Overthinking Terrible: Kingdoms of Amalur

Ugh.

I tried playing this game once before, but it was at a good time in my life, and that's the worst frame of mind when playing Kingdom of Amalur.  No, you need to be incredibly depressed, worn down, just utterly destroyed to put up with the utter bullshit this game throws at you.  So when I had to deal with one of the worst periods of my life, I knew just the game to play.

The plot of was written by R.A. Salvatore, a dude primarily known for having his dumb fantasy shit clogging the shelves at every used bookstore I've visited.   You're a dude in the middle of some epic war between the mortal races (humans and sexy elves) and the Tuatha Fae, who are evil and have sinister glowing red swords.  The Tuatha are evil perversions of regular Fae, who are plant/human hybrids (not in a cool way like roots growing out of your dick, but like someone painted your face green and glued cardboard flower petals to your shoulders) and basically do nothing the entire game.  The obligatory boring variable that distinguishes this turgid BATTLE BETWEEN GOOD AND EVIL is that apparently everyone has a predestined fate except you, because your dumbass got kilt but was brought back by the WELL OF SOULS (just don't fucking ask).  Needless to say, since this is R.A. Salvatore and not Philip K. Dick, the sole way this plot device is used is your FATELESS HERO blunders into scenarios constantly and changes someone's bad fate to a happy fate.

I don't even want to talk about the sexxxy fanservice elf.

Kingdoms of Amalur was originally designed as an MMO, and it really shows.  In between the long stretches of actual plot advancement, you will run into a million yellow exclamation points denoting various side missions.  There's the big boi "faction missions" which feature your character stumbling into such ORIGINAL groups as a MERCENARY COMPANY, a SCHOOL FOR MAGES, and A THIEVES GUILD, each time going up the corporate ladder faster than a CEO's nephew and saving your incompetent coworkers from certain death.  There's the multiquest location missions which usually involve going into three caves to fight monsters and find a thing, maybe culminating in killing a boss.  There's regular missions which usually involve you going into one cave to find a thing.  There's also tasks, which are repeatable missions, which if you make the mistake of accepting lead to you picking up things that rapidly fill up your inventory for the purpose of getting money, which becomes a total non-issue about five hours into the game.

And let me tell you, inventory space is sacred in Amalur.  Almost everything you pick up takes up a single inventory space.  You get about 100 such spaces which wouldn't be so bad if the game didn't make it so you tripped over a chest every five meters.  You can send items to the trashbox, but it's a blow to whatever fun this game has that you have to manage your inventory every two minutes to dump out the 34 azurite longswords you just picked up.  While it's true that alot of modern rpgs still latch on to this stupid mechanic, at least I could console command ~player.modav carryweightfuvefuckingmillion in most of them

There are other aspects compounding the inventory problem.  If you decide to throw out a bunch of useless potions (oh boy a 10 second minute boost to my fire resistance), the game simply compensates by having those same useless potions appear in every subsequent chest you loot, usually until you have like 11 or 12 of every stupid flavor.  And why yes, the game does manage potion stacks in groups of 10, how did you guess? If you accept quests, you'll tend to gain a bunch of stupid quest items that of course count towards your inventory total, and you can never destroy them no matter how much you want to.  Even better, some of those same items don't actually go away when you finish the quest, so you'll always remember that time someone gave me a useless ring for killing some kobolds.

add to junk?  not in this town, fucko

In between quests, there's...not much to really do in Amalur.  Exploration is pretty dull, especially since the game drills into you early on that any cave or dungeon you see is gonna have a quest attached to it, and believe me you do NOT want to run through any of these dungeons again.  For the sheer amount of precious lifeforce that Amalur demands from you (70 hours, jesus CHRIST), the excitement coming from new discoveries dries up in about five hours.  I'm not a big fan of The Elder Scrolls series, but it succeeds at driving the player forward, always promising one new diversion if you just walk a little further.  The biggest diversion in Amalur is listening to NPCs.

It's frankly terrifying how many voiced lines they stuffed into Amalur.  You will run into at least a half-dozen named dipshits in every vague settlement, and they all have shit to say.  The problem is that most of the shit is the most extraneous boring garbage imaginable.  Every, and I mean EVERY, voiced NPC will have a dialogue option about the area they're living in.  I made a point to actually listen to these both as a fuck-you to the inexorable march of time and because I felt bad for the intern that was obviously tasked with writing all of this horrible crap.  God knows, I would have had a nervous breakdown after my hundredth variation on how qt elf girl feels about Generic Mining Hellhole #342.  After awhile, it was the most hypnotizing and comforting part of this shit game: the knowledge that wherever I went, someone would be there jabbering about their hometown and how "it's got it's bad'uns, but overahl it's a good lot, just wish the giant spiders would go away."  When you play a 80-hour game that requires only a working pulse to beat, you gotta latch onto something.

Despite the fact that everyone admitted that the plot and characterization for this ROLE PLAYING GAME was shit, alot of people still liked the game.  Why?  Generally it came down to graphics and the actually fighting gameplay.  I'll agree that the graphics weren't bad, to the extent that I didn't really notice them one way or another as I stumbled through the game's pre-defined paths.  But gameplay?  No.  All of the people that praised the combat as "incredibly fun combo-based excitement" are either insane or have never played a brawler in their lives.

or they could be a no-talent GAME JOURNALIST RETARD SHITBABY, whatever.

An important part of any third-person combat game is the concept of evasion.  Evading enemy attacks serves a dual purpose: it allows you to to, via player reaction, dodge attacks and thus preserve health; more importantly, it lets you feel like some kung-fu badass.  An important point of any sort of game like KoA is determining how forgiving your evasion options are.  Most of the time, the general rule is that you should be able to evade most attacks unless your character is attempting some sort of ultra dangerous heavy combo, because if you're gonna wield some massive axe you shouldn't really be able to instantly get out of the way right?  A decent player should be able to avoid most damage, and if you get hit, you smack your forehead, darn I shoulda seen that coming, better luck next time me.

Kingdoms of Amalur does not care about such things.  It's completely true that there are very impressive combos in this game.  The problem with this is that once you are a certain point into said combos, you are LOCKED IN SON, and good fucking luck if a monster feels like attacking you.  Every move that isn't the basic "hit button once" attack has at least a second of dead air where you cannot fucking dodge or move cancel or anything.  This is especially a problem because, at least in the hard difficultly, monsters are constantly harassing you with attacks.  These attacks would be easily dodgable if your dumbass avatar wasn't doing a rendition of Swan Lake with his chakrams on some barrels and I AM HITTING THE LEFT SHOULDER BUTTON FUCKING ROLL YOU SACK OF SHIT FUCKING ROLL ROLL ROLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLL.  Maybe it's unfair to expect crisp control from a multi-million dollar studio's first game, but jesus, Devil May Cry 3 had like 14 different combat systems that were all amazing, I don't think anyone would have cared if Curt Schilling just ripped one of them off like he did Rhode Island daaaaaaaaaaamn son.

Here's a prime example.  The threat level of enemies is based entirely how quickly they close distance and how often they attacked.  The evil that struck the greatest fear into my heart was not the generic demon monsters or the flakey elf Tuatha, but wolves.  Wolves have a single attack: they run at you, and then dive at you.  There are ALWAYS multiple wolves, and they tended to run at me one after the other.  Amalur's targetting is really fucking shitty, so I usually ended up attacking the wolf that already attacked, so a realistic impression of my hero would be a man bathed in the blood of demons and cruel lords, with several hundred comical wolf-sized holes throughout my body.

pubic enemy number 1

This surreal gameplay oversight completely takes away from any sort of real skill (haha video game skill), forcing you as the player to either plink at enemies with your basic moves or just suck it up and expect to get knocked around every time you want to feel like a badass.  If Kingdoms of Amalur was a difficult game, this would be an incredibly frustrating experience.  Many "goddamnits" would be uttered, controllers would be jerked and screamed at.  It would be shit, but there would still be the barest semblence of being invested in what is happening in Boring Fantasy Land.

Of course, this isn't the case.  Even on the top difficulty, Amalur quickly stops trying to challenge in any sense of the word.  I'm not even talking about the whole crafting issue mentioned in every review, though it's utterly true that spending 15 minutes at a forge will yield you the most boring armor with the most broken stats.  I'm actually okay with that, since it's not like Skyrim didn't have the same issue except that game took 3 hours of your life away so you could craft your god armor and stop pretending to give a shit about its garbage combat.  No, even with self-found armor, the game just completely fails to draw in any sort of interest.

The big problem is that every class has some sort of boring means to ignore the game's shitty combat system.  The rogue can stealth out and OHKO problem enemies because of the stupid amount of crit damage naturally begotten.  The warrior has an ability that straight up gives super armor so you can accomplish all your dumbass combos.  The mage has a heal and spells that are so goddamned broken that it's hilarious.  Hybrid classes are even worse, since now you get TWICE the broken abilities.  I primarily played the rogue/mage class, which in later levels gave me the perk of having my mana refill whenever I landed a critical hit, so battles were a choose your own adventure of zero tension or reward.  This isn't even accounting for the Devil Trigger Reckoning Mode, which makes any combat scenario completely null and void, takes like 3 battles to refill, and can just be refilled via USEABLE ITEMS ARE YOU JOKING.

As a result of all this, Amalur couldn't even muster a shriek of dismay or hatred more than a few times.  When the wolves commenced their strafing run, I'd just roll my eyes and mutter under my breath.

Ugh.