I both did and did not grow up on RPGs. I, of course, grew reading fantasy and playing pretend. My sister and I would dress up, run around for hours pretending to be monsters or princesses or what have you, and everything would be good and right in the world. That turned into roleplaying via AIM or Neopets messages (fite me, children), and the inevitable dive into D&D.

But video games? I played the video games that were on the family computer and which were, by and large, Christmas gifts from my grandmother to my father. Games like Axis and Allies, Civ II, Roller Coaster Tycoon, all these strategy games, fun, but never fantasy. I didn’t play my first RPG until high school when my partner pressed a well-loved copy of Morrowind into my hands and insisted I play it.

I almost flunked chemistry because of that. Thanks, Zach.

This isn’t to say that this isn’t my genre. Far from it. I love RPGs, and there have been several of them in this series, albeit generally ones I didn’t get into as much as the devs would probably have liked. There are still many, many more to go. Like with deck-builders and city-builders, however, I’ve played enough of them to start to have a theory of what makes them good and interesting. Perhaps there’s a bias to it - after all, it’s based on the RPGs I was willing to play completely enough to figure out what I liked about them, and RPGs are, in general, a massive time commitment. The RPGs I hated, I hated quickly enough to know why I hated them, thus removing the need to spend tens of hours on them.

And to be clear, these games take tens of hours. There’s a reason you haven’t seen a review from me since August. That reason is Divinity: Original Sin II.

In my defence, these hours aren't all mine. 60 are my partner's. So there.

Divinity: Original Sin II is a party-based fantasy RPG. You play as one of several potential characters (or custom character) sent into exile on a prison island. As you seek to escape, you learn of your greater destiny as a candidate for godhood, propelling the characters into an epic narrative of destiny, inter-dimensional beings, and the fate of their very reality.

As with all party-based RPGs, this story is not one of a character in isolation. Instead, your character meets and potentially befriends a wide cast of characters who then join you on your quest. While the game can be completed solo, I didn’t do this. I like having friends.

DOS II’s companions are also each accompanied by their own backstories, motivations, and questlines which the player can choose to follow and fulfil (or not, if they’re a jerk). While fragments of these questlines exist without recruiting these characters, the storylines are decidedly more satisfying to follow with the character they’re about. Killing an arch-demon is all well and good, for example, but it’s much more exciting when doing so rescues a character you’ve spent dozens of hours getting to know and care about and recognising the difference it makes to her. Killing the slaver wannabe-dragon and absorbing his soul is great, but much more satisfying when it’s done by a cannibalistic, psychopathic elf.

Character makes a difference, is what I’m saying.

You'll never guess who I played as.

The interesting conundrum with Divinity, then, is that, despite recognising and understanding the importance of writing and character development, the longer the game went, the more the characters within the world felt flat. Rather than being flesh-out people, they became a list of abilities, a questline, someone to rubberstamp all the bad decisions my character was making. While the NPCs I interacted with felt externally motivated, the characters trailing in my wake, helping me enact a terrible idea on the people of Rivellon said nothing. As long as I vaguely nodded in the direction of their questlines, they were happy to join me on whatever massacre I was perpetrating at the moment.

This is not to say that Divinity’s writing is bad, or even that the characters themselves are poorly developed. Far from it. The world of Divinity is flush with lore and narrative, with new elements of the story to discover around every random corner. The game heavily encourages the player to chat with everyone they meet, and rightly so. The myriad of side quests, small conversations, and jokes do wonders to flesh out the world. Indeed, the fact that every voice line - especially the animal conversations - was fully acted out by voice actors clearly passionate about their characters made the world one worth thoroughly exploring.

It’s because of this lushness of the world as a whole that the main characters and the player’s interactions with them start to feel flat in comparison. These aren’t characters that banter with one another, nor are they characters that seem particularly interested in talking with the main character about their thoughts or feelings. Beyond one (skippable) moment, there’s no need to convince these characters to do anything - they will happily follow along, unremarking upon the horror of what they’re being asked to do.

And yet, despite this flatness when playing, I understood these characters. I could make jokes to my partner about Ifan just wanting to shoot people in the face, or Sebille being a terrible influence on everyone around her. As part of the world, the characters were alive and real, motivations clear and interesting. As playable characters, the writing was not complete enough to feel like they were more than puppets.

Which, to be fair, I was playing a psychotic, mind-controlling elf. So I worked it into my character. It’s good fun.

meistr siva doesn't know me

What, then, kept me invested, given that the character writing left me feeling vaguely uncomfortable, particularly in the romance sections? 95 hours is a lot of time to pour into a game, and while the world and the story are good, they aren’t the most compelling setting I’ve seen.

Where Divinity shines is not necessarily its writing, though its writing is on the whole excellent. No, what kept me going in Divinity was combat and the sheer creativity with which I could approach it. Not in terms of builds or any of the obvious combat mechanics, oh no. No, I enjoyed the sheer variety of ways in which I could decide to skip combats entirely.

I am the cheesemonger, and business is good.

Oh, you have no idea.

Divinity uses a class and perk system that will be familiar to anyone who has ever played an RPG. Players invest points in one of several attributes (such as strength, intelligence, etc.), additional combat skills (pyromancy, dual wielding, etc), and non-combat skills (persuasion, sneaking, etc.). Players also maintain a spellbook of memorised abilities to be used in combat, but which can be swapped around as needed outside combat. These abilities are then augmented by armour and special skills.

There are many, many combinations for each of these builds and characters various abilities. In my run, for instance, I ran one character as a combination geomancer/pyromancer, burning off enemies’ magic armour before they could act, then mind-controlling them to kill their friends on my behalf. What build a player chooses to invest in is entirely up to them, as the game supports not only freely building, but reconfiguring into a new build at any point.

Combats themselves also vary significantly, with terrain dynamics and enemy abilities creating a new experience every time the “fight” icon came on screen. Fights might be significantly more difficult if the terrain didn’t have ledges, for instance, or I might have to rethink my approach if enemies were immune to fire.

This variety of combats encourages the player to think creatively, not only about their abilities and how to smash that demon to bits using them, but about the world and how to use it to their advantage. Some of that comes through in having players move to ledges or dance just out of reach of enemies. Some of it comes in recognising enemies’ weaknesses and exploiting that.

I invested in an unbreakable box and taking potshots through open doorways, personally. It makes me feel like the cleverest of cookies.

Sure, Jan.

About halfway through the game, I stopped playing boss combats straight. Unless a combat was obviously easy or obviously uncheesable, I found some way to break it. Your witch will instantly murder my entire party before they get a turn? Not if I teleport her over to the guy with stats in the stratosphere and make her his problem. Your boss is going to summon four powerful minions and start throwing lightning around in an enclosed space? Not if I nuke him with insta-death before combat starts.

This, more than anything else, is what sold me on Divinity. Its writing is great, it has a delightful sense of humour and lightness about its otherwise grim world, but it’s the sheer creativity with which it let me avoid difficult fights that I fell in love with. It got to the point where I spent longer figuring out how to break a fight than I likely would have spent on actually trying it, just because I had so much fun abusing teleportation. It’s Divinity’s combat-avoidance mechanics that make it unique and an absolute joy to giggle at. It’s RPGs played by someone who grew up on tactics, strategies, and deck-builders, and who is now here to just break everything in the best way.

I don’t feel bad for the game designers, by the way, and neither should you. If they didn’t want me to break their game, they wouldn’t have given me the tools to do so. Or an unbreakable box. Or a sewer full of nukes. Or four characters with mind-control. Really, it’s on them.

I do it all for moments like these.

All that said, I recognise that what made Divinity fun for me is also likely what killed its character writing. At the point I start looking at the game mechanically, it’s difficult to be truly involved in the story. Everything starts being its fight mechanics, its positioning, its abilities. The act of meta-gaming itself is a reminder that this is a story, which makes the other elements of the story that aren’t as well done as they could be stick out as further reminders that none of this is real. This is a video game, and I am here to beat it.

This is not the fault of the game by any means, but rather, a reflection on how, any time I set out to break a game, I break it, with every meaning of the word. I solve it, but I break the magic and allure of a game, and once gone, there is no getting it back.

Divinity: Original Sin II is an excellent game, though perhaps in some ways despite its own best efforts. While its writing is fantastic, the player characters feel weirdly flat in ways that are vaguely uncomfortable if considered for too long. Where it instead excels is in its world-building, storytelling, and exploration.

And cheese. Oh, so much glorious, unadulterated cheese. I’ve never seen anything like it in an RPG, and I can’t wait to break another Larian game in the future.

Developer: Larian Studios
Genre: RPG
Year: 2017
Country: Belgium
Language: English
Time to complete: 60-80 hours (or 95 if you are spending too much time calculating exactly how low you can get the final boss’ hitpoints before he triggers phase 2, and you have a bet going with your partner that you can beat him without triggering phase 2, and you are determined to win)
Playthrough: https://youtu.be/gZlnx3iC_Ws