- Useful Info: https://rpgcodex.net/forums/threads/gri ... in.129093/
- Cheat Engine: pretty easy to give yourself fixed numbers for your bonus point rolls during character creation, recommended if you don't like rerolling a bunch.
- Speedhack: works, useful for some of the slow animations like Little Rosy flying in.
No, I'm serious, it's bad. Never before have I played a game where casting a spell is such a laborious task. Mouse to character, click action button, click 'spells', mouse over to menu that has just popped up, click school, click spell, mouse down a little, click power level, down some more, click 'cast', mouse back to character, click target. Six clicks and a lot of mouse movement to cast one spell, then repeat for every caster in the party. And of course, you probably can't or won't cast the same spell every turn, so you'll have to repeat all that every turn. That failure of design is so enormous it makes the inventory system look snappy and intuitive in comparison.
The multiclass (misnomer, should be called class change) system is incredibly autistic. You keep everything but your attributes and unspent skill points when you multiclass -- even unspent attribute points are saved -- which means that you'll want to multiclass as much as you possibly can while not spending any attribute points beyond the minimum necessary to reach the attribute requirements for your target class. The limitation is that each class has only three options to which it may change and one may never return to a class he's already been. Thus, a player who desires to play optimally must create a multiclass path that hits as many classes as possible, without repeats, while also ending on a desirable class, for all eight of his characters. This is where I almost quit before I began, but instead I saved myself the headache and made six of my party members carbon copies of each other with the same intended path.
The game could have been described as unforgiving had it not featured quicksave/quickload. 0 HP is dead and there doesn't seem to be a way to revive a dead party member without clerical magic that can be acquired at level 6 at the earliest. The poison status may as well be death for most characters, although at least you can learn Neutralize Poison at level 4 -- again, provided you have a cleric. There also doesn't seem to be a way to roll new characters partway into the game the way you can in many other DRPGs. The net effect of these design choices is that the player has little choice but to save constantly and load frequently, killing all tension and turning the experience into (more of) a slog.
The above is all the more aggravating because it's otherwise a carefully crafted and interesting game. There are secrets and puzzles galore. The game world is huge. The old school style is charming. I have fun searching for hidden buttons and illusory walls (except when I trigger a random encounter by turning
), reading inscriptions, testing items on objects, entering words into the text parser, and so on. The combat itself is fine aside from the aforementioned UI issues, though why this sort of DRPG where you target whole groups of enemies indscriminately and crits are insta-kills is oft described as "tactical" is beyond me.Overall I give it a conflicted not-sure-if-I-will-continue out of 5.
