This one was exhausting. Wrath of the Righteous is a colossal and ridiculously ambitious project, delivering a high-fantasy epic on a scale and level of complexity that puts the competition to shame. Even though it has plenty of rough edges and presents itself in a very restrictive way, it is a respectable and deservedly successful work, offering an experience with strengths far beyond what its minimal budget should have been able to support, and earning itself a place among the best representatives of the genre. The presentation is probably the most consistent within this genre, and it doesn’t lag behind productions with much higher budgets. It features strong art direction, managing to retain that sharp clarity of pre-rendered backgrounds while presenting a distinct look with greater depth through richly detailed fully 3D environments and character models. Even better is the framing of the interface, with flourishes everywhere and a feeling that you’re perusing a storybook and moving miniatures on a table. Pure charm. Combat animations and effects are nothing special, but they do their job—especially when paired with good sound design and a killer soundtrack, with true epic anthems. You won’t see anything elaborate like cinematics or dynamic environments, but they delivered the best possible result. But it definitely has problems. And I wouldn’t recommend the game to just anyone without a long list of caveats. I paid something like U$1 for it, and for that price I will never again find something with the same level of quality and replay value. But I would be lying if I said the time investment was proportional to the fun. For something that demands so much dedication, the payoff is a bit disappointing, especially if you already have a decent set of references and are no longer impressed by empty power fantasies and uneven complexity. The player takes on the role of a character who rises to prominence for mysterious reasons, and is given the supreme task by the local royalty of gathering and commanding armies in a brutal and grueling campaign against the forces of the Abyss, in a war known as the Fifth Crusade. Along the way, our “hero" goes through various adventures, meets colorful figures, solves mysteries, builds a small political, military, and economic power base, issues decrees that change the course of the war and the lives of those under their command and protection, crushes enemy armies, conquers territories, and turns extraplanar entities into ground meat. Your character also goes through a kind of super puberty . The game consists of an interchange between two parts. The main one is a straightforward traditional CRPG adventure structured in the style of the classic Infinity Engine games, where you explore with your party a series of small maps, fighting enemies, solving puzzles, and consuming most of the narrative through an old-fashioned text interface. The other is the infamous “Crusade Mode,” which essentially works as a parallel game meant to simulate the abstraction of controlling troops, conquering territories, etc. The game’s main appeal is being a highly customizable experience, with a multitude of adjustable difficulties and character creation options. It is meant to be an epic with seemingly endless potential. Crusade Mode, although justified, works against the core of the experience, killing the game’s pace. It is limiting. Inefficient in its narrative function, it is simply a time sink with no sense of spectacle. It adds very little to your adventure and detracts enormously from it. Contrary to the idea that the game is extremely intimidating and hard to learn, I’d say the problem is that, once you navigate through the immense number of archetypes, classes, skills, and spells variables, in a system that demands a lot of commitment to be learned properly, you eventually realize that it is nothing more than a more customizable revision of the same worn-out and limited system we had in 90s CRPGs — just with a lot of fluff getting in the way of what actually matters. Nearly the entire design seems confined to limitations from the 90s. And thus, instead of elevating the genre with immersive dramatic or mechanical possibilities that go beyond simply slaughtering monsters in a ridiculously outdated system — inheriting several inconvenient mechanics that make no sense outside the tabletop—, they double down and throw a big glass of been there done that in your face. You can hardly expect much more than what Baldur’s Gate 1 offered. Imagine a version of that with modern QoL features, far more padding, and a terrible sense of structure. Old but Gold, yeah? If you’re expecting an amalgam of well-crafted narratives arcs that form an engrossing storyline, with memorable characters, interesting quests, fun interactions, and something meaningful to say, this game is not for you. This is a min-maxer’s wet dream. Made especially for those who prefer stacking numbers rather than engaging in dynamic tactical challenges or fun conversations. If you enjoy crunching numbers and watching your sheet blossom into an illegible pile of descriptions, you’ll love this game. If you don’t expect any fun use of the tools the game gives you, any narrative integration or deeper interactions beyond disarming traps, opening chests, and very, very occasionally interacting with the environment in a way more meaningful than just recognizing set dressing, then... well... good for you! This arithmetic monstrosity that is your characters has little relevance beyond kicking some ass. And the narrative component, which could have supported all this, leaves a lot to be desired. The story suffer from a strong tonal discrepancy, showing all kinds of extreme and disturbing brutality, while at the same time presenting cartoonish characters that feel like parodies straight out of the rulebooks, with priorities and behavior that make no sense at all. The text lacks awareness. Characters seem to completely ignore what is happening or has happened and appear to prioritize their generic roles over the situation they are in, which makes it very hard to see them as people who actually live in that world. Which in turn makes the world feel far less immersive. Even your companions, are mostly one-note archetypes with a tragic background attached and little more than that. Most of the time it seems like they're not even there. Quests in general are very basic and don't tell anything, offering little more than a setup that justifies entering a place and killing everything until you reach a “boss” without any sense of antagonism. I’s hard to care about anything when there wasn't even a single memorable conversation. The writing lacks wit and has almost no sense of objectivity. There is no tension. The bloated word count, mountains of boring exposition, and lack of eloquence in the prose comes as a bonus. The only thing that kinda works is the overarching narrative (the outlines of your military campaign and the progression of power), mainly because of the Mythic Paths, which add a lot of flavor to the game, but frankly, it's just not enough. At its core, it's an inefficient and ineffective narrative that wastes a lot of time and doesn't build or delve into much, navigating a jumble of themes without a firm grasp on anything. It doesn't create interesting situations for the player to immerse themselves in, it doesn't present engaging problems, and worst of all, it simply forgets choices and stats whenever it's convenient. Anyway... This is a time-consuming beautiful mess that requires a lot of effort to sift through before you get to the fun. There's definitely a good RPG here, but you have to dig. And in the end it might not be worth it.