Ash of Gods: Redemption - Banner Saga-like with CCG elements

[J1M]

Lesson learned: don't trust hipsters in New York and London to do translations. Since their level of effort appears to be equal to what google translate will do.

 

[MRY]

It's too bad. I had suggested to them that they work with some Codex folks to localize the game, and I had thought it was going to go forward, but apparently not.

 

[J1M]

If those "english speaking" translators are really claiming that the translation is correct but a different "literary preference" then payment should be withheld. They produced english suitable for a machine-learning algorithm, not a game.

 

[fantadomat]

Lets be honest here,they just used the google translate and that is all.

 

[MRY]

A translator friend is always telling me about jobs he gets where he has to clean up after such "prestigious" translators have done Google-translate quality work. It's fascinating -- even if you assume the client can't judge the quality, you'd think that second-hand reactions would be sufficient to annoy the client and cause the translator to earn a bad reputation. But it appears not.

 

[fantadomat]

A translator friend is always telling me about jobs he gets where he has to clean up after such "prestigious" translators have done Google-translate quality work. It's fascinating -- even if you assume the client can't judge the quality, you'd think that second-hand reactions would be sufficient to annoy the client and cause the translator to earn a bad reputation. But it appears not.

Rebranding is an easy thing,you can just go bankrupt and the remake the company with another name and under another owner.

 

[Balor]

Don't fret! Russian voice acting is REALLY horrible, so they get to suffer as well.

 

[HoboForEternity]

finally finished the game. i quite like it.

pros:

- the overalll system. it's better than banner saga, and quite more complex but still similar. i like the combat better
- music oh so good 10/10
- art and animation are pretty damn good too.
- i like the story and overall world/setting. it is just a bit harder to grasp because any character bearing important information can just die or you simply pick the wrong conversation topic

cons:
- turn initiative system. another one of those " give equal amount of moves even if it is 5 against one " sure it seems balances hopper's fights out because he only fight alone, but hopper dont really need it and surely makes chipping off enemy number seems worthless. it's just a straight bad system despite the other parts of the game are pretty damn good

now to the spoilery stuff

Spoiler

in my run i managed to keep almost everyone alive, and have decent understanding of the world / setting and story. it basically take place in a multiverse of some sort, in which world are separated by a dimension barrier called the misty veil or something. the world we play in is terminum, a world which alot more mundade/less magical than the other. this other world is the enses and umbra's world. this world, i assume is very magical and ruled by gods or just really some powerful beings worshipped as gods, they have, collectively a spiritual lifeform called umbra to be their servant, while the ordinary people in their world aka the mortals are just the enses. one day one of this god gone rogue or just being a colossal dickhead he waged war against the world and destroyed it for whatever reason. the other gods for some reason didnt see it coming or simply outpowered by this one particular god and failed to save the world, but using their remaining strength, proceed to evacuate the people and the umbras into terminum, planted the menhir as a guidepost / power source for the umbras and enses. the rest of the gods died shortly after that, but the dick god remains alive, however stripped out of their energy and strength and lies in a coma like state as a spirit like the umbra when they died.

years after, some of the enses tribe was frozen in a cyro-sleep like state in a vaults hidden underneath menhirs on terminum, some was set free and mingle with the people of terminum so are the umbras. some of the umbras like hopper and his friends choose to live among the mortals, some eventually breed with the mortals of terminus even establish tribes of their own. one day, the sleeping god awoken from his slumber, with even a slight power he was able to manipulate some of the umbra, took their will and turn them into reapers. the first reaping happened (technically the second reaping that has happened, the first one is the one that happened in the original umbra's world. the reapers in turn, is an extension of the dick god's will and able to subjugate mortal's mind. his aim is to resurrect himself in a host. a host created by intermingling of umbras and humans. as far as i gather, an hybrid can be a host and they hold certain power to resist the reaper's mind control. gleda, reet, and breet or whatever his name is one of those.

during the first terminum reaping, 12 lower umbra took stand to fight against 5 reapers which are mind controlled 5 higher umbras. on the battlefield the 12 lower umbras sacrificed themselves to create explosions that wcan destroy the reapers. however, with one bad stroke of luck, the 12th umbra failed to do his job as arrows struck his chest and incapacitates his mortal body before he did the deed. that killed some reapers but not all. the surviving reapers retreated and 700 years later they came back to finish the job.

hopper and several other surviving umbras just kept living as they goes until the second reaping happened. the enses awaken from their cyro sleep and immediately controlled by the mind control effect and rush to menhirs and corrupt them, in order to draw the potential hosts, people with the thickest of umbra blood into one place. the dead menhir so the god can take over the host's body and revive in full strength.

depending on your choices, the god can be sealed within amma (which i failed to do) or inhabit one of the host's body. imy game ended with chilla's roaming the wasteland after the dick god got gleda and turn the surrounding land of opacum into wasteland, with a black sphere in the middle.

my question is who the hell is chilla since she seems to be alot stronger in sorcery and more knowledgeable than hoppers and the other umbra. she helped hopper by hinting him towards certain goals and imbued him with the black curse so he have the choice to surpress the reaping and make it easier.

secondly, what is the evil god's motivation in doing all of these? just gaining more power? simple cruelty and moustache's twirling evilness?

Sneaky Seal

i will play it a second playtrough and try to solve the riddle this time, but can you explain the part of the story i dont understand? will the "good ending" explain the god's motivation and who chilla is ?

 

[Rahdulan]

New update.

UPDATE 1.2

Hey! In this major update we not just fixed a lot of issues but also added new features, such as hardcore mode 'Iron Man', post-mortem for the story, combat log, portraits and emotions feature for multiplayer and many balance changes for single player.

IRON MAN MODE

As you may know, we were very attentive to community feedback after the release, and one of the very first problems was very high difficulty of the game. Of course, we took it into account and made some changes to make the game more comfortable.

But this decision also disappointed the ones who prefer to face challenges, that's why we decided to make a separate hardcore mode for them—and today we are glad to introduce you 'Iron Man':

• You have only one save
  
• No lowered attributes for AI units
  
• AI has no limitations since the very first level of Reaping
  
• You can't change the level of Reaping manually
  
• Balanced abilities, which can be used to create so-called 'imba-tactics' based on such classes as guardian, fighter and archer in small teams
  
• Three additional achievements which could be earned in hardcore mode only

POST-MORTEM

Players who already beat Ash of Gods, also wanted to know more about what happened in the end of the story and what happened to the rest of their beloved characters.

It was a great idea, and we changed the end of the game with post-mortem, where you can find some additional details about what happened with the world and those characters who still alive. But keep in mind, that fate of characters are non-linear as well and depends on your unique story.

COMBAT LOG

Now you can track everything what happens on a battle field with combat log. It is hidden on default but you can easily turn it on by pressing the icon with 'L'-letter near the clock.

Combat log available in both single-player and multiplayer.

PORTRAITS AND EMOTIONS

Now you can talk with your opponent in multiplayer via our chat analogue, which allows to share emotions like 'Well played!' or 'Victory will be mine!'

Bots also use emotions to answer you.

SINGLE-PLAYER

• Added new 'Iron Man' mode and three achievements
  
• Added post-mortem which explains what happened with alive characters and what happened in the final video
  
• Added combat log
  
• Added option to turn off autofocus of combat camera
  
• Lo Pheng's team now getting increased amount of experience—both Pheng and Thorn teams should have equal level in the end
  
• Strixes usage of Thorn's team increased on three strixes a day
  
  
  
  
  
  
• Changed sorting of the deck in inventory (now sorting for level and availability)
  
• Numerous balance changes for abilities (guardian, archer, fighter, spearman)
  
• Added Galaxy support (achievements and overlay) for GOG version of the game

MULTIPLAYER

• Added portraits and emotions feature
  
• Added combat log
  
• Injuries in common fights are disabled
  
• Added injuries information to profile's window
  
• Added version check when connecting to server

LOCALIZATION

• A huge update of English localization from second to six chapters
  
• Fixed numerous spelling and stylistic mistakes in Russian
  
• Increased fonts size in Chinese localization for the loading screen in the beginning of each chapter
  
• Fixed many mistakes in English, Italian and Chinese languages
  
• Fixed problem for Chinese language with incorrect displaying of hieroglyphs in single-player and multiplayer modes
  
• Fixed out-of-bonds text on loading screen in Italian localization

BUGS

• Fixed visual bug when enses figures (the blue ones) grew during death animation
  
• Fixed possible freezes during passive abilities animations because of cards usage
  
• Fixed logical errors in 'Merchant Sid' event
  
• Fixed logical errors in 'Sinvicta brothers in Friga' event
  
• Fixed logical errors in Blance's dialogs in Friga
  
• Fixed a problem when Silver Diadem item doesn't appear in the inventory if you choose it during conversation with Rask
  
• Fixed a scene in the woods where trees covers the battle field
  
  
  
  
  
  
• Fixed logical errors in Thorn's dialogs in wastelands (if twins are dead)
  
• Fixed incorrect loading in the beginning of 'Menhir Arch' location which led to skipping a battle against enses
  
• Fixed unlimited leveling of Thorn's team during battles with frisians
  
• Fixed displaying of high attributes value in story mode (>100)
  
• Fixed position of 'Close' button in multiplayer on resolutions less than 1366x768
  
• Fixed a bug when hints about arenas in multiplayer may not be displayed
  
• Fixed a bug when battle track froze in multiplayer

WHAT DO WE DO NOW?

• Experimenting with battle system: testing new stun and also agro mechanics, card usage without ending your turn etc
  
• We finished preparations for clans in multiplayer and now integrating them with server
  
• Additional fixes for English language with help of two new editors from community: @Reavy and @K. Constantine
  
• Fixing bugs you are reporting

 

[Kaivokz]

Game seems pretty awesome so far. Biggest critique is definitely the odd sounding, sometimes dry, writing. It's always sad to read something interesting when it's obvious that stuff was lost in translation. The world and characters all SEEM interesting, but the writing doesn't sell it. The world can get away with it more, as dry prose is a more acceptable method for conveying historic or natural facts. But, it really sticks out in some of the dialogue. It helps to pretend they're all speaking a different language and you have some sort of translator-chip implanted in your brain...

edit- I'm only in the first chapter, so I'll see how their localization changes seem for the other chapters.

 

[SerratedBiz]

This had gone completely under my radar. Ironically, the game having its own sub-forum probably didn't help. However, it looks good and I'm looking for something to scratch my turn-based itch (which Battletech failed to do) so here we goooo

 

[Kaivokz]

Some thoughts after playing a bit more.

Pros:
-The art and music are beautiful.
-The world is interesting and general plot serviceable to explore the characters.
-The three protagonists have different perspectives on the events of the game, which makes the world feel detailed and expansive.
-The resource management is sufficiently challenging.

Cons:
-The combat initiative system is poorly designed. You alternate moving one unit each no matter how many units are on the field & must use each of your units once before any can be used a second time. I think it could have easily been fixed by alternating turns until everyone had taken a turn, and then starting a new round. The current system leads to a number of counter-intuitive/un-fun scenarios. Combat often feels most dangerous when there is only one enemy remaining, because they get to go over and over until they die (usually hitting the same person repeatedly, while you can only move that wounded unit once every 6 'turns'). It leads to the optimal solution often being to weaken everyone, or get it down to 2-3 weak enemies, so they can all be finished off at once. There are also situations like: 6v6, you've moved four of your guys and eliminated two of theirs, they've moved four of theirs and have taken none of yours, so their units all refresh but you still need to move your remaining two before you can access your other four. This often makes it so that the four enemies who just refreshed start ganging up on one of your units who have already moved.
-The writing is still weird sometimes in chapter 2-3 (I'm at the end of chapter 3, currently), and it's hard to tell if it's a problem with the source material or with the translation. Some things seem out of order (characters forget things they just learned) and sometimes the replies you can choose don't really make sense in context. I find myself asking: Why are these my options? What do they have to do with what was just said? Furthermore, there's a transparency problem; your character says exactly what is written, but it sometimes provokes an odd reaction which makes it feel like what was written wasn't what you chose to say.

I'd also echo that this game having its own sub-forum limits its exposure on the codex.

 

[Infinitron]

GameBanshee review: http://www.gamebanshee.com/reviews/120505-ash-of-gods-redemption-review/all-pages.html

Introduction

Ash of Gods: Redemption is a narrative RPG from AurumDust Studio based on a novel series by Sergey Malitsky and the first thing everyone notices about it, is how similar it looks to Stoic Studio's The Banner Saga. From presentation and combat to the world map and even some of the characters, the similarities are clear and obvious.

However, keep in mind that Banner Saga-like is not exactly an oversaturated genre. And in fact, the Stoic developers themselves have endorsed this game. A couple of them even appear within Ash of Gods during a random event and joke about the perceived similarities. So, with that out of the way, let's take a look at Ash of Gods and see what it's all about.

Story

Ash of Gods is set in a fantasy world of Terminum during what's known as the Reaping. The game opens with a brief prologue that introduces us to the Umbra, a race of immensely powerful humanoid beings from another world. Some of the Umbra try to coexist with the humans of Terminum, while the others transform into Reapers in an attempt to resurrect their dead gods by sacrificing the humans.

When the game starts proper, seven hundred years have passed since the previous Reaping and the Terminum people have forgotten all about it. This allows the Umbra to plot, scheme, and manipulate everything and everyone, resulting in a story filled with political intrigue, large-scale conflicts, and double-crossing.

We'll be experiencing this story by following three separate protagonists with their own unique storylines that all converge at the end. Hopper is an Umbra who failed his mission during the previous Reaping and now seeks atonement by acting as a healer. Thorn is a former guard captain of a rural town and a decorated war hero. And Lo Pheng is an emotionless hired blade who's a ninja in all but name.

Surprisingly, the frequent perspective shifts are handled extremely well and don't make you grit your teeth every time they happen. The interconnected stories don't feel disjointed and offer a nice change of pace.

Just like in The Banner Saga, the story is told through a series of vignettes where the characters talk with one another or move from place to place. AurumDust's artists are top notch and their animations are a joy to look at, which immediately pulls you into the story and makes you want to learn more.

On top of that, as the player you get to chose how the story unfolds by deciding which paths your characters and their respective companions take. And the limited, and constantly dwindling, resources create some nice tension and add a welcome layer of resource management.

Now, before I get to the bad parts, allow me to stress that I greatly enjoyed Ash of Gods' overall story, pacing and presentation. There are definitely plenty of talented people over at AurumDust. However, their translators and writers, or rather whoever adapted Sergey Malitsky's writing for a video game, leave a lot to be desired.

The translation is far from perfect and has plenty of easy to spot typos and some odd word choices, but it's not terrible. With the developers not being native English speakers, I can understand how they wouldn't be able to gauge the quality of the translation themselves. And considering that they seem determined to fix the issues based on user reports, I can't really fault them there.

Now, when it comes to the actual moment-to-moment writing, the best thing I can say about it, is that it's uneven. Some of it is quite good, namely the chapter subtitles and scene descriptions. The dialogues, on the other hand, oftentimes make little to no sense and are painful to read. Every single line is more akin to a long-winded monologue. A very stiff, redundant, and needlessly verbose monologue.

There's no distinction between character voices, every conversation takes several unnecessary detours before getting to the point, and so on. It's like the antithesis of what good video game dialogue should be. Getting through Ash of Gods' bloated dialogue feels like a chore. There's no consistency and characters often act in inexplicably contradictory ways.

In one scene, Thorn's friend berates him for killing what's essentially a bunch of ravenous zombies because they used to be people. In the next, he advocates cold-blooded murder of one of his sane and quite friendly underlings for next to no reason. And that's just one example on a very long list.



What's also annoying is how the dialogue options you get to chose from can be misleading at times. Early on, the mayor asks Thorn about his business at the market. Trying to play Thorn as a reserved man of little words, I chose an evasive option, something along the lines of “just browsing.” Somehow, that led to Thorn abruptly ending the conversation and storming off.

And while I'm not familiar with Sergey Malitsky's work, a quick search tells us that he's a prolific writer with some literary awards under his belt. As such, I can not believe that the source material is the issue here. During the first few hours, the game bombards you with a shrapnel of weird-sounding proper nouns. None of these names and places mean anything to you at that point and only serve to confuse you. I just can't see an accomplished author making such an obvious “baby's first fantasy novel” mistake, so I have to assume that something must have gone wrong during the book to video game adaptation process.

My biggest piece of advice for approaching Ash of Gods is to not read too carefully. Just scan the text, get the general gist of things and move on. That way, you'll get an enjoyable story packed with intrigue, mysteries and exciting twists. Ignore this warning, and you will likely be uninstalling the game after your first session with it.

Now, on a more positive note, Ash of Gods was advertised as a game with “rogue-like storytelling.” What it initially seemed to mean, was that you could choose where your characters went and only had a single, constantly-overriding autosave slot to work with. However, that's not exactly the case.

Your short-term decisions can lead to you running out of resources and losing some of your people. Such scarcity can force you to act in a variety of unsavory ways and create a narrative you weren't intending to create when setting out on your heroic journey. As a result, the story can take wild, at times infuriating turns. And while in a 15-20 hour campaign that can cause some understandable frustration, playing a game where you have no idea what's about to happen next is a nice change of pace.

In a true roguelike fashion, it's extremely easy to fail and get a bad ending. How long your journey takes, how you interact with the various NPCs, which points of interest off the beaten path you visit, it all factors into the grand finale you'll get at the end. After finishing my playthrough and looking up the other possible outcomes, I ended up being pleasantly surprised. Things and events I thought were set in stone, in fact were anything but. The amount of moving parts in Ash of Gods is truly staggering.

Moreover, the quest line that can lead you to the good ending is actually pretty well hidden. In order to get there, you'll have to follow a set of cryptic clues and prophecies that are extremely easy to overlook. You will need to pay attention to the world map, write down clues, and piece things together yourself. With no in-game journal, Ash of Gods is very old-school that way, and pleasantly so.

Combat

The combat in Ash of Gods combines turn-based tactics with some light CCG elements. It's similar to The Banner Saga in that it uses the alternating turn order, where your unit's move is always followed by your enemy's move. However, in Ash of Gods you get to decide in which order you take those turns, which adds a nice layer of tactical consideration into the mix and encourages using smaller squads.



Where this system falls apart, is when your enemies have just a couple of fighters left. This allows them to act a lot more often and down a couple of your characters as their final act of defiance. And when one of them falls in battle, they get a wound. Upon getting four of those, they die for good.

Thankfully, while the game's story boasts its roguelike roots, you can replay the combat encounters until you get them right, making those needless casualties less annoying than they otherwise would have been.

The combat itself features a risk/reward system where your units can expend either their Energy or their Health in order to use their more powerful abilities. When a unit has no more Energy left, it takes double damage. And when its Health hits zero, the unit gets downed for the remainder of the fight.

With a wide selection of unique character classes, plenty of enemy variety, and basic leveling and inventory systems, Ash of Gods' combat is quite an enjoyable addition to the game's narrative.

I do have some minor gripes with it. Apart from the abovementioned turn order shenanigans, there's also a rather generous turn timer. It goes from about five minutes per turn to slightly under a minute as the game progresses. What's it doing in a single-player game is anybody's guess.

And then, there's the CCG aspect. Most of the cards you can get your hands on are extremely underwhelming, on top of requiring an entire turn to use. Playing them is rarely practical, and with a few exceptions, I only touched them when I wanted to skip a turn and let the enemies come closer.

Overall, though, I found myself enjoying Ash of Gods' combat with its variety and flexibility quite a bit and if you're not averse to turn-based systems with alternating turns, you might enjoy it as well. And if you'd like to test your skills against human opponents, there's always the online multiplayer.

Technical Information

Ash of Gods uses the Unity engine, but it's extremely well optimized. It runs exceptionally well, doesn't hog a lot of resources for a change, and loads pretty fast. The options menu is quite basic, but it does have three different animation speed options, which is always nice to have.

The game offers two difficulty modes, Classic and Story. The latter allows you to skip most of the combat if you don't like it or find it too hard. Personally, I thought the game was easy enough on Classic, so go for Story only if you don't enjoy turn-based battles.

The art and animations are simply a joy to look at. The music is not far behind, with limited voice acting adding some flavor at the start of every chapter.

The game didn't crash on me once and I haven't encountered any major issues or bugs. There were some minor visual glitches during scene transitions but that's about it.

Conclusion

With great visuals, nuanced tactical combat, a compelling story, and an incentive to play through the game multiple times in pursuit of the perfect ending, Ash of Gods is a great entry in the burgeoning narrative RPG genre. While on the surface it's a shameless copy of The Banner Saga, in reality Ash of Gods adds plenty of unique elements to Stoic's formula and stands perfectly fine on its own, without the need to be propped up by the cliched “if you liked The Banner Saga, you will like this” endorsement.

While the game has its share of problems, it manages to provide an enjoyable and memorable experience despite them. And if the developers manage to overcome their shortcomings, their next game could end up being quite spectacular.

 

[Bara]

Just got through the game. Looking forward to playing through it again once those updated translations come through.

I still hate round robin turn order systems with a passion but the way Ash did it was tolerable enough. I'll take the predictability of what happens when one opponent is left alive over the shenanigans that happened with DOS2's system.

 

[zaper]

I've been following this game since the early announcements, and I could never understand what the fuck was going on with the blatant obvious "inspiration" they got from Banner Saga. From reading this forum, I'm clearly not the only one.

I mean, it always amazed me that there was so much high level production value associated with something that, regardless of its own merits, will ALWAYS be thought of as derivative. At best, people who know of Banner Saga will see it as a homage, at worst they will think Ash of the Gods as an unimaginative and uninspired copy of a successful game.

There is no denying that the art assets seem beautiful, and by no means I'm saying Banner Saga is the only production allowed to have this kind of art direction, but there are just too many similarities, aren't they? At least at first glance(which is what matters most, at least in marketing). There's even a father/daughter dynamic, if I recall correctly.

Now, that being said, the reception of the game itself(and not people's first impressions of it) seem quite nice, and as a customer I would be very interest in playing this, but this whole "the translation is shit" thing really bothers me. Is it that bad? Isn't there nothing that can be done about it?

 

[ERYFKRAD]

Isn't there nothing that can be done about it?

I hear the translation has been revised since release.

 

[Rahdulan]

I think it's WiP still with some of the earlier chapters getting another pass. Although what really confuses me is devs working on MP patches at the same time. I guess there's an audience there or something unlike Banner Saga's Factions mode.

https://steamcommunity.com/games/691690/announcements/detail/1642004416602117023

DISCUSSING UPCOMING MULTIPLAYER CHANGES
22 MAY - BIJOU

Hello there! We’ve collected a lot of multiplayer stats since Ash of Gods release. Also you wrote us many suggestions how to make multiplayer more interesting. And today we would like to announce and discuss with you new changes in multiplayer to publish them with the clans feature.

Currently we would like to fix following key issues:

• Incorrectly working chests drop—chests with the same type or with the same stuff drop (first arena stuff generally)
  
• Incorrect allocation of units (classes) on the arenas—new classes appear too slowly and player does not have enough time to level up them or add such units to their teams.
  
• Classification units by rarity is not always successful.

Let me describe what we are going to do with that issues:

• Correct the rarity and allocation of classes by arenas: you’ll get 16 out of 24 classes from first 3 arenas and remaining 8 classes for the rest of 5 arenas. You get a guaranteed 1 current arena’s card from arenas’ chests.
  
• Fix matching of the units to arena: 12 units will be available in the first arena for each player and include 6 common units, 4 rare units, 2 epic units. 6 of them will be in the team and the rest of them will be opened by player. Each arena from 2nd to 4th will add 2 common, 2 rare, 2 epic units. And 2 common, 2 rare,1 epic and 1 legendary will be added from 5th arena.

• Fix chests drop—now chests will be dropped by mix of table and probabilities—it guarantees that all the players will get fixed amount of wins and probably same amount of bonuses.
  
• Changed number of dropped-down gold to speed-up the leveling, increase number of obtained awards per win. Added guaranteed rare and epic cards to chests on every arena higher than 4th. Fixed free chests in “Menhir” to start sharing strixes apart from gold and unit cards.

You can take a look into new rarity table and allocation by arenas here (clickable):

[i.imgur.com]

What we would like to discuss with you
We would like to know your opinion on changes, if they could make the game better. What else we should change? Whether we should make changes migration or wipe + compensation would be a better option?

Join discussion in comments. Thank you.

 

[baud]

I think it's WiP still with some of the earlier chapters getting another pass. Although what really confuses me is devs working on MP patches at the same time. I guess there's an audience there or something unlike Banner Saga's Factions mode.

Or perhaps it's not the same dev working on the translation and on the multiplayer.

 

[Trash]

So, how is the translation now? When I first tried it the story was near incomprehensible at times. Which really jarred with the rest of the overall excellent presentation. Any progress made?

 

[Bocian]

Decided to give it a shot, out of curiosity, and I have mixed feelings. I like the character's design, contrary to what others claimed I haven't seen many signs of SJW'ism up to the third chapter (except women with swords, but it's fantasy, so let it be); they're relatable and quite interesting despite completely atrocious writing. At first I thought that maybe my reading comprehension is failing and I'm receding in my abilities, but after reading the thread I confirm what others wrote, the story arcs are sometimes incomprehensible and full of holes. In the prologue, a guy (who looked similar to one of these anime-like swordsmen from the intro) comes to the mountain place to speak to the seer. Instead, he meets a woman that he recognized as his loved one he though that died. Instead of some natural, more emotional reaction the guy acts like a robot and first thing he says is "that's not my name anymore, call me Hopper because I like it more". I don't think it was intended as a characte presentation - if so, it fails completely, because after that scene I know even less than previously, and it does a bad job in making the characters' goals and personalities clear. It's hard to rate the storyline in general because I'm having extremely hard time following it. There's no place to read about history, no time table with dates and events, it all becomes a blur when I try to put the pieces together. People speak of things I don't know the meaning of, I don't know what they refer to and there's nowhere to look it up. And I don't mean PoE-style lore dumps, simple dictionary would suffice.
Combat is another thing. I find it flawed, and hard to get accustomed to, because advantage in numbers means absolutely nothing in this game; a regular enemy will be able to smash several of your party members just because he's on his own. I'm playin on iron man, so maybe it's less aggravating on normal difficulty. Nonetheless, it's challenging and requires tactical planning. I really enjoyed the Chapter 2 combat as one character against many enemies, figuring out the pattern that enemy uses and developing a strategy felt great and was satisfying to win. So, I'm willing to give it a chance despite atrocious narrative - if developers still frequent the Codex, in my opinion rewriting all of the storytelling and dialogues in this game should be top priority.

 

[fantadomat]

I like that the first thing you look for in a game is whether it has the mythical sjw in it lol
Stop trying this hard

I have seen this retarded post pop on a lot of games when someone ask about sjw. You are becoming annoying retard! At least try to diversify the fucking post.

 

[ERYFKRAD]

At least try to diversify the fucking post.

Wait... Are you an SJW now?

 

[fantadomat]

At least try to diversify the fucking post.

Wait... Are you an SJW now?

Fuck no! Just that the SJW like maxie are not diverse enough . With their stones onto their heads i say.

 

[fantadomat]

I like that the first thing you look for in a game is whether it has the mythical sjw in it lol
Stop trying this hard

I have seen this retarded post pop on a lot of games when someone ask about sjw. You are becoming annoying retard! At least try to diversify the fucking post.

stop being sick in the head

Drop dead you cuck! no wonder your woman is cheating on you.

 

[Bocian]

I continue the game; I had some troubles with the battle under the double menhir, the enses are ridiculously difficult to fight. One of them has an ability dealing flat 24 damage with no cooldown and with no health cost for the attacker (as many weaker abilities do). Too overpowered, also considering that

Spoiler

one of the allies goes insane at this spot, and it happened to be the one I leveled up.

Also, the band of feminists that join Lo Pheng in another chapter gave me major cringe. Their writing is atrocious, none of them has any merits or interesting personality, their only purpose is to display "gurl power" in bold letters. What underlines that fact is that they're a liability in combat, Lo Pheng is much more capable on his own, and fighting alone gives him more experience.

 

[Daniel Pacheco]

I was following this game since its kickstarter but I los the track of the game and I just see that has been released in Q1.

Does anyone recomend me the game then?