Pathfinder: Wrath of the Righteous - Enhanced Edition: Gaiden no Satsu & Knuckles: Review

[Humbaba]

Once upon a time, a small indie studio of determined Russians Cypriots sat together with the lads at Paizo, rubbing hands, wheeling and dealing until the Americans would hand over the license to their hit roleplaying system Pathfinder. Fast forward some unknown amount of time and the Cypriots, now collectively known by their gang name "Owlcat" released a classic isometric crpg called Pathfinder: Kingmaker. Then, about a year later, they released it again and this time, it was even in a playable state. Kingmaker was a very good game for what it was, adding more fuel to the furnace that is the crpg renaissance of the early 2000s. Still, Owlcat was not satisfied. "We need to go bigger, better, LONGER!", said Owlcat's leader Mishulin, beat the shit out of 3 employees and ordered the production of the next game in the Pathfinder franchise of crpgs. The result was Pathfinder: Wrath of the Righteous and that's what's getting reviewed now. In short, the game is a masterpiece, a modern classic and the gold standard of crpgs. Spoilers ahead.

Part 1: Whaaaat is this place

Like all good reviews, this one too starts at the beginning. Wrath of the Righteous (henceforth referred to as "Wrathfinder") is a heckin chonker of an rpg, with an average playthrough lasting at least 100 hours, taking the PC from level 1 all the way to max level or even double that, depending. Wrathfinder markets itself as an epic level adventure, eschewing the more typical running around in the woods and killing bears in favor of storming castles and killing demons within the first few hours of gameplay. This irregularity has angered many rpg connoisseurs but the author is of the opinion that this is a welcome change of pace in a genre that has been coasting on nostalgia and imitation for much too long and is in desperate need of innovation. Not every adventure has to begin like Baldur's Gate 1.

Character creation is obscenely in-depth to the point of being seen as "bloated" by some. Truthfully, much of the class roster exists for the sake of grid filling ("Well, if we're gonna have a fighty rogue then we should also have a fighty wizard, and a fighty cleric...") and many are somewhat redundant or plain illogical. It may be nice to have a thief that can shoot mind bullets but you don't bring along a rogue for magic anyway. Wrathfinder has been referred to as a "buildfag" game and there is a lot of variety in how to build your character. None of the more complicated multiclassing options or prestige classes are necessary to beat the game but the option to go completely nuts is there. You can go 400+ hours in the game without ever dipping into anything but your base class and still get through the game fine. That being said, some classes are strictly better than others and picking one of the worse classes or building it wrong can make the game a great deal more frustrating.

Part 2: Story

The story of Wrathfinder puts the player in the shoes of a quasi blank slate character, who wakes up in the middle of some festival in the middle of the city of Kenabres. Kenabres is located in the vicinity of the Worldwound, a massive gash in the earth from which demons have been springing up for centuries, ruining housing prices in the area. Local Queen Galfrey and her forces have been trying to stop that from happening by launching Crusades against the hordes of the Abyss. Much like the historical Crusades, they delivered no results, in fact the demons seem to be coming out on top by the time the game starts.

The PC, whose motivations for coming to Kenabres are left up to the player's imagination and a single dialogue option at the beginning of the game, soon makes a recovery after being healed by resident silver dragon TERENDELEV (has anybody SEEN her?!). About 3.50 seconds later, the city is attacked by a teleporting horde of demons led by demon prince Deskari, who proceeds to one shot TERENDELEV (bet she didn't SEE that one coming) and chucks the player down a chasm. They eventually make it out and join up with the Crusaders, being appointed it's Knight Commander after it turns out that they are the Messiah or something. From there on out, it is the PC's life goal to exterminate demons and close the Worldwound.

The Crusade is Wrathfinder's big framing device. The Crusade justifies the player's presence as well as the companions' who join you. Many rpgs lack such a framing device. Oftentimes, the PC just seems to be doing it because the player wants to play a game and the companions are just happy to be around and have nothing better to do. Every companion and their personal quest is in some way or another tied to the Crusade and/or the people within it. The PC does not even factor that much into it, aside from being the reason the Crusade is started. This makes every character involved feel plausible because they all have a valid reason for being here.

The demons are an incredibly effective antagonistic force. Very early on, the game establishes that the Crusaders stand very little chance against them. The Abyssal forces are individually much more powerful than the vast majority of units the Crusade can muster, they are more numerous and seem to be always one step ahead. Several NPCs in the early game are rather paranoid about spies and demonic tricks and the game makes them out to be entirely justified. At several points in the game, the Crusaders are completely fooled, ambushed and tricked.

This is important, because in the end, a good rpgs need to be about the player and the player should have a good reason for being the main character. In Wrathfinder, the PC is the only person in the world who can stop the bumbling Crusaders and their incompetent Queen of bungling yet another Crusade. What sounds like common sense, is lost on many rpgs. In New Vegas for example, the PC just goes off to risk their lives to deliver an object, they don't even know is important. That game's premise hinges entirely on it being a video game that's meant to be played with little in-universe explanation. Not so with Wrathfinder.

Tangent: Mythic Paths

The PC, fuelled by so called mythic powers and apparently destined by heaven to defeat the demons, may opt into one of the many "mythic paths", aligning themselves with a selection of outsiders, like angels, fae or *check notes* demons. Wait a minute-

The mythic paths are overall a mixed bag. While providing an incredible amount of replay value, they are very much hit and miss both mechanically and narratively. Some provide very strong combat abilities and alter the story extensively. Others, the late game paths, are only available in the last third of the game and thus impact the story very little. To properly explain, we need to go into specific detail about several different paths. The author can speak on the paths of the Lich, Angel, Legend, Azata, Trickster and Swarm-That-Walks ("Swarm" for short).

Out of the 6 paths mentioned, Lich is easily the weakest. First of all, it is heavily skewed toward spellcasters, martial classes get very little out of it by comparison, limiting build variety. Narratively, the path is awful. The PC is reduced to a lackey of an actual Lich who is oathbound to turn the PC into a lich as well. The Lich is a prick and boring. You consequently spend the entire game building him a house, paying for decoration, amenities and food. Ultimately, the player also has to sacrifice several things in order to not turn into a half-assed Lich and that's it. It would've been much better if the player learned by himself how to become a Lich, learning dark secrets and descending ever deeper down the rabbit hole of lichdom. As it stands, the PC has no agency of his own and does what he does only because some skeleton tells him to.

Contrast this to Legend. Eventually, it turns out that the PC's powers are due to the experimentation of the game's main antagonist Areelu Vorlesh, the architect of the holocaust Worldwound. The player can then decide whether or not to care about the fact that they're not sent by god after all and can either carry on as usual OR they can reject the mythic power and become a Legend. No other path puts as much emphasis on player agency than Legend, making it easily the best path in the game. The PC rids themselves entirely of subversive influence and gets the job done on their own terms. No prophecy, no secret bloodline, just pure fucking gumption.

Then, we have Swarm, which is the biggest waste of potential if there ever was one. Being a late game path, you don't get to spend much time as a walking hivemind but when you do, you become virtually unstoppable. This is the closest you can get to godmode without cheating. However, all the pieces were in places for Swarm to be a fantastic full path like the others.

It would've been easy: the player discovers the notes of the mad swarm scientist (so far so good) and you're required to do some research on them. Instead of those things not having much effect on the player, they should've taken the place of mythic progression; instead of glowing every once in a while, the player conducts ever more depraved experiments on themselves in a perverted quest towards immortality and unlimited power over mankind. Eventually, the Crusade no longer puts up with their Knight Commander becoming evil and mutinies, putting the player in the dirt, chucking his corpse into the Abyss, so that he may never return. Too evil and ambitious to stay dead, the PC thanks to their previous experiments and black heart attracts a swarm of vescavors through sheer will, is devoured and subsequently reborn as the Swarm-On-Wheels. They then fuck up the Abyss so hard that the demons banish him back out of the Abyss back to Golarion. Then the player evens up with every NPC and companion, ultimately heading to the Worldwound to do the same with Areelu. Badabing badaboom.

The paths also have the chance to make the story make little sense. At some point the Hand of the Inheritor directly intervenes to save the player, because he too thinks they're jesus. Now, this makes sense if the player has chosen the Angel path for example and is radiating holy energies. It makes ABSOLUTELY no sense however if the player is an aspiring lich, unless we accept that Za Hando is dumb enough to believe that his goddess gave her chosen champions necromancer powers, which are outside her portfolio. Granted, Za Hando being an idiot is his in-universe characterization but this seems like an oversight. Especially seeing as many paths have characters that could've just as well stood in for Za Hando (Zacharius for Lich, the CG Goon Squad for Azata etc.)

Tangent End

Anyway, the game's story is well paced, aside from the early game, which really drags its feet especially on replays. The story only diverges with the availability of mythic paths, which only start being a thing about 10 hours in. Owlcat could've really cut down on that and it's surprising that they didn't. Act 4 is divisive, Alushynirra being a sore on the eyes and ears. The author doesn't mind it too much, though it is weird to see that there are cities in a plane of chaos. Then again, that's a problem with the setting, which Owlcat didn't invent. The game loses steam towards the end, as most cprgs do for some reason. The Ineluctable Prison is the game's last highlight and then it's all downhill, with the endgame dungeon being legitimately terrible.

Part 3: Combat

Combat is FANTASTIC and it is the author's view that everyone complaining about it should GIT GUD. Wrathfinder's caught a lot of shit for being allegedly riddled by stat bloat and BIG NUMBERS.

The author disagrees and rejects any notion of the sort. It is very easy to keep up with this supposed bloat, no buildfagging necessary. Combat and encounter design is generally good and fun, carried by fantastic sound design and decent animation work. That's not to say that some encounters don't overdo it a bit but most of those are optional.

If you wanna beat the bloat, you must become the bloat. Luckily, the game gives you tons of build options in order for you to bloatmaxx. There's many broken builds out there that dip and dive into all sorts of classes but again that's not necessary at all. You'll do fine picking a decent martial monoclass and focus on single target burst damage. Gibbing a minotaur for 300 dmg with your halfling deliverer with a vital strike focus never gets old. Neither does sending enemy ragdolls flying off the screen.

It must be said that mages are very disappointing and weak compared to martials. In BG1 and 2 i.e. 2nd DnD, mages were an absolute menace, putting themselves behind about 3.50 layers of protective spells that required several rounds of dispelling by your own wizard. This sort of spell fencing is non existent here and usually a wizard can be geeked by physical damage no problem.

On the other end of that spectrum are the bosses, who are virtually immune to melee combat, having ACs high as the moon, damage resistances and being themselves highly dangerous to engage close up. While this may bum out martial fans, it gives those neglected casters time to shine, because many spells target touch AC and are thus the only thing able to hit and kill a boss.

Part 4: Dungeons, Reactivity and Whatever Else Doesn't Deserve Its Own Section

Dungeons are generally good. There aren't that many traditional dungeons but those that are present are very good. The tutorial dungeon is a very cool underground base of Baphomet worshippers and its decorated in all sorts of satanic shit. Every Baphomet themed dungeon steals the show, especially the Ineluctable Prison. Blackwater is an easy pick for best dungeon for its novelty alone. The game opens the path to Blackwater way too early though, resulting in many underlevelled parties getting bitchlapped immediately, causing bitching among the playerbase.

There's a lot of reactivity to anything that should have it. What stands out is how much reactivity there is to the PCs selection of religion. Granted, some deities have more reactivity than others but some of them get really cool stuff. If you worship Gorum, you get megabuffed during the fight with the dragon during Greybor's quest. If you worship the Godclaw, you get a buff during the Darrazand fight. I'm sure there's other examples as well.

What the game handles extremely poorly though is alignment. Kingmaker suffered from the same problem. Every now and then the game will present you with a alignment coded dialogue option and choosing it nudges the PC's alignment in the given direction.

There's several problems with this. First of all, the options are the most stereotypical shit answers ever. Any evil option is something along the lines of "Durrrr, I HATE everybody and I want to KILL THEM ALL", every lawful option goes like "FOLLOW THE RULES I AM A ROBOT". This isn't exactly compelling roleplaying. The other issue is that the options always nudge you towards the respective neutral alignment. This means that if you're anything but NG, TN, NE, LN or CN you actually never get to play your alignment. There's no such thing as a LG dialogue option in Wrathfinder, so Paladins can go suck a lemon.

I praised the game's plot before and while I stand by that, it must also be said that the writing, that is, the prose is trash. It is offensively bad to the point that anyone with a brain will skip the dialogue on anything beyond the first playthrough. It gets less bad the longer the game goes on but it never surpasses middling quality. Voice acting is equally bad, with a few notable exceptions, like Regill.

Part 5: Conclusion

Wrathfinder is by no means perfect in any regard. Then again, no rpg is. In fact, many of the classics have glaring problems that the scene has decided to ignore at one point. In comparison to those classics, Wrathfinder easily surpasses any of them. Being better than something made 20 to 30 years ago might sound unimpressive but until Wrathfinder came along, BG2 remained the gold standard of crpgs and that title was released in 2000, with studios like Obsidian utterly failing to live up to it.

What Wrathfinder proves is that isometric crpgs with lots of dialogue and a runtime of 100 hours aren't passé and that they can still be made in this day and age. It is a definite must-have for any monocled and virile specimen and will be fondly remembered by future generations of epic gamers.




-Humbaba

[Dead]

Screenshots and tldr pls

[Humbaba]

Screenshots and tldr pls

Screenshot machine broke. Tldr is in the first paragraph my little zoom zoom.

[Element]

In short, the game is a masterpiece, a modern classic and the gold standard of crpgs. Spoilers ahead.

This kills the admin

[Acrux]

So are you three still going to stand by these quotes?

[GhostCow]

So are you three still going to stand by these quotes?

@Ratcatcher @rusty_shackleford @Atlantico

[agentorange]

Sounds gay.

[The_Mask]

Voice acting is equally bad, with a few notable exceptions, like Regill.

I think I would be so much more interested in an in-depth review of Regill, and how he reacts to the Commander's path, than anything else in that game. I would easily read something like a 5 screen worth of an essay.

[General Reign]

Voice acting is equally bad, with a few notable exceptions, like Regill.

I think I would be so much more interested in an in-depth review of Regill, and how he reacts to the Commander's path, than anything else in that game. I would easily read something like a 5 screen worth of an essay.

He is one of the better characters in the game. If you play Lawful Neutral it works out perfect.

[Atlantico]

So are you three still going to stand by these quotes?

I cannot stand by it anymore.

I retract my previous quote and my new™ and reconsidered™ statement is that @Humbaba is a fantastic addition to the HQ

[rusty_shackleford]

I'm not reading this so I can't make a statement either way.

[Rand]

Sounds gay.

Oh, it's WORSE than gay.
One of the first characters you meet is a literal magical tranny, and "her" lesbo she-orc paladin (lol, no) "wife" shows up shortly thereafter.

Because: Paizo is full of disgusting degenerates.

[Rand]

I could literally not get past the first part where you're in a rush trying to "sneak" out of a hidden underground cult HQ, but you're so weak and useless as compared to the enemies that you repeatedly have to camp out for 8 hours after every little fight, meaning you're probably down there for about 3 or 4 days. It's clown-school game design.
Not the game makers' fault, though. It's Paizo's incompetent design they were obligated to follow.

With the wokeness and idiocy, I quit and uninstalled. (I did NOT pay good $$$ for it, of course.)

[General Reign]

It is the only game where you can be truly evil and turn the Queen into a zombie though.

[Goth-Girl-Supremacy]

Bigg Boss/General Reign is such a retard that he'd ignore all the transsexual cocks being shoved down his character's throat if only because he can muffle out a, "but at least you can do this!"

Probably one of my top five most disliked redirects from Codex.

[gerey]

Not the game makers' fault, though.

OwlCat seems pretty committed to the pozz though. You can argue that part of it is the IP itself, and another part Paizo being a den of oven-dodgers, but ultimately it's OwlCat that decided what to implement in their games and what not to implement.

And yes, depending on the contract they may be required to include/exclude parts of the module, but I believe that the overabundance of pozz was a decision made by OwlCat.

[Sweeper]

Humbaba's existence makes me want to support Israel.

[Mystic_Sausage]

As much as I enjoyed the greater part of the game, the cringe is just too strong to consider it a masterpiece.

[maidenhaver]

Bigg Boss/General Reign is such a retard that he'd ignore all the transsexual cocks being shoved down his character's throat if only because he can muffle out a, "but at least you can do this!"

Probably one of my top five most disliked redirects from Codex.

At least he isn't brown.

[Red7]

so on woke scale where 10 is soyfield/wokepunk2077 and 0 is darkness2 how bad is it?

[Acrux]

15

[Cretin]

Combat is FANTASTIC and it is the author's view that everyone complaining about it should GIT GUD. Wrathfinder's caught a lot of shit for being allegedly riddled by stat bloat and BIG NUMBERS.

I dont give a shit about stat bloat, in fact its probably necessary to make up for constraints. Im more concerned about enemy AI. Kingmaker's AI was dogshit. How is WOTR's better, if at all?

[rusty_shackleford]

Combat is FANTASTIC and it is the author's view that everyone complaining about it should GIT GUD. Wrathfinder's caught a lot of shit for being allegedly riddled by stat bloat and BIG NUMBERS.

I dont give a shit about stat bloat, in fact its probably necessary to make up for constraints. Im more concerned about enemy AI. Kingmaker's AI was dogshit. How is WOTR's better, if at all?

No. Worse than the original IE games. All the "difficulty" is in stat bloat, which just checks how good you are at copying broken builds other people post online.
Doesn't even get close to approaching something like IE games with SCS.

[Oyster Sauce]

Combat is FANTASTIC and it is the author's view that everyone complaining about it should GIT GUD. Wrathfinder's caught a lot of shit for being allegedly riddled by stat bloat and BIG NUMBERS.

I dont give a shit about stat bloat, in fact its probably necessary to make up for constraints. Im more concerned about enemy AI. Kingmaker's AI was dogshit. How is WOTR's better, if at all?

When I played I noticed they'd take to the high ground, flank your spellcasters, use consumables and take advantage of traps and other environmental hazards.

Just kidding, they run to the closest party member and hit them.

[rusty_shackleford]

When I played I noticed they'd take to the high ground, flank your spellcasters, use consumables and take advantage of traps and other environmental hazards.

Larian's games have enemies actually do this if you play on Tactician, btw. One of the few RPGs I'm aware of that has something approaching a decent AI out of the box.

[Cretin]

When I played I noticed they'd take to the high ground, flank your spellcasters, use consumables and take advantage of traps and other environmental hazards.

Larian's games have enemies actually do this if you play on Tactician, btw. One of the few RPGs I'm aware of that has something approaching a decent AI out of the box.

Its actually surprising how little talk there is surrounding the AI in BG3. On the hardest difficulty, I dont think its an exaggeration to call it the most sophisticated AI in the genre besides maybe KOTC2. I mean hell, can anyone honestly name a single RPG in the history of the genre where the enemy AI will do something as obvious as try to avoid active AOE effects?

I've read they even have differing script sets for how intelligent the creature is supposed to be, e.g beasts have very simple AI while humanoids can employ a full range of devious tricks.

[SoLong]

Honestly what annoyed me the most was, as you already pointed out, evil options are stupid. Not just selfish or cruel, they're legitimately stupid and directly hurt your own plans.

When you do an evil transformation at the earliest opportunity (meaning Lich and Demon for example) you murder and terrorize your own army. If this while war were played with any kind of realism this action would lead directly to a game over.

Sigh. Still, the game is otherwise quite well done. The combat is the highlight.

[Kalarion]

When I played I noticed they'd take to the high ground, flank your spellcasters, use consumables and take advantage of traps and other environmental hazards.

Larian's games have enemies actually do this if you play on Tactician, btw. One of the few RPGs I'm aware of that has something approaching a decent AI out of the box.

Clearly you have never played the first module of Knights of the Chalice 2. @Cedric and @Tweed, school this fucking pleb please.

[Tweed]

Nothing really comes close to the AI of KotC 2. Enemies may occasionally make bad decisions, but they're not stupid. They will always try to prioritize and one-shot your casters/healers when possible, grapple easy targets, and throw/pull you into hazards. They always use their most powerful spells at the right time and any spell-like ability that Pierre decided they should have because he hates you so much. This also creates the problem of "win initiative or reload" and "first round, everyone down". You cannot afford to go second and most enemies need to be neutralized somehow before it's their turn. On the flip side your own guys become so godlike they can devastate entire fields of enemies with a few spells or psionic powers.

[Sweeper]

I mean hell, can anyone honestly name a single RPG in the history of the genre where the enemy AI will do something as obvious as try to avoid active AOE effects?

Play more RPGs.