintuitive as it gets. You can tell they were already trying to go for a system where you actually have to think for yourself on how to progress and find things naturally if you can't, but some of this ♥♥♥♥ is just out there. It's some Dark Souls level nonsense. The combat does get repetitive because of the balancing, and some parts of the system feel kind of useless unless you go out of your way to engage with them, like alchemy. Like, game, I have been hoarding potions and have yet to use more than like 5 every hour. The worst offender in the game is the final act. The wastelands where suddenly all depth is sucked out of the game and you just absent mindedly wack monsters until you kill all of the Black Ring, then the final boss. Wizard bossman becomes useless, all the friends you assembled died, there's no new characters or quests, it's just emptiness. Just run up to the big bad, wack him and take the baby, the end. Larian has a weird thing with the last bit of their games being rushed, for some reason. That aside, still a great game. You can tell this set the foundations for some awesome ♥♥♥♥ from Larian Studios later on. Except ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ Beyond Divinity.