Septerra Core: Legacy of the Creator

Developer: Valkyrie Studios

Release Date: October 31, 1999

Time Played: About Two Hours

Dubiosity: 2 out of 5

Final Fantastosity: VII out of VII

Would I play more? Would not be opposed, but I’d prefer a turbo mode kthx

Septerra Core occupies a similar space to Dubious RPG Hall of Famer Sudeki, in that it’s a western-developed RPG intentionally trying to imitate their Japanese counterparts. Even more specifically, Septerra Core *really* wants to be like Final Fantasy VII with some of its initial worldbuilding choices, although its visuals and general aesthetic reminded me more of Fallout 1 and 2. Technologically advanced empire? Sure. Sassy protagonist from hardscrabble, vaguely Midgar-looking dirt town? Yeah. Does said protagonist get her call to adventure after being accused of a crime she didn’t commit? Sure did! There’s a robot dog, so that’s cool, and uh…

Okay, so here’s the thing: If there’s an actual crime in Septerra Core, it seems like it might imitate its JRPG influences a little too faithfully, which is why I spent most of my two hours with the game doing the game’s take on slow, active-time battles when I wasn’t listening to reams of overwrought exposition and clunky worldbuilding. It’s actually not dissimilar from how Final Fantasy XIII handles its ATB gauge, with each character having three segments they can use one at a time or bank for more powerful attacks. There’s also a magic system involved with combining cards? Anyway, the game itself seems totally fine, but also I sure didn’t get past the inciting incident because I was too busy slowly grinding my way through enemy encounters.

Ultimately, I think the biggest take-away from Septerra Core’s slow start is that it seems like it might be an entirely okay time but also I ain’t got time for that shit. RPGs in general are a genre that aren’t known for respecting the player’s time, but at some point I felt like I needed to cut my losses before the game began in earnest. If I’m going to spend my time playing a game with lengthy JRPG battles… there might be other candidates more worthy of consideration.

Drakensang: The Dark Eye

Developer: Radon Labs

Release Date: February 18, 2009

Time Played: About two and a half hours

Dubiosity: 3 out of 5

Still more coherent than: any of the Realms of Arkania games

Would I play more? This seems fine, but there are so many other, way more immediately interesting CRPGs vaguely hovering around my backlog.

The Dark Eye, or Das Schwarze Auge, is Germany’s premiere RPG system, occupying a similar cultural cache to Dungeons and Dragons in its homeland. Unsurprisingly, it’s been host to many video game adaptations over the years, from the inscruitably hardcore Realms of Arkania series to adventure games like Quick Look hall of famer Chains of Satinav. The best of the bunch are probably Blackguards and its sequel, which toe the line between intelligent tactics games with bespoke, hand-crafted missions, and a trial-and-error sadism fests depending on how the developers were feeling that day. They’re pretty neat, and being reminded of their existence has made me want to give either of them another look one of these days. I remember the second one being a little better on that front.

Alas, Drakensang is not either of those, but it had the fortunate (or perhaps unfortunate) timing to be one of the few games of its type to come out in 2009. While Dragon Age Origins is probably the mean comparison I could make, Drakensang is probably better compared to the likes of Neverwinter Nights 2 (which we'll get to,) both for its intimidating suite of character building options and adherence to an established pen-and-paper RPG system. There are indeed a frightening abundance of options in Drakensang’s very freeform character building system and you’d better believe they all scared me to death. This is very much a personal preference, but having skill, stat, and spell increases all draw from the same pool of experience points rather than being separate leads to a lot of analysis paralysis. Do I bank points to increase my stats, or do I focus on smaller increases on crucial skills? I’m suffering Arcanum flashbacks over here.

Now, to be clear, I think there’s probably a solid, if unspectacular CRPG underneath the eurojank NWN veneer. The real-time with pause combat seems manageable, the camera isn’t a horrible nightmare, and there does seem to be some thought put into the mechanics. It’s just unfortunate that instead of giving any sort of strong first impression, my time spent in the initial opening act of Drakensang mostly involved slowly killing wolves, dealing with a weirdly punishing “wound” system, and interacting with writing that I’d generously describe as “quaint, extremely Germanic mid-fantasy.” It might eventually blossom into something more interesting (or not) but the two and a half hours I spent were, point blank, a mediocre slog.

That's the weird trend with both of this week's games, actually. Both of them feel like they might be alright, but they sure didn't pass the "first few hours" test that more-or-less summarizes this feature. Now obviously, a game is more than just its first few hours, and I can think of more than a few of my favorite games that give off less-than-great first impressions. No one is going to be enchanted by the first few hours of Temple of Elemental Evil, either spent doing fedex quests in Hommlet or slowly getting worked at the moathouse, nor is anyone going to speak highly of the first act of The Witcher. Ultimately I hope this feature isn't taken as any rigorous critical discourse or serious recommendation to play or purchase any of these games (except Wizards and Warriors, which I genuinely think is a weird, rough gem) but also I fully invoke Wolpaw's Law here. I am under no obligation to give a game a second chance if it doesn't put its best foot forward... but also let's be honest some of this shit might actually get revisited for charity-related purposes.

Ultima IX: Ascension

Developer: Origin Systems (RIP)

Release Date: November 23, 1999

Time Played: A little over 3 ½ hours

Dubiosity: 5 out of 5. You might be able to convince me that it’s a 4 by simple value of “it’s pretty playable” but from a historical angle I can’t say anything less than a 5.

Virtues: 1 out of 8 (Sacrifice, probably)

Would I play more? You know, I’d rather play this weird franchise-killing piece of shit over more than half the other games I’ve played for this feature and I don’t know what that says about me.

Of every single game I’ve played on this feature so far, I cannot think of one more infamous than Ultima IX, the game that not only killed the Ultima franchise, but also killed Origin Systems after its disastrous release. It’s also, to be entirely honest, exactly the kind of garbage I want for this feature. I enjoyed my time with Ultima IX, not because it’s a good game, but because it’s the perfect combination of what I want out of a stream fodder dubious RPG. It’s an ambitious game from a renowned series which whiffs massively on execution, trying to appeal to both series fans and newcomers without quite managing either. It fundamentally misunderstands the Ultima series’ core themes and ideas, which sure is a problem given that it’s the conclusion to the franchise. I’m someone who deeply respects Ultima from afar, but as someone who wasn’t alive on this planet when most of the series’ games came out, I’ve found going back to them to be quite difficult. Nonetheless, it doesn’t take being an Ultima Expert to know why this game seems like “a real bummer” while still being the exact level of bullshit I’m willing to tolerate in an RPG like this.

A lot has been said about Ultima IX’s troubled development by the people who worked on it, Richard Garriott especially. In case you needed a reminder that Electronic Arts’ history of driving talented studios into the dirt goes back decades, look no further than Ultima IX’s “Holiday 1999 or bust” release date leading to massive swaths of cut content. I can’t speak to “what could’ve been” but the game as it is now is a little fascinating? Ultima IX brings a top-down party-based isometric series into the realm of a 3D, third person, single character, action-RPG. I think the transition would’ve been awkward even if the ideal version of this game had come into the world, but regardless the game that does exist is sort of fascinating in a “they were still figuring things out” sort of way. As my recent rude awakening revisiting Mario 64 has reminded me, game developers were still very much figuring out how games controlled in a 3D space during the mid-late 90s, and Ultima IX’s mouse-centric, utterly baffling UI and inventory management is no different. I am on the record as being entirely pro-Paper Doll inventory, but Ultima IX goes one step further by just asking you to awkwardly drag and drop equipment onto (your avatar) The Avatar. I think it’s supposed to be accessible? Accessible for whom I’m not entirely clear, but one gets the impression that putting most functions to the mouse was meant to make the game *easier* to handle.

Anyway, there are also some rudimentary physics and particle interactions in Ultima IX, which continues a lot of ideas established in games like Ultima VII, and are pretty impressive for the time period. You can light and extinguish torches, blow some things over with wind, or toss an infinite number of rocks at a stupid rat while your game audio redlines on stream. What are these mechanics in service of? Sub-Zelda dungeoneering puzzles, it turns out. Did you want platforming in your RPG? No? Well there’s platforming in Ultima IX, alongside an abundance of “what if you pressed this button” or “what if you lit all the torches in this room” style design. Alongside combat that mostly consists of ineffectually clicking on enemies to whack them, there are ideas at play here, most of which are in service of very simple, somewhat janky solutions.

The story of Ultima IX, in which the villainous Guardian has corrupted the eight virtues of Brittonia, is particularly derided by the fanbase with the way it handles and concludes the long-running series. As a relative Ultima neophyte, the idea of a (particularly clueless) Avatar bumbling around and solving people who are now “opposite day” versions of their city’s particular virtue is very funny, alongside an abundance of full voice acting that can only be described as “of its time.” It seems poor, and a pretty obvious step down from what I’ve seen of prior games, even going back as far as something like Ultima VII, but for my twisted purposes it seems the exact right amount of dumb to be entertaining. This game is not some hidden gem. It’s not a misunderstood hidden classic, but nor is it an irredeemable trash fire like I was led to believe. I had a good time with Ultima IX. You should not play Ultima IX.

Dungeon Hack

Developer: Dreamforge Intertainment

Release Date: Couldn’t find a clear release date. 1994ish?

Time Played: Exactly one run on stream, which was about 30 minutes.

Dubiosity: 4 out of 5

Would I play more? I shouldn’t have put this game on the list in the first place.

Dungeon Hack is a procedurally generated solo dungeon crawler using the Eye of the Beholder III engine. If you ever wanted the side-stepping, switch-hitting, item juggling magic of a “Dungeon Master-like” without bespoke level design or puzzles, then boy do I have the game for you! The combination of having to manage only one character and the lack of interesting gimmicks within those proc gen levels means I lasted about half an hour with Dungeon Hack before I decided I’d had enough. Doesn’t seem especially well-advised, or interesting enough to make any sort of content about, but for the sake of completion I will record that I played it. Honestly, should’ve probably put something else on the wheel, but it’s a learning experience for all involved.

Dungeon Lords

Developer: Heuristic Park

Release Date: May 5, 2005

Time Played: About two hours on stream (about four hours total)

Dubiosity: 5 out of 5

Clickiosity: I had to take some tylenol so my arm wouldn’t hurt

Would I play more? Hahahahahhahahahahah maybe

For this feature, I’ve made a deliberate attempt to avoid a lot of smaller independent games, as that feels a little like punching down on small teams or low-hanging fruit. One of the reasons why something like Inquisitor, an ambitious, earnest, and misguided piece of shit, hasn’t been featured (other than the part where I never want to play it again) is because it wasn’t a big, full-price release (that said it might get its own “hall of fame stream” depending on how things go) No doubt there are plenty of questionable RPGs once you get into the indie space, and especially the realm of stuff like RPGmaker, but I’m not really interested in dunking on those. In any case, if things like this next game are any proof, there are still plenty of boxed retail video games put out by actual publishers that are more than capable of filling my dubious needs.

Okay, so you know how I have a lot of very nice things to say about Wizards and Warriors despite the game itself being more than a little janky and not much of a looker? Now imagine, if you will, all of the esoteric jank that made Wizards and Warriors charming, but with the bizarre levels cranked up all the way and the actual mechanics replaced with incessant clicking. That’s right! It’s another game from Heuristic Park, the studio that noted CRPG alumni David W. Bradley founded after his departure from Sir Tech and the Wizardry series. The pedigree is there, the lineage is evident, but also this fills all the quotas for “weird, obscure, and questionable” you could possibly imagine.

I say, without equivocation or exaggeration, that Dungeon Lords is the single most dubious game I’ve played for this feature. I mean that in the sense that it’s a bizarre hack-n-slash attempt at “modernizing” the classical CRPG dungeon crawler, built on the corpse of a canceled MMO. BUT ALSO, It’s basically broken-ass Diablo Musou with the deep class building mechanics of D.W. Bradley’s other games, and you can absolutely subject other humans to it. Sure it doesn’t seem like it has an active player-base, but if you're that one guy who was hosting a server when I was streaming I would not be opposed to seeing what this game is like with eight people. Quests and environments seem to be a little more crafted and bespoke than your average “looter slasher” (back off Godfall) but instead of random encounters enemies will continually spawn at a fixed rate. Basically, imagine a constant stream of rat gank squads coming after you, with questionable, poorly-mixed audio design and a MMO hotbar of spells and abilities as you fill up your inventory with vendor trash, BUT ALSO you can do a bunch of ridiculous, dense multiclassing nonsense like you were playing Wizardry 7. It somehow manages to be profoundly mindless and surprisingly in-depth at the same time; an enviable feat.

Needless to say, it seems like it’s the product of a troubled development, and no amount of reworking (the steam version that I played is the second revision of this game) makes it seem like a great time. Playing Dungeon Lords feels like playing a fake video game, or maybe someone’s canceled, unfinished prototype that wasn’t supposed to be launched. The MMO skeleton is obvious, but the weird ways they tried to combine that with classical genre tropes is one of the more baffling things I’ve seen, and I’ve played a lot of Eurojank recently. Genuinely, for something I bought for under $5, it’s the closest any game on this feature has come to a fever dream. There’s also nothing else quite like it, which is why in spite of it clearly being, uh, not good, I wouldn’t be opposed to trying more of it.

Or not. Maybe I should just play a nice, relaxing game of... uh. Well, what do I play now? I got what I needed out of Hades, I got all 120 stars in Mario 64 after 23 years. Uhhhhhhhh. Maybe I'll get back to Dragon Age II? Nope. Nah. Not right now. Maybe. We'll see. Maybe I'll start streaming Troubleshooter or any number of guilty backlog games. Until then, take care of yourself.

Lionheart: Legacy of the Crusader

Developer: Reflexive Entertainment

Release Date: August 13, 2003

Time Played: About three hours

Dubiosity: 4 out of 5

Video Game Lies Rating: ½ Molyneux

Would I play more? Listen if you wanted to pay me money or like… do a thing for charity, this is the level of bad I would be willing to do for a charitable cause. Otherwise no. Though, honestly if I was gonna do something for charity it’d probably be something a little more big name terrible.

Lionheart was one of the major inspirations for this feature; an inconsequential object of fixation for myself and exactly no one else. The last game published by Interplay under the Black Isle label before the company’s implosion a few months later, Lionheart reeks of an interesting premise cut short by the demands of a failing publisher. It’s very easy to take a look at lost, cancelled games from that period like Van Buren and Baldur’s Gate 3: The Black Hound and imagine “what could’ve been” (even if ideas from both eventually showed up in Fallout New Vegas and Pillars of Eternity) but it’s even worse in the case of a game like Lionheart, which feels blatantly downscaled and unfinished.

Taking place in an alternate history where Richard the Lionheart and Saladin teamed up to fight demons and magic from another dimension, the most interesting thing about Lionheart is the part where it straight up tricks you into thinking it’s one kind of game before turning into another. It starts as a CRPG in the vein of Fallout, even using the SPECIAL system, before revealing itself to be… way more of a straight hack-n-slash. It stands out in my memory precisely because it’s so blatant, and it’s so immediate. For the first few hours (which is all that was shown on my stream) it’s actually kind of promising. After that? You sure do wander around a lot of wilderness areas and kill a lot of monsters. Sure hope you didn’t invest *that much* into speech, because it’s useless for 80% of the game.

To be frank, Lionheart is less enthralling upon revisit than I imagined. The Neo Barcelona sequence is, even in its deceptive vertical slice form, a little underwhelming even by the standards of its time. There’s something genuinely kind of great, in a very pulp fantasy sort of way, about William Shakespeare, Nicholo Machiavelli, Leonardo Da Vinci, and Hernan Cortes all hanging out in the same city, giving you petty low-level RPG quests, but the writing isn’t quite there? And once you get out of the city, it falls into the same “oh no it’s Diablo but more boring” trap that numerous other action-y RPGs from around the same period fell into. I feel like I’ve said my piece on how I feel about that particular slice of the subgenre.

Divinity II: The Dragon Knight Saga

Developer: Larian Studios

Release Date: November 20, 2009

Time Played: About three hours

Dubiosity: 2 out of 5

Literally can't think of a joke-y thing to put about this game: Yes

Would I play more? I mean, I already did like nine years ago and I didn’t finish it then either.

Larian Studios was not always the crown champion of western RPGs. Long before they hit it big with Original Sin and were handed the keys to the Baldur’s Gate franchise they were a small Belgian studio trying to make it big with a bunch of ambitious, but flawed RPGs. I might eventually have more to say about Divine Divinity and Beyond Divinity, depending on how this feature progresses, so I’ll refrain from talking about the series’ history for now. Instead, Divinity II (you know, the third Divinity game) is definitely reflective of the time it came out. In an era where “serious” PC-centric RPGs were more-or-less dead (see: the last paragraph of that Dragon Age blog I wrote a few months ago) Divinity II’s most historically relevant aspect was a troubled development cycle and a contentious developer/publisher relationship that eventually led Larian to the world of crowdfunding. So, in some way, you definitely wouldn’t have gotten Original Sin if not for this game being as much of a mess as it was.

I tore this game a new one in that blog I wrote circa 2011, and I think I was way too hard on it. No one deserves to be compared to The Sword of Truth, and the writing deserves far more credit than that even if it waffles between earnest seriousness and goofs at the drop of a hat. Divinity II: The Dragon Knight Saga (which is both Divinity II: Ego Draconis and its expansion Flames of Vengeance) is an entirely competent Eurojank action-RPG whose most outstanding aspects are Kiril Pokrovsky’s remarkable soundtrack and the generally light, goofy tone that characterizes most of the series. For a game where you’re a mind-reading dragon knight with a flexible, open character progression and multiple ways of solving quests, it mostly looks and plays like a clunky, bog-standard action RPG where the biggest layer of “strategy” is mostly about kiting groups of enemies and managing mana and health while you whail away with your preferred attack style of choice (be it hit things, shoot things, zap things, or summon things.) I didn’t get to the part where you can be a dragon on stream, but based on my memory it both takes forever for that to happen and actually being a dragon is less exciting than it should be.

That’s not to say you can’t see hints of a great game hidden underneath Divinity II’s mid-budget exterior. Well, great is maybe stretching it, but there are hints of a decent game hidden between the technical jank and awkward combat. You can definitely see the roots of games like Original Sin and its sequel, with the flexible character development and lighthearted, off-beat writing. I could see someone having an okay time with it, but it doesn’t excel at any one thing enough to be remarkable even by the standards of Eurojank. It’s merely… fine. And I don’t really have much more to say about it other than “wow they’ve definitely improved since then.”

Honestly? Should've picked Beyond Divinity for this feature instead. But I guess that's what THE WHEEL 2.0 will be for, right? Assuming my life doesn't suddenly take an especially successful or unsuccessful turn, that'll probably happen next year.

The Bard’s Tale

Developer: InXile Entertainment inc.

Release Date: October 26, 2004

Time Played: A little over two hours

Dubiosity: 2 out of 5

Mediocrity: 5.5

Would I play more? Only out of morbid curiosity

It’s only fitting that following the release of Wasteland 3, an honest to goodness non-dubious RPG that I highly recommend, we take a look back at InXile’s roots. Well, sort of. Founded by Brian Fargo after his exile from Interplay (ha, get it?) the first big project from the studio was a revival of the storied Bard’s Tale franchise. Well, storied in the sense that I think The Bard’s Tale trilogy probably rates as the fourth string Dungeon Crawler behind Wizardry, Ultima, and Might and Magic while still being historically relevant. Similarly, I mean revival in the sense that it uses the same name and has some of the same vague themes as those old CRPGs, but uh, in most senses The Bard’s Tale 2004 is probably one of the most 2004 RPGs I can think of. Probably makes it even more baffling that it’s been ported to pretty much every console you can think of (including the Ouya,) but I guess this is better than Hunted: The Demon’s Forge.

The Bard’s Tale 2004 has the grand misfortune of being a “comedic” send-up of RPGs and video game tropes in general; something I’m already not fond of. There’s a sneering quality to The Stanley Parable’s “Hey you dingdong, look at you, playing a video game, doing video game things” style of commentary that I’ve always found a little insufferable, so I was expecting the worst from BT 2004. If nothing else in its favor, it has a pretty impressive voice cast, featuring Cary Elwes as the titular bard (doing an inexplicable, but not unwelcome cockney accent) and the late, great Tony Jay in one of his last roles as the narrator. That said, for as much as I’d love to talk about how poorly comedy ages, especially the comedy of the unfortunate era that was the mid-00s, to be perfectly honest the comedy in Bard’s Tale isn’t nearly as terrible or cringe as I was anticipating. Oh, it’s got some T-rated edge to it, and it certainly goes after some low-hanging fruit with its “lol video game” humor, but most of it reaches a bare minimum level of competence to merely be “mildly unfunny” or “vaguely chuckle-worthy” rather than something I can earnestly rip into.

It’s probably doubly unfortunate that The Bard’s Tale 2004 wants its writing (and frequent musical interludes) to do most of the heavy lifting. As a video game, it’s running on the Baldur’s Gate: Dark Alliance engine and is a pretty standard console hack-n-slash from that era with some acceptable RPG character building. It has ideas, like having the bard’s magical repertoire consist exclusively of summoning spells and forcing the player to time their parries, rather than hold down the block button, but I sure did spend two hours of my life lightly tapping X on my controller in service of middling jokes and middling, streamlined loot. It’s genuinely one of the more boring things I’ve played as a part of this feature, but it’s far too competently made to be truly bad. I know that’s a ringing endorsement if you’ve ever heard one, but maybe give this one a skip?

Stonekeep

Developer: Interplay

Release Date: Nov 8, 1995

Time Played: A little under two hours

Dubiosity: 3 out of 5

Contains: FMV

Would I play more? Wouldn’t be opposed

That’s right nerds, it’s a “Video games produced by Brian Fargo” double feature today. This was entirely unintentional, but it makes for good theming, right? Stonekeep is a first-person dungeon crawler that isn’t quite a deep turn-based meat grinder like Wizardry, nor is it exactly a “Side-Stepping, Square-Dancing, Puzzle-Solving Real-Time Panic Management Sim” in the vein of Eye of the Beholder (or for those of you under the age of 1000: Legend of Grimrock.) It is, instead, a product of a delightful period of game development where the CD-ROM was just starting to come into fashion. Basically, it’s a dungeon crawler but with a whole hell of a lot more digitized sprites and FMV than its contemporaries.

Unfortunately, the extremely goofy, extremely “good” use of Full Motion Video and digitized sprites is about the only thing in Stonekeep I think is especially remarkable. As a dungeon crawler, it’s going for a little more streamlined, simplified approach, with “Elder Scrolls-style” skill progression and intentionally obfuscated numbers. While you eventually do get more characters than extremely “dude we found hanging out in a coffee shop in LA” protagonist Drake, I didn’t encounter any of them during the two hours I spent putt-putting around the first floor. Instead, I mostly spent my time throwing rocks at ants and not really encountering any big interesting puzzles or mechanical concepts. It seems entirely playable, and I’m to understand that there’s more high-quality FMV later down the line, but honestly there are far more interesting dungeon crawlers sitting in my backlog and judging me. Did you know that a sequel to Vaporum comes out next week? I still need to finish the first one!

A bit of a short one this week, but that’s what comes from two “one-stream” games in a row. Next week’s offering is something a little more meatier, and one of the biggest inspirations for this feature in the first place. I can’t talk more highly enough about it and its dubiosity, and I highly recommend you tune in. I might also start doing non-dubious streams every once in a while, since my time with Berwick Saga was a lot of fun. Maybe just follow me on twitch, hmmm?

Sudeki

Developer: Climax Studios

Release Date: July 20, 2004

Time Played: About 3 ½ hours

Dubiosity: 3 out of 5

Crimes this game is responsible for: Getting me to talk about Fate/Stay Night and other pervert anime on stream.

Would I play more? This game is too weird for me to say no

I know the premise of this entire feature is predicated on me playing weird, obscure, and qualitatively questionable RPGs, but even by those standards Sudeki is a weird one. It’s a pretty sterling example of a brief trend during the late 90s and early 00s, when Western developers were making Japanese-style RPGs in order to catch the wave of both the 90s anime boom and the massive popularity of Final Fantasy VII. As a late-model original Xbox game (published by Microsoft, no less) Sudeki feels like it comes right at the tail end of that period, but that doesn’t make it any less, uh, charming? Endearing? Listen, take one look at that art style and those character designs and tell me they don’t resemble those old “How to Draw Manga” books they sold at Scholastic Book Fairs (albeit way hornier.) You’re not going to confuse it with the actual anime-ass bullshit that was coming out on the PS2 around the same time, but there’s an earnest, almost innocent, attempt at evoking that Japanese inspiration without directly trying to copy it. It’s colorful and bright and I honestly am into it for as much as the game is also a bizarre mess.

For the longest time, the only things I knew about Sudeki were those aforementioned horny-as-hell female character designs and that Jeff Gerstmann has mentioned his wife being a fan. So imagine my surprise when I found out it was an action RPG with two styles of play, rather than having any sort of turn-based or ATB-inspired system. It feels like a preview of what to expect from a more console focused Wheel of Dubious RPGs vol 2 (which might actually happen) and a reminder of where video games were at in 2004. Do you like big, ugly UI elements meant for standard definition televisions? Boy, I sure do. Having spent the past few weeks with fairly broad, open-world games, being funneled back down to smaller, more linear corridors of simple polygons was also a refreshing change of pace, even if I'm not sure my experience was an entirely positive one. Memorable? Yes.

Main Shounen Swordtagonist Tal and Scantily Clad Claw Lady Buki operate like a fairly simplistic, slightly janky brawler, where you can rhythmically input different combinations of X and A to put out different basic attacks. Butt Princess Alish and Jetpack Scientist Elco, on the other hand are gun wizards and literally operate like first-person shooters. If you wanna live your life by awkwardly circle-strafing mobs of enemies and occasionally pressing Y to slow down time and unleash a special attack (it’s still an RPG, and it seems like you have some amount of options when speccing the four characters) it’s something you can do, which I recommend. By the end of my play-time I had only just assembled the full party, so I can’t speak to how Sudeki’s combat moves beyond the early hours. However, as a noted fan of Gun Wizards and a noted fan of Janky Nonsense, it had my attention. Not for being great, obviously not. 2004 is also the year that Devil May Cry 3 and Halo 2 came out, so I think I’m covered if I want actual good action games and shooters from that period.

Now, the other part of this game being weird as shit has a lot to do with everything else? The voice acting in Sudeki follows the Chrono Cross school of accents, with a lot of different vaguely-European voices coming out of various anime-looking dudes and ladies with no rhyme or reason to it. Consistent worldbuilding? PFFFFFT. I guess Elco’s accent is supposed to be Dutch? Anyway, I sure as hell couldn’t tell you what was happening in Sudeki’s story based on those first three and a half hours, other than “Something something invasion, something something crystals” and a vague summation of each character’s personality. (Shounen boy with daddy issues, spoiled princess, eccentric playboy scientist (?), and noble tribal warrior lady.) There’s just something about how slightly… off about the way it’s executed which makes me want to see more. There’s a certain level of pantomime going on here with the way Sudeki tries to deliberately replicate JRPG plot points that I find fascinating, especially in hard contrast to something like Dragon Quest XI, which I’ve been going through in a fairly staggered, meandering fashion.

Not that the writing itself is great or anything, but the rest of Sudeki is odd enough that it falls into the much vaunted “I’d consider doing something more with this” category alongside high quality games like Two Worlds and Rise of the Argonauts. This is NOT an endorsement of quality, before any of you jump out and purchase this for $5 on the next steam sale (once again, would like to genuinely apologize to the multiple people who played Rise of the Argonauts in the Year of Our Lord 2020 because of me.) It's more that I want to see more of this game because it’s weird and I’m a fundamentally broken person. Sudeki! Catch it again! Eventually!

GreedFall

Developer: Spiders

Release Date: September 10, 2019

Time Played: About 4 hours

Dubiosity: 2 out of 5

Tricone Hats: 5 out of 5

Would I play more? Given the broken curve I’m grading on here, the answer is “yes, I’m seriously considering giving this a full playthrough”

GreedFall seems… totally alright? Coming from the studio responsible for Dubious RPG Hall of Fame candidate and unintentional comedy masterpiece Bound by Flame, this is the highest of compliments I can manage. This is the first game from French RPG studio Spiders that seems like it has a genuine budget behind it, as opposed to a handful of euros and some earnest intentions. It made me realize they might actually be capable of making something too good to show up on a randomizer wheel of cursed RPGs created entirely to stave off Quarantine Madness, which is something I don’t think I would’ve ever said before this. It reminds me of The Surge being the follow-up to Lords of the Fallen, actually. Just pretend that The Surge 2 wasn’t apparently a pretty straight sidegrade, because I still have faith that Deck 13 will eventually make a solid souls-like, be it fantasy or sci-fi.

As the newest game on The Wheel of Dubious RPGs at slightly less than a year old, GreedFall benefits from mostly resembling a modern video game. The voice acting is acceptable-to-good most of the time and it looks pretty good for a game of its budget even if you can sometimes see the limitations peeking through the cracks. As De Sardet, a fantasy ambassador/cop tasked with accompanying his/her dipshit cousin on a voyage to the new world, it cannot be faulted for lack of ambition. Oh, the combat seems awkward, (especially if you didn’t accidentally spec into the most overpowered “Gunquistador” path like I did) the skill tree seems limited, and I’m not entirely convinced the game’s slightly-too-wordy, on-the-nose writing will be able to handle the historically fraught, extremely messy subject of colonialism. It’s a game that has a lot to prove, and given the decidedly “mixed” critical reception it’s gotten as well as the pedigree of its developer, I question whether it'll manage to nail everything it sets out to do. Hey, it's still EuroJank, right? What's the point of games like this, if to not always mildly disappoint such grand ambitions?

However, I had a pretty alright time, mostly bereft of irony, and my handful of hours with the game made me want to see more. There’s definitely a place for these sorts of “AA” budget games out there, and in another very real sense Greedfall is filling that medium-complexity RPG void that Bioware has left vacant for the last six years. I can’t speak to how De Sardet and his/her ramshackle party of miscreants will navigate the terrifying turns and twists of “Colonial Government Bureaucracy” (side note: a surprising number of quests I’ve undertaken thus far have been the video game equivalent of filing paperwork, which I appreciate for their audacity if nothing else) in the long run, but for the moment I think GreedFall is on my radar.

Risen

Developer: Piranha Bytes

Release Date: October 2, 2009

Time Played: Around three hours

Dubiosity: 3 out of 5

Gothic: Yes

Would I play more? Honestly my time with this game might’ve actually sold me on trying to play through at least one Piranha Bytes RPG. Not right now though.

So hey remember how last week’s game was Arcania: Gothic 4? And remember how my write-up on that was essentially dropping a laundry list of Gothic things it doesn’t do? Well, I have great news: Risen is a Gothic. Don’t feel like I need to repeat it all here, but it’s a single character, classless RPG whereupon the player character is a nameless, vaguely Germanic dude who enters a closed, conflict-filled space and immediately finds himself torn between factions. Instead of an open-air prison with a magical barrier, it’s a Mediterranian-ish island where ancient temples have been rising (risen?) out of the ground. There are the bandit-ish dudes living out in the swamps! There are the inquisition dudes in town and at the monastery!

Say what you will about Piranha Bytes, it really does seem like they’ve nailed making different variations on the same game for the last 20 years; at least well enough to remain in business. Even in my short time with the game, I felt like I had a pretty good grasp of the hierarchies, politics, and weird pecking order in the bandit camp, and I was generally… surprised at how non-awful most of the voice acting was. It was almost like I was seeing what other people claimed these games were good at for ages, which was a weird experience after bouncing so hard off the original Gothic. It probably helps that Risen has a control scheme that isn’t a keyboard-only unintuitive monstrosity, or that I spent more than 30 minutes with it. Either way, it has my attention.

Now, the caveat to all of this is that I sure did spend a large portion of my time on stream solving petty delivery quests and dying to anything more dangerous than a giant bug or sickly wolf with the decidedly clunky combat. I’m to understand that’s the game working as intended, and I think knowing exactly what kind of game this is helped frame my expectations. I started feeling a little lost and aimless near the end, trying to poke around until I found something that wouldn’t kill me, but I guess overcoming that is also part of the game. If nothing else, I sure did have a more enjoyable time than I did with Gothic 4, which had all of the EuroJank flavor with none of the interesting, overly-ambitious substance. I still don’t know if I have the exact amount of patience to deal with Gothic Risen’s very deliberate, grinding brand of bullshit, but I think I’d seriously consider trying to find out. Consider this another one on the “would consider doing something more with on stream” shelf.

Betrayal in Antara

Developer: Sierra On-Line

Release Date: July 31, 1997

Time Played: A little under two hours

Dubiosity: 3 out of 5

Number of human beings who have thought about playing this video game in the Year of Our Lord 2020: I have to assume it’s just me.

Would I play more? You look at that “Time Played” and you ask me that question again.

If you couldn’t tell my basic level of patience for streaming janky RPGs has actually decreased as this feature has gone on, I present to you my time with Betrayal in Antara. It was the first game in a while that felt like a real “one and done” stream, even if it’s hardly the worst thing I’ve looked at. The spiritual successor to Betrayal at Krondor, the 1993 DOS RPG based on Raymond E. Feist’s Riftwar novels, Antara was mostly picked over that game because: A. It’s less well-known and B. It’s worse. It’s probably one of the more obscure games I’ve covered on this feature outside of maybe Wizards and Warriors or Thunderscape, which is weird because it’s actually sold in a bundle alongside Betrayal at Krondor on GOG.

It certainly resembles what I remember of BaK, between the strange, tile-based combat system, very talk-y prose, and exploration/management mechanics. Indeed, the story of noblechad William Escobar and his pet incel wizard boy Aren Cordelaine definitely seems like it might go somewhere, complete with the requisite amount of 90s snark you’d expect… but eh. I spent almost two hours hitting pirates with sticks in un-tactical combat and wasn’t entirely sure how much longer it would take before the game got good or even “good.” I’ll give it this: the voice acting is better than most other games of this era, and there sure is a lot of it. Similarly, the character portraits are hilariously bad in a way that evokes educational material or maybe WikiHow, and it has paper doll inventories, which I can always get behind. However, after replaying through all of Pillars of Eternity and starting on the second, my RSI has been acting up like crazy. Unfortunately, Betrayal in Antara didn’t hook me enough to justify being in actual physical pain, so I guess it’s fortunate the next game on the wheel is one that seems meant for a controller.

Needless to say, if you’re wondering what kind of dubious RPGs that would be worth being in pain for, that playthrough of Dragon Age II will happen… eventually. Playing Pillars right after Dragon Age Origins really doubled down my point that DAO is a less special and interesting game removed from the context that it came out in, and playing Pillars II feels like an additional nail in that coffin. Fear not! There’s still absolutely a part of me that wants to re-experience the slow motion trainwreck of DA II for the first time since it came out, and I still intend on getting back to it before the end of the year.

The Elder Scrolls II: Daggerfall (Daggerfall Unity)

Developer: Bethesda Softworks

Release Date: August 30, 1996

Time Played: About two hours on stream, messed with it a little more off camera

Dubiosity: The original game is definitely a candidate for the coveted 5 out of 5 Dubiosity rating, but honestly Daggerfall Unity seems like it improves enough to drop that down to a potential 3 or 4.

Number of times I fell through the floor: 0! YOU DON’T UNDERSTAND HOW REVELATORY THIS IS

Would I play more? Yes.

I’ll fully admit that putting Daggerfall on the wheel was entirely an excuse to check out Daggerfall Unity, an ambitious attempt at remaking the entirety of the second Elder Scrolls game with a more modern engine. I have great news: If you wanted, for some ungodly reason, to play Daggerfall in the Year of Our Lord 2020, this would be the way to do it. What if Daggerfall controlled and ran like a modern video game? Or was at a resolution higher than 640x480? What if there were a bunch of small, but significant quality-of-life improvements, and what if the numerous broken-ass technical issues were gone (i.e. Language skills actually working?) What if there was an experimental toggle to make the dungeons a more reasonable size? WHAT IF DAGGERFALL HAD MOD SUPPORT? Are you getting excited? I’m getting excited.

Now, let’s be clear here, it’s still Daggerfall. Even without being in a constant semi-broken state, it’s still this staggeringly ambitious, extremely large game full of a bunch of half-baked ideas and endless swathes of procedurally generated content, all surrounding a massively big world with nothing in it. But if you’re like me, and have a certain amount of affection for Bethesda’s deranged, dungeon-crawling opus, this is like candy. There’s something about this game I really like, and I’m not sure if it’s the part where it doesn’t feel like it was designed for humans, or the part where it’s actually a solid randomly-generated dungeon crawl with all of the absurd power creep you’d expect. Either way, don’t feel like I have a whole lot else to talk about, and if you really cared you could easily play the game yourself. It’s freeware, after all, and so is Daggerfall Unity. They’re updating it constantly, so why not check it out?

Arcania: Gothic 4

Developer: Spellbound Studios

Release Date: September 27, 2010

Time Played: About three hours

Dubiosity: 4 out of 5

Number of times I was murdered by a single wolf: 0

Would I play more? Couldn’t uninstall a game faster.

Sometimes you get a Daggerfall, sometimes you get a… whatever the hell this is. Arcania: Gothic 4 (sometimes just “Arcania” and sometimes “Arcania: A Gothic Tale”) is one of the games I was dreading the most. After the series’ original developer Piranha Bytes and publisher JoWood split up, the former went on to make “Pirate Gothic” while the latter commissioned Spellbound Studios (probably best known for making the original Desperados games) to make a new fourth installment in the Gothic series. It’s, uh, something of a black sheep among the fanbase (at least the ones who acknowledge its existence in the first place,) and after playing it I think I have an inkling why: It’s not a Gothic game. Nor is it particularly interesting as a non-Gothic game.

Let me be clear: I respect those first two Gothic games in equal proportion to how little I want to play either of them. They’re the crown champions of Eurojank RPGs, beloved cult classics and, alas, perhaps a little too European and Janky for my preferences (they’re also slightly too beloved to appear on this wheel, tbh.) They are games with a very distinctive style and open world design ethos, where your nameless hero crawls his way to competence by solving menial tasks after getting murdered by local wildlife and kicked to death by local children. You know, basic German RPG design. If you want a good primer on the appeal of the series, between its strong worldbuilding and uncompromising mechanics, you’d be better off reading Mento’s recent write-ups on Gothic II and its expansion than my own floundering words. They’re games I wouldn’t be opposed to giving another shot one day, but maybe I’ll just wait for the remake of Gothic 1 before I do so.

So, of course, Arcania has none of those things that makes its predecessors special. In what I have to imagine is a targeted dig at Piranha Bytes, the main character of the original three Gothic games has now become a mad king. Said king is responsible for the deaths of the new nameless main character’s friends and family, in one of the more bizarre opening chapters to a video game I’ve played in a while. Make no mistake, Arcania is a janky RPG made on the European continent, filled with weird, awkward dialogue (delivered in English by a bunch of otherwise prolific LA-based VAs who have done much better work elsewhere), weird, awkward combat and weird, awkward graphical glitches. But Gothic it is not, between the straightforward, boring skill tree of incremental percentile improvements, to the seemingly linear environmental progression made for last generation consoles, to the complete lack of me getting my ass kicked by even the most sickly and infirm of wolves. I can’t help but imagine it’s an ill-advised attempt at chasing a larger, more mainstream or console audience, because it was remarkably playable. In this case, I don’t mean that as a compliment. Playable in the sense that I spent my three hours alternating between dodging very slow enemy attacks and clicking rhythmically to kill things.

Was it interesting? No. Not really. I might’ve uncovered something more had I played longer, but at no point during these three hours did I ever feel like I found a “hook” or even a struggle. There’s nothing exciting about a Eurojank RPG that isn’t also recklessly ambitious, and as far as I could tell there was nothing particularly ambitious about Arcania. Games like the first Witcher or Two Worlds are endearing precisely because they reach far higher than their humble budgets (or technical limitations) would call for. This? This was just kind of… there.

Well, as if Karma herself had intervened, my next game is actually the real Gothic 4: Risen. Just for a heads up, the current plan is to play through all the games currently on the wheel before taking a break. I think there’s a non-negligible chance of “The Wheel of Dubious RPGs vol. 2, feat: a bunch more console stuff and CRPGs I overlooked” happening, but for now I’m going to focus on what’s in front of me… which is already frankly terrifying on its own. As always, you can catch my streams on my Twitch channel (no interest in archiving them beyond the 14 day window) and I try to go at least once a week, usually Friday or Saturday.

Until then, just… re-read my 5,000 word Dragon Age Origins write-up, I guess. This whole feature is responsible for that anyway, and you’ll get the sick pleasure of me doing something similar for Dragon Age II once I muster up the willpower to do so.

THE WHEEL OF DUBIOUS RPGs GAIDEN

Don’t say that I don’t commit to the bit. Thanks to my popular streaming/blogging series “The Wheel of Dubious RPGs” I’ve taken what should’ve just been 2-3 two hour streams of Dragon Age II and turned it into an entire thing, starting with a full replay of Dragon Age Origins. For, how am I to scientifically judge the dubiosity of BioWare’s infamous “first*” flop before I decide where I land with its predecessor? This has led to a journey of ups and downs, of joy and sorrow, but most of all “Wow, The Fade is just as bad as I remembered it.” This is a tale of conflict, both within myself, and outwardly, with the game, and even more outwardly, with fan-fixes which keep the game from crashing. This is a tale of generic-ass fantasy, where the demon zombie orc monsters are literally called DARK SPAWN, but a lot of the writing and characterization is mostly on the level. This… is what happens when you try and go back to your nostalgic faves and accidentally decide to write an entire retrospective blog as a way of sorting out one’s feelings.

In all seriousness, this is something I’ve wanted to do for a while and the wheel just provided the perfect opportunity. Dragon Age Origins was a favorite of mine for years, but I’m pretty sure the last time I finished it was back in 2009, and the last time I played a significant amount (i.e. like a dozen-ish hours) was sometime around 2014. I’ve been vocal about my feelings on the decline of BioWare as a developer, but part of that has been an examination of how my own tastes have changed over time and how our collective standards for video game writing have risen since the mid-2000s. Certainly, I’ve been throwing around the “BioWare didn’t get worse, everyone else just got better” thesis for a while, but it’s one of those things where I was never quite sure how true it actually is. Honestly, after finishing the game, I’m still not sure how true it is, even if this experience (alongside being reminded of Mass Effect 3’s… inadequacies, thanks to Mass Alex) has helped clarify the way my views on writing and mechanics have shifted in the last decade.

Thedas, THE Dragon Age Setting

Let me just get this out of the way before we talk about anything else: If there’s one, single thing that immediately stuck out to me as far, far worse than it was in my youthful memories, it’s the world of Dragon Age itself. This is one of those things that I think the sequels actually improved upon but as it stands in this game it’s the glum, unappealing no man’s land of high fantasy worldbuilding; an awkward middle-point between D&D’s Forgotten Realms and George R.R. Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire. There’s no getting around the giant sword throne-shaped hole in the wall; Dragon Age Origins is heavily inspired by Game of Thrones. Well, at least the books, because the TV series wasn’t happening yet nor had it subsequently ruined itself. All of the knights are called “Ser.” There’s a lot of murder in the name of ruthless politicking. The big innovation of Thedas mostly comes in applying that layer of grime and unpleasantness over a traditional fantasy world, with just a dash of medieval European equivalencies for good measure. That’s not to say there isn’t some interesting lore, but a lot of it is just that, lore.

Here’s the thing: for as much as Dragon Age wants you to know it’s set in a grim world where mages are basically walking demon conduits, Elves are second-class citizens, and you the player will have to make HARD CHOICES… it’s not as close to the edge as it thinks. Martin’s work is almost singular in its rawness (rape, murder, and moral compromises aplenty,) and it was the source material for the biggest prestige television show of the last decade. You can blame HBO for putting that out into mainstream popular culture, but Dragon Age is remarkably tame in this modern context. Forget Game of Thrones, we live in a world where The Witcher is now mainstream, and has a blood-and-boob-filled Netflix series of its own. For the most part the hardest DA:O goes is the hilariously copious amounts of blood spatter on everything and a handful of PG-13 sex scenes between two mannequins in their underwear.

The default expression of “serious themes” mostly comes in a nice heaping spoonful of “Fantastical Prejudice,” which is like real prejudice but more contrived and toothless. Elves are treated like garbage, Dwarves have an archaic caste system, and Magi are under the oppressive, controlling yoke of “Definitely not Christianity.” Anything to say about those systems other than that they’re bad, probably? Okay cool. It’s not “fun” enough to be a swashbuckling high fantasy adventure, but it never goes hard enough to actually justify a heavier tone. This is something the sequels actually course corrected a bit, but since I’m just talking about Dragon Age Origins here, I assume I’ll have something to say about that in a later write-up.

The [GREY WARDENS] gotta stop [THE BLIGHT]

Thankfully, I think most of the actual moment-to-moment writing in Dragon Age still holds its own, regardless of my newfound antipathy towards the setting. I could go off about the flimsy framing story that holds the entire thing together, but it’s a framing story. The Grey Wardens having to unite the squabbling factions of Ferelden against The Blight and The Darkspawn is about as paper-thin as Commander Shepard needing to assemble a crack suicide team of scallywags to go against The Collectors, or Revan needing to find four star maps in order to track down the secret Star Forge. There’s definitely a larger critique to be made about “The BioWare Formula,” and the way BioWare has leaned upon the same structure and basic power fantasy tropes for most of its RPGs since KotOR, but I feel like that’s an entire write-up unto itself and beyond my scope right now. I will readily criticize this game for having milquetoast, noncommittal politics despite occasional attempts at bringing in “serious” topics, but you’ll have to forgive me for not going into that stuff harder. I don’t think there’s anything wrong with unapologetic, indulgent power fantasy every once in a while, and for better or worse Dragon Age aims to be an unapologetic power fantasy. Themes may be for eighth grade book reports, but being the coolest, most specialest person and holding the fate of the world in your hands is for the eighth-grader in all of us.

The real meat of Bioware writing has always been the smaller, self-contained storytelling vignettes; the more crucial part of the formula than the frame story itself. The Grey Wardens need allies to stand with them against the blight, and most of them would be more than happy to stand with you as long as you solved this teensy, civilization-shattering problem they’re dealing with atm. Arl Eamon is sick, the Dwarves are in the middle of a succession crisis, the Mage tower has a minor demon kerfuffle, and the Dalish Elves are at odds with some Wurrwulves. Like a lot of Bioware’s games from the era (and now, TBH) a lot of these conflicts can be reduced down to a binary of “meaningful choices” between two diametrically opposed viewpoints. Do you save the mage circle from the demons, or do you purge the entire thing “just in case?” Do you defile the sacred ashes of Lady Not-Jesus just to appease some insane dragon cultists, or do you not do that? Some of these plots are definitely only one step above Knights of the Old Republic’s “Save the Dog versus Kill the Dog” level of extremity, but I don’t want to avoid giving credit where credit is due. Some of the quests are messier than that, like the Dalish/Werewolf beef, which doesn’t really paint anyone in a fantastic light and can be solved in a couple of different ways. That’s the sequence that surprised me the most, because it’s the one I remembered the least, and of the four “main” quests, it’s the best.

It’s just a pity that the best questline in the game, The Landsmeet, is the penultimate one (for reasons I’ll get into later.) After gathering all of your allies, it’s finally time to confront Teryn Loghain and make a play to put Alistair on the throne. While it’s still a mostly linear succession of dungeon crawls and dialogue sequences, there are a lot of different ways this can play out, and it’s the one part where the Game of Thrones-lite politicking actually works. For my part, I executed Loghain and his mustache-twirling goons, then forced a reluctant Alistair and Anora to marry for the good of the kingdom (he whined about it to me afterward). The actual final sequence of the game, where you finally confront the Darkspawn horde, is just an extended combat thing, which is fine, but it mostly feels like an obligation to fight the big demonic zombie dragon once you’ve figured out everything else.

I actually think the single best thing overarching all of Dragon Age Origins’ writing is the way it integrates all of the titular “origins” into the story and into your personal role-playing options, full stop. Some of the story beats are fun, some of the character writing is good, but for my money the best part is your suite of roleplaying options as a player. It’s something I remember being good then, but even now it manages to be impressive. Each of the six character origins is remarked upon in little ways throughout the game but is directly tied into one of the larger sequences you have to go to as part of the main quest. It’s, admittedly, the kind of reactivity that boils down to a handful of contextual lines of dialogue and certain NPCs treating you differently, but it’s consistent enough that the illusion works. I went with the Dwarf Commoner origin, which meant that a large chunk of NPCs in Orzammar treated me like garbage, but also gave my character a built-in motivation to side with the reformist Prince Bhelen (who had taken my character’s sister as his concubine) over the traditionalist Lord Harrowmont. On the other hand, if you were to go with the Dwarf Noble background, your origin would detail the way Bhelen (your brother) is a ruthless tyrannical shitheel, which would give that conflict a very different context. As the last BioWare game before they moved entirely to voiced protagonists, there’s a lot of space for you to express your version of the lone Grey Warden, and the origins bring in a lot of built-in roleplaying fodder to help that. Tell all the human lords that they stink, that their Chantry is dumb, and that you’re gonna help them anyway because you need their dumb asses to fight demon orcs. It’s very good and I appreciate it.

Morrigan Disapproves

I think the other pillar of a BioWare RPG, alongside the vignetted story structure, is the idea that you the player will bring along a host of interesting and likeable characters on your fun adventures. Among the various BioWare casts, I think Dragon Age Origins fits pretty firmly in the middle of the pack (as seen in the extremely scientific tier list I cobbled together in 5 minutes.) I think everyone is at least okay, helped by some quality voice performances and what I’d consider to be the gold standard of incidental party banter. However, I’d hesitate to call anyone truly loveable. Alistair is just as much of a whiny goober as I remembered (even if you can resolve his personal quest in a way to make him *less* of a whiny goober), but that’s also half the point of his character. Morrigan is fun because she’s a mean bitch, but her sarcasm and judgemental nature applies to pretty much everything the main character does, thus the title of this section. Oh right, did I mention this is a game where everyone has an affection meter? Because this is definitely a game from an era where you tell characters what they want to hear and give them presents so they’ll like you more and potentially get “rewarded” with a sex scene. I’m sure glad I bypassed most of it with the built-in cheat DLC (Feastday Gifts and Pranks) that lets you put everyone’s love meter as high as possible to get those free stat boosts. For the record, I didn’t romance anyone this time around, partially because I have visual novels and hardcore strategy sims if I want to be tricked into liking fictional characters and partially because I didn’t feel particularly attached to any of the four romantic options. Beyond the two mentioned above, Leliana’s dominant personality traits are “French” and “Religious” whereas Zevran reminds me a little too much of Antonio Banderas as Puss in Boots to take seriously.

As for the rest of the cast, they’re all… mostly fine. Well, Oghren is pretty damn one note, and if not for the part where it’s Steve Blum doing his best “constantly drunk” voice I think I’d have written him off entirely. Shale is great, but half of that is because she’s a slightly different take on the “glibly sociopathic” archetype started with HK-47 (also, hey, remember how Shale was totally the “buy this game new or else you have to pay for them” character? Remember how that was a trend?) Wynne is a cool grandma and the best healer by far, but she left my party when I defiled the ashes of The Virgin Mary Jesus Andraste. And then there’s the ostensible “villain” of the game (because a faceless horde of monsters doesn’t really cut it) in Loghain Mac Tir… who you can recruit if you’re into punishing the guy who directly or indirectly caused half of the story’s conflicts by forcing him to hang out with you. I didn’t do that this time around, and while there’s definitely some merit to sparing him once you know what his deal is, it doesn’t really help that he’s portrayed as a paranoid, power-mongering thug for 80% of the game’s runtime. Finally, there’s also the Mabari Warhound, who is both very much a good boy and also not worth bringing in one of your four precious deployment slots when you have literally anyone else. I almost forgot about Sten, but he sure does exist and sure is basically just a Klingon.

Dungeons and Dragon Age

Okay, so I’ve somehow managed to get this far without getting to the part where you play it, which is weird because I think the actual gameplay parts of Dragon Age are its best and worst aspects. Forget whatever kerfuffles I might have with the “good” to “somewhat hackish” writing and cast of mildly to moderately likeable characters, let’s talk about my wheelhouse, which is of course the dark realm of dice rolls and mechanical analysis. While it’s not without flaws, I think the basic real-time with pause combat of Dragon Age remains solid, aided by one of the better AI scripting systems to help cut down on micromanagement. I played the entire game on “Hard,” which I felt offered a decent challenge and forced me to use many of the tools at my disposal… right up until high levels trivialized all but the most involved fights. Like almost all games with RTwP combat, it can turn into a chaotic mess sometimes, especially in regards to visual clarity. However, it’s more rigid and wooden than other games of its kind, especially when it comes to the way certain abilities take forever to come out, or the overabundance of bad canned animations. Despite that, when everything clicks together it’s still a tactical time, and I think I like it more now than I did then.

For as much as Dragon Age is a throwback to the D&D based Infinity Engine games, it also draws a lot of influence from MMOs for its class and combat design. It’s not quite the rigid Tank-DPS-Support “holy trinity” but it’s darn close sometimes. Neverwinter Nights' abundance of classes and prestige classes this is not, and you’re more or less deciding upon a character’s role by the kind of weapon you give them. Sword and Shield warriors exist to draw aggro and take hits, while going two handed or two weapon fighting involves hitting things hard and hitting things a lot respectively. The two real layers of customization come in your perfunctory secondary skill choices (i.e. maxing out the main character’s persuasion skill and dumping all the crafting stuff on companions) and unlockable subclasses, some of which you can find the manuals for sale, some of which need to be taught to you, and some of which are hidden in the most obtuse places imaginable. In Dragon Age’s streamlined, stripped down class system, Rogues are in an awkward spot. They’re also the only class who can disarm traps and pick locks, but Origins’ approach to locked chests and traps in dungeons feels like something shoved in entirely because it was expected. 90% of the game’s chests contain vendor trash, and I can only think of a few encounters based around traps. Beyond that ability, and a handful of extra secondary skill points, they’re not all that different from Warriors other than their subclasses. This is where the 4 character limit for the party really starts to chafe, especially in light of more recent games like Pathfinder Kingmaker and Pillars of Eternity II, which offer greater levels of complexity but more options on party composition.

Now, here’s the real actual caveat to all of this, and it’s that (just like in D&D) mages are broken and also the most interesting class in terms of build options by a mile. While my Dual Wielding Dwarfman certainly put out a stupid amount of damage as a heavily-armored cuisinart, that’s basically all he was able to do. For that matter, it’s something that one of the other numerous DPS party members can also do almost as well (No seriously, between Oghren, Sten, Shale, Zevran, and Pupper, you have like five different options for melee damage dealers.) Mages might be ostensibly designed around being the glass cannon “powerful but vulnerable” class, but in actuality they’re kind of capable of everything. If you want a tank wizard who can sort of be this game’s half-assed attempt at a sword mage/gish character, there are builds involving the Blood Mage and Arcane Warrior subclasses. If you want to dump heals and buffs forever, Wynne is basically already specced in that direction, but with a handful of skill points she can also drop plenty of damage and crowd control with offensive spells. You only get two mage NPCs, and you might as well bring them both if you can help it, since all mages need to keep their capabilities up is a quick swig of a lyrium potion. Crowd Control forever. Destroy everything. Heal the world. (I didn’t end up doing this, mostly because it turns out Wynne will leave your party if you decide to taint sacred relics, and rather than reload my save I decided to stick with my decision. Excuse me lady, I’m just trying to get mine.) Really, I’d unequivocally recommend you also make the main character a mage if not for the fact that the Magi origin is the most boring one of the six.

Lost in the Fade

The true one and forever eternal sin of Dragon Age Origins is the way it pads its length out to achieve a “CRPG-sized” hour count. I might’ve gotten older and my attention span might be a flaming mess, especially in these unprecedented times, but I am still not opposed to a lengthy, dense RPG. I’m saying that even by the standards of these sorts of games, Dragon Age drags on for an age (or in my case, somewhere around 45 hours doing almost everything but the most trivial fetch quests.) Almost every single sequence lasts at least an hour longer than it needs to, thanks to an endless abundance of trash mob fights (the combat is good, but it sure doesn’t want to be sometimes,) back and forth quest objectives, expository dialogue, and some truly boring dungeon design. For all the things I think Dragon Age does well, dungeons aren’t one of them. When you’re recovering all your health between every encounter and the only penalty for being downed in combat is an easily-removable injury debuff, resource management isn’t an issue, which means all but the most meaningful encounters feel like chaff. Moreover, I’d struggle to name a visually distinct, mechanically interesting dungeon layout, so you’d better believe I’m going to have some things to say when we get to the Dragon Age game that is nothing but visually repetitive dungeon layouts. This lackadaisical pace is something that starts as early as the opening Ostagar portion, and by the time I reached hour 30 I had to stream myself playing to drag myself over the finish line.

Admittedly, half of this complaint has something to do with two particularly infamous sequences, both of which have me seriously questioning if I would ever want to play this game again in an unmodified form. The Fade portion of the Mage Tower is the worse of the two. It’s a 3 hour solo dungeon crawl (this was me following a guide, too) with a bunch of terrible trash mob fights, and some conceptually interesting puzzle solving that goes on for too long through a bunch of visually monotonous environments. For as much as my opinions on this game have shifted in spots, my hatred of this part remains the same, and it remains just as bad as I remembered it being in 2009. On the other hand, the Deep Roads portion of the game is way worse than I remembered; just one long monotonous four-level dungeon with nothing in-between. When the equivalent dungeon crawls in the Brecillian Forest or Frostback Mountains take half as long, it sticks out. If you want to know why it took me so long to finish this game, it’s partially because doing both of these sequences back-to-back sapped a lot of my enthusiasm. Luckily, the back half of my experience was a smoother one, and I guess it’s fortunate that I unintentionally saved the best for last?

Awakening: Tales of the Amaranthine Coast

In the last minute swerve that no one saw coming, I think Dragon Age: Origins - Awakening is better than the main game. Most of Dragon Age’s other DLC comes from an awkward period from when developers didn’t quite know what to do with bite-sized additional content, and it shows. Shale is basically part of the main game, while Warden’s Keep and Return to Ostagar mostly exist as extended side missions with overpowered items and skills as the reward. I didn’t replay the smaller modules, which are either trivial story stuff (Leliana’s Song, Witch Hunt) or “Challenge Map” dungeons (Darkspawn Chronicles, A Tale of Orzammar, Golems of Angmarak.) However, Awakening is a fully-fledged, Throne of Bhaal style post-game expansion that brings all of the high-level ridiculousness you’d expect with the added bonus of actually fixing a lot of my problems with Origins’ full campaign… namely, not overstaying its welcome. In fact, I think parts of it might be too slight for their own good. For something I played once a decade ago and barely remembered, this might be the Shyamalan-esque twist this entire write up has needed.

But seriously, Awakening at least partially addresses many of the problems mentioned above. It adds a bunch of fun quality-of-life improvements to mechanics, such as the addition of stamina potions and runecrafting, alongside a bunch of ridiculous overpowered high-level skills that I wish were retroactively included in the main game. It manages almost as much with its smaller cast of characters in 15 hours than Origins did in 45. It has dungeons that don’t go on forever, a fade sequence that isn’t hot trash, and a more contained, focused plot about cleaning up the aftermath of the giant army of doom and reestablishing the Grey Wardens as a presence in Ferelden. If I have any specific problems with it beyond feeling like I bulldozed through all of the conten, it’s that Awakening is a lot buggier than the main game. Several quests ended up breaking and I permanently lost my main character’s equipment at one point, so I’d seriously recommend installing some fixes if one were to take part. Nonetheless, I’d put Awakening on a level slightly below something like Tyranny, as far as solid examples of what the genre is capable of when it isn’t so concerned with its own hour count.

The Legacy of the Blight

So… where does this leave me? Torn, unsurprisingly. If you’re wondering how I feel about Dragon Age Origins, I’ve gone back and forth on it multiple times just in the process of writing this. This isn’t a Might and Magic VII situation, where I remembered large chunks of the game well enough to make the act of replaying it feel less like reexperiencing the game and more like rote repetition of memorized steps. I had forgotten many of Dragon Age’s specifics, and I think as a whole the game is both better (playing) and worse (written) than my vague memories suggested. I guess I’ll put it this way: if one were to play this game for the first time today, my first suggestion would be to install a “skip the fade” mod and my second suggestion might be to play a different CRPG first. We’re here, it’s 2020, I might as well acknowledge the presence of other video games.

What do I mean? Origins was a throwback to a style of game that was more or less dead and buried in 2009, a quaint novelty in a world where it’s biggest direct competition from that year was (Wheel of Dubious RPGs contender) Drakensang: The Dark Eye and Spiderweb Software’s Avernum 6. No shade on Germany or Jeff Vogel, but I wouldn’t call either of those titles mainstream. If this game were to have come out three years ago instead of almost eleven, I don’t think it’d compare entirely favorably to the recent wave of stuff from the “CRPG Renaissance.” You might find Pillars of Eternity’s mechanics occasionally unwieldy and its writing verbose and morose, but it does the Baldur’s Gate throwback thing better, and its sequel still has one of my favorite class systems in a class-based RPG. Hell, Larian Studios, the same company responsible for the 2009 eurojank clunker Divinity II: Ego Draconis, is now high profile enough to be working on a video game called Baldur’s Gate III. Even if you didn’t want to go back to the supposed golden age of the late 90s, you are not starved for choice if you want a mechanically dense, well written RPG, nor do you need a decent computer to do so. If you want to play Baldur’s Gate on your Switch, you can, but Divinity Original Sin II works just fine with a controller, Pathfinder Kingmaker is getting a console port with official turn-based support, Wasteland 3 is likely going to launch on Game Pass day one, and even something as quirky and out there as Disco Elysium is eventually coming to everything. You might not like any one of those games, but the abundance of choice is, well, abundant.

The dark, crushing realization of this replay wasn’t that Dragon Age Origins is a bad game, because it isn’t. It’s the realization that it’s a far less special game removed from the context of when it came out; its myriad shortcomings are more obvious in the light of what has come since and its strengths aren’t quite as strong. That’s not something I’d say about Baldur's Gate II, or even Mass Effect 2, even if time has worn away at both. Did I enjoy myself? Yes? Yes. Do I see myself playing Dragon Age Origins again any time soon? No? No. But hey, Awakening was a pleasant surprise, so you bet I’m going to get good and mad about how dirty the future will be for my boy Anders.

Kirkwall awaits

I guess now the question is “if this is where you land on the Dragon Age game you remember loving, then where the heck are you going to land on the others?” I have great news: you won’t have to wait too long to find out. I might take a short break, but rest assured that Dragon Age II will be played this year. Look forward to it.

Also… fuck it, might end up playing Inquisition too. No promises though.

In case you were wondering, a summation of my choices:

*: Just going to say again that I’ve been beating the “Jade Empire is secretly one of the worst Bioware RPGs” drum since 2013 and I’m going to stick by it.

Ravenloft: Strahd’s Possession

Developer: Dreamforge Intertainment

Time Played: A little more than two hours

Dubiosity: 4 out of 5

Spookiosity: 3 out of 5

Would I play more? If I was compelled.

There are two things you should know when it comes to the 2nd edition era of Advanced Dungeons and Dragons (1989-2000): THAC0 and hella campaign settings. The former is the routine punch-line of RPG modernists everywhere, a shorthand for mechanical anachronism and weird backwards math (yet somehow still more streamlined than the literal “to hit” table that first edition trafficked in.) The latter is what eventually killed TSR, having split their user base between no less than half a dozen different campaign settings at one point. It’s something Wizards of the Coast has taken great pains to avoid, outside of their recent ventures into one-off setting books based on popular Magic the Gathering sets and also Critical Role.

TSR’s folly is my fortune, however, and their overabundance of weird settings offer a lot of fun, imaginative campaign fuel 20+ years removed from the fact (it also helps that they’re $10 PDFs instead of $50+ boxed sets.) One of these is Ravenloft, a gothic horror setting based around a famous first edition adventure of the same name; expanding the concept of a mist-shrouded land of gothic horror into multiple domains of dread. It’s not my favorite D&D setting, which is still probably Planescape, but there are definitely things to love about Ravenloft’s decidedly pulp approach to spooky draculas. Count Strahd von Zarovich and his domain of Barovia might be the enduring legacy of the adventure and the setting (Curse of Strahd is probably the best and most popular official 5e module, after all) but there’s a lot of fun camp to be had in a setting that’s nothing but the most ridiculously gloomy regions ruled by different evil-but-tortured dreadlords. This one is ruled by a werewolf! This one is ruled by a wolfwere! This one is ruled by Lord Soth from Dragonlance? Sure, why not? It’s basically a giant halloween store of a setting.

On the video game front, however, this era and campaign setting is also the source of the current oldest game on the wheel. There’s no beating around that Strahd’s Possession looks and feels like a game from 1994, a first person blobber stuck between tile-based, sprite-based worlds and free-roaming, fully polygonal ones. It’s running on the same engine as the Forgotten Realms-based Menzoberranzan, and had a sequel in the form of Stone Prophet (which takes place in the “pyramid mummy world” domain of Ravenloft). You don’t need to spend more than 10 minutes watching me stumble around, attempting to line-up the view window and mouse cursor so I can bash the enemies to death in a vague, real-time approximation of D&D combat, to get the idea that it maybe isn’t quite as intuitive as it wants to be. Inventory management is definitely one of those bugbears (the abstract concept, not the large hairy goblinoid of D&D fame) that a lot of older (and newer) RPGs struggle with. Alas, no amount of fun with paper dolls can save me from the slowly-brewing nightmare of being a hoarder with limited slots and no merchant to sell to. To its credit, none of what I’ve complained about here is truly impenetrable in the way a lot of other things I’ve run into are, so much as “mildly to moderately” inconvenient. There’s a solid automap system with plenty of room for taking notes, and I can't say that it's the worst thing I've encountered. Crazy that a game more than 25 years old might have some unintuitive UI, I know. (At this point I might just have to stream a little Might and Magic to show the audience what a well-aged RPG from the early 90s looks like)

However, there’s definitely some ambition and moxie in the way Strahd’s Possession conducts itself, such that I can’t write it off entirely. If it was boring and drab, that would be one thing, but there is enough here that I could see this being an enjoyable spooky romp if approached from the right angle (an angle I'm probably a little too young and impatient to find). As I mentioned before, the original I6 Ravenloft adventure is one of those iconic D&D classic modules, and it’s kind of impressive how much Strahd’s Possession manages to evoke the gloomy gothic atmosphere of Barovia despite looking like blurry pixelated mush a lot of the time. Between some genuinely solid MIDI music, well-written, setting appropriate prose, and an abundance of, uh, well-intentioned voice acting there are some legitimate production values behind it too. The progression of the game’s story seems fairly linear, but there also seemed to be a decent number of optional side ventures and puzzles along for the ride.

It’s just a pity that any positive sentiment I had for the game evaporated around the time I ran into the first real dungeon and had to navigate a monochromatic cave of green and brown, solving some switch and teleporter puzzles only to run into a bone golem capable of paralyzing and murdering my entire party posthaste. I’m sure there’s a way around it, and there’s enough fun spooky atmosphere that I kind of want to see where the rest of the adventure goes. By that point, however, I’d run up to my 2 hour limit and figured I’d be better off just watching a LP on youtube than continuing to bash my head against it. I didn’t hate my time with it, so a B+ for effort, Strahd’s Possession. I think I might just end up reading through the sourcebook again for fun. I almost ended up running a homebrew Ravenloft adventure the last time I did a “vote for your favorite adventure pitch” with my group. Don’t worry though, the next game is Daggerfall, in case you thought I was free from janky mid-90s first-person RPGs.

Until then, remember that I appreciate you taking the time to read this, and that playing Final Fantasy XI in 2020 may be hazardous to your health. See ya. (Dragon Age retrospective soon? Dragon Age retrospective soon.)

Wizards and Warriors

Developer: Heuristic Park

Release Date: September 27, 2000

Time Played: About 3 ½ hours on stream (I’ve played around 20 on my own time)

Dubiosity: 4 out of 5

Would I play more? Yes.

Should you play more? Maybe?

When I pick the dubious RPGs to put on the wheel for this ill-advised streaming/blogging feature, I’m usually coming from one of two places. The first are games that should be entertaining to watch, either due to the game’s own quality or my own excellent, eSports-grade play. The second are games that I feel the need to show others, in a “you need to see this weird shit” sort of way. While there’s plenty of overlap between those two sentiments (Two Worlds is a pretty good example of something that reflects both) Wizards and Warriors is a pretty hard example of the latter. It’s a game that I’ve wanted to show off for a while now, because it’s a weird, funny thing and feels like another “failed evolutionary branch” of the Wizardry/Might and Magic style first-person party-based “blobber.”

If you were to ask someone to name a title from the late 90s/early 00s “golden age” of Computer Role Playing Games, I don’t think Wizards and Warriors would even crack the top 20. It’s probably one of the most obscure games on the list despite carrying the pedigree of Wizardry V-VII director D.W. Bradley on the front of the box. Sure, it probably doesn’t help that it came out literal days after genre juggernaut and actual best Bioware game Baldur’s Gate II, or that it was notoriously difficult to run on operating systems newer than Windows 2000 (which is the kind of thing that really stifles any sort of cult fanbase.) Or maybe it’s that the game is kind of a janky mess and looks pretty damn ugly even by the standards of the time, which led to a less-than-stellar reception at the time. I certainly wouldn’t recommend it over the likes of Might and Magic VI-VIII or Wizardry 8, which are probably its closest contemporaries.

And yet, I still kinda love what Wizards and Warriors is going for. It’s definitely a lower budget, small-team sort of game and what it loses in polish and quality of life it makes up for in scrappy ambition. If you should know anything about Bradley’s style of RPG design, it’s a heavy emphasis on multiclassing your party members between different professions and a willingness to push the envelope on what is normally considered a pretty conservative subgenre of RPG. Wizards and Warriors is no different on that front. Despite an obvious low budget, everything in the world is represented polygonally, from the individual arrows enemies shoot at you to the equipment showing up on your characters’ (polygonal) paper doll models. Mechanically, the game is trying to thread the needle between the slower, more dense Wizardry series and the faster, more streamlined Might and Magic (in case you need a shorthand between comparing two dead RPG franchises that look the same to an untrained eye, it’s pretty simple: Might and Magic is the one where more than half the games in the series are still surprisingly playable in the year of our lord 2020. Wizardry is the one where the only game I’ve made any headway with is the last one.) The class system is dense enough to go outside the scope of this blog, but essentially there are four base classes that can go into different combinations of eight elite classes (and three “special” classes near the end of the game.) Multiclassing is more or less the name of the game, which means there’s some amount of planning in advance but also an abundance of flexibility in how you want to turn your party into jack-of-all-trades murder machines. If I got further in the game, I’d have more to say about it, but it’s the one thing about W&W that definitely seems head and shoulders above its contemporaries.

It’s hard to remember now, but turn-based combat was quickly going out of fashion among RPGs from this period, and W&W’s solution to this is a janky, half-functional approach I’d describe as “sort of like Superhot????” As long as your characters are moving, combat is basically in real-time for you and your foes, but as soon as they stop moving things proceed in a more-or-less turn-based fashion. It doesn’t quite work as elegantly as that description might suggest and it’s quite frankly exploitable as shit, but it’s also endearing in that way. Sure, Might and Magic’s literal toggle between real-time and turn-based is a more elegant, sensical way of doing this, but does Might and Magic have Elephant Men? I rest my case.

I haven’t even gotten into some of the weird idiosyncrasies that Wizards and Warriors brings in its attempt to both be a hardcore traditional dungeon crawler and also a much more active thing. Gold is held on a per-character basis (you have to press a button to pool it every time), NPCs will remind you of the quests you haven’t done every single time you talk to them, and monsters will randomly spawn at a continual rate to recreate the effect of random encounters. If you want a visual picture of how it actually plays, I highly suggest giving my archives on Twitch a look (once again, no interest in archiving or uploading them elsewhere for the moment, so you’ve got 14 days to check them out) or just checking out one of the few playthroughs on youtube. I fully admit that this game is actually kinda my shit, and I think there’s a genuine “diamond in the rough” quality to W&W. On the other hand, I also fully admit that like half of my excitement for it probably comes from discovering a new old CRPG that I hadn’t played before. I dunno, it’s currently less than $5 on GOG if you really want to give it a look. Maybe it will surprise you. Or maybe you should just pick up the Might and Magic 6-pack instead. World of Xeen? That's a non-dubious RPG right there.