Best Of

You know, that feeling you get when you finish a really good book series, or a really solid television series. The one you've been using to supplement your life, that you don't realize you were really enchanted with until it's gone. Long enough to feel like it'll never end, long enough to form a dependency, and then, suddenly... credits. That's it. The universe behind The Witcher is one I've been a really big fan of for quite a while. I read through all the books I could find - including one sort of Christmas special sort of short story - back after I finished the first game. I sought out fan translations of the books when the English versions gave up - at the time, the English versions quit after the first entry in the series (excluding the set of short stories)... which meant I got to deal with all SORTS of absurd translational issues. It was SO worth it. Makes that prolactin hug from finishing the story that much more bittersweet. I won't talk too much more about The Witcher's universe - I mentioned it in the previous posts, and reviews and explanations are all over the internet. The thing is... it's hard for me to talk much about The Witcher 3 as a game. I didn't really play it as a game. It felt more like reading a book, or watching a movie - I wasn't distracted by the controls, or by any bugs, or by any weird voice acting - I was just completely, 100% enthralled in the story, the world, the characters. Seeing Yennefer and (my favorite character FINALLY showing up in a game) Ciri come to life was everything I wanted. They matched exactly the picture I had in my head of them - okay, maybe Yennefer was a LITTLE less unpleasant. The combat was stellar. The game's come a VERY long way from its roots - the signs, potions, and combat moves all feel more viable; not a single trick in Geralt's arsenal feels gimmicky (okay... MAYBE the crossbow and the bombs, with their long wind-up and low effect, but requirement for certain fights). I will confess to being a LITTLE disappointed once I'd figured out that dodging/fast-attacking was a surefire way to survive every fight, but I made up for it by mixing decoctions and trying to fight in different styles. That's a big deal, right? Trying the different forms of combat for flavor's sake? The fact that each form of combat IS viable, even on the hardest difficulty setting (yup) and with low-level enemies upscaled (YUP) is a real triumph. The alchemy system was incredible. Are you the kind of person to collect EVERY DAMN HERB YOU WALK ACROSS? No problem, they all weigh nothing. Find yourself not using potions so you can hoard them, a la '99 elixirs in final fantasy and I've never used one once' style? No problem - you only need to craft a potion once, they automatically refresh _while you rest._ Go nuts! Mix and match! The quality of life was nothing to sneer at, either - flag a recipe and the ingredients are highlighted in shops, eliminating the need to swap back and forth between the shopkeeper and the crafting menu. And if you still need to swap? The alchemy menu is pre-loaded and is a SINGLE CLICK AWAY FROM THE SHOP. Super convenient! The crafting system was a little bit sillier - you very quickly discover Witcher gear, making the forty thousand crafting recipes obsolete before you find them. It's great that there are so many weapons, but I managed to play through the game while only upgrading my gear a handful of times. Oh, god, the in-game card game. Starts out stupid - too simple, too unintersting - and then it becomes a BLAST once you discover there are special cards. You start to think about the optimal way to play around the Scorch card, or consider trying out a spy-heavy deck... I'm super jazzed for the standalone Gwent game that's coming out. The voice acting was sublime. I heard some folks complaining about Ciri being too 'breathy' (not me, nothing is going to dull Ciri in my eyes) and my least favorite voice belongs to Triss (too monotone for my tastes), but otherwise I can't think of a single complaint I've thought or heard. Geralt is just the right amount of gruff and introverted and his actor's subtle vocal shifts serve to showcase the writing on a level rivaling (or exceeding!) femshep, the female version of Mass Effect's main character. This guy doesn't steal the stage, doesn't ham it up, doesn't telecast the dialogue before it's spoken - he just turns words into real, honest-to-god conversation, undertone, and emotion. It's impossible to even conceive of a human having that voice - this can't be a voice actor. It's just Geralt's voice. That's just his. That's it. Someone found Geralt in an alternate dimension and filmed him. It's that good. _And he's not the only one._ The Baron, Yennefer, Crach an Craite, Vernon Roche, fuckin' Zoltan - all of em. Phenomenal voice acting. Ohhhh maaaaan, and the directing - these guys must have worked their asses off. No matter what dialogue choice you make, you sound like you're having a conversation. Dialogue flows naturally, everything segues into the next bit, nobody is angrier or happier than the conversation should allow - and everyone remains in character the whole time. This goes a LONG WAY to creating a believable universe. It feels like the characters get angry because of what is going on around them, or what is being said to them - not just because they had the word 'angrily' in parentheses near the script. Very seldom do you do an about-face on a dialogue tree and think 'huh, that's funny, they were just screaming... but now they're being polite?' A lot of the segue-ability is by virtue of the phrase 'you mentioned x... what's that mean/he up to/that about?' Thing is, you don't notice that particular trick until about halfway through the game - and it's not even an irritant. It's only really used when it's called for - and, as Geralt is a monster hunter interviewing victims and witnesses, it's never out of place. The music is something else, too. Polish folk music might be my new favorite thing (okay, maybe not that badly-tuned flute). Here. Here's a song for staring at a hungry wolf as you circle one another, slowly; a song for sending your own mortality creeping up your spine in shivers. Listen to it. So good. That bassy bit in the background drifting around sets an atmosphere of slow things that drift and creep in the dark, juxtaposed against the anger and ferocity of frantically chanting voices - perfect for slow fights where you size an opponent up and wait to see who lunges first, or frantic dodging and swordplay. The level design is out-of-this-world. Architecture feels real, cities reflect squalor, bustle, or peaceful high-class living. Villages show their poverty and distrust, the sewers of Novigrad feel sufficiently maze-like. Great manors in the swamps feel secluded and far away, yet vulnerable to the denizens of the environment - like they exist but for the grace of those that simply aren't hungry yet. And... oh, that story. I can't describe it. I can't tell you a single thing about it - I would feel terrible spoiling even the minutest detail. This story deserves to be told in completion or not at all. Characters from the books come to life, or are referenced in tomes hidden about the world, or are mentioned in conversation. Geralt and Yennefer's story FINALLY comes to some sort of closure without that stupid 'well, what ACTUALLY happened to them?' complication from the end of the books, Ciri AT LAST has a place in the world that doesn't involve constantly outrunning what she is. The setting even does everything justice. This game happens in the middle of A WAR. But you know what? You never SEE the war. It's discussed a little in this piece: http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/2016-08-28-the-witcher-3-is-one-of-the-best-war-games-theres-ever-been It's there, like a future dinner companion, or a disease. War is just someone coming to visit you, or war is just something that is happening to someone else. You see war's effects - battlefields, wounded men, orphans, poverty - but you never really see the war. You barely know about Emhyr or Radovid on a political scale, their policies, their strategies - and it was true of the previous Witcher stories, too. Statements like 'who controls the Pontar controls the north' mean almost nothing to you - the Pontar is just a place, isn't it? Who cares that this duke should die? What consequences can your actions have on something to big and odd as WAR? It doesn't seem fair that any of this should end. It always, ALWAYS feels like there's more. What about Zerrikania? The battle of Sodden? I desperately want to give Geralt, Yennefer, and Ciri a break, let their story end... but I also desperately want to see it continue. It's a strange feeling. A strange juxtaposition. 11/10, would play again. Probably one of the best games I've ever played. I'll be coming back every couple years to revisit the series, for damn sure.