![]() Instead, Divinity II (you know, the third Divinity game) is definitely reflective of the time it came out. I might eventually have more to say about Divine Divinity and Beyond Divinity, depending on how this feature progresses, so I’ll refrain from talking about the series’ history for now. Long before they hit it big with Original Sin and were handed the keys to the Baldur’s Gate franchise they were a small Belgian studio trying to make it big with a bunch of ambitious, but flawed RPGs. Larian Studios was not always the crown champion of western RPGs. Would I play more? I mean, I already did like nine years ago and I didn’t finish it then either. Literally can't think of a joke-y thing to put about this game: Yes Divinity II: The Dragon Knight Saga FWIW this is the final "Developer's Cut" version of Divinity II that ironed out many of the bigger technical and mechanical problems of the original release of Ego Draconis. I feel like I’ve said my piece on how I feel about that particular slice of the subgenre. There’s something genuinely kind of great, in a very pulp fantasy sort of way, about William Shakespeare, Nicholo Machiavelli, Leonardo Da Vinci, and Hernan Cortes all hanging out in the same city, giving you petty low-level RPG quests, but the writing isn’t quite there? And once you get out of the city, it falls into the same “oh no it’s Diablo but more boring” trap that numerous other action-y RPGs from around the same period fell into. The Neo Barcelona sequence is, even in its deceptive vertical slice form, a little underwhelming even by the standards of its time. To be frank, Lionheart is less enthralling upon revisit than I imagined. Sure hope you didn’t invest *that much* into speech, because it’s useless for 80% of the game. After that? You sure do wander around a lot of wilderness areas and kill a lot of monsters. For the first few hours (which is all that was shown on my stream) it’s actually kind of promising. It stands out in my memory precisely because it’s so blatant, and it’s so immediate. It starts as a CRPG in the vein of Fallout, even using the SPECIAL system, before revealing itself to be… way more of a straight hack-n-slash. Taking place in an alternate history where Richard the Lionheart and Saladin teamed up to fight demons and magic from another dimension, the most interesting thing about Lionheart is the part where it straight up tricks you into thinking it’s one kind of game before turning into another. It’s very easy to take a look at lost, cancelled games from that period like Van Buren and Baldur’s Gate 3: The Black Hound and imagine “what could’ve been” (even if ideas from both eventually showed up in Fallout New Vegas and Pillars of Eternity) but it’s even worse in the case of a game like Lionheart, which feels blatantly downscaled and unfinished. The last game published by Interplay under the Black Isle label before the company’s implosion a few months later, Lionheart reeks of an interesting premise cut short by the demands of a failing publisher. Lionheart was one of the major inspirations for this feature an inconsequential object of fixation for myself and exactly no one else. ![]() Though, honestly if I was gonna do something for charity it’d probably be something a little more big name terrible. Would I play more? Listen if you wanted to pay me money or like… do a thing for charity, this is the level of bad I would be willing to do for a charitable cause. ![]() Septem11 Comments Lionheart: Legacy of the Crusader I'll take "Bullshit literally only I care about" for 400, Alex The Wheel of Dubious RPGs Episode 017-018: Lionheart: Legacy of the Crusader and Divinity II: Ego Draconis
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