So as you might've figured out by now, Act 2 ending is an awful stinker. It essentially ruins the main plot, no matter what way you look at it. Sure, you may feel forgiving because, as many here have stated, "Who does a better job anyway", but I don't feel that this is a good enough of an excuse. Anyway, whatever. On to Act 2 and beyond!
So Act 2 ends with us basically foiling the villain's plot, learning an ancient language and finding out what causes babies to be born soulless. And how to stop it. We also get a quick promise of getting into political intrigue. Faction tensions, political debate, audience with the duke or whatever the fancy word was. Basically, we got a build-up, which was supposed to lead to a reasonable follow-up that would pay off our efforts. Instead, what we got was a good joke at our expense and a display of what amounts to "wasted time". I usually hate this term being thrown around by reviewers, because even if it "was all a dream", we still get our entertainment, who gives a fuck? In this case, though, it's pretty much what it is, because we end up wasting our time on a nice little "kill everything" campaign that amounts to nothing - just a slide or two in the end of the game. Duke dies, your allies die or break out into a little fight routine, you run away from the city but not before passing out like a pregnant girl at the sight of a sock.
Of course, because somehow the Bad Guy has all the answers to your problems (I still have no idea why we decide this is the case, can someone clue me in on what I missed? To me it was like seeing a furry after scalding my hand and deciding that the furry must know why it happened and how to heal it), we follow him into Act 3 and visit the rustic Barbarian Village, a nice town that has a FUCKING TEMPLE WITH ACTUAL GODS LIVING IN IT right next door. Okay so apparently now this is a thing? Gods of the entire world live here and people are like eh w/e but maybe lets go hide there now that we have pogroms in our city, surely these PEOPLE THAT USUALLY LIKE TO KILL TRESPASSERS AND HAVE NO SYMPATHY TO OUR KIND will let us in and house us and shit. There's like GODS living here and nobody gives an actual fuck. What?
Then we go and flirt with wooden chicks. I'd flirt with wooden chicks, and so I'm glad there's an actual option to do so in the dialogue, together with a great comeback from one of the wooden chicks that brought me back to things I learned about plants in biology lessons. Turns out that the BAD GUY has collapsed the entrance to the FUCKING TEMPLE OF THE GODS but it's okay because you can go and pray to the gods in a shrine nearby and they'll help you with a magical elevator. Since my character was a nice guy I only skipped helping out God of Death, which apparently is so powerful he couldn't kill two elderly guys and needed my help with these. Powerful beings, these.
Yadda yadda, every god wants you to do something slightly different, so you figure out you'll have like 4-5 options which are somehow mutually exclusive despite logic but ah whatever fuck it, still not feeling any interest besides actually ending the Legacy, which is like the only part that interests me at this point because it has some kind of emotional investment in it since you know, potential death of an entire nation. Anyway, after all this emotionally engaging stuff, you go down a well and hoo boy Act 4 starts.
So final acts are usually cool when they combine the things that your character did over the entire course of the game, the game's setting, the game's plot and maybe some neat twists from the past or otherwise. I can think of a few neat endgame revelations/wrap-ups, but I'll talk about one of them in particular here just to get the point across as to why PoE ending (pre-slides) fails to work.
First, it dumps the exposition on you. Gods aren't real - except they are but they're fake. Anyway, I wouldn't mind this arc, if it was somehow important to the plot - or completely unimportant to the plot, conversely. Unfortunately, just as the gods are real but fake but real, the theism vs atheism debate is fake important but important but actually not. It's not important because so what? The game makes no effort to show why this may be important. Why your character betrayed a woman so important to him (can be waifu, or mother) over this super knowledge. Why it's worth all this trouble of killing off a nation to keep a secret. I don't get it. Okay, gods are synthetic, and they send you on quests to do menial shit. So what? Why is this important?
However, apparently it is important, because our final walk is accompanied by memories of previous conversations, of Deionarra talking to Sarevok flashbacks flashbacks. Not a single flashback of what was actually important. Nothing of what you did in the entire game. Just a bunch of echoes from the previous life, something you at the very least had no hand in, and at the most don't give a fuck about. And here I have to point out a game that does the exact fucking opposite, and it may shock the good folk here but that game is Witcher 1. I loved the final walk to the endboss in Witcher 1 - it was early hours and I was tired as fuck but suddenly I'm walking up this hill, meeting people whose fates I affected - and talking with something from the past, the Wild Hunt. Except since Wild Hunt wasn't disjointed from the rest of the plot, it actually felt important too - and fuck, my actions were acknowledged! I could for a moment see what I did from another angle! Cool shit. The talk with the endboss was also cool - it was about the past, the future, it was all about the things that happened in the game. Plus the final revelation of who the villain actually was. Good job.
This guy? I already forgot what he told me. I guess it was about importance of religion in people's lives or some shit like that. He talked to my character like he was still the Inquisitor from the past. Fuck you guy! I'm not he.
TL;DR the game puts too much importance on the "past life", fails to set up the importance of the past life, of the characters involved in the endgame, and of the whole theological debate. The writing is still competent, but it just too split off from the actual game and what's going on in it. The current events, on the other hand, are dismissed too readily for the "sins of the past" plot and other such things - which aren't properly set up.
