Zhirzzh
Scholar
- Joined
- Nov 24, 2007
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I wrote a review of Arcanum on another forum, and thought I would post it here:
As I'm doing an ironman playthrough of Arcanum now, I might as well review it. Minor spoilers up to Tarant (third area). Review may also contain some general concepts that will not be revealed until Dernholm (4th area)
Arcanum: of Steamworks and Magick Obscoura 85/100
Arcanum is my favorite CRPG, but is so flawed that I can't see my way to giving it a higher score.
Arcanum is set in a tolkienesque world undergoing an industrial revolution. Magick and technology have difficulty existing together, as magick breaks and warps natural law and technology reinforces it. Strong magick will cause technology to fail, while complex machinery will make a powerful mage violently ill. Magick had largely dominated technology, with the exception of the Dwarves who keep largely to themselves, but with the introduction of the steam engine by Gilbert Bates (yes, I know, but there is really very little fourth wall breakage in the game) technology begins a rapid accent that soon has the technological city state of Tarant and it's newly founded empire, The Unified Kingdom, reigning ascendant over it's more magickal neighbor Cumbria. While Cumbria is clearly in decline in all areas, Tarant is not so clear cut. Much like the real world at the time, there is a very wide gap between the rich industrialists, who send you to rob eleven tombs so they can outdo their neighbors in pretentious displays of wealth, and the factory workers, poor orcs who are legally prohibited from forming unions. Even your main quest giver in the city, while overall a decent fellow, comments that his workers conditions are almost humane, and will become furious if you press the matter any further. The world is brilliantly realized and is one of the major strong points of the game.
The dialog is exceptionally well written, in a vaguely Victorian style that also acknowledges the fact that the lower classes did not speak in the style of Jane Austen and other writers of the period. While the game does have some one dimensional NPCs this can be forgiven, due to the brilliance of the writing and how well the dialog fits the period. Frequently even said NPCs feel deeper than they actually are, due to the brilliance of the writing.
Upon opening the character creation screen, you will be presented with a great many possibilities. After choosing your name; your race, which will affect your stats and how NPCs react to you; and your background -are you a bookworm, technophobic, autistic, or even an insane asylum escapee?- you will be taken to the stat screen. The game's system unifies attributes, skills, technological disciplines, and magickal collages into a single point based system. Nothing costs more than one point. Throughout the game you will receive 60 skill points for leveling up (one per level, two every fifth), for a total of 65. This system allows you to build very diverse characters, that can do multiple things well or 1 thing incredibly well. There are 8 attributes (starting at 8 and capping at 20), of which, Beauty and Perception will be dump stats in most builds (perception is needed for ranged builds).
There are 16 skills (4 types of skills with 4 skills each) that can only be increased if you meet attribute requirements. Besides raising a skill with your character points, you can also receive training. There are 3 levels of training. There will be several people in each town to give you apprentice training for a modest fee. Only a few people in the game can train you to be an expert, in exchange for a fairly large fee. There is only one master of each skill. While the other levels can be purchased, most masters will only train you in exchange for doing a quest. Each level of training will give you a special power. A repair master can repair broken items, while a melee apprentice gets plus five to the speed of all weapons.
The combat skills are all based on your dexterity and are fairly generic, with the notable exception of throwing which, in a notable departure from tradition, is not only viable but actually a decent way for a technologist to play. The thieving skills, based on dexterity or perception, are completely traditional, although Pick Lock is under a different skill set. The social skills are based on several different attributes. Gambling and Haggle are of questionable use as, by the middle of the game, you will have too much money to be very worried about the prices you're getting on items, and even how many items you can outright win at dice. Heal, while not a bad skill for a player with a large party, is underpowered, both compared to other skills and to magickal healing. Persuasion, by far the most useful, is fairly generic, opening new dialog options. The technological skill set, while the most uniquely organized, consists of largely generic skills, from Pick Lock to Firearms, the only one worth mentioning separately is repair which I will come back to later. It only takes 5 points to max a skill, but you will need a very high rank in the attribute it is based on to do so.
Then we have the Magickal colleges and the technological disciplines. Technological Disciplines are based on combining 2 items to make a new one, and are divided into 16 disciplines such as electricity and chemistry. You can only purchase a level in a discipline if you meet an intelligence requirement and have all previous tiers. Each level you purchase gives you a schematic which will allow you to make an item; it will also give you points in that discipline which will make you less likely to fail when making items using schematics that can be found throughout the game(you can also buy books that will give you points in that discipline). The 32 Magickal Colleges are much more straightforward, spells are divided into tiers, and in order to purchase one you must both have all previous tiers in that collage and a minimum of willpower. There are some balance issues there, but I'll come back to that a bit later.
At the start of the game you are in the zeppelin, IFS Zephyr, traveling over a mountain range. The zeppelin is shot at by mysterious flying craft piloted by ogres, and crashes in a mountain range. You and a gnome are the only survivors, but the gnome is clearly not long for this world. The dying gnome gives you a ring bearing the imprint of P. Schuler & Sons. He tells you to, “Find the boy”, to tell him that, “they had no choice” and that, horrible things were done to them. At this point he dies, and your first party member, Virgil, comes along. Apparently the zeppelin crash and your survival of it appears to fulfill a Panarii prophecy, which would make you a reincarnation of the elf Nasrudin, and would also set you up for a climatic showdown with the forces of evil. After fruitlessly searching the crash site for survivors; you attempt to leave the canyon. While leaving, you are confronted by an elf asking about the crash. Virgil will tell you that he believes that the elf’s motives are less than pure. Virgil’s judgment in this matter is at least mildly compromised, as he is somewhat racist (you won’t know that at this part of the game unless you play a race he doesn’t like), although there are no signs that he is prejudiced against elves. Virgil will ask to be allowed to handle the conversation. If you let him he’ll scare the elf off; if you don’t you’ll have to fight the elf. If you kill the elf and search the body you will find an amulet of the Molochean hand. After speculating about why they want to kill you, you can move on to the first town: Shrouded Hills. While the plot sounds very cliché now, it gets much better. I can't describe it too much without giving things away, though I can say that one of the major mysteries of the game is whether you actually are Nasrudin’s reincarnation.
While the games story follows a very linear path, you can take a vast multitude of paths to get there. There are multiple solutions to every major quest until around the last third of the game. For example, in the first town in the game, you need to clear a gate of thieves to cross a bridge. If you’re a combat character, you can simply kill them. If you’re a fighter who isn't as strong but is charismatic, you can get a half ogre named Sog Mead Mug to join your party and help you kill the thieves. If you’re intelligent and persuasive you can even convince him that you represent a thief’s guild, not only will he leave, he'll give you 200 gold in reparations for violating your territory. You can even skip the last boss fight, if your have maxed Intelligence and Persuasion. While in Fallout, which was also known for this, you simply demonstrated a simple flaw in the boss's plan; in Arcanum, you can engage in a philosophical debate with the boss, and convince him that his plan is morally wrong.
You control only your own character, but can accumulate a party that you can give orders to. You may have one part member for every 4 charisma points you have, and may have an additional follower if you have an expert rank in persuasion. Summoning mages can also summon a familiar, as well as various monsters that will behave as party members until you dismiss them. Unless you are a persuasion master, characters that have opposing moral alignments to yours won't join you. Party members will follow you everywhere. You can tell them to wait, but they will eventually get tired of waiting, and go back to where you first found them. You can give party members orders, but they will not always be entirely responsive depending on how interested they are in whatever they are doing. Party members can also use their skills out of combat, if they are of a higher level than yours (IE: Vigil can pick locks). Party members can be revived if they die, but if you're in the wilderness and don't have the skill/item to revive them, you won't be able to find them again.
The magick and technology dynamic, while one of the best elements of the world, is a major flaw in the game itself. Your technological vs. your magickal aptitude is rated on a scale of 100 to -100 with 100 being purely technologically oriented and -100 being purely magical (the same is done for your morality). The higher you alignment in favor of one, the better you will be at doing things associated with it (casting spells, using magickal swords, and firing guns). This penalizes technological characters more than magickal ones, as it will stop them from gaining the benefits of enchanted weapons.
While the technological skills are balanced so that no one discipline is better than another, the same is not true of magick. Some magickal colleges are much better than others, and the good ones are much better than the technological skills. The first skill in necromancy (harm) is wildly overpowered compared to the rest of the collage for example. However this power difference is somewhat canceled out by places Tarant, where magickally oriented characters have to walk all the way through the city while technologists can simply take the subway. Technology also has one in game saving grace: Grenades.
Grenades in Arcanum are incredibly powerful. They do a large amount of damage over a wide area, and somewhat inexplicably will not damage your party (they will however damage friendly NPCs). There are several types of grenades, from stun grenades to pure explosive. They can be made by following schematics in the explosive discipline of technology, although the last level in the discipline gives you a schematic for dynamite rather than a grenade. This very well may be the best way to play a technologist. He will be fairly weak early in the game, having to rely on Molotov cocktails and the three grenades you can find early in the game, while you raise your throwing skill. In the mid to late game though, he will be very powerful, with the size of your inventory being the major limitation. As with all technologists, you will want to have several party members to carry your vast store of items.
The game also features a realistic, and annoying, repair system. All weapons and armor have a rating that will decrease when you are critically hit (for armor); critically fail (for weapons); or hit something hard, like a rock monster (also for weapons). When their rating hits zero, the weapon will break, and can only be repaired by a repair master. Most early weapons and armor have a low rating, and will break after just a few critical failures/hits making the early game a trip from one NPC that can repair to the next. You can repair items yourself, if you have the repair skill, but if you aren't a master, the item will lose some of it's maximum rating. This means that after a few do it yourself repairs the item's rating will be so low, that it will break the next time it's damaged. As broken items can't be repaired (unless you master the repair skill) this means you still have to visit the NPCs that can repair. If you have a maxed repair skill and put the effort into getting repair mastery; you can repair items (even broken ones) without losing maximum rating. This requires not only the skill points to raise repair but also the immense effort of getting mastery in a skill. You can't even use the repair skill until you get mastery, unless you're willing to reduce the max rating of your items.
The game has two other major flaws (apparently it is also buggy, but I've only had one minor bug, so I can't comment on that). The last third of the game is very linear, forcing you into a good or evil path, both of which must be played in a linier way, with no alternate way to get through quests. Probably worst of all though, is the combat. There are 3 combat modes: Real Time, Turn based, and a version of turn based with some animations cut out.
All combat modes share some features. Characters have both health and fatigue, and most weapons will deal damage to both. Spells use fatigue -as does attacking when you don't have enough AP- and as such, if you aren't careful, you could be knocked unconscious, after spending your fatigue on spells.
Real Time moves at approximately 3 times the speed it should. Melee characters do fairly well, but have little control of combat, Mages can't cast quickly enough, gun using technologists though, have the worst time. Guns don't actually fire at targets. They fire at the squares the targets stand on; meaning that any movement of the target will cause them to miss. Grenade users can't throw grenades quickly enough, but the large blast radius means that it's still possible to hit with them. If they start fights with a couple of stun grenades, they can get through the game with a minimum of pain.
The turn based modes, which use an AP system, are better. Melee characters will have a very easy time, although they will critically fail around half the time at the start of the game (if played in Hard mode); Mages are ludicrously overpowered; ranged fighters are still almost useless, as enemies will close with you in one turn 99% of the time; and grenade users will be very strong, being somehow able to throw a half-dozen grenades, which seem to detonate instantly, a turn. Of course, doing lots of things in a turn is traditional in turn based games, but it somehow feels ridiculous when throwing grenades. I prefer the system Fallout employed, in which they would explode while your enemy was taking his turn.
Overall, combat is very easy. It falls into a standard RPG trap; that is, you get stronger faster than the enemies you fight. While hard mode is indeed fairly hard early on, it's not much harder than normal by the end. Melee characters have a hard time early in the game, critically failing left and right in hard mode, but you fail less and less as your hit chance gets higher, until you get melee mastery, at which point you can't critically fail at all. Mages will only be able to cast a few spells at a time near the start of the game, but by the end of the game they will have enough Fatigue and Fatigue restoring potions to cast continuously, no matter how long the battle is. Gunslingers are underpowered at every stage of the game, but life does get simpler for them once they get an elephant gun. Other types of technologists, including grenade users, initially have a hard time collecting all the items they need to make items, but by late game will have an immense stockpile.
Even factoring in all of the games many flaws, Arcanum is still not only my favorite CRPG, but also probably my favorite game. It has an incredible story that, while beginning as a traditional role playing epic, chosen one and all; evolves into much more. The story is brought to life by the exceptional dialog, which gives life to the characters. Despite the linear plot and all the effort dedicated to bringing the characters to life, the game moves in a very nonlinear fashion, with many ways to complete quests. Due to its many flaws however, I can only give the game an 85 out of 100.
As I'm doing an ironman playthrough of Arcanum now, I might as well review it. Minor spoilers up to Tarant (third area). Review may also contain some general concepts that will not be revealed until Dernholm (4th area)
Arcanum: of Steamworks and Magick Obscoura 85/100
Arcanum is my favorite CRPG, but is so flawed that I can't see my way to giving it a higher score.
Arcanum is set in a tolkienesque world undergoing an industrial revolution. Magick and technology have difficulty existing together, as magick breaks and warps natural law and technology reinforces it. Strong magick will cause technology to fail, while complex machinery will make a powerful mage violently ill. Magick had largely dominated technology, with the exception of the Dwarves who keep largely to themselves, but with the introduction of the steam engine by Gilbert Bates (yes, I know, but there is really very little fourth wall breakage in the game) technology begins a rapid accent that soon has the technological city state of Tarant and it's newly founded empire, The Unified Kingdom, reigning ascendant over it's more magickal neighbor Cumbria. While Cumbria is clearly in decline in all areas, Tarant is not so clear cut. Much like the real world at the time, there is a very wide gap between the rich industrialists, who send you to rob eleven tombs so they can outdo their neighbors in pretentious displays of wealth, and the factory workers, poor orcs who are legally prohibited from forming unions. Even your main quest giver in the city, while overall a decent fellow, comments that his workers conditions are almost humane, and will become furious if you press the matter any further. The world is brilliantly realized and is one of the major strong points of the game.
The dialog is exceptionally well written, in a vaguely Victorian style that also acknowledges the fact that the lower classes did not speak in the style of Jane Austen and other writers of the period. While the game does have some one dimensional NPCs this can be forgiven, due to the brilliance of the writing and how well the dialog fits the period. Frequently even said NPCs feel deeper than they actually are, due to the brilliance of the writing.
Upon opening the character creation screen, you will be presented with a great many possibilities. After choosing your name; your race, which will affect your stats and how NPCs react to you; and your background -are you a bookworm, technophobic, autistic, or even an insane asylum escapee?- you will be taken to the stat screen. The game's system unifies attributes, skills, technological disciplines, and magickal collages into a single point based system. Nothing costs more than one point. Throughout the game you will receive 60 skill points for leveling up (one per level, two every fifth), for a total of 65. This system allows you to build very diverse characters, that can do multiple things well or 1 thing incredibly well. There are 8 attributes (starting at 8 and capping at 20), of which, Beauty and Perception will be dump stats in most builds (perception is needed for ranged builds).
There are 16 skills (4 types of skills with 4 skills each) that can only be increased if you meet attribute requirements. Besides raising a skill with your character points, you can also receive training. There are 3 levels of training. There will be several people in each town to give you apprentice training for a modest fee. Only a few people in the game can train you to be an expert, in exchange for a fairly large fee. There is only one master of each skill. While the other levels can be purchased, most masters will only train you in exchange for doing a quest. Each level of training will give you a special power. A repair master can repair broken items, while a melee apprentice gets plus five to the speed of all weapons.
The combat skills are all based on your dexterity and are fairly generic, with the notable exception of throwing which, in a notable departure from tradition, is not only viable but actually a decent way for a technologist to play. The thieving skills, based on dexterity or perception, are completely traditional, although Pick Lock is under a different skill set. The social skills are based on several different attributes. Gambling and Haggle are of questionable use as, by the middle of the game, you will have too much money to be very worried about the prices you're getting on items, and even how many items you can outright win at dice. Heal, while not a bad skill for a player with a large party, is underpowered, both compared to other skills and to magickal healing. Persuasion, by far the most useful, is fairly generic, opening new dialog options. The technological skill set, while the most uniquely organized, consists of largely generic skills, from Pick Lock to Firearms, the only one worth mentioning separately is repair which I will come back to later. It only takes 5 points to max a skill, but you will need a very high rank in the attribute it is based on to do so.
Then we have the Magickal colleges and the technological disciplines. Technological Disciplines are based on combining 2 items to make a new one, and are divided into 16 disciplines such as electricity and chemistry. You can only purchase a level in a discipline if you meet an intelligence requirement and have all previous tiers. Each level you purchase gives you a schematic which will allow you to make an item; it will also give you points in that discipline which will make you less likely to fail when making items using schematics that can be found throughout the game(you can also buy books that will give you points in that discipline). The 32 Magickal Colleges are much more straightforward, spells are divided into tiers, and in order to purchase one you must both have all previous tiers in that collage and a minimum of willpower. There are some balance issues there, but I'll come back to that a bit later.
At the start of the game you are in the zeppelin, IFS Zephyr, traveling over a mountain range. The zeppelin is shot at by mysterious flying craft piloted by ogres, and crashes in a mountain range. You and a gnome are the only survivors, but the gnome is clearly not long for this world. The dying gnome gives you a ring bearing the imprint of P. Schuler & Sons. He tells you to, “Find the boy”, to tell him that, “they had no choice” and that, horrible things were done to them. At this point he dies, and your first party member, Virgil, comes along. Apparently the zeppelin crash and your survival of it appears to fulfill a Panarii prophecy, which would make you a reincarnation of the elf Nasrudin, and would also set you up for a climatic showdown with the forces of evil. After fruitlessly searching the crash site for survivors; you attempt to leave the canyon. While leaving, you are confronted by an elf asking about the crash. Virgil will tell you that he believes that the elf’s motives are less than pure. Virgil’s judgment in this matter is at least mildly compromised, as he is somewhat racist (you won’t know that at this part of the game unless you play a race he doesn’t like), although there are no signs that he is prejudiced against elves. Virgil will ask to be allowed to handle the conversation. If you let him he’ll scare the elf off; if you don’t you’ll have to fight the elf. If you kill the elf and search the body you will find an amulet of the Molochean hand. After speculating about why they want to kill you, you can move on to the first town: Shrouded Hills. While the plot sounds very cliché now, it gets much better. I can't describe it too much without giving things away, though I can say that one of the major mysteries of the game is whether you actually are Nasrudin’s reincarnation.
While the games story follows a very linear path, you can take a vast multitude of paths to get there. There are multiple solutions to every major quest until around the last third of the game. For example, in the first town in the game, you need to clear a gate of thieves to cross a bridge. If you’re a combat character, you can simply kill them. If you’re a fighter who isn't as strong but is charismatic, you can get a half ogre named Sog Mead Mug to join your party and help you kill the thieves. If you’re intelligent and persuasive you can even convince him that you represent a thief’s guild, not only will he leave, he'll give you 200 gold in reparations for violating your territory. You can even skip the last boss fight, if your have maxed Intelligence and Persuasion. While in Fallout, which was also known for this, you simply demonstrated a simple flaw in the boss's plan; in Arcanum, you can engage in a philosophical debate with the boss, and convince him that his plan is morally wrong.
You control only your own character, but can accumulate a party that you can give orders to. You may have one part member for every 4 charisma points you have, and may have an additional follower if you have an expert rank in persuasion. Summoning mages can also summon a familiar, as well as various monsters that will behave as party members until you dismiss them. Unless you are a persuasion master, characters that have opposing moral alignments to yours won't join you. Party members will follow you everywhere. You can tell them to wait, but they will eventually get tired of waiting, and go back to where you first found them. You can give party members orders, but they will not always be entirely responsive depending on how interested they are in whatever they are doing. Party members can also use their skills out of combat, if they are of a higher level than yours (IE: Vigil can pick locks). Party members can be revived if they die, but if you're in the wilderness and don't have the skill/item to revive them, you won't be able to find them again.
The magick and technology dynamic, while one of the best elements of the world, is a major flaw in the game itself. Your technological vs. your magickal aptitude is rated on a scale of 100 to -100 with 100 being purely technologically oriented and -100 being purely magical (the same is done for your morality). The higher you alignment in favor of one, the better you will be at doing things associated with it (casting spells, using magickal swords, and firing guns). This penalizes technological characters more than magickal ones, as it will stop them from gaining the benefits of enchanted weapons.
While the technological skills are balanced so that no one discipline is better than another, the same is not true of magick. Some magickal colleges are much better than others, and the good ones are much better than the technological skills. The first skill in necromancy (harm) is wildly overpowered compared to the rest of the collage for example. However this power difference is somewhat canceled out by places Tarant, where magickally oriented characters have to walk all the way through the city while technologists can simply take the subway. Technology also has one in game saving grace: Grenades.
Grenades in Arcanum are incredibly powerful. They do a large amount of damage over a wide area, and somewhat inexplicably will not damage your party (they will however damage friendly NPCs). There are several types of grenades, from stun grenades to pure explosive. They can be made by following schematics in the explosive discipline of technology, although the last level in the discipline gives you a schematic for dynamite rather than a grenade. This very well may be the best way to play a technologist. He will be fairly weak early in the game, having to rely on Molotov cocktails and the three grenades you can find early in the game, while you raise your throwing skill. In the mid to late game though, he will be very powerful, with the size of your inventory being the major limitation. As with all technologists, you will want to have several party members to carry your vast store of items.
The game also features a realistic, and annoying, repair system. All weapons and armor have a rating that will decrease when you are critically hit (for armor); critically fail (for weapons); or hit something hard, like a rock monster (also for weapons). When their rating hits zero, the weapon will break, and can only be repaired by a repair master. Most early weapons and armor have a low rating, and will break after just a few critical failures/hits making the early game a trip from one NPC that can repair to the next. You can repair items yourself, if you have the repair skill, but if you aren't a master, the item will lose some of it's maximum rating. This means that after a few do it yourself repairs the item's rating will be so low, that it will break the next time it's damaged. As broken items can't be repaired (unless you master the repair skill) this means you still have to visit the NPCs that can repair. If you have a maxed repair skill and put the effort into getting repair mastery; you can repair items (even broken ones) without losing maximum rating. This requires not only the skill points to raise repair but also the immense effort of getting mastery in a skill. You can't even use the repair skill until you get mastery, unless you're willing to reduce the max rating of your items.
The game has two other major flaws (apparently it is also buggy, but I've only had one minor bug, so I can't comment on that). The last third of the game is very linear, forcing you into a good or evil path, both of which must be played in a linier way, with no alternate way to get through quests. Probably worst of all though, is the combat. There are 3 combat modes: Real Time, Turn based, and a version of turn based with some animations cut out.
All combat modes share some features. Characters have both health and fatigue, and most weapons will deal damage to both. Spells use fatigue -as does attacking when you don't have enough AP- and as such, if you aren't careful, you could be knocked unconscious, after spending your fatigue on spells.
Real Time moves at approximately 3 times the speed it should. Melee characters do fairly well, but have little control of combat, Mages can't cast quickly enough, gun using technologists though, have the worst time. Guns don't actually fire at targets. They fire at the squares the targets stand on; meaning that any movement of the target will cause them to miss. Grenade users can't throw grenades quickly enough, but the large blast radius means that it's still possible to hit with them. If they start fights with a couple of stun grenades, they can get through the game with a minimum of pain.
The turn based modes, which use an AP system, are better. Melee characters will have a very easy time, although they will critically fail around half the time at the start of the game (if played in Hard mode); Mages are ludicrously overpowered; ranged fighters are still almost useless, as enemies will close with you in one turn 99% of the time; and grenade users will be very strong, being somehow able to throw a half-dozen grenades, which seem to detonate instantly, a turn. Of course, doing lots of things in a turn is traditional in turn based games, but it somehow feels ridiculous when throwing grenades. I prefer the system Fallout employed, in which they would explode while your enemy was taking his turn.
Overall, combat is very easy. It falls into a standard RPG trap; that is, you get stronger faster than the enemies you fight. While hard mode is indeed fairly hard early on, it's not much harder than normal by the end. Melee characters have a hard time early in the game, critically failing left and right in hard mode, but you fail less and less as your hit chance gets higher, until you get melee mastery, at which point you can't critically fail at all. Mages will only be able to cast a few spells at a time near the start of the game, but by the end of the game they will have enough Fatigue and Fatigue restoring potions to cast continuously, no matter how long the battle is. Gunslingers are underpowered at every stage of the game, but life does get simpler for them once they get an elephant gun. Other types of technologists, including grenade users, initially have a hard time collecting all the items they need to make items, but by late game will have an immense stockpile.
Even factoring in all of the games many flaws, Arcanum is still not only my favorite CRPG, but also probably my favorite game. It has an incredible story that, while beginning as a traditional role playing epic, chosen one and all; evolves into much more. The story is brought to life by the exceptional dialog, which gives life to the characters. Despite the linear plot and all the effort dedicated to bringing the characters to life, the game moves in a very nonlinear fashion, with many ways to complete quests. Due to its many flaws however, I can only give the game an 85 out of 100.
