In the end, it was not a clean completion. I wound up having to cheat shamelessly in the final dungeon. But I'm only going to accept 50% of the blame for that. The other half I'm going to lay directly at the feet of the terrible legacy systems it inherited from AD&D 2nd edition.
DO YOU HEAR ME, PLANESCAPE: TORMENT, IF YOU'RE GOING TO INSIST ON LIMITING MY SPELLS AND HEALING BASED ON HOW OFTEN I REST, YOU CAN'T ALSO PUT ME IN LONG DUNGEONS WHERE I HAVE NO ACCESS TO SAFE RESTING PLACES!!!
It's just not cool. When I was stuck in the prison underneath the border town of Curst, I wound up having to send my main character into fights solo, despite him being a mage, because the rest of my party was down to single-digit hit points and I was all out of both healing and resurrection magic. Only the Nameless One himself was expendable enough to risk, and even then, the fights were utterly ridiculous, with me just getting one or two weak hits in before being killed and then running back through the bulk of the dungeon to slowly chip away at one enemy at a time. I know that the game's "fire and forget" magic system is supposed to encourage resource management, but it's not so fun when I'm stuck in a no-exit dungeon and I only realize too late that I don't have enough oomph to get me through.
I've kind of got it in my head that I might one day come back and try the game with a tougher warrior build, but that's long term thinking. For now, I can barely stand to think about this game.
Which is a shame, because the story is really quite good. The Nameless One was once a tricksy mortal guy who bargained/hoodwinked a powerful celestial spirit into granting him immortality, but the catch was that every time he died, he was brought back to life without his memory and some random innocent somewhere else in the universe died in his stead.
Eventually, for reasons that are never entirely made clear, his amnesia problem starts to clear up, and he can remember what has happened in his most recent lives. Determined to end this cycle of suffering, he gathers a rag-tag group of oddballs and sets out on a quest through the multiverse to piece together the mysteries of his existence.
In the end, he confronts his sins and faces his end with dignity and grace. His friends vow to find his spirit and release it from hell, but that's a story for a sequel that never came.
Overall, I'd say the story isn't quite as deep as its reputation led me to believe - ultimately the solution to the central conflict lies in some fantasy-grade technobabble - but it does explore some headier issues than most other video games. People have conversations about mortality, duty, and the whether existence is worth the suffering that accompanies it. It was fascinating seeing the wreckage left behind by the Nameless One's previous incarnations, but it would have meant more if you'd had a more intimate connection to them. As it stands, they felt almost like completely different characters . . . which is an interesting philosophical question that the game only touched on superficially.
Still, that's more than most, so I'm going to give Planescape: Torment a tentative thumbs up. Half the time the journal didn't track my quest progress properly, leaving me utterly at a loss about where to go (especially if I'd been away from the game for awhile), and the difficulty did not scale in a satisfying way in the second half, but it was an intriguing world with some fun characters and even with its faults it was enough to rope me into playing 15 hours in a single day. I'm glad I finally got to see the ending.
(Wait, is that somehow in line with game's theme? Have I been experiencing a scaled down version of the Nameless One's dilemma when I failed to beat the game time and time again and resorted to starting new save files in order to start from scratch? Is this a revelation?
Probably not. But it's fun to think about.)
No comments:
Post a Comment