Planescape: Torment

The Good
The second of the Black Isle D&D games. Planescape: Torment, took the high road and instead of setting the game in the wildly popular Forgotten Realms, choose to set it in The Planes. This is easily the best of the five Black Isle games. And unfortunately sold the least copies. Even the abysmal Diablo sold more copies, about ten times more. This is a shame.

In Planescape: Torment, you are cast as The Nameless One. A warrior whom has lived countless lives and can not die. You awaken in The Mortuary, where you meet Morte, whom is a talking skull. (The Mortuary clearly inspired the first area in Baldur’s Gate.) Once you escape you end up in The Hive. From here you try to put the pieces of your fractured life back together. At this point you will have many unanswered questions. Who are you? Can Morte be trusted? And who is that strange woman at The Mortuary?

The plot is very well written, and will keep you guessing. As well as keeping you glued to you monitor. The setting is so unique, it has to be seen to be believed. There are tons of plot twists to keep things interesting.

There are up to five others that can join in your quest. From a pool of eight. The range from a half-demon, half-human thief. To a human mage that is on fire! Your party members may not get along either. As they will threaten each other, and not work well together.

The game controls very similarly to Baldur’s Gate. One thing that you will probably notice right away is how much more of the screen is devoted to the game, unlike Baldur’s Gate pathetic 1/3 crap. The characters are also much larger on screen. And therefore much more detailed. The quest is a long one about 40 hours, with plenty of side quests for all those completers out there.

The battle system, is simple. Like other AD&D games it is turn based in real time. You can pause the game while you make your decisions. Then you either attack, defend, use skills, use magic, or try to flee. Oddly though you can kill your allies in battle why?

Menus are also handled like other such games. Yet in Planescape, it seems to be done better. And when you look at the biography of someone you get this nice art of them. And it is not just PCS that you can view but NPCS and monsters as well.

The Graphics are much better than those fond in Baldur’s Gate. Or even BG II! The strange looking environments look cool. And the alien design makes you feel as if you are in a strange land. PCS and NPCS have huge very detailed sprites. You can even see facial features unlike many of these games. As well as make out the Nameless One’s tattoos. Spell effects are huge and impressive. Particularly more powerful ones like, Call The Lightning, and Power Word: Kill. Different weapons and armor show on you allies.

The Music and Sound department is solid. The voice acting is superb. And feature many well known actors, including Dan Castellaneta, the voice of Homer and many others in “The Simpsons”. The sound effects are loud and sound great. Music is scarce but excels as well. The battle music is one of my favorites.

The Bad
This game is challenging. The hardest of these games. This would not be so bad if it were not for the way it spikes in difficulty. It is not so bad at first but towards the end it gets hectic.

You can screw up your game if you are not careful. And may not be able to finish it. I hate it more than anything when, games pull this shit.

This game was outsold by the crap ass Diablo. Why?

The Bottom Line
Overall fans of Black Isle’s AD&D games and fans of RPGS owe it to themselves to play this game, even if they have to get the version that comes with the horrible Soul Bringer.

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!

The Good
Amnesia in today's role-playing games has become little more than an over-used cliché to create blank characters on which players can project whichever personality they wish, but which nonetheless have a past that's relevant to quests and NPCs. Off of the top of my head I can name only two RPGs in which the cliché works as a plot element, one being Knights of the Old Republic, the other Planescape: Torment. Planescape's major feat is combining the time-honoured AD&D rules with a setting and characters that are amazingly original and deep. Players are presented with a world that appears to the main character as alien as it must have appeared to lovers of classic high fantasy when they first opened the Dungeons & Dragons Planescape campaign box.

Waking up on a slab in a gigantic mortuary, players are hit with some rather surprising facts about their existence: one, they were dead; two, they can't be too sure whether or not they still are; three, their memories of what brought them there are gone and four, apparently somewhere along the way they befriended a floating skull who pleasurably gives the hero what little information he is to be provided with to start his quest. The macabre miracles don't stop there because not only must the walking corpse flee the mortuary run by a slightly disconcerting group of people nourishing a philosophical death wish, upon stepping out into the streets the nameless hero, appropriately named Nameless One for the entire game, discovers that he is in Sigil, the City of Doors and easily the most unusual place in the entire AD&D multiverse. Being the hub of a cosmological wheel on which all possible worlds in the Advanced Dungeons & Dragons universe are located in the form of dimensional planes, Sigil appears to possess the inherent trait of randomly opening magical doors to said worlds and attracting its inhabitants. The potential for literally outlandish characters which bring a plethora of personalities, backgrounds and quests to Torment's rich story is nigh unlimited and used to almost full effect by the creators.

Everyday little wonders can be found at every corner and its a credit to the game's sheer narrative power that the vast majority of odd episodes play out almost entirely as text box descriptions. Dialogue in Torment is elaborate and incredibly well-written; at the time of its release it easily beat the until then wordiest RPG, Baldur's Gate. The game's strong focus on personalities and intellectual problems very elegantly steps in the way of this becoming a chore. Battles play an inferior role in Torment and can often be evaded altogether using the game's equally developed and elaborate dialogue options. In short: Planescape is one of the wordiest games ever, waking memories of old Infocom text adventures which captivated gamers' imaginations like good fantasy novels do. Torment achieves exactly that.

Torment's main cast is one of the strongest and most colourful in any RPG created to date. Whoever thought Final Fantasy holds the monopoly on quirky and unusual party members needs to play this game. Where else does an undead hero team up with the already mention floating, Billingsgate-talking skull who equips dentures like weapons, a half-demon street thief, an honour-bound mystical warrior, a succubus and ex-proprietor of a platonic brothel, a robot looking like a walking TV set, an eternally burning arsonist wizard or an animated suit of armour?

Based on the Infinity Engine already used in the Baldur's Gate and Icewind Dale series, Torment's graphics are presented in Black Isle's standard isometric view. Running at a resolution of 640x480, the game's detail level benefits from larger onscreen sprites and a closer look at the morbid scenarios. Thanks to a freely placeable actions menu that can be displayed and hidden with a right-click, the screen layout feels a little less cramped than in Baldur's Gate and allows for a literally broader view of the world. Torment's music is appropriately odd, mixing minimalist and experimental tunes with mysterious melodies just unusual enough to never let players forget that while they're still playing a fantasy game, a classic AD&D campaign this ain't!

The Bad
For players with the right mindset Torment is an almost perfect RPG experience and its shortcomings are mostly matters of personal taste. Unfortunately, its greatest asset, the captivating text descriptions and dialogue, make the game inaccessible for casual gamers or those who don't feel like wrapping their minds around an exceedingly fantastic and macabre world. The game decidedly (and rightly!) closes the door in the face of people who are unwilling to read the equivalent of a fully-fledged fantasy novel onscreen.

The graphics, while bigger and clearer than in other Baldur's Gate-related titles, restrict a larger view of the scenarios by limiting the game to a single resolution, 640x480 - pretty low by today's standards, considering that unlike Baldur's Gate even the action panel to control characters can be freely moved and hidden when desired. In addition, character models, although detailed and well animated, are static in terms of design. Almost no equippable item changes anything about the models onscreen appearance.

AD&D fans will also miss the possibility of building a custom party of adventurers. As versatile as Torment is in terms of scenario, it is far more linear than most other AD&D game when it comes to character development and customisation. Only the main hero can equip different weapon classes based on his chosen profession and it isn't possible to choose from all professions the AD&D rules have to offer. The Nameless One can be either a fighter, wizard or thief, but always looks like a buff warrior type even if his stats and chosen profession say otherwise.

Exploring Sigil and its inhabitants is one of the greatest joys I've ever had in an RPG. It is almost a pity that after three fourths of the game players are ripped out of the by then familiar surroundings. While the game builds to a climax they are forced to travel to other, significantly smaller and more linear planar worlds.

The Bottom Line
Planescape: Torment is one of the most unusual, original and rewarding RPG experiences to date. It requires and tries players' patience and imagination but repays them many times over if they are up to the task. The game exists and entertains through its deep and lyrical understructure, making its lack of character customisation excusable. All seasoned gamers looking for a fantasy tale far, far away from the genre's stereotypical elves, dwarfs and humans vs. orcs stories must play this game.