Divinity II – Ego Draconis Review

Divinity II – Ego Draconis is a case study in the inherent merits and pitfalls of a cross-genre PC gaming mash-up. Part action RPG, part arcade aerial shooter, part Shakespearean dramatic epic, it’s an intriguing ride.

The game’s narrative threads are sewn together a generation after the original Divine Divinity. Lucian, the Divine one, got himself stabbed to death by a once loyal Dragon Knight some time ago. Since then, Damian—the Divine One’s evil son—has once again reared his bald, shiny head after decades of silence, bent on committing dastardly fiendish deeds  to the unprepared lands of Aleroth. Your journey begins as a newly minted Dragon Slayer, whose sole purpose is nothing less than total draconic genocide. Unfortunately, along the way to extermination glory, your soft tapioca rookie mind gets a tad ahead of itself, and you’re semi-possessed by the last remaining dragon spirit, instantly turning you into the once sworn enemy. This turns out favorable though, as Damian’s doom apparently rests in the power of your hardened talons and scaly flesh.

Cool house, no doubt. But doesn’t the custom molding kill the resell value?

While the transformation from Dragon Slayer to Dragon Knight occurs at the very onset of your quest, you can’t actually turn into a dragon until roughly 50% of the way through the campaign. That’s actually good news. See, what Divinity II does fabulously well are the feet-on-the-ground action-RPG morsels, not the flying. Larian Studios smashed the ball out of the skin with 2002’s Divine Divinity, and despite Divinity II’s switch from the old-fashioned top-down isometric perspective into the newfangled third-person Max Payne-like gameplay, much of Larian’s expertise and inspiration carries over nicely. All prior annoying quibbles like item encumbrance and repairing belongings are gone. There’s still an overall inventory storage limit, but you can increase this base value through skill points, and identical items stack rather than counting against your overall restriction, i.e. 40 healing flasks take up a single slot.

Combat is fast-paced and diverse, and you’re often encouraged to utilize the handy ‘battle-pause’ feature to flesh out target priorities, chug potion buffs, and strategize deadly chains of spells and special attacks. You can even bash goblin skulls in real time (like I did) and set up rules for automatically activating the battle-pause, such as when your health falls below 15% (or any desired derivative thereof). And evasion is no longer just a passive background die roll. Like the The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion, jumping, rolling, seeking cover behind obstructions, and outright erratic movement all add to the success and failures of physical and magical contact, adding juicy immersion to the numerous encounters. Nothing’s more rewarding (and exhilarating) than successfully rolling out of the path of a lethal fireball, hiding behind a tree, downing an precious elixir, and then braining your aggressor when they foolishly poke their head around to pursue. To aid in your perilous struggles, you’ll eventually collect and craft a tailor-made summoned minion, which you’ll use regularly. You can maximize your pet’s various aptitudes by hot-swapping severed arms, legs, torsos, and heads in a comically decadent version of Mr. Potato Head. All of this makes up for a hearty and downright tasty RPG combat stew.

Just another day at the homicidal volcanic beaches.

From the first uttered words, Divinity II’s honed and perfected British voice acting will blow you away. These guys mean business. This is audio-book quality content we’re talking here, easily trumping all other paltry examples in the medium (Batman who?). Divinity II feels like a Broadway version of a tabletop Dungeons & Dragons gathering. A background narrator accentuates otherwise mediocre actions like leafing through an ancient tome, while the hollow words of your sarcastic melded dragon spirit responds to outcomes and blunders with precision wit. The hero takes a refreshing hybrid role of silence and oratory responses, typically emoting and grumbling everywhere except the dialogue trees. It looks like the character animators were a bit overindulgent in their efforts though; NPCs dance around like Cap’n Jack Sparrow on a powerful does of wacky weed while they chat with you.

Quests are plentiful, and most are varied enough to keep things interesting. There’s often a plethora of rewards offered upon mission completions—like surplus experience, gear, or gold—but in a clever move, you’re only allowed to choose one or two of the presented items. Do you go for that mound of excess XP, but watch that powerful two-handed magical sword evaporate in the process? Or vice-versa? Fantastic role playing is driven by the gears of opportunity and personal choice, and Divinity II offers a substantial plethora of both of them. There’s still an annoying handful of “make this guy dead, I give you money and junk” tasks, but they’re overshadowed by the brilliance that radiates through their lofty peers. An early example (*Minor Spoilers*) involves how you choose to deal with a group of rowdy knights roughing up the denizens of a local tavern. Do you rat them out to their commanding officer? Or gain their favor and cover for them when the sergeant comes charging in, demanding an explanation for their atrocious behavior? Or do you instead join them in their jovial abuse of the bar-going regulars? Each choice bears strikingly different consequences and rewards.

“Sorry guys, but my schedule’s just totally booked today.”

Often, you’ll actually feel and see the weight of your decisions. In my case, I ratted those belligerent drunken fools out big time, and as punishment, they got tasked with killing a 20-foot tall murderous mountain troll for their foul exploits. No matter right? They had it coming. I mean, surely I’ll never see them again. Wrong. After about an hour of otherwise pleasurable countryside exploration, I stumbled across a familiar set of faces and watched as the troll smashed their sternums in with a tree trunk, killing every damn last one of them despite my attempts to intervene. For a moment, I felt a heavy guilt unparalleled in all my PC gaming years. That folks, is brilliant. (*End Spoilers.*)

One of Divinity II’s biggest sells circles around the highly-advertised XP-as-currency mind-reading distinction. And in an honest surprise, it delivers. Initially skeptical, I wondered how a developer could ever convincingly justify spending precious XP in favor of supplemental information (losing XP is commonly a terrifying penalty, not a form of player encouragement). But Larian’s crafty. Instead of reducing or removing your experience points, spending them instead adds to a deficit pool that must be emptied before advancing your normal accrual. It’s a minor yet crucial device that makes the still-risky wager a mouthwatering one. And like any authentic gamble, some mind reads pay off huge – such as revealing bonus quest options or even granting extra stats or skill points, while others are hilariously terrible and sobering – such as a crusty mariner pondering, “That cannonball with the bathing twins motif will cost a fortune, but I must have it!” Only give-away is if a mind-read’s cost teeters on the cliffs of astronomical, you can bet your lucky pajamas it’ll be a keeper. Typically, the low-expenditure mind-reads are the useless ones.

Wonder what his shoe size is…

Magnitude-wise, Divinity II’s a monster. Expect to entrench a solid 50 hours or more in your endeavors to defeat Damian and his horde. In an awesome nod to the ardent fans of the series, there’s a liberal peppering of references to characters from Divine Divinity – like the remnants of a once massive evil tree, a fearful-of-existential-pondering skeleton, and a narcissistic wishing well. There are even a few outright zingers to Divinity II’s RPG gaming competition, such as an alternate quest with the option to engage in passionate love to an erotic treasure chest, where the ultimate payoff depends upon your answers to a sequence of nonsensical memory games (after which she begs you to ‘penetrate’ her fruitful ‘depths’). Classic.

And then, at long last, you finally gain the ability to spread your leathery wings and soar as a no-crap bad-ass fire-snorting dragon. But wait, you’re massive imposing form is artificially contained to a narrow and finite set of canyon walls and an invisible ceiling? You can’t meta-morph into the dragon just anywhere? The bad guys on the ground just jarringly vanish when your teeth grow long, yellow, and pointy? What the hell? I’m a damned dragon! I want to fly thousands of feet above the tundra, I wanna roast those land-locked peons and their sharpened sticks like hot dogs over a bonfire! What I don’t want to do is circle around and blast duplicative stationary ground structures in localized and messily cluttered areas, and get my ass kicked doing it.

Spread your wings and fly… directly into the side of a mountain.

However, if the claustrophobic cliffs and undeviating canyons prove overly jail-like for your fine-tuned dragon sensibilities (and they will), you can always visit the four optional flying fortresses as a method of environmental delineation. But sadly, these aren’t much better than the alternative. These auxiliary levels remove the side-to-side physical barriers so constantly prevalent back in the ordinary world, but they instead rely on monotonous, repetitive, and outright dull skirmishes with heaps of cloned ballistas, lightning-throwing parapets, and over-powered enemy wyverns. Your first foray into a flying fortress, unless you’re level 30 or higher, will likely result in complete disaster.

There’s a spattering of attempts here and there to include assignments that the dragon and human form must tackle equally for success, but they feel artificial and cumbersome. Most dual-form quests revolve around throwing a switch or two as a biped, and then traveling over dangerous caverns to your eventual human destination as your green-plated larger counterpart, popping dispose-a-enemies in-between for good measure.  This is hardly intuitive. Honestly, in the end, you’ll wish the developers just abandoned the whole dragon-shifting dynamic altogether and stuck with what they’re good at. Oh and Larian? Jumping puzzles in a contemporary RPG are positively maddening. It worked in Zelda II: The Adventure of Link. It doesn’t work here. We’ve evolved since then. Let’s not go backwards shall we?

It’s just like having a real-life pet! Only this one’s undead and eviscerates people.

Hey speaking of maddening, hope you like dying! ‘Cause yeah, you’re gonna die like crazy. On “normal” difficulty, this game is unapologetically brutal. Specialization is of the utmost importance while planning out your character’s upgrade paths. In the positive veins of the first Divinity title, you’re never locked into one narrow route of augmentation; you’re free to cross train into any of the presented disciplines. But be wary: unless you stick to a tight cluster of focused skills, inflating the potency of each with progressive sets of earned skill points, you’ll play yourself into an almost unbeatable challenge. No hand-holding in this game ladies and gentlemen, you’re on your own when it comes to player-character development.

And yet, despite even the most perfectly tuned of avatars, there are areas in your adventure that will prove borderline impossible regardless (even on “easy” difficulty), mainly the end-boss, and a particularly enraging section where you’re commanded to defend the wizard Zandalor from swarms upon swarms of adversaries while he mutters a timed spell to seal a set of demonic gates. If he gets mildly scratched or slightly bumped even once, he starts the spell all over, rewinding the 1-minute countdown to the very beginning. He did this approximately 38 times before I somehow managed to beat it. Not fun.

Just like Olympian Michael Phelps, our hero swims to victory by strapping two gigantic war hammers onto his back.

To stave off death 100% of the time, you’re awarded a battle tower as soon as your draconic alter-ego physically manifests. From the massive monolithic structure—which you can visit any time via the press of a single key—you can store your collected loot, improve your death-dealing equipment through use of specialized trainers, create oh-so-crucial potions, play some more in-depth Frankenstein experiments with your pet, and send runners out to gather required raw materials and ingredients for helpful enchantments and potions.

It’s too bad there isn’t a battle tower trainer that specifically excels at wiping out programming bugs, because if there was, the poor sod would have his hands constantly dirty. As mentioned in Game Central’s Top 5 Buggiest Games article, Larian Studios, for whatever reason, seems cursed by malicious digital insects. While I never lost a save file or suffered any main quest-halting anomalies, the retail release version of Divinity II is nevertheless plagued by infestation. Just a few unfortunate notables encountered: having to re-bind my left strafe key every time I started the game (it’d inexplicably tie-in to the attack assignment upon every exit); infinite load screen loops, curable only through alt-tabbing and ending the process (disastrous if you don’t quick-save often); an inability to exit the game to Windows using the main menu; and a minor irritation where after an auto-save the protagonist continues to run forward even without any player interaction. Before you even consider playing, patch it up to the latest version ASAP.

When dragons burp, small forests get lit on fire.

After it all boils down, Divinity II – Ego Draconis serves as a serviceable romp in the fantasy wilds. But like a cracked pair of aged work boots, it lacks some serious spit and polish. If only Larian approached the dragon gimmick in an alternate manner, this could have been one helluva title. As stands, it just doesn’t carry the girth of a Mass Effect or a Dragon Age. Only action-RPG devotees and recognizers of consummate voice actors need apply.