Planescape: Torment

The Good
Never before have I stumbled upon any similar game to this one. This one is strong enough to define a new dimension of adventure and role-playing genre by itself, as it borders with so many similarities to as-we-know-them isometric hack & slash RPGs (by simply being played throughout such a viewport), and with royal 3rd-person point and click adventure genre (as it has more dialogues than in any pure adventure genre I know, more text that in some pure text-only adventure, too). So what's so special about this game in general and why is it worthy spending couple of months playing it (and that's bare minimum you'll need of your time), let's see...

You're playing a big, muscled character, who simply cannot remember his name. Awaking in the mortuary, on a slab pushed here by some mindless zombie drone, you find your only help to be a babbling skull, Morte's the name. For some strange reason you yet need to discover, you are immortal (at least in general), and your wounds heal very quickly. However, your body does look like you've pased through some serious series of battles and got skewered and hacked quite a lot. Yet another thing is making you a drawback in this game, your memory. You've seen to lost it. As a matter of fact, you seem to lost a part of it every time you die. So, that's all you find out from the story epilogue, but it gets more and more complicated as you progress, with a series of sub-stories aside as well.

A typical mark of an RPG is a character skill level upgrading system. Well, here you have all the needed, charisma, which improves your look and help you when talking to strangers, or at least they're more pleasant. Wisdom, which helps you regain your memory faster, and makes you smarter, or should I say, wiser, so you get more options in dialogues with everyone. Intelligence whih can be good if you decide to orient your character into a mage. Dexterity which comes in handy for thief's hands, raw strength for a warrior class, and so on. Or, you can try making a ballance of them all, and have good part of all, but none to be the best.

Dialogues are really enlarged and I bet the script for this game was at least twice the size of some encyclopedia, but the fact is that the text isn't just babbling in the wind, it actually makes sense, all of it (well, most of it), and is funny, sad, annoying, ordinarily, and basically resembles the situation of the game to fit it in its own style. Battle system is also nicely done, especially when you have to control all six of your characters, it work efficient, more or less. Dunno if it could be done any better (except for the speed). Music is very nice to listen in the background, but isn't the stronger side of the game, especially since it's rare and you won't remember hearing more than just a couple of different songs throughout the whole game, even though your music directory on your hard will tell you otherwise.

I dunno what's happening nowadays, either we're getting too much or horror games out there, or is the graphic just getting better? Anyway, I don't think some "Ghost 'n' Goblins" or "Castlevania" or even "Alone in the Dark" could scare anyone, but today's games, hehe, man, that works even too good. Must've been the graphic and the bigger power our machines can achieve. Well, the thing I mention these is not because this game's a horror, it's most certainly not! But comes to think of it, if all those things you'll encounter by playing this game, and all things that'll be described or heard in the dialogues would be done a bit better visually, or at all, "Phantasmagoria" would seem like a child's toy comparing to the level of yuckness this game could achieve. Why am I saying this under the 'good' section? Well, because you won't get a feeling you're in some gruesome place at all, hehe, it's all so well made to show such nonesense not a bit. It really sticks to story instead of the atmosphere, and they achieved that quite wonderful, I must say.

The Bad
So, is there anything bad about this game? Well of course there is, and no, don't just tell me "every game has bad things", because that doesn't have to be true in every case, and every player can count at least two games that have no flaws in his/her eyes.

I) All dialogues (99,99999% of them) is not done by voice-acting at all, which begs to ask, why employing such a known people for voice-acting when there's barely something you may hear. Only speech you hear is when you try to take someone's armour or a weapon off, or the first sentence in their dialogue with you. And yet, game is on 4CDs, but this really looks terrible. I mean, once you hear them talking, and next 100 paragraphs you must read yourself, and not to mention there are as many descriptive talks as actual parts of conversation. I mean, Sierra did make their "Phantasmagoria" in 16 colors only just because the FMV took 7CDs, but if they removed speech, they'd at least spare one more CD on that game, too.

II) Game that comes on 4CDs and barely has any animations and speech is doing something wrong. Even though game has so many paths you can finish it, play it, and do certain things in it, should fit on one or two CDs. And as much as it may seem big, it is not. That small map you see at the start is the entire territory of the game, and all those planes that are mentioned in the game are just a few you will be, and can be at. The game is smaller in places than "Revenant" or maybe even "Nox", which both come on a single CD only, and yet both of them have more animations than this one. Not to mention fully speech. And they're all made pretty at close distance to each other, so comparing can be allowed and fair.

III) This game is dragging its butt like a wild boar who was shot with a sleeping injection. It's so slow that it's intolerable. As soon as some magic is used, or more enemies comes to the screen, it almost looks as it'll crash. The fact that this game is released three years ago, and that I was playing it on 1GHz processor with 384MB of RAM is very bad to accept. I mean, back in 1999 even best computers weren't this strong, so for who did they make that game? Or maybe they made it be equally slow on 30GHz CPU or some old 486 just as well.

IV) The entire sound and music quantity in this game is terrible. Of course, this is all shadowed by the story, but it's terrible if you focus on that thing, only. Also, if you battle, and the music is fast and furious, and then you go talking to someone, you may end up talking for half an hour, while having same annoying fast attacking song in the background. Sometimes, my only choice is to switch to some radio station until I'm through reading some dialogue. Man, how would it only be if this game WOULD have speech ;)

V) The game is too filled with bugs, as if they rushed its release before some serious must-testing. Since game constantly fills its 'temp' directory with infos about all the rooms and places you were onto, it may slow down every now and then, and that happens rather too often to neglect. Or sometimes you may just end up wihtout seeing your mouse cursor or selection lines and windowses.

I could say a few more annoyances, but I could also say a few more good things about this game, and I'm bordered with the size of this post, so this should suffice as general pointer.

The Bottom Line
This is one of those games that manages to fascinate you with its creativity level to being unbelievably good. However, no matter how much you may like it, it also gives you an open view to all of its downfalls, so you can either choose to neglect them, and keep being angry inside yourself, or you can shift your opinion about this game all the time, going from "whow, what a treasure" to "ah crap, is there anything good about this game". The thing is, that no matter how deep this story may seem at first, second or ever at fourthyfifth attempt, it is a cover for a simple story in which your main nemesis is your own life, nothing we didn't see in many other games before it, but the fact is that this game separated your life from you, so it can be shown as a physical battle, not just a battle of good and evil inside someone's mind and body.

Unless you're determined to finish this game without any subquests, and do the only things you must to finish it, you'll need couple more months for it, and being on four CDs should speak for itself about the game's length, especially since there's not much of a voice-acting in it, all text, vast army of letters. It has quite a balance of story, adventuring, strategy and action, but how well is the game balanced between thee, it's up for everyone to decide on their own. Truth is that I enjoyed immensely at some part of this game, considering it the best game ever... but then I got over it, as soon as it showed me how annoying it can be sometimes, and patience was never my virtue, unfortunately. But then again, it's hard not to like a game which gives you so many questions, is it not? ;) Find out for yourself, I can't say anything that would attract or repel you to this game. It's great, buy it. It's a crap, toss it away if you get it as a present. Nope, nothing solid like this can I offer you, nothing but to say, 'try it'.

The Good
It's a superbly well-written game -- easily the best written game I know of in the rpg genre, ranking with the best adventure games.

The central quest to "know thyself" is not unusual if you've played a lot of adventure games, but is unusual in the genre.

Certain mini-quests are extremely memorable. The game starts you out in a mortuary and some of the things you do there are fascinating -- I especially like a moment where manipulating an item in your inventory gets you experience.

Dialog trees are not tough, exactly, but are often absorbing. It's possible to gain experience by taking the proper route with various characters, very neat.

One mini-quest, which requires you to die in order to continue, neatly subverts most rpg quest-like actions. There's also a mini-surprise here that really is eye-opening, regarding your relationship to one of the main npcs.

Excellent voice acting and music, with some genuinely haunting moments.

The Bad
I'm one of the eccentric few who find this game overrated.

Much has been made of the unique setting of the Planescape world, and that's true. That said, though, it's not that unusual. There's still wizards, thieves, priests, etc. Instead of healing potions there's blood clots, but they do the same sort of thing. You'll still see skeletons and zombies -- not quite as you have before, but they're there. Point is, much of the game can be seen as a one-to-one transfer: clots = solutions, charms = scrolls, etc.

The game is very well-written, and often plays like an adventure game. Frankly, it probably would have been more successful as an adventure game. The rpg blendings work well at the start, less well as time goes on. You're in trouble when the most interesting parts of an rpg are the conversations and puzzles, and the combat seems a slog.

My biggest complaint is that the combat engine here is awful. You can pause, give orders to your party, then unpause and see how things turned out -- but your characters don't often behave as you'd have liked. Bad guys often swarm the weakest party, and it can be extremely frustrating to pull somebody out of harm's way to safety. Especially when they kind of ran off and did their own thing despite your wishes.

This wouldn't be a game killer for me, except that combat increases dramatically in the third quarter of the game, and it's exceptionally frustrating to play. This game was not suited to dungeon-crawl antics, and suffers when you have to do them.

I in fact stopped near the end and never finished this (although I read a solution to see how it all turned out -- and the ending seems worthy of praise).

The Bottom Line
This is an interesting attempt at an adventure-game/rpg hybrid. It works extremely well in it's first half, less so in the second. It's considered a classic by most gamers, and if you're an rpg fan you owe it to yourself to try it, if for no other reason than to see what the fuss is about. Like many hybrid games, though, I think the blending of genres points up the flaws of each -- it's a tribute to the makers that they can keep the plates spinning as long as they do, but eventually it does all coming crashing down. Despite it's worthy sections, I can't recommend it.

The Good
Forget Neverwinter Nights... Forget Final Fantasy... THIS is what an RPG should be! In this game YOU can choose what you will be, if you'll act as a good-hearted angel or a hellish demon, if you'll be a skull-crusher fighter or a more stylish wizard (with the BTW most original spells you'll ever see in a D&D computer game). And your choiches WILL eventually change the story, so you'll be playing the game again and again, only to see what will be the outcome if... And, unlike the 99.99% of computer RPGs, this time you can really perform your character like in your favourite pencil&paper RPG. Think about this: you can beat the game fighting only two, perhaps three times, but you'll still be the strongest man in the multiverse, and you'll had the most deep experience ever in a computer RPG.

The Bad
The fact that a Torment 2 doesn't exist... And perhaps, the confusion of some battles... But nothing serious.

The Bottom Line
This game is not so popular as the Baldur's Gate saga, but it beates his cousin in many ways. The characters are well described, the story is so fascinating, it's almost as intriguing as a novel... Definitely the best computer RPG experience I had since Wasteland! (and it was a long time ago... ;-) And I love succubus!