Retro Review: Divine Divinity

To accentuate the recent release of Divinity 2, we thought it’d be a groovy time to highlight its nomenclatural-redundant predecessor, Divine Divinity (we’re also going to pretend Beyond Divinity never existed, because really, the world is better this way). To start, it’s probably good to point out that while playing Divine Divinity is certainly not a required prerequisite to partaking of Divinity 2, it may just provide a better understanding for the roots and narrative of the rightful sequel. And again, just to make it perfectly crystal shiny clear, repeat after me: “Beyond Divinity was a cruel and painful practical joke. It isn’t real.” Got it? Awesome.

“Wife took the whole damn planet in the divorce. All I got left are my bones.”

As Divine Divinity begins, you’re offered three title roles: Fighter, Survivor, and Mage, all with female and male variants. Each of the three main choices contains a special move (powered by your stamina meter) that’s unavailable to the rest. Unfortunately, only the warrior’s spin-slash is useful; the others are pretty lackluster, and easily replicated through selectable abilities or potions. The difference between the sexes provides alternate starting skills and stats, and best of all: unique and sometimes hilarious—in a good way—voice-actors; the male survivor sounds identical to a young Jack Nicholson, and the female mage is constantly annoyed. This is one of those games you’ll want to replay simply to hear your new character’s auditory responses to various contextual nuances. Even better, the plot is peppered with cheeky and humorous twists; something that’s altogether an unfortunate rarity in RPGs. Divine Divinity never takes itself too seriously.

Got a micromanaging fetish? Behold your dream come true. You can open any number of info menus all at once.

Besides being locked into a singular special move, choosing a character type doesn’t contain you to one  narrow line of skill progression; there are zero imposed class restrictions. Wanna play a club-wielding muscled wizard? A sneaky but physically weak demon-summoning fighter?  Go for it. You’re free to take your character down any path you choose. All skills are there for the potential taking, whether magical or thuggish. But beware, this amount of freedom can be daunting, and spreading yourself too thin in multiple areas will prove troublesome. It’s best to stick with two total discipline’s skill sets, unless you’re really itching for a serious challenge.

Leveling up grants one (and on rare occasions, two) skill points and five total stat points for your dispersal into the four main attributes: strength— useful for lugging around heavy treasures and bashing stuff; agility— good for shootin’ arrows on target and not getting creamed by cudgels; intelligence— handy for pumping up your magical reserves; and finally: constitution— valued for marathon running and ballooning health points. You’ll also have the choice to select the charm skill, which, depending on the amount of points invested, will let you attach up to 5 runes into slotted weapons and armor to increase your base numbers. This is a great way to provide added strength to carry more gear if you’re a skinny Survivor, for example.

“I’ll take an ale, a cup of mead, and the blood spatter of a savagely butchered vagrant.”

Divine Divinity follows the tried and true method of the top-down point and click perspective. Thanks to the pinnacle of 2D technology when the game first crawled out of its fabricated cocoon, the graphics are colorful and gorgeous, even by today’s standards. The natural explored environments are varied and provocative, with perhaps the thankfully-limited cave crawls being the exception (it’s just tough to make rocks and dirt captivating). While the initial gameplay and on-screen HUD might remind more than a little of a certain unknown title called Diablo, the similarities screech to a halt soon after. This is not a frantic Torchlight-esque mouse-abusing click-fest. Divine Divinity does cram boat-loads of bad guys into your monitor all at once, practically begging you to start slamming that mouse clicker like a Cheetah on crystal meth. But unless you’re blasting  points exclusively into strength and straight-up role-playing as Conan, rushing into a crowd of enemies and going balls-nuts will get you corpsed-up but lickity-split quick. More than likely, you’ll instead be hitting pause, planning your attacks, chugging precious elixirs, retreating, and calculating strategies in a seamless real-time/frozen-time amalgamation accordingly.

Divine Divinity did God rays way before Crysis. More or less!

In a decision I wish more RPG devs would emulate, enemies don’t respawn, and they don’t get more powerful as you do. Once the baddies are dead, they’re dead for good, and traveling too far into the vast open world will get you humiliated early on. Because of the no respawn dynamic, your level limit isn’t arbitrarily capped at a glass ceiling like an MMO. Instead, your max level is determined by the total amount of antagonists and quests left available for mangling and completion, respectively. This is a far more fluid approach to role-playing, and I’m honestly not sure how the trend ever went out of style.

More in-game readable books than your local public library! Mostly because libraries don’t have in-game readable books.

For those seeking a robust and meaty trek, you’ll be pleased to hear that Divine Divinity is a damn long game. Expect to garner a solid 50 – 60 hours if you hit all the side quests and ancillary areas. The bad news? Well, like Game Central referenced here, your 50 – 60 hours, unfortunately, will not be bug-free. Even after something like fifty billion patches, this title still suffers from some deadly serious code gremlins. Certain quest-based NPCs sometimes fail to appear, one-use non-duplicative keys can open the wrong doors, and a tiny handful of broken skills have all managed to elude the developer’s bug-smashing hammers even now. Putting a few points into the deadly gift slot and releasing death scorpions renders the game 100% unchallenging; the scorpions just wander around murdering everything they see with ease (sending you buckets of XP in the process). You’d think that after years of patching and tweaking, this type of behavior would have been rectified.

Looks like a pretty safe place to set up camp…

Regardless, Divine Divinity remains one of the finest RPGs ever constructed. Sure, it doesn’t do anything substantially different from the basic tenements of the RPG codex, but what it does, it does damn near to icy-cool perfection. If you consider yourself anywhere near an RPG connoisseur, you’ll be well inclined to give this retro title a spin. Plus, to top it all off, the music is good enough that you’ll salivate over the possibilities of acquiring the soundtrack. And at a dirt-cheap price of 6 dead Washingtons on Good Old Games, you really have no reason not to start playing it right now. Trust us: it’ll make a perfect companion to your forays into Dragon Age and World of WarCraft. You won’t be disappointed.