I finally completed the game, had ton of fun.
Random thoughts from bad to good, IHMO :
The single thing I hate about the game is the way you gain xp, by performing any action. That this can be a thing has always been beyond me, that's utter unsatisfying and does prevent you from playing fights just the way you want, one way or another, xp from kills or from related objectives, you should gain higher xp from more difficult places. Trying to open the door in the last dungeon would make the game crash, so I needed to farm Gate Travel scrolls and wands from merchants, also there's at least one more case of crash (when trying to take high level gladiators in the arena). I hated how mass dispelling would not affect your default characters so it does not cure charm and even at the opposite would cure your charmed enemies from the effect. Finally a mercenary archer who would get an enemy close to him would change his weapon, the problem is that he would never switch back to his bow. Don't get it wrong if you've not played the game, these are not big deals.
Equipment is just a big mess of random + to stats (even unique items to some extent), all items really feel generic and the roster of effects is not really impressive to begin with but anyway I would rather have found each effect once on some unique item. Hell is possibly the single worst dungeon in the game, one has to be but that and the bugged doors in the castle just before it make the ending parts kind of terrible, they are a tiny bit of the game so it's alright.
Fight wolfs, wolfmen, warrior wolfmen, archer wolfmen than spell caster wolfmen then reach the library, the ceremonial room and the boss, replace wolf with some other animal or wolfman by a variation of goblins, orcs, ogres, ... and you get more than half of the dungeons of the game. Fortunately it's not all the dungeons and it's caricatural, the spellcasters won't launch the same spells, there is some thoughts put into layouts, some special places, creatures and other encounters than these only ones. The game is only encounters, containers and hidden doors, that's fine, what I want to say is just that it's normal that it's hard to have a lot of variation. I think there's still some welcome difference between a temple, a castle and a cave. In each dungeon there's an emphasis put into encounters be at least slightly different, there are still a lot of not exactly unique ones and the different caves do contain similar patterns so I would not go as far as calling the encounters very varied but it's because the game is very big, not because there's no content. There's nothing really interesting to choose at level-up, you really make your choices at creation, and that's fine. Fights are tactics, and finding a strategy which works is cool, but I would not say I changed my strategy a lot during the game. Finally I realised near the end that crafting equipment much better than what I wore was far too cheap for my taste, granted you have a merchant to sell junk that is, after crafting equipment I breezed through the ending parts of the game, and that was not the most fun part, especially since an easy encounter can take some time, the strength of the game not being in the speed but rather in the large amount of encounters which can challenge you at least at some point, I am glad I only figured out that at the end.
The presentation is good, it's clean and just good enough and with just enough variety that it's not boring. The spell roster is good enough too, what you'd expect is there, and I like choosing the level to cast a spell. The AI is very fun to play against, not specially aggressive (3 archers could easily kill your mage in one turn, fortunately they don't) but rather big groups of enemies you need to apprehend, if one thing the enemies could maybe have a special behaviour towards summons or towards their charmed friends, but that's alright.
And finally for the best points, including some fundamental ones. The game is a traditional RPG with a P&P inspired system. Full keyboard controls are good, combat is top down with squares and bump in melee, you can't go better than that. You create a big party of 8 characters (+ AI-controlled mercenaries if you wish) and there's a good choice of races and especially classes. The game offers a big handcrafted world full of big dungeons of various difficulties, and the geographic distribution of the difficulty of the encounters is very good, harder dungeons as you get further from the start but not exactly, a progression inside a dungeon which would make you sometimes do the beginning then either get back later for the end or eventually use your wand towards the end but not always, and sometimes contain a one shot hard encounters or a small hard zone, against sharks or something, that's just perfect. The progression of characters and their equipment is very on point and satisfying, it's really one of the bigger strenghts of the game and the amount of challenging encounters is great. You have to do with your limited MPs (and HPs) for a fight and there's definitely large scale resource management, healing herbs and magic improvement mushrooms are not infinite and recharging wands is not cheap. Besides finding a new strong wand especially is very satisfying, in the beginning of the game it's really what made some parts go from hard to approachable, finding a book for a strong spell is too.
In case you've not played the game it's a very big one, I am almost sure I spent quite more than 100 hours on it. What's certain is that the game is a no brainer for people who like big, open-world, combat-focused games, it's at very least among the best of this kind and among the best RPGs at all as far as I'm concerned.
My 2 cents.
