[I haven’t used this area in some time but I thought I would make a note here and now: I’m going to be posting less often. Due to my unusually high class load right now, I will have less time to write than I have had in recent months. However, I will try to post several times a week, when I can.]

After finishing Final Fantasy X-2, I went looking for another RPG experience. Having spent several weeks and forty-plus hours in X-2, I thought it might be worth it to jump into another large world. My first plan was to try Final Fantasy XII next. I had placed it in the tray of the PlayStation 2 and had done some preliminary research on what to expect. But then I visited Gog.com yesterday (during their sale of Apogee Games) and saw Planescape: Torment and knew I had to play that instead.

So, I did.

I’m just over a hour into the game and I am impressed for several reasons.

1. The amount of writing this game has is astounding. I’ve written some long works — couple of screenplays and a novel — and I know what it takes to put out this amount of text, tens of thousands of hours of work. Everything I have run into from simple enemies to common items have detailed text about what they are, where they came from and what they are doing. All dialogue options have multiple paths with large paragraphs of explanation. This world is large and, having only seen the surface, I am amazed at the sheer amount of text just so far.
2. The world is different. I have built up a passing knowledge of how Dungeons and Dragons works (4e, anyway) and like that despite this world being based in that, it manages to be based in its own logic and consistency. I’ve played in fantasy worlds and science fiction worlds. This Gothic, twisted world is both different enough and seeming familiar that I think I will come to enjoy a break from the norms of lasers or elves that fill too many genre games of today.
3. Death is not the end. I have come to find death as a mechanic that ends a session to be tiring. I’m sick of it, really. I want games that justify their mechanics within the in-world narratives. This game does that. If you die, you start over again at, as I understand it, some type of spawn point. In fact, as part of the story of the protagonist, death has happened to him several times before and this game’s story, as the plot is revealed, is just the latest of a string of lives this, The Nameless One, has had.
4. It’s funny. This is important for the sheer fact that I rarely laugh at dialogue in games. By the time that it has been written, spoken and made into a computer generated frame, it’s lost something of the magic it originally had. Very few games have me laugh on text only and this game has managed to do it several times so far in just this one session of playing through the tutorial area. The side-character of Morte (a floating skull) is particularly amusing.
5. I’ve had to take notes. This is something that I mostly missed as I bypassed the computer games of the nineties — Planescape: Torment came out in 1999 — while I playing console games on and off. There was very little need to write down anything when I first started playing games and I have had little reason to do so, for gameplay reasons, until my recent interest in older games. While this game does, in fact, note down in a journal your quests and goals, I’ve enjoyed knowing exactly what I am supposed to say to a certain person instead of just guessing at it from among several choices.

In classic review styling, I thought I would coda this with some things I am less impressed with.