This is part of a continuing series of old rants/essays/snark/thoughts/etc/etc/etc from years back that I figured I might as well throw somewhere other than a decrepit and deleted Discord server. This was written up about the base game of the first installment - I never played any of the expansions.

As Always, Assume Spoilers

  • Backstory: One god (Eothas) started a war by creating an avatar and then taking over a kingdom, and then invading another kingdom. A bunch of people working for another goddess (Magran) made a magical nuke and blew up Eothas There’s also a goddess running around in exile (Woedica), who no one seems to like? I think the game’s pretty vague on how Woedica. Also, in one country (the one you’re in), all the babies are being stillborn because they aren’t getting souls. Souls apparently get reincarnated in new bodies after death in this universe.
  • Story premise: You, the main character, get punched by a magical wind and can now interact with souls. In practice, this is mostly “see history” on people. Fun concept, not really amazingly explored beyond flashbacks, mind reads, and some ability flavor . Also, you keep getting dreams of a previous life.
  • Structure is very BG2 (Ed: Baldur’s Gate 2, for the children) - there is a bad guy, he did something bad to you (although here it’s dubiously bad, other than weird dreams), now you have magic powers and he’s doing bad thing, hunt him down. Game lets you RP how/why you hunt him down.
  • Most of the game is generic pastoral fantasy. Go to place X, kill everyone in the dungeon, disable some traps along the way. Roleplaying options are mostly “do good” or “demand more money” or “be a pointless dick.” First third of the game involves try to get to a city, doing some pretty traditional fetch quests along the way. The second third is doing some weak faction quests and getting scraps of information about the villain - ends with the city in riot mode because literally everything you do in game gets fucked by the villain in a particularly lame way (we’ll get to this). Last third involves basically a running theme of “here’s what all the gods think about shit” and belatedly getting you familiar with all the deities, who have just been vaguely in the background until now, while you prep for the final fight with the villain.
  • Right before the final fight, you meet some ghost lady from your nightmare who delivers the “twist”: “The gods aren’t real.” That is literally what she says and everybody gasps in shock. I have to listen to a bunch of otherwise smart characters act hurt and betrayed before pointing out that the gods exist, I’ve met them, this guy over here is literally a cleric who gets his powers from the gods, and you yourself are being tortured in the afterlife by the fucking gods. A whole conversation later the writing finally makes it clear that what she actually means is “there are no natural gods, these gods were created by an ancient civilization to enforce morality.” Okay, I guess that’s interesting, but we’re locking into the final dungeon at this point and can’t do anything interesting with this information. Made even weirder by the fact that several (at least half) the gods are portrayed as dicks (seriously, one of them leads slavering cults that sacrifice random civilians, one preaches extreme Darwinism, and that one guy started invading other countries!). So morality is a bit of a stretch . . . This whole thing is made stupider by the fact that she found all this out not by investigation, but by basically a bunch of people who were initially evangelizing for the created gods basically talked about the plan one room over. And yet no one else ever figured this out? (I guess others might have, but she’s the only figure in the game lore to come near this perspective). Long story short, this is a vaguely interesting idea who’s presence as a last minute twist robs it of all justification. Saving most of the god stuff for act 3 doesn’t really help either, because their existence isn’t a big focus of the game up to that point.
  • The core weakness is that the villain’s (Theos) plot is basically “lol, whatever.” Basically:
    • Sadly, he’s almost always off screen, and has no real personality in his appearances.
    • His first appearance is just operating a big weird machine.
    • He leads a crazy secretive cult, as in no single member knows more than two other members. No idea how he recruits them or what they want.
    • He’s one of the initial guys who created gods. Supposedly because he thinks that atheists are incapable of morality without fearing an afterlife (this is only revealed at the end, after you know the twist). Of course, he also worships (kinda?) the gods. Nevermind the fact that the gods that were created are basically the kind of gods people were making up anyway (he literally says before they made the gods people were fighting over). He also literally brags about causing several Holocaust-level catastrophes to keep the issue going, although he doesn’t explain how those terrible things helped anything? He just says shit “I stabbed this good ruler and replaced him with a famine causing tyrant” because somehow that was better than atheism? Like, how cartoonish is this guy’s view on atheism, given he would have been agnostic/uncertain of what gods existed according to his own admission (that the ancient civ was looking for gods with magic and found none).
    • He’s working specifically with Woedica specifically, the god that no one else likes and got herself exiled (although what that really means is unexplained). It says she’s his favorite because she doesn’t follow rules when they’re inconvenient (I think she’s the god of law and vengeance, which is weird). But he’s basically super invested in this one goddess. There’s another line that implies they’re just mutually using each other for their own goals, but his are kinda vague in this case, because I have no idea how this helps him.
    • Anyhow, his whole plan is to use these ancient machines to trap the souls that are supposed to reincarnate into babies, and then send them straight to Woedica as a power source. Debatably making her the ultimate villain of the game, but she’s so backgrounded it doesn’t matter. Okay, cool. This part is fine and could work great, although the god-atheism bit muddles it all.
    • Along the way, he tries to blame “animancers” (basically necromancers) for the stillborn plague. The way he does this is a combination of mass raising undead corpses, and possessing a sanitarium inhabitant so he can fuck with a scientist enough for a magical accident to happen (the details here a vague, and it’s super jarring to find the main villain possessing a guy locked in a cell). It’s vaguely implied that this is because the study of animancy might lead to the discovery that the gods were handmade, but it’s an implication of an implication that animancy was how the gods were made.
    • In the course of the second act, the PC fucks up the whole animancy plan. The end of the act involves just going to see the city’s Duke and convincing him to allow/disallow animancy in the city. I never got to see his verdict because after you’ve laid out what’s going on, Theas just walks in while possessing an animancer and fireballs the Duke, kicking off riots. This could have really been done at any point and leaves open the “why go about this is such a roundabout way?” Especially because animancers are being superstitiously blamed for the spellborn plague without his intervention. He also would need the Duke to ban the study.
    • Of course, Act 2 is the only time he really does things. His only appearance in Act 1 is to turn on a machine, and in Act 3 he does nothing! In the ending he’s just there to trigger a larger, scarier machine.
  • Weird implications that annoy me
    • Literally all the cool stuff is in the backstory (god bombs, treacherous queen, avatars of gods causing wars)
    • I really like the idea of a villain who thinks we need a god to be moral, but it only really works in the context on a monotheistic “god is good” religion. Petty squabbling Greek gods don’t really work like that. I guess the “bad” ones are meant to be threats, but they have so many worshippers it’s comedic.
    • You can’t disrupt the god status quo. Endings where you wave your middle finger at a god involve them blighting the land. Really weird. It leaves the player with food for thought, I guess.