After finishing Baldur’s Gate 3’s third playthrough, I was planning to do a fourth playthrough with an evil ending, but… somehow I didn’t feel like leading not only my character but also these beloved companions down the path of evil(?), so I ended up seeing the good ending again. I was going to do a fifth playthrough as Astarion origin, but once Astarion shut his mouth, the game became too quiet, so I eventually quit. After that, I saw the ending of Monster Hunter Wilds, and now I had no games left to play.
So after a week of buy-refund-buy-refund-buy-refund, I finally ended up finding something in my library.
I found Pathfinder: Kingmaker. Oh, Owlbear? This is the same world as Baldur’s! So I installed it and played it again. It was a game I got from Humble Bundle, but when I tried running it before, there were way too many complicated choices to make so I couldn’t play it. But after doing 4 playthroughs of Baldur’s, I had learned something to roughly make various choices(?), so I gave it a try.
The reason I couldn’t finish it was because there’s no official translation, so I was playing with a user translation. Since it’s a novel-like style game but wasn’t done by professional translators, the text wasn’t as smooth to read. Furthermore, the UI couldn’t be adjusted, so reading text on the monitor for a long time was very tiring. Plus, it’s an old game so the graphics were poor too… Maybe I got too used to Baldur’s turn-based system, but playing while pausing was also difficult to control… So I ended up deleting it after about an hour again.
A few days later, I found there was Pathfinder 2, Wrath of the Righteous. Since Kingmaker wasn’t great, I read some reviews
‘If you’ve come this far, it means there’s nothing else to eat, so just eat it’ – this review ㅋㅋㅋ was exactly my situation, so I thought I might as well try it. When I searched, I could buy it for $3.5, so I bought it.
Well, I put quite a bit of effort into making character with various choices. As always, I started as a Sorcerer, and chose Dhampir as my race (Dhampir born from between a vampire and a non-vampire race, or born when bitten by a vampire while pregnant). The character 3D modeling was pretty poor, but since it seemed like a story-driven game, I started with the expectation that ‘it should be fun^^’
The translation was better than Kingmaker’s, so reading the story was quite enjoyable. However, what I don’t understand is why the art style is inconsistent from portraits to story illustrations…? All the artwork has different art styles, giving it a disorganized feeling. Still, well… illustrations aren’t important… since it’s a story game…
…Come on… Artwork matters…-_-
The companions are also… well… I guess they’re decent enough…
The story is also… okay, readable enough…
But the combat is really hard to adapt to. When I first chose Dhampir, I read the explanation saying ‘Dhampirs can’t be healed by positive energy and are healed by negative energy!’ and just thought ‘Oh, I’ll recover by drinking blood^^’ and moved on. But ㅋㅋㅋ when my health dropped, I tried to heal with a companion character and my health got reduced, so I went to an enemy to suck blood, but apparently vampiric drain doesn’t just work here and I have to knock them unconscious first? That’s when I started thinking ‘Huh…? Wait…? Did I choose something wrong?’ and furthermore, the Sorcerer class also seems kind of trash.
In Baldur’s too, Sorcerer feels kind of trash in the beginning, but at least Shadowheart casts blessings from the side and sometimes crits happen, so you can provide support while dealing chip damage. But the Sorcerer here is genuinely trash. I don’t know if it’s because this is my first time playing this game and I put stats in the wrong places, but 8 out of 10 times it misses, once it shows 2 damage, and once it shows 1 damage. I really don’t understand the hit rate – it’s like my character is casting spells with closed eyes, so I kept watching the dice rolls closely, and most enemies roll something like 13-18 on their dice and dodge all my spells. What, did everyone in this world take saving throw proficiency against magic or something…
In the end, I deleted this one too after 4 hours – it’s just not my style, so why did I buy this again…
+ Please make DLC, Larian…ㅜㅜ