The Witcher 2: Assassins of Kings (2011) by CD Projekt Red

Witcher 2 is a mix of positives and negatives whose positives ultimately far outweigh the minor complaints I have with the game.

It shares some of this roughness with its predecessor, The Witcher, which I find to be so rough as to be almost unplayable nowadays. The Witcher 2 had similarly convoluted, poorly designed levels which make it a chore to navigate to and fro while completing quests and exploring. The forest outside Flotsam is guilty of this. It's exceptionally difficult to get where you need to go without circling around hedges and trees and carving through numerous cannon-fodder caliber enemies. Additionally, looting and interacting with the environment is a huge chore given the cooldown on your amulet scanning ability, and the way the game locks out looting for what feels like an eternity once combat starts. Crafting and inventory management is a gigantic chore due to the obtuse user interface, which I felt like I had to fight with constantly. I also experienced a few lock-ups in which Geralt would get stuck in an animation, and a few crashes here and there. Transitions into different areas of the map are bothersome as well. There are numerous small complaints like this that show some of the roughness the previous game also exhibited, albeit far less of them overall.

But there are significant improvements, too. This game looks beautiful, especially when compared to the previous game. I was surprised by how high a quality some of the textures were, and the art design in general is noticeably improved from the first game. The character and monster designs are fantastic, with some of the sorceresses and Geralt's outfits being particularly stunning. Even just the background of the dice poker board, or the deranged drawings on the wall of the burnt out asylum are artistically impressive. Due to this mix of artistic prowess and a powerful new engine, a lot of the visuals on display in Witcher 2 still hold up today, nearly a decade after its original release in 2011. This is made more impressive by the use of developer CD Projekt Red's in-house REDengine, which they developed and used for the first time with this game, to glorious effect. Although I dealt with a few crashes, the game otherwise runs superbly (I'm near 150 fps at all times with max settings) and it still looks great despite being nine years old. It's a pretty impressive achievement for what was a small studio at the time to develop such a solid engine, and the game is made much stronger than the first Witcher, which used the ancient Aurora Engine, licensed from BioWare.

The combat is also substantially improved, ditching the previous game's ridiculous and shallow faux-rhythm system for classic third person combat which is far more satisfying to execute. It feels a bit loose to me, especially when compared to The Witcher 3, but it's still miles better than the first game's combat and far more intuitive. Enough depth has been added to make things more interesting throughout.

Where The Witcher 2 really shines, though, is in terms of narrative, quest design, and providing the player agency. The strongest thing The Witcher 1 did was weaving its quests together, so you feel especially detective-like once you begin uncovering all the pieces. This is also true of Witcher 2. For example, in Chapter 1 you very quickly obtain a series of side quests very early, simply by talking to people. Almost all of these quests turn out to be intertwined in some way: An incense-maker turned fisstech dealer and a drunken troll turn out to be related. Sounds far-fetched, but the common ground not only turns out to be reasonable and compelling, but also teaches you more about the political situation in the game's setting of the Pontar Valley. And if you're looking for a game in which you have the power to impact the story with your choices, then look no further—The Witcher 2 features perhaps the best example of "your choices matter" that I've ever seen in a game.

CD Projekt Red took a massive chance in the way they designed this game, because there's a significant choice to be made at the end of Chapter 1 that leads to two nearly exclusive routes through the plot. Meaning that no matter your choice, you will end up missing out on about a third of the story content in this game because the two paths moving forward from this choice are so different from one another.

It's a ballsy choice by the developer, because these people had to be designing these entire areas and questlines knowing that half of their players would likely never experience them (unless you're a nerd like me and replay the game to take the other route). The consequences of this choice further reinforces the fact that you are actually impacting what is occurring in the narrative. Few games take player choice to this extreme, and the fact that CD Projekt Red did makes The Witcher 2 something special for that reason alone. Furthermore, the choice is packaged appropriately—you likely won't even realize that you just made a game-altering choice, even though you still realize the gravity of the choice when you made it. The game won't pause and give you any hint that a massive choice is about to occur, which I love. It's an exceptional, ambitious move that is perfectly executed and it makes this game far more memorable and impactful than it'd be without it. Bravo to the developers for making the difficult decision to include two branching paths like this.

If for nothing else, this game is worth playing due to the quality of its narrative. It's a politically-driven game with strong social commentary and genuinely interesting characters, and it gives you the opportunity to pass judgment and act within this world as you see fit. It's constantly satisfying in this manner and it left me thinking about my own moral code regularly. Although Witcher 2 does not feature the classic, epic story that is featured in Witcher 3, I appreciated the narrower scale and the stronger focus on the political machinations of this world's elites. It might take some concentration, but once you grasp what's going on in the narrative, it's quite compelling.

The Witcher 2 is not without its warts, but it shows a staggering improvement over its predecessor and it remains more than enjoyable today. If you're in the mood for a good story, check it out. You'll probably be well-satisfied.

⭐⭐⭐

Dragon Quest XI (2017) by Square Enix

I'm awestruck at the near-unanimously positive reception this game has received.

Maybe this is partly due to its looks. Right off the bat, it's incredibly impressive visually—especially on an artistic level. Toriyama's character designs are timeless. His style has aged like wine, from his Dragon Ball manga until the present day and pretty much everything in between. The game also features surprisingly good visuals on a technical level; the way it renders lighting and water will often surprise you.

Unfortunately, unlike Toriyama's art, the rest of this game has aged like milk.

First, some necessary backstory for context so nobody mistakes me for simply being a JRPG-hater. The original Dragon Quest (called Dragon Warrior back in the '80s here in the states) was one of the first games I ever played back as a young sprout on my father's NES console. I played it at such a young age I had to wait for my father to come home from work so he could read me the text, because I wasn't able. Dragon Quest II introduced companions to accompany you on your journey; a novel idea at the time. Dragon Quest III had you put together a team of various different classes of warriors—whichever you liked! Incredibly novel for back then. And Dragon Quest IV, with its varying scenarios, was probably my first favorite game ever. The shock of the end of chapter 2! Playing as an actual storekeeper in chapter 3! The tragedy of the beginning of chapter 5! What a game. Incredibly inspired, perfectly paced. They executed on everything they sought out to do. To this day I'm a massive fan of RPGs, and turn-based games don't bother me. JRPGs are some of my favorite games of all-time.

But man, even given all that, the most unfortunate thing about this game is that it feels old. And not in the timeless, classic way that Toriyama's art feels. So much of what this game relies on as its core loop, as its reason for keeping people coming back for more, feels so stale and ineffective that I grew to hate it inside just a few hours. The turn-based combat feels slow and antiquated and made obsolete by games like Persona 5, the music sounds incredibly bland, uninspired, and poorly mixed (despite the game being peppered by some original sound effects from the old NES games, which I enjoyed). And perhaps most damning; the story writing is of substantially poor quality. Although some of the characters are charming and well-acted by the voice cast, the main plot includes some of the most ridiculous, childishly contrived, video-gamey nonsense I've played in years. Most of the characters in the story regularly make stupid and puzzling decisions for no other purpose than the developers creating this story decided it should go in one direction or another without giving any thought as to how plausible said direction felt. It feels like something a child would write. It feels like fan-fiction. No, it's worse than fan-fiction.

There are numerous instances of moment-to-moment actions making little logical sense. A couple of early examples:

The prophesied hero finally shows up! But you know what, we should throw him in jail because his appearance means the bad-guys are gonna show up, too! He's not The Luminary! He's The Darkspawn!

I'm sorry, what? How does this make any sense whatsoever? What human being would make a decision like this?

This thief is in jail, and he's been tunneling through the floor to escape (presumably a process taking many years of painstaking, Andy Dufresne-esque hard work and suffering to complete) but he's able to instantly steal the guard's key to his cell and unlock his door simply punching him in the gut through the bars—punching him through the guard's steel plate armor and chain mail—to knock him unconscious! And not only that—the door's now unlocked and he's free to go straight out, but instead, he'll use the tunnel he dug, which requires going through the sewers and a dragon's den. He'll go that way instead of simply leaving through the door he just opened.

Games are no stranger to contrived writing. But this isn't just excusable as, "well, it's a video game, I can put up with some contrived nonsense if it's fun". Dragon Quest XI's caliber of writing is so bad, so utterly amateurish, that it pulls you straight out of the experience and prevents you from taking anything in the story seriously. And without a compelling story as context to fall back on, this game is nothing more than a series of old, stale systems dragged forth to the present from the 1980s, including archaic turn-based combat, monotonous fetch-quests, and dry overworld travel from point to point through an uninspired, linear, tunnel-and-corridor style map.

Look, my games don't have to be literary. I'm not some high-minded snob who refuses to dirty himself with anything not to the caliber of War and Peace or King Lear. The games I play don't even have to have high-minded themes or make moral or political points. That stuff is completely unnecessary to a medium which puts you straight into your player character's shoes and hands you agency over his or her actions. But what my video games do have to do is make sense! And they have to tell a story with real stakes, with events that seem real, and threatening, and compelling! And they have to give me characters that I can relate to, that I can care about and root for and sympathize with when they fail and triumph alongside when they succeed! They can't give me a silent, d e a d - e y e d protagonist who acts so unnaturally through it all that he may as well be a puppet being moved around by a ventriloquist; an ambulatory anime body pillow with so much plot armor he may as well not take damage in battles!

I have so much nostalgia for this series and I wanted so badly to love this game. It's not even that far-gone! I could have put up with everything else as-is, if only the story was well-written, emotionally affecting, and inspired. The flaws Dragon Quest XI exhibits may have worked in the '80s and skated by on name merit in the '90s, but packaged with such awful writing, it just doesn't float the boat anymore in a world in which games like Disco Elysium, Red Dead Redemption 2, and Witcher 3 exist. And I'm not saying every game has to have the caliber of writing as those games, either. But damn it, can't they at least try!? There's no longer any excuse for the awful writing, for the tinny, uninspired music, for the empty, silent protagonist, or for the lame, busywork chores that are the fetch quests that populate Dragon Quest XI. This stuff doesn't cut it in video games anymore, and people searching for quality Japanese roleplaying games shouldn't be settling for this kind of trite, stale drivel. A charming, well-executed art style is not enough to carry a video game with such uninspired gameplay, sound, and story as Dragon Quest XI.

If you're a Dragon Quest mega-fan and all you want is another formulaic Dragon Quest game, then by all means, purchase this. You'll probably love it. It's exactly the same game Enix (and now Square-Enix) has been making for decades. But this game can't stand with other, modern roleplaying games. It's not even in the same building as the better RPGs being developed today—much less on the same level.

This game is a colossal disappointment and doesn't deserve to have a single minute wasted on it by any player out there.

⭐