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.