Pathfinder: Wrath of the Righteous thoughts
"Gee willikers Flint, how come you've not been posting about video games much lately?"
Well, my curious and oddly speaking reader, this is why:
I've only just completed chapter three, by the way. Out of six. Pathfinder: Wrath of the Righteous has been eating a lot of my playtime. It's also going to eat a lot more of it because even though I'm now taking a break (I've got other games to catch up on), I am eager to continue.
This comes as a slight surprise because whilst I enjoyed the first Pathfinder PC RPG (Pathfinder: Kingmaker), I eventually dropped it because it became a chore. Its gameplay particulars had begun to tire me and the plot and the characters weren't good enough to retain my interest, and when I realised I was playing the game for the sake of playing it rather than because I was genuinely engaged with it, I thought to stop it. From what I've read, it seems like the rest of the game would have become even more grating. Wrath of the Righteous feels like a wholly different beast though despite the same core roots, and I think it can be boiled down to a couple of easy reasons.
The kitsune race - OK let's get the brand-friendly obvious joke-but-maybe-not entry out of the way first: one of the canon races you can play as is a culture of anthropomorphic foxes, which is obviously revolutionary. That they are naturally aligned towards charisma and persuasion is an added plus given that's the route I tend to lean towards in these games. Other characters even comment on your foxiness. It's great!
You can dial down the DnD - Here's my dilemma. I'm a huge fan of good ol' isometric PC RPGs (turn-based or bust) that I can sink into for hours as I adventure from rags to riches in a world that isn't afraid to dump paragraphs of lore on me every time you turn a corner. The problem is... I'm starting to realise that I really do not gel with the Dungeons & Dragons ruleset, which is a bit of a problem given how many of these games feature it. There's a whole myriad of issues I have with DnD but they all boil down to how the system prides itself in being as convoluted as possible. The biggest battles I go through in these games is seemingly trying to understand half of what the five-paragraph mechanic descriptions actually mean, where the simple concept of "pointy edge of sword meets monster" is bloated with about fifty zillion variables and dice rolls that are absolutely impossible to make sense of in the heat of the moment. Clear numbers are treated like the plague, there's restrictions upon restrictions upon restrictions courtesy of your race, class, favourite ice cream flavour, how moral they find crossing the road when no one's coming, how they like their coffee et al, until all these countless available options you have to make the story your story just means you are railroaded into an incredible precise method of advancement that you better not even dare to divert from. A big part of the reason why Kingmaker wore me out was because the DnD-powered battles were such a ball ache to actually play.
One of the best parts about Wrath of the Righteous is that you can just dial all that down and it's perfectly within the game's parameters. As you advance in the plot you gain mythic levels - basically fantasy superhero points for plot reasons - and each time you get a new mythic skills. These mythic skills are all intentionally overpowered game changers, most of which seemingly exist to just get rid of the arbitrary bullshit of DnD. They allow you to simplify or even skip certain mechanics entirely, and the result is a massively more enjoyable gameplay experience. Each mythic level has not only felt rewarding, but they've all coincided with my gameplay experience improving.
You still have to deal with the core mechanics themselves being written by a madman without an editor, but thanks to the various QoL changes (including the mythic levels but also a number of other settings you can tweak), they're so much more bearable. I'm actually enjoying playing the game.
It's just overall more interesting - Kingmaker felt like your standard fantasy RPG game, from the setting to the characters - nothing truly unique, nothing that would make it stand out from the crowd. Wrath of the Righteous pulls the classic sequel move of allowing itself to go a bit off the beaten path, and the result is a lot more engaging setting and set of characters. You're now leading a crusade against an endless horde of demons bleeding from a giant hell portal (literally called the Worldwound which is one of those metal-AF names you remember) that's barely kept contained by arcane magic, with the game being set (so far) on the border regions around the fantasy resonance cascade event where everything is going a bit awry and the normal people are just trying to deal with it. The cast of characters you surround yourself with are a genuinely interesting bunch of personalities who regularly seek out to challenge your initial misconceptions of them: even the blatant uWu waifu bait succubus-turned-good party member becomes a genuinely interesting POV on the war raging around, not to mention she's a fantastic fighter. The sidequests are frequently interesting vignettes to various facets of the war and the people around that most of the time they don't feel like just meaningless chores. The mythic roles mentioned above further highlight this, as after the first few levels you have to pick from specific paths which not only open new paths and ways to advance in the game, but which add their own unique flair into the proceedings.
Wrath of the Righteous isn't a masterpiece of writing in RPGs, but it does the most important thing: it presents a world and set of characters that you want to save (or doom if you play a bad character, I guess) because you're engaged with them.
There are actually some things I preferred about the first game too, though. Namely, the chosen side-game. In Kingmaker, in-between your RPG adventures you would engage with a light kingdom management sim: build structures, make big decisions about sudden events happening in the realm you ran, nominate ministers to guide your in your absence, etc. It split opinions but I actually quite enjoyed it - it had enough depth to be entertaining and involved, but not so much that it'd become a time sink blocking you from the main game. And to be honest, the further I got in the main game, the more I began to prefer the kingdom sim aspect and kind of wished I could have just had it on its own.
In WotR, this has been replaced with a store own brand discount Heroes of Might and Magic minigame: recruit heroes and troops, let them traverse around the map conquering regions and defeating demon hordes, gain levels for better combat abilities, etc. The kingdom sim is there to a smaller degree, as you can create new buildings in the forts you conquer (which increase your armies' numbers and stats), and in your throne room you're asked to make certain key decisions throughout the campaign or solve minor dilemmas that usually give you small resource or unit boosts of your choice. It's decent, but it is more of a chore: given the size of the map it takes an awful long time to manouver your troops and reinforcements, the barebones HOMM-style combat frequently throws humongous enemy hordes or overpowered hero spells at you even at the lowest combat setting, and you do genuinely have to take your time with it if you want to succeed, sometimes standing in the way of making progress in the main game. You can automate the crusade through the settings but this apparently also foregoes any story or character beats which are the result of your level of success in the war campaign, so it's not optimal.
As mentioned I'm still halfway through the game and there's still a chance that it all goes tits up horribly as it goes on. I would hope not, and so far WotR seems to be very keen on ensuring that it avoids the mistakes of its predecessor. It's solid, in the best possible usage of the word: it keeps you engaged, the mechanics work (at least once you begin beating the DnD ruleset to a bloody pulp) and the world is genuinely interesting to figure out. I don't think this going to be bothering the top tiers of my favourite RPGs at any time but I have been in the mood for a new classic fantasy top-down for a while and this is scratching the itch nicely at the moment (as opposed to replaying the Pillars of Eternity games which is on the to-do list, or relenting and playing BG3 like the rest of the world).