As much as I determined to avoid the plot and just mess around, I wound up stumbling ass-backwards into the main story anyway. I wandered into a castle and got tormented by an annoying prince. Then, as I sought revenge for him humiliating me (and being an evil little shit who tortured prisoners), I somehow wound up the only surviving Marked One, with a mission to unite the various fantasy races against a resurrected god of chaos. You know, as often happens in these situations.
It's a decent enough way to end the first act of the game. Giving me seven broad quests allows me a certain amount of freedom to explore at my own pace. It's a trick that has been used very effectively in rpgs for a long time now. So I'm going to go ahead and give the plot a tentative thumbs up. Prince Janus was a fun villain, and while I found Zandalor's shtick a bit tiring, I could appreciate what they were trying to do, and there was a point where I was given vital information by a talking cat. I will admit to being jaded enough that a by-the-numbers fantasy plot, competently executed, is not enough to thrill me any more, but I'm not quite so jaded that I'm going to jump on it as a major flaw.
My main disappointment with this game is that I did not get far enough in the plot to really consider the theological ramifications of the "Marked One" situation, or the political nuances of attempting to fight chaos through assembling a multinational coalition (and the way those nuances would have inevitably been undercut by the action-oriented quests necessary to advance the plot). Divine Divinity is a more thoughtful game than I gave it credit for, but I suspect the store page boast about "an adventure that will last you 100 hours" is accurate, and as pleasant a time as I've had, I'm not really ready for that sort of commitment right now.
So here is where I'm going to call it quits. I've got 8 weeks to play 6 games (assuming I don't break down and buy any in the winter sale), and while I would say, on balance, that I enjoyed this game (level-agnostic orc ambushes or dungeon bosses notwithstanding), it didn't spark an obsession. I do, however, have an unusually powerful sense of unfinished business here. This isn't like The Last Remnant, where I reached the deadline amidst a major gameplay roadblock. I could continue from here, quite easily. I perhaps even should continue, considering I still have two sequels to play, and I might get hopelessly confused about the story as time goes on. Yet I won't, because I am a rootless wanderer among games, my quest to experience each one tantamount to an embrace of dilettantism.
Will I ever come back to Divine Divinity and finish what I started? I wish I could say yes, because I kind of feel like I owe it to the game to see where it's story goes. Yet, I have so many other games I'd rather play that it seems like a real long-shot. I think its best chance is if I play the later games in the Divinity series and come to love them so much that I come back to this one as a sort of prologue.
It's not likely, but it could happen.
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