Baldur's Gate 3: Finally finished this. Game clock was around 104 hours, final level was (of course) 12. I did most of the optional content, but not all. It's not an easy thing for any game, let alone a WRPG, to get me to play it for 100 hours, so kudos to the game for that.
I enjoyed Act 3 the most of any part of the game. Part of it is that Baldur's Gate itself is a more compelling setting than the previous, part of it is all the cumulations of character arcs and long-expected boss throwdowns, most of which are actually quite fun fights.
Ultimately I think my final thoughts on the game remain pretty close to where they were at the year-end reviews a few months ago. The amount of jank in the game never really stopped being frustrating. I feel like I could list literally dozens of ways the menus or interface or AI behaviour was annoying in some way, often in ways that I find just crazy that such a large team couldn't fix them; I just choose not go into that list to because I don't want to come across as petty, or take away from the really cool important big-picture things the game is doing.
The way WRPGs handle dialog will always be weird to me, but this game did about as well with that format as a game could, I think, mostly because the characters themselves are very compelling. Particular shout-out to getting the characters' thoughts on other characters, which helped make the team feel like more of a team even though the amount of talking characters actually do with each other is more limited than I'd like.
I'm still not sure what this works out to score-wise. Surely either 7 or 8, though it's more deserving of awards and high praise than most games I would give such a score to. I'm very happy this game was made, and very happy I played it. I also don't want to play any more games like this unless I hear the polish is improved considerably, and since genre fans don't seem to care I'm not holding my breath.
Dark Deity 2: Finished on Deity mode (Hard, basically; the second highest), game clock around 37 hours (although Steam says I played it around 33, so IDK). Very fun Fire Emblem clone which both manages to significantly improve on its predecessor and also forges its own identity.
So DD1 was pretty fun but the biggest problem it had gameplaywise was that it had this complicated damage-types system where there were a bunch of damage types and a bunch of armour types and they interacted in a way which required a big chart to make sense of. Add on to that the fact that there was a needlessly confusing "stat which makes you ignore a certain fraction of target defence" stat and damage became almost impossible to hand-calculate/predict and it turns out this is bad for Fire Emblem.
DD2 throws all that out. Damage is Atk-Def, very straightforward, the only difference between this and vanilla FE is that magic damage is more common, which is great.
Class design is good, like Sacred Stones but expanded. Everyone gets four tier 2 classes (and tier 2 is gained... very quickly) and four tier 3 classes, and can go through them in any combination. Trying out the different classes is fun, and fortunately you get multiple PCs of each class tree so you can try different ones, and you can also reclass between classes in the same tier. (My one issue with this system is that once you go to tier 3 you can't change your tier 2 class, so the game really rewards you changing your tier 2 class right before going to tier 3 if you have an eye on a particular synergy/skill combo, but now that I know that it's no problem).
The game's biggest thing where it does its own thing to FE is the presence of abilities (read: spells/skills/etc.) which cost MP. Everyone starts with 100 MP and regenerates 20 per turn, somewhere between FFT and TO/Fell Seal in a way which feels quite good. You get abilities from your class but everyone also has a personal one (in addition to a personal passive, similar to FE). Some of the abilities end up feeling tuned pretty strong, particularly the damage-dealing ones in the hands of certain units on the mage class line, which can just one-shot many enemies from high range at 100 hit, but it's okay. The high level of power these abilities offer make the game not too hard, but you definitely have to be awake since enemies are quite strong, and on the whole I appreciate this approach to challenge.
Map design is... pretty fun! There are time limits but they feel reasonable, just enough to punish extreme turtling and MP regeneration. There's a good array of map types/victory conditions, and secondary objectives which are fun. The game sometimes doesn't clearly telegraph certain locations on the map, though (actually this game has its share of small interface problems. Less of them than BG3 at least!), and fog, though rare, is even less fun than FE since there are no torches.
Writing... is better than the first game, if still not really a reason to recommend the game. It certainly swings for the fences, both in terms of a world which feels far bigger than anything it shows, and in terms of character moments. Sometimes too much; the protagonist in particular lurches from one operatic character crisis to another and a certain point it kinda wore thin. But it manages some good/poignant moments as well.
