Story sucks (some don't think so, please shoot yourselves)
Comparing it to fantasy books, yes, it's pretty shallow, with few twists and complexities.
Comparing it to other RPGs out there, it's considerably deeper than most. That's not a high bar, I admit: but it's the fairer bar to compare to.
For the English version, I found the mashing together of multiple regional accents in a single village a little jarring. I found the low number of voice actors a bit of a pain too, but even Bethesda has that problem, and they have a crazy budget.
However, again: voice acting is worse than you get in decent anime's and cartoons, but considerably better than the typical game. Given the probable budget, I think they did astonishingly well.
(Aside: anyone else remember the beginning of Ultima Underworld 1, Gariott declaiming "What news, Yorick?" THAT was bad voice acting :P Classic, but awful!)
Didn't notice anything bad there. Was impressed with a few little things: like, when you climb ladders, the spacing generally matches with your hands, which I presume was something agreed between scenery and animators. Didn't always work perfectly, but a
really nice little touch that they made the extra effort.
I used a bow exclusively in my playthrough, so suspect I missed a lot of the fighting anims. They looked amusing enough, in a consoley way (Fighting on consoles, seems to me, is a lot more about the funky visuals, and less about the gameplay).
Gameplay is hack and slash all the way
Agreed, here. It's sadly impossible to play this game as a pacifist, which, to me, is one of the marks of a great game: where every single fight is a moral choice, rather than a requirement.
Far better a measurement of a great game than "Seconds to Crate" is "Encounters to Required Kill". For ED, this is pretty darn high, probably about 40 or so: you don't need to kill any goblins in the training level, and you can talk to everyone in the village. However, several "main questline" quests require a fight, and in order to become powerful enough to do any damage in those fights, you need to have done lots more fighting.
The skills in the game is half thought through, some are blatantly better then others like exploding arrow and magic blast (exploding arrow is better because it effects an area)
Sort of agree: there were skills that I basically ignored in the tree, but then, there are in every skill tree.
I never really touched poison arrow, and basically forgot about the basics (mindread, lockpick, etc), once I'd got them up to 5.
But some of the skills in the ranger tree complemented themselves rather nicely, and the fact that I could spend points on some of the "less important" ones, while I waited to hit the limit break that let me raise the "better" ones, was nice. I also liked that I wasn't fixed into a single tree: I could branch out on stuff from different trees, like "reflect", and "heal", which was really nice.
DID I MENTION THE ENDING SUCKS!?
Other than it was a downbeat/cliffhanger ending, and people weren't expecting that, there seems little substance behind this claim. Not everyone liked the ending of Mononoke Hime, either, for the same reason. Or The Italian Job, Clockwork Orange, Lock Stock and Two Smoking Barrels, On Her Majesty's Secret Service, Pan's Labyrinth...
It's not just "foreign films", though. Hollywood
can do decent endings like this, they are just in the tiny minority: The Empire Strikes Back, Citizen Kane, Planet of the Apes, 12 Monkeys, Evil Dead 2, Butch Cassidy & The Sundance Kid, Titanic... these movies are great in large part
because they didn't have the shiny happy saccharine Hollywood ending.
Or in the world of computer games, Ultima 7:SI, Planescape: Torment... hrm, it's hard to think of many other games which have awesome yet downbeat endings. Anyone?
I'm really glad they didn't go for the typical Hollywood ending, but I guess people who've been brought up on that over-sweetened pap might not be accustomed to something a little more complex.
