Let me start by saying that I’m digging the game, actually. I’m about 25hrs in, and I’m just leaving Hernand. I’ve gotten used to the overly-complex gamepad controls, and in some cases I even think what the game \*does\* with that overcomplexity is cool. I just unlocked the focus/snare abilities, for example, and the way that you use the thumb sticks to mimic Kliff’s arm movements, which correspond to different intuitive effects like “ranged attack,” “shield” or “meditate” feels a lot more aligned with the fantasy of doing battle magic than selecting an icon from a hot bar. So I want you to know that I have lots of positive things to say about the game, I’m just not going to be saying very many them here. Because boy-oh-boy is the story a mess. 

Lots of people have already talked about this, and PA themselves even acknowledged that it was disappointing on an earnings call, so I know I’m not blowing your mind by pointing that out. But I’m not just going to say it’s “bad,” and leave it at that, because I think what’s going on here is not a lack of competence, it’s a complete absence of vision, structure and intention. It’s not “bad writing” \*per se\*—it’s awkward narrative design and muddy creative direction, and I think thats an interesting hair to try and split. 

Leave aside for a second that the world is so generic it’s like what ChatGPT would come up with if you asked it to write you lore for a fantasy world, and leave aside that Kliff seems to have suffered traumatic brain damage for all the personality and agency he exerts. “Bland world and/or hero” is a criticism you could level at 90 percent of video games, so while that certainly doesn’t help things here, I don’t think it’s the heart of the problem. 

And, moreover, the actual dialogue is mostly \*fine.\* There are a few clangers in there: Kliff telling a dude he just beat at arm wrestling that he did well and “should be proud of his own strength” sounds like a line from an anime where a group of high school students fight god with the power of friendship, not something a hardened mercenary who just cheated death would say. But for the most part, I think if you were John or Jane Q Writer at Pearl Abyss, and someone dropped by your desk and said, “hey, I need forty seven scenes where a farmer tells Kliff something bad happened to his livestock, crops and/or family and asks for help,” you did a pretty good job at writing those scenes under the circumstances. The style is consistent, the scenes have beats and turns and blocking, and they sometimes even find a way to express some level of characterization, even if we’ll never see the same character again. It’s far from groundbreaking, but it’s competent. 

The heart of problem, I think, is that there \*are\* forty seven scenes where farmers have similar problems, and none of them \*go anywhere\*. Almost every quest, including the main story, follows this structure: 

1) “Hey Kliff, I have a problem, can you help?” 

2) Kliff instantly solves the problem.

3) “Thanks! Here’s a reward!”

There are no complications, no surprises, no escalation, and everybody is exactly who they seem to be on the surface. Point 2 is often “he goes and kills a bunch of bandits,” but sometimes it’s even worse! Sometimes he just goes somewhere, has an inane conversation, and comes back. The merchant quests are the biggest culprits of this, and all amount to Kliff going somewhere nearby, encountering zero obstacles along the way, talking to another character, who are always immediately helpful and accommodating and have no ulterior motives, and then returning. One that sticks out in my mind as particularly terrible was a saddler asking me to go and get feedback from a client on a saddle. This story went like this: 

1) Saddler: “I’m proud of my saddles, but I’d like to get some feedback. Can you go ask my last client?” 

2) Client: “Oh the saddle? Yeah, it was pretty good.”

3) The end. 

I’m summarizing, but not exaggerating. There was \*no\* conflict, \*no\* escalation, \*no\* reversals, \*no\* surprises, \*no\* deepening of any characters or themes. Thats not a story, it’s an exchange of information. It’s a meeting. All the merchant quests (and plenty of others) are some version of this.

Another egregious example:

I did one last night where a mysterious structure fell from the sky and a local noble asked me to investigate. There was a whole cutscene to set this up, and when I got near the impact site, his guards were nearby, too afraid to get close. Sounds like a setup for a big moment, right? Like the ancient structure would respond to Kliff’s abyss bracelet and unfold into an entrance to a cool dungeon, or spit out a big monster or something, right? Wrong. It was just a new fast travel point. Also, Kliff has some of this same stuff attached to his wrist, and never brings that up to explain what’s going on or reassure anyone, nor does he try to hide it or keep it secret for any reason. It’s just totally irrelevant, even in this quest that \*directly concerns it.\* He just activates the fast travel point and, boom, mission complete. 

What. The fuck. \*Was the point of that!?\* Why was there a whole cinematic and \*interstitial beat with the soldiers\*, just to build up to that \*popcorn fart\*?! A new fast travel point!? Not even one of the puzzle ones!? I feel like I’m going insane. 

It’s \*all\* some version of this disjointed, aimless mush. Kliff’s Quest from God to “kill five dudes for some reason” has no emotional relevance to him, exerts no gravity on events, and provides no structure to the game, so everything is just this shapeless laundry list of random tasks from boring characters. Even the quests that do lead to cool moments like boss fights or big bandit camps seem to do so incidentally. The boss fights and the camps I do encounter are almost never a punctuation mark on an adventure, they’re just events I happen to stumble into by chance. 

I mentioned at the top that I’m just leaving Hernand now, and \*even here\* at a \*chapter break\* marking a new leg of the adventure, a guy just gave me a note that said “time to go somewhere else now.” No big climax, no change in fortune motivating the change in scenery: just a little shrug of a scene and some new objective text. 

I could sit here listing examples all day, but if you’ve made it this far you get the point: It’s bafflingly shitty storytelling. 

“Baffling” because, every now and then, it shakes itself awake and is suddenly very good. The one example of that which comes to mind is the Reed Devil story, which breaks down like this:

\>!

1) Approach the manor of a local noble, as I have many times before, in search of some of my homies who may be here.

2) Oh no, I’m ambushed by a bunch of dudes, and all but one servant has been slain! 

3) There’s a nice Visione scene and some well-written documents laying around that tell a memorable little horror story, where the noble cast out his plague-ridden son, who has somehow returned as a supernatural revenant called The Reed Devil, tormenting his parents and exacting a slow, cruel revenge.

4) I use the lantern to track one of the assassins, leading to a beautiful treck up a mountain dotted with colorful whirligig scarecrows and agile, teleporting bandits. I feel like I am on a proper adventure now—a knight errant pursuing his quarry across a strange and beautiful landscape. 

5) I eventually find my homies in a small cabin further up the mountain, but the devil himself intervenes and stabs my boy through the door! He’s hurt! Will he be okay? Stakes! Drama! Now it’s personal!

6) It all climaxes with a super cool, cinematic duel in a reed field with the devil himself, introduced by a well-written, well-performed monologue that summarizes the events of the noble-and-son story from his perspective. 

So here, in contrast to much of the rest of the game, we have clear characters and motivations grounding a strong conflict, a nice sense of pace and a satisfying, memorable payoff. It’s pretty good!

!<

So that’s why it’s baffling—clearly PA has the internal talent to pull off compelling storytelling, but for the most part they seem to have just thrown a bunch of random shit at the wall and hoped some of it stuck. 

I have a few \*wild speculations\* about why it turned out like this: 

1) The quests where the stories do briefly shine were used for demos at some point, so they got a lot of extra love and scrutiny 

2) There was more of a coherent organizing narrative structure at some point, but it was ripped out of the game for some reason shortly before release, and all the orphaned content had to be quickly reworked because the progression system was designed around the player getting regular quest rewards and they didn’t have time to redo it. 

2a) Every now and then I’ll notice a weird pause in the dialogue at the end of a quest, usually when a character is about to deliver the critical information (like in the saddler quest: the noble had this weird pause right before she said the saddle was “fine, thanks!). That makes me wonder if there was some kind of choice-and-consequence system that got cut at the eleventh hour (like maybe at some point you actually had to make the saddle, and she responded differently depending on how you did), and when they ripped it out they just made all the quests default to the “success” outcome. Again, wild speculation, but I think it’s plausible. 

3) Narrative was not a “voice in the room.” The repetitious quest structure of “Talk to Random NPC->Do Task->Reward” feels to me like there’s some under-the-hood system that presumes a majority of content will have exactly this flow. A hundred little template quests would have been sprinkled all over the game by designers who didn’t care what actually happened in them, and these were only filled out with dialogue by hired-gun writers at the last minute, well after there was time to make big changes. 

4) Fully-authored player characters were a last minute change. The core fantasy of the game is incoherent. Kliff is a mercenary leader, and a great melee fighter, and also an archer, and a magician, and a sneaky rogue. And if you pay attention you’ll notice that few quests ever assume he’s any one of these things—as far as 90 percent of the dialogue is concerned, he’s just \*there.\* Compare that to The Witcher, where nearly every quest is built on the assumption that the player is a wandering monster slayer generally or Geralt of Rivia specifically; compare it to Assassin’s Creed, which has entire quest types built around assassination and infiltration—now compare it to Fallout, where quests can assume you are a general archetype, but not much else. Which one does CD feel more like?

So why did I say the story was the “worst of all possible worlds?” Because I think when you approach the game as a fantasy sandbox it’s actually pretty good. Its biggest problem is that it \*presents itself\* as a narrative game in the intro, instantly goes off the rails with the obviously tacked-on Quest From God stuff, and then silently shifts gears into more of an open world sandbox. But even then, its (super fun) character progression and exploration is so entwined with these conflict-free, plain-oatmeal stories that you can never just fully ignore them and engage with the fun part of the game. Worse, because every now and then one of them \*actually is\* decent, like the Reed Devil, I don’t want to miss out on something that could change my mind, or at least shift the balance of my perspective on it. 

I’ve heard a lot of people say that the game should embrace the design it seems to be slouching toward already and “add a character creator.” I agree that this would be an improvement, and actually does seem feasible given Kliff’s minimal impact on every scene he’s in, and the fact that all the systemic dialogue is already gender and character class neutral. What I would add is, while we’re still playing Fantasy Game Consultant, they should also rework character progression around the sandbox mechanics, cut all the generic fluff quests, and repurpose as many of the animations and camera setups as they can around the new system—a conversation where a noble sends me to look at a fast travel point could be conversation with a noble about anything. Then, cut all the Quest From God nonsense from the intro to play up the \*mystery\* of the Abyss and re-orient the hero’s goal to be “re-establish the scattered Greymanes and retake Paliune.” Then the goal is clean, personal, attached to the core mercenary fantasy, and motivates you to explore the sandbox. Along the way, the hero \*gradually\* learns about their strange new powers, why they were spared from death, etc. Finally, we restructure the content so that the main regional objectives are gated by the interesting quests, which require (or are much easier with) progression gained in the mercenary sandbox. IMO, that’s how you could let the game be the thing it clearly wants to be, mostly just by moving pieces around and cutting stuff. (Obviously still a ton of work, but PA admirably do not seem to be allergic to hard work). 

Anyway, if you made it to the end, thanks for reading! I’ve had all this swimming around in my head for the last week or so and I needed to get it out. Tell me what you think! Do you agree? Am I huge idiot? Both? 

The story is the worst of all possible worlds