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Pathfinder: Righteous Fury Review
need to know
What is it? An old RPG is so dense, it has universal gravitation.
Expect to pay 50 USD/43 GBP
Developer Owl game
Publisher Meta-publishing
Review date Windows 10, Intel Core i7, 16GB RAM, Nvidia GTX 1060
multiplayer game? not any
go out now
Associate Official website
The first boss battle in the old-school RPG Pathfinder: Wrath of the Righteous is the character creation menu. It is as intimidating as any multi-limbed demon you will face.
There are 25 categories to choose from, some of which are subdivided into six prototypes. You cannot choose certain prestige professions until you level up and meet certain requirements, anyway, these will appear during the character creation process in case you want to build around one of them. You can also choose race, ethnic tradition, background, religion, skills, expertise, and perhaps an animal companion with its own profession, skills, and expertise.
At the end of this process, you will most likely end up with a character who is completely unsuitable for getting what you want from Righteous Fury, and will want to restart or readjust a few hours later. Maybe they are too weak to deal with the challenge of core difficulty. If you are enthusiastic enough about it, maybe they partnered with their early peers and feel redundant, maybe their ability is not as good as you imagined and it is a bit bad. In contrast, it seems easy to deal with some big water elements or shadow demons.
Mathematics of justice
Your character, whether it is a raging blood knight with a pet saber-toothed tiger, a halfling knight riding a dog, or just a wizard elf-which is also very cool-will join a crusade against the Worldwound demons. Those The devil passed through a hole in reality a few years ago and has been messing up this place ever since. In the end, you will become the commander of the Crusaders and a mythical hero with incredible power.
This happened in an isometric role-playing game, and it evokes Baldur’s Gate so strongly that sometimes I walked under an autumn leaf thinking I was back in Jianwan. If you have played Pathfinder: Kingmaker, you will be familiar with this effect, although this is not a sequel to Kingmaker, it is actually a better introduction to Pathfinder rules. Developer Owlcat Games understands that tutorial pop-ups are a good thing. If you equip an item with a non-overlapping reward or otherwise obfuscate the mysterious rules of the desktop RPG on which it is based, the text box will warn you.
Better tutorials make the digital stream of combat easier to keep up, although it can be better presented. (I’ll go to the grave and don’t understand why it displays the unmodified dice result next to the difficulty target they must defeat, instead of showing the actual modified number compared to the difficulty.) Another thing to smooth the battle is to choose. Switch between turn-based and real-time pause mode, even in battle. You can take turns against the boss, or kill the bastard alchemists who are trying to burn your local bar by throwing incendiary bombs at your local bar, and then switch to RTWP when you raid cultists or other fillers. (There are a lot of fillers.)
Heroes and tragedies
Although these pop-ups are eager to help with battles and upgrades, they become thinner once you hand over the entire army to them to manage. In an underexplained side game, your crusaders are fighting on the grid, and their oversized generals are seen from the left, occasionally casting spells, just like one person in each group project behaves as if they are contributing, but not Without really reducing their weight, when real soldiers fight and die, throw some flashes on the poster board.
This strategy layer is an important and demanding time node. After it becomes clear that you have won for a long time, you have to reduce the units representing hundreds of troops round after round. Once I found the best strategy-ignored the opportunity to collect a bunch of useless experts, these experts will only mess up the map, support the construction of hundreds of deep high-damage units of the doomsday pile, and then be surrounded by knights Camping archer in the corner of the corner-it is no longer such a trouble. It even becomes a pleasant rhythm change, which is a slight imitation of “Heroes of Might and Magic”. Maybe the mediocrity of the first two true Might and Magic hero games lowered my standards.
In addition to managing the Crusades, you also need to manage multiple areas of the map in the Kingdom Management System version of Kingmaker. However, it has no ongoing disasters in the game to deal with, and the buildings you build in settlements are more useful, which is a clear improvement. In Kingmaker, most of them feel like a trap for new players to waste resources. Another improvement is that when you decide which decree to pass, whether it’s holding a parade to boost morale or sacrificing hundreds of soldiers in a magic experiment, the result will be clearly stated. You won’t fall into one of those death spirals caused by Kingmaker’s opacity.
These management systems are like the bread in the sandwich, with your actual adventure in the middle, and the adventure is delicious. Side missions have unexpected endings. The main storyline takes you to besieged cities, bloody wastelands, and even the abyss itself, just like the hell brother prefers heavy metal. You may be a crusader, but you are also an undercover spy in another dimension, and a mayor who needs to participate in council meetings.
Party of six
I suspect that every companion will be someone’s favorite, whether they prefer those who subvert stereotypes (a paladin who likes to drink and the cold war, a pragmatic victorious hell knight who is also a dwarf at all costs), or those who are too The exaggerated person comes directly from the casting of the animation center (a pure witch who makes cultists change their way, an analytical wizard who treats people like a scientific experiment).
Performance
Righteous Fury runs better than Kingmaker, saving and loading are much faster. The frame rate of large cities has dropped significantly (especially a city made of rotating floating islands), and turning off shadows and SSAO can only partially improve the situation. For some reason, when the enemy also dies, the frame rate drops, which makes the end of each battle stuck.
Dialogues often mention the choices you make in character creation, and even which god you follow. When you decide who to stand with and whether to be a bastard, your companions will join their thoughts. However, it is unbalanced, ranging from the evocative grotesque and tortuous passages of the storybook sequence to the NPC’s gentle spit out long background stories, and the occasional sentences read as if they were messed up by Google Translate.
All these dynamic conversations make the moments that lack specificity stand out. In a side mission involving elf politics, my character is also an elf, and an inevitable dialogue option allows me to call the NPC “elf” in an artificial way, just like I call you “human”. At the same time, I was incognito in Magic City. Although I was a luxury bard wearing a domino mask and a colorful hat, I was labeled a “mysterious knight”. This kind of thing happens frequently and it is enough to be distracting.
Hits and myths
The mythological path is also uneven. These paths to the demigods are all over the Wrath of Righteousness, and when you choose one of them, it will add another level of upgrade on top of the complex character you make. These can turn you into anyone from a demon to a legal incarnation. He is basically a Judge Dred who travels through time and space, and you can choose to switch to another mythical path as you move forward. Some are tightly integrated with the rest of the game, such as Angel Road, while others are an afterthought. The whole content of the liar is to issue a lame “sarcasm” punishment at the end of the mission, a series of discouraging jokes are not funny, and the core ability of the Lich to resurrect dead soldiers is so inadequate that it actually makes the Crusader mode more difficult.
Then came the error. Although I didn’t hit many in the first few chapters, they were very frequent later. When the battle started, the character got stuck on the wrong side of the door, the whole team was teleported to the ground or the wall, and I had to reload the old archive because a movable bridge stopped moving and got me stuck. Horseback fighting seems to be completely destroyed, whether the charge is effective is 50/50. In order to avoid the black screen that appears every time I kill a particular character, I have to switch to window mode, but even this doesn’t help a constant crash at the end of the final dialogue. (After replaying the ending, I still didn’t see the ending, and tried to solve this problem in four different ways.) Compared to Kingmaker’s mistakes at the time of the release, all of this is nothing, but I saw that the problem was relatively smooth in the early days. Later, a frustrating chapter was added.
However, after more repairs, Wrath of Righteousness will be well worth your time. This is a huge game. For more than 100 hours, you will put your carefully crafted heroes into the meat grinder of war, politics, and cross-plane travel, and see how they are reshaped by it. After the most complicated character creation system I can think of, it makes you think you are done, when in fact the whole game is about creating a character. This scale is both its strengths and weaknesses, because it provides space for half-baked areas of the story and the system, and it feels like you have wandered in the unmapped wilderness. But when you find the right path and solve the world’s problems while jogging through the fields with a group of colorful friends, it’s as if Baldur’s Gate 2 never ends.