Dysfunctional Dynamic Duo Describes Depths of Divinity: Original Sin 2

Divinity: Original Sin II review by: Lowfat and TheJewphinDivinity: Original Sin II is a cooperative turn-based RPG where up to four players can control up to four characters to adventure through a magical fantasy world. If you’ve heard of Divinity: Original Sin II, it is likely you have also heard that it is an amazing game. If you have not heard of it or were not convinced by others, we are here to explain why the game is awesome and why you should play it.In our playthrough, Lowfat and TheJewphin played as a party, each controlling two characters who worked closely as a team to solve the group’s problems. We also got distracted by shiny objects along the way, and frequently separated the group to our own peril. Occasionally, we fought each other and sabotaged each other’s schemes out of pettiness. For instance, one time when TheJewphin was bored waiting for Lowfat to leave a dungeon, TheJewphin wandered around to every barrel of poisonous gas. He dropped them all into Lowfat’s inventory, which left him overencumbered and unable to walk. Worse, Lowfat was stuck in a corner of the room, so he couldn’t even remove the barrels from his inventory without trapping himself in the room permanently. Good times.Our ability to make each other miserable using the game’s systems speaks to how customizable the gameplay is: if you can think it, you can probably do it. Every item and NPC is interactive, and - more importantly - reactive to whatever stimulus you apply. Want to turn something to ice? You can cast a frost spell. Or you can summon the rain, and then freeze the rain. Everyone not frozen will slip and fall on the ice unless they apply nails to their shoes. Everything in the game has a rock-paper-scissors feel to it, so that nothing is ever truly safe from everything. Every monster has a weakness. Or two. Or five. And every puzzle has a solution. Or two. Or five.CustomizationAt the beginning of the game, Divinity: Original Sin II allows you to select from several unique characters, each with their own rich backstory. The Red Prince, for example, is a tall lizard-man whose kingdom has been overthrown. He seeks vengeance on the traitors who cast him from his throne, his family, and his birthright. Lohse is a travelling bard. She uses her body like an inn for wayward spirits: in exchange for temporary shelter, the ghosts that possessed her granted her unique, hypnotic abilities that allowed her to achieve a type of celebrity status throughout the land. All was going well until, one day, a powerful and less-than-benevolent spirit decided it didn’t want to leave. Ever. Now Lohse must find a way to exorcise the demon before it overtakes her completely. You can also create your own character from scratch, but there is a tradeoff: these characters are completely customizable, but lack the excellent backstory of the premade characters. As you progress through the game, you gain more chances to customize your character with upgraded equipment, special talents, and equipped skills. Unfortunately, unless you choose to dual class, the customization seems to fall off near the second half of the game. Most abilities can be purchased within the first 50 or so hours of the game, leaving you with a relatively full build of moves long before the endgame.StoryDivinity: Original Sin II picks up right after Divinity: Original Sin leaves off. Right afterward plus, like, a thousand years. You begin your journey as a prisoner on a ship, awaiting your new life as a permanent resident of the slave island Fort Joy. As things do in any good RPG, events quickly go horribly awry, and you and you allies (up to four) are forced to use an ever-expanding arsenal of magic and abilities to survive and to uncover the mysteries of your exile.The game is huge. If you fancy yourself a completionist, expect to spend between 100-200 hours exploring every nook and cranny. Fort Joy is an immense island with lofty mountains, long stretches of beachhead, and deep subterranean caverns. The eponymous fort that occupies the majority of the map features a densely-packed marketplace, castle, barracks, dungeons, and more. It alone would have made for an adequate-sized game, yet Fort Joy is followed by an even greater map. And then another. And then another. And then, well, you get the picture. The game just keeps going. I never tired of the experience, but I was definitely ready for the end by the time the final curtains lowered.Many parts of the game are completely optional, which is both a blessing and a curse. The blessing is that there tend to be many ways to move from point A to point B. The curse is that you either skip interesting content which could have effects later in the game or you end up solving the same problem multiple different ways. To escape a prison you can kill some guards, or convince a bunch of dogs to turn on their masters, or kill the alligators for the teleport scroll. But if you want to level up to become the strongest skeleton in the world like TheJewphin, or if you are simply interested in every plot thread like The Lowfat, you are going to pursue each optional path with a feeling of diminishing value as you proceed.That said, the fact that we wanted to do every single quest instead of moving onto the next part of the game really speaks to the awesomeness of the game. All interactions are voiced with talented actors, including interactions with talking animals (side note: always make sure someone in your party can talk to animals). And the vast majority of the stories are interesting, character driven pieces instead of the standard “Get 6 cups of flour for the baker because he apparently can’t shop for himself.”Graphics, Sounds, and MusicThe graphics are amazing and intricate. Everything is rendered in great detail, and each item and inhabitant seems a natural part of the world that contains it. Palm fronds sway to and fro in the breeze, and they reflect light when dampened by heavy rain. Fire twists and churns, and if it is cursed, it takes on a more ghastly, deadly appearance. Although much of the game is brightly lit, with sunbleached beaches and brightly-colored foliage and costumes everywhere, it always feels diverse. More than once TheJewphin and I came across a disturbing image or scene, and openly exclaimed our disgust. Make no mistake, Divinity II is not a horror game, but there were plenty of scenes that could easily be described as horrific. Diablo III would have benefited greatly from having environments capable of instilling emotional - or sometimes visceral - reactions.GameplayDivinity: Original Sin II is positional turn based combat at its peak. All abilities have a range around your character that they can affect and each character has a limited number of action points they can use each turn. Each combat scenario tends to include some balance between positioning your character optimally and using your abilities optimally. Failure in either of these can cause a battle to go south quickly, such as when Lowfat casts a sleep spell on a unit that still has magic armor or when TheJewphin sends his glass cannon into the center of combat only to whine for healing a turn later.Optimal ability usage can be extremely rewarding, but difficult to pull off. Some status effects require removal of an enemy’s magic armor while others require removal of their physical armor. So stun locks tend to be gated by one team’s ability to damage and the other team’s ability to heal or buff. This balance allows for strategic planning where the team works together to weaken a particular enemy so that one fighter can continually stun him.But battles aren’t just random encounters. With rare exceptions (like when TheJewphin sets a shop owner on fire), enemy positions in each battle are predetermined. While teleport spells can allow you to move characters around - leading to our favorite line of “I’ll put this with the rest of the fire” - most battle have some element of being initially scripted. Yet instead of feeling confining, the set pieces of the game feel almost freeing, allowing a player to think through multiple options for dealing with a situation.And some of those set pieces are amazing. I have fond memories of a battle on top of an oil rig that ended with us being surrounded by a screen-filling, blazing inferno filled with fiery slime demons. Another time, we methodically picked off demons guarding a giant, blood-soaked tree. The battles can feel epic in scale, but rarely so difficult as to feel unfair, or so easy that we don’t feel challenged.We would be remiss to not discuss the incredibly robust map editor. We didn’t play around with it too much, but every resource in the main quest can be used, placed, and manipulated by a dungeon master and up to four intrepid adventurersa player designated DM in order to weave a Dungeons and Dragons-esque campaign. The end result is a very elegant and beautiful tool for storytellers and their unwitting friends.The ProblemsQuests are rarely explained when you acquire them. This is as much a blessing as it is a curse, but quests are very rarely explained. You approach each new quest the same way an investigator enters a crime scene. By the time you arrive, the action is already well underway, or it has already resolved entirely, though that may partially be a factor of TheJewphin running off and activating questions while Lowfat lagged behind, distracted by some shiny bauble. You are left to piece together what happened, whose side to take, and how to best steer the course of events back onto its proper course - often without any explanation. Such scant handholding could definitely be seen as refreshing to some players, but at times it seemed the game was too eager to leave players without any clue how to proceed. On more than one occasion, TheJewphin would wander into a clan of hostile creatures and kill them all for looking at him funny. Soon thereafter, Lowfat would learn that the people were hostile because they had been driven mad by a spell - the cure for which we discovered mere minutes after slaughtering everyone. The game was liberating in its freedom, but the results of so much open-endedness meant many quests ended with frustration and disappointment.Despite having played Divinity: Original Sin II together for over 148 hours, Lowfat and TheJewphin are still friends. Mostly.