Katie Egervari

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Generally, I don't feel like this is a very good remaster of what was a pretty out of date game in 2002 to start with. Even on release, the base campaign in Neverwinter Nights was quite a step back from Baldur's Gate 2, Torment and the Icewind Dale series of games from a single-player perspective. The graphics looked far too blocky even for its time - the engine looked about 6 years out of date on release. The animations were terrible - characters slide around the ground and are very stiff. The UI was even more cumbersome than the Infinity Engine games, taking inspiration from games like Ultima 7 or various MMOs. For those that say it's not fair to judge graphics 20 years later, I would disagree. Super Mario World and Link to the Past still look fantastic despite being released 30 years ago. Games like Metroid Prime or Warcraft III (also released in 2002) look vastly superior, and have aged better. Icewind Dale's painted art looks gorgeous, and that was released in 2000. The art in Icewind Dale is so good, it can still captivate your imagination and immerse you even in 2022. But Neverwinter Nights? It's just a blocky mess and looks like the worst kind of shovelware. Even the first campaign was extremely light on story and filled with a lot of filler combat. Exploration felt tedious and the copy-paste environments get tiring very quickly. Not having a massive party of characters to manage made the game feel dull. The reality is, if you want to play as one main character with henchman, you're much better off playing a game like Skyrim or Fallout 4, which are strictly better games in every conceivable way. I can't think of anything Neverwinter Nights does better outside of its multiplayer niche. The UI in the game is atrocious, and it's definitely not made for consoles. Managing your inventory is tedious - moving items between tabs and sorting is painful. This should have been modernized at the very least. Selecting enemies to attack in real time is inconsistent. It's difficult to see which menu options are currently selected due to poor highlighting. The font is also extremely blurry due to the scaling and is put to the top-left corner of the screen for some reason rather than the center. It's a wonder why any of this was not addressed in the enhanced edition. All those reviews saying "Neverwinter Nights is still the best game ever made!" are either using insanely specific criteria no other game can measure up to while ignoring all of this game's flaws, or are simply delusional. You can at least try to be objective. I get that you're nostalgic for this game, but it shouldn't come at the expense of leading people astray who do not share your nostalgia. At the end of the day, more could have been done in this remaster to improve the fonts, UI and controls. This would benefited Neverwinter Nights: EE greatly, even without a presentation overhaul. I'm giving Neverwinter Nights: Enhanced Edition 2 stars because the game comes with a ton of content, which is great value for money even despite these problems. The sound track also holds up quite well. If you enjoy single-player games, I recommend playing Pillars of Eternity 1 & 2, Tyranny, Pathfinder: Wrath of the Righteous, etc. to get your CRPG fix with tactical battles. Wasteland 3 and Dragon Age: Origins are other great, modern choices. All of these recommendations are better than shelling out money for Neverwinter Nights in 2022.

Neverwinter Nights

3 likes

The Young Turks

I am mixed on this dlc. It has a great companion, lots of new interesting environments and crossbows. But some of the areas are utterly massive and really difficult to navigate naturally. The dlc features a lot of scavenger hunt quests in massive and copy-paste environments where there are no quest markers to help you. You absolutely have to use a guide on steam. A lot of the quests arent even marked and are not recognizable either. Very frustrating dlc.

The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim - Dawnguard

I'm 2-3 days into Origami King and the game is really good. The environments are amazing, jam-packed with stuff to do, puzzles to solve and stories to tell. The music is stellar. Like color splash, the game looks gorgeous. And the writing is superb and the characters are really funny and interesting. Olivia is definitely a standout partner in this game - I really like her - she's naive, witty, funny, honest, etc. The game isn't perfect. The tutorials at the beginning are a bit drown out and I wish I could have skipped them. Anyone who watched the trailers probably knows how the basics of the game works already. There's also some weird resource mechanics where you have finite supplies of resources - like confetti, gold and items - but everything is so plentiful I am not sure why it's finite in the first place. It's a shame we can't control our partners in battle, but I don't really miss the loss the xp progression - the game has other ways to progress in the form of accessories, heart containers, items, etc. As someone who loved ttyd and rpgs in general, I thought the puzzle-like battle system would bother me a lot, but it hasn't. Most battles are required to progress in the story, or at least make it so you don't have enemies chasing you constantly in the environment. Beating them is not pointless like some say because you have to beat them to progress in the story. Solving the same in-battle ring puzzles can get a bit boring and most of them are easy, but it hasn't really been such a major problem to drown out the rest of the game. The rest of the game is so great that the overall experience is still great. I really have fun playing it. Oh, and the boss battles are a lot of fun and each one has different mechanics. At first, they are not too difficult, but by the 4th boss, things definitely ramp up. They hit like a truck too, doing 40-75 damage at this part in the game. Overall, I'm really happy with Origami King. It is a game with lots of polish and love put into it. It just has so much charm, and it does so much so well. I would have given it a 10 if the battle system incorporated your companions more and offered more depth than just solving the puzzle, but I think the environments, the writing, the sound track and the bosses steal the show that I really do think this game deserves a 9/10. I think anyone giving this game a lower score than 8 just because it's named "paper mario" but is not designed the same way as TTYD is being dishonest. A game needs to be judged on its own merits. It's hard to take these people seriously when the game could have had a different title, like "Mario's Origami Adventure" and it would suddenly have a better rating using their review standard. It's frankly a dishonest way to review games. For better or worse, the series has changed - it's been over 15 years since TTYD - the old rpgs games have essentially been discontinued. I miss them too, but that doesn't make Origami King an objectively "bad" game. Part of me doesn't really understand how Nintendo fans of zelda or mario or metroid would not like this game - it's an adventure game like many other Nintendo games. Do these ttyd fans only play rpgs? If so, then I understand why they don't like it, but wow that's a pretty niche interest to only like rpgs on a Nintendo console while disliking all of the other adventure/action games Nintendo has on offer..... seems a bit biased/close-minded if you ask me. If you like Zelda, you would like this, whether you like rpgs or not.

Paper Mario: The Origami King

4 likes