Divinity: Original Sin - Enhanced Edition

I really wanted to love this game, I have to admit anyone jumping into this after playing Larians other games (Baldur's Gate 3, Divinity 2) was spoiled with those releases, Divinity Original Sin 1 does not hold your hand, ever, nor would I consider it beginner friendly. which is fine but felt tedious at times. There is some funny humor, nice stories and environmental elements that are fun to interact with, but I struggled to connect with the companions (Specifically Bairdottr, her storyline is NOT rewarding or nice to see come to a close) and the story itself- whereas it felt more compelling and immersive in Divinity Original Sin 2. There's also a specific bug I encountered with grenades, throw 'em one way and they'll land on the opposite site, it happened from literally start to finish. The biggest downside and the reason I write this review is the FINAL boss battle. Fighting death knights that respawn unless you kill every.single.one. in one turn was horrible enough, but the final-FINAL fight where you apparently have to keep an NPC alive was straight up awful, the NPC is weak and dies within 1 if not 2 turns and it's an immediate game over each time, your party of 4 has to go up against 15 NPC + the strongest boss AND somehow save the NPC that's the priority for all of said enemies. I may have been unprepared or didn't follow the meta, but I tried for hours and in the end left this unfinished. Honorable mention: There is no short rest, long rest- hell there is not even a bedroll. You venture out and have to keep teleporting (or often times walk) to an Inn or bed to heal, Oh! AND YOU HAVE TO WAIT FOR EVERY PARTY MEMBER INDIVIDUALLY TO HEAL UP. (or use a spell BUT also only individually). Overall I would recommend this game to someone well versed in the divinity universe or someone up to a challenge, but for anyone looking for a good time or a experience close to BG3 or DOS2, just replay those.

Get ready for terribly inefficient and overly complicated 90's-era inventory management, long winded rants by NPCs (what does it say about the amount of hours play-testing this game when the characters in the very first town you end in continuously spout their lines until it drives the player nuts?), a lot of backtracking with only vague clues to go on and no undo last-step button in sight. The latter is unfortunate because you'll be misclicking a lot in this game: sometimes the cursor just doesn't 'snap' on and bam, there you go: you accidentally robbed someone and pissed off the town! At least outside of combat ,you can always load a save game and hopefully it'll be right before you misclicked but during a fight, it's just a painful thing to have happen to you. Especially the part where your companion slowly walks forward and you watch him waste that opportunity you sorely needed, The companions-with-opinions based is sort of novel, the music is nice and the graphics aren't bad but it is just another high-fantasy with the exact same story that we've seen a hundred times over. The voice-acting is painful and does not help immersion at all, it's over the top and so are the characters and the writing, Did i forget to tell that this game just doesn't respect your time; healing is an absolute chore and your party members can not be easily revived. I also severely dislike the way that you set up your two main characters and bam, you run into almost identical 'companions' making you wonder if perhaps you should just re-roll and start over. I really find these class-based games outdated and time consuming. Just give us a blank slate so we can develop our characters as we play the game rather than having to wiki everything beforehand to make sure we're not shooting ourselves in the foot 10 hours from now. Not recommended, it's like Baldurs gate 2 hit the air duster.