Larian Studios have been doing Divinity series for 16 years now and if anything, I cannot call any of their games “boring”. Divine Divinity was an attempt to mix the depth of Ultima series with simplistic aRPG gameplay of Diablo, Beyond decided to add dual character control into that mix, Divinity II allowed you to read NPCs minds and turn into a dragon at almost any point in the open map and Dragon Commander was a bizarre mix of genres where you played as a dragon with a jetpack. When going with crowdfunding for Original Sin, they decided to switch from action RPGs to turn based RPGs and focus on cooperative gameplay, half-jokingly saying that the game was designed to be played specifically by people in a romantic relationship.
But despite all of these creative and fun ideas, every single game they’ve made felt clunky, not particularly good at anything it tried to be and somewhat half-baked. I did enjoy my time with Divine and Divinity 2 back in the day, but none of the other games, including Original Sin, could get me interested for longer than a few hours, either because they were boring, or plot was terrible, or something else, or all of the above. So, I’m glad, that it wasn’t the case for Original Sin 2, when I’ve recently completed it in the updated Definitive Edition package.
In many ways, Divinity: Original Sin 2 feels like a mix of ideas Larian had before, except this time done properly. All the best elements from Original Sin return and this time game is designed for 4 people in a team from the start, not 2 (though you can solo). The combat system is still solid, though since I dislike turn-based combat in most games I switched to Explorer difficulty, which is easier than default Classic. And the best part about it is the absolutely amazing environmental effects system, so you can still throw poison at someone and then light it on fire so it explodes, then douse it with water, electrify the water and then freeze it to enemies slip and fall. It makes fights quite a bit more interesting than they would’ve been otherwise, since all these environmental surfaces work as their own system and can be somewhat unpredictable in all the best (and sometimes frustratingly worst) ways.
Unlike OS and more akin to Divine Divinity, the game exploration is extremely fun and seems to come naturally because the game is very smart about directing you where you need and might want to go first and clearly showing if you are going in a direction where you might have troubles on the level you’re on, without feeling too restrictive but also without just hitting you in the face with a high level monster out of nowhere. Also unlike OS, the game is very good at easing you into the mechanics, the game world, the quests and the characters.
And speaking of that, this might be the very first time Larian has made a genuinely well written game. Not just full of cool ideas and concepts, but one that is actually fun to follow. And somehow without losing the quirkiness that was always present in Rivellon. It’s just that this time the story is presented with enough care and enough seriousness and good writing for you to care about it and all of the silly elements are there in the background. Which is especially important, since it was one of the most distracting things about Original Sin – all the badly placed jokes and silly elements felt like an incompetent writer being apologetic about his work and trying to pass it off as a joke, not as good comedy among good drama. And as a result it was hard to care about the story or the game world.
Though, unfortunately, this, along with the game itself, essentially falls apart in the last quarter of the game. A very long game I must add, as it took me about 70 hours to complete. This is also somewhat reminiscent to Divine Divinity, where after hours of fun exploration, interesting fights, quests and adventures, you get into what you expect to be a closing act of the story. And it’s a bit weak, full of boring fights and boring locations. But you’re ignoring that as the game is about to end. Except, it doesn’t and lasts for another act, that is completely unnecessary and takes about 15 hours more. To make things worse, it’s also full of absolute worst ideas and encounters in the entire game. The story more or less falls apart and becomes a confusing mess, almost every fight has some terrible gimmick attached to it, and for whatever reason Original Sin 2 expects you to care about exploring yet another location and doing more quests even though you were in the mood for the game to end. And when the game does end, it ends on a rather letdown sequence of events that doesn’t feel like it was worth it.
Which is a horrible shame, because when looking back at my overall experience with the game it became clear that I was having incredible fun with it up until the point where it should’ve and could’ve ended but didn’t. And it was only during the last hours that I was constantly frustrated with the game. I mean… Of course there were frustrations before that. The AI can be ridiculous sometimes, which means if you need to involve a friendly or neutral AI in a fight, no matter what you do and what insane sequence of game breaking events you invent, they will probably die after running to fist fight giant enemies on a field of cursed flames. And it’s also worth saying that the story, while exciting at those points, was more confusing to me having played all of the previous games, than it would’ve been to someone not familiar with the game universe. So my suggestion – think of this as a completely unique game and not part of the series and the story will make more sense. Oh and I shouldn’t forget that this game is also full of the exact same issues any game with 3D camera and top down view has, where you need to constantly fight it just so you can see what you want to see and hope that you don’t click on something you don’t want to on accident.
But… I loved so much about this game. It’s mechanics are fun, it’s world is exciting, the characters are interesting, a lot of quests are surprising (and allow out of the box solutions), the visual style is great… The music is also very good, which is important to note since this is the first project in the series done without Kirill Pokrovsky, who passed in 2015 (and his soundtracks were always a highlight for Divinity games). It’s a fantastic game that simply refuses to end when it should. And it really shouldn’t have. But I’m sure that some people will have easier time forgiving this than I have, especially if they go for cooperative playthroughs.
So… despite the flaws, despite the terrible closing hours of the game and some of the elements that remained broken and silly even in the Definitive Edition, Divinity: Original Sin 2 is an amazing game. It’s most definitely the best Divinity game in the series so far and one of the very best RPGs I’ve played in recent years. I hope that this will mark the proper revival of Divinity as a series and from now on, things will only get better.