Drakensang

There always seems to be another Dark Eye video game adaptation I hadn't heard of before, although in Drakensang's case it's because I had mixed it up with Drakengard, thinking they're the same game. And as I don't play Japanese games, I had ignored it until I happened to watch some video featuring less-known roleplaying games and I realized my error. Drakensang seems to have carried 'The Dark Eye' as its subtitle (the other way around in German: 'Das Schwarze Auge: Drakensang') but now the game is being sold without it.

We have Dragon Age at home

Drakensang is a party-based, real-time-with-pause RPG utilizing the aforementioned German tabletop system. In terms of gameplay, it's similar to Dragon Age: Origins but with lower production values. (Drakensang actually predates Origins by a year.) I got the impression of pretty dark fantasy from my previous visits to The Dark Eye setting but Drakensang doesn't come off as grim. (I assume it's the same one in this -- maybe it's not.)  And there are elves and dwarves whom I don't recall seeing in Demonicon nor the Blackguard games. In terms of magic level, Drakensang is pretty low, though.

The intro cinematic hints a dragon theme but it takes a while for the story to get there. At first you're simply going to visit an old friend who requested your presence in a letter. That leads to a murder investigation and eventually to a sort of a 'chosen one' plot. Your companions are pretty basic stuff -- quite on the level of the first Baldur's Gate, in fact. They do comment on various things occasionally, though.

There are few errors in the English localization of the game, like a special talent having a different name in different places and some skill check in dialogue being in German, but they don't really matter. An actual issue is how every stat and such is abbreviated to mere two letters, making you guess what something is. The English voices are fine, with exception of the egregiously overacting Malgorra.

Return to The Dark Eye

The rules were kind of familiar -- spells especially -- but the implementation is again a bit different. And I had forgotten most of it anyway, so there was some (re-)learning required. The Dark Eye is unnecessarily complicated in how skill checks require rolling a d20 against 3 different stats in most cases and then your skill rank is subtracted from the rolls to hit the difficulty value -- yes, a lower roll is better.

Huge tracts of land

Like in Blackguards, the problematic wound system is in Drakensang, too. Each wound suffered gives stacking penalties, and at 5 wounds a character goes down regardless of their current hit points. Early on you have to bandage someone after -- and sometimes during -- every fight. The 5-wound limit usually comes into play against enemies like giant crabs whose attacks that can cause more than one wound per hit.

There's a healing spell but it needs many ranks to cure actual wounds. The Willpower talent is used to resist wounds and once you eventually hit around 15 ranks on it and have raised base stats for every character, wounds are no longer a thing -- unless your character goes down from the lack of hit points. Enemies also take wounds but big bosses are immune to them so you can't mass Mortal Blow them dead right away.

Drakensang's character creation is not quite free-form: you have to pick from a selection of "classes" and there's no visual customization either. Class selection matters truly only for magic: whether your character can cast spells and if they're a full caster. The Charlatan, for instance, is a mage college dropout and will be unable to learn the late game spells like Fireball. Otherwise any character can become good at pretty much anything. You can remove the initial skill points the game has assigned: no need to focus on more than one weapon type etc.

Mage recommended

I read that making your character a full caster is recommended and I would agree now. Classes such as the elementalist (my pick) and battlemage start with a summon spell and that is immensely useful, particularly at the start when you don't yet have a full 4-man party. The first companion capable of summoning comes much later, too. The fire elemental my character got wasn't the most durable summon (I replaced it with a djinn later) but it definitely did help.

Offensive spellcasting didn't seem very effective in combat due to the long casting times. A single spell won't kill anything outright either. Even the late game area-of-effect spells only weaken groups the rare times you get an opportunity to cast your spell. Drakensang is much like the first Blackguards for spellcasting: it's mainly useful for buffing and debuffing.

Spellcasting is disabled while wearing metal armor and that may apply to metal weapons, too. (I realized now that I forgot to test that.) But fencing weapons at least are excluded from that -- reminds me of old D&D druids: how they can use scimitars and sickles despite the metal restriction. Fencing weapons is also what I might suggest for a spellcaster because: 1) there's a good, wounding rapier in the first third of the game, and 2) you get a special non-metal shield from the main quest which you obviously can't wield with a two-handed staff a mage might be drawn to use. You also get special non-metal armor pieces from the main quest: they are hidden in the quest items tab in your inventory and I hadn't realized their existence until I got the shield. With the Fastness of Body spell, your spellcaster will have better protected body parts than your full plate wearing fighters.

One argument against using fencing weapons on your mage is that you might want Gladys, for instance, to use fencing weapons as well. And there aren't many really good weapons in any one category. It might have been a good idea to have Gladys to use a ranged weapon but the game doesn't have a secondary weapon slot and I reckoned it would be annoying to open inventory to equip a melee weapon every time something got close to her.

Combat lacks finesse

Drakensang has no difficulty options, which caused some trepidation for me: would the game be easy or challenging? It turned out to be straightforward but still slow going -- arduous, even. The AI behavior settings of your characters is limited to attacking things freely or attacking only when attacked. Drakensang's easier combat encounters would go by so much quicker if your characters could use their special attacks on their own without micromanagement. Everyone ever gets only 1 attack per turn: killing enemies takes an eternity with basic attacks.

Another huge problem in the combat is that positioning matters but Drakensang doesn't let you have proper control over it. Attacks from behind can't be parried but if you try to move a character when there are multiple enemies attacking them, the enemies will shuffle around too -- through each other, I might add -- and you won't be in any better position than you started with. And in the midst of the shuffling, someone will hit the character, too.

Everyone also gets only a single parry attempt per turn -- two while wielding a shield. Thus the system encourages ganging up on one enemy at a time to get attacks through far easier. Your peeps don't understand that so you have to manage that as well. Admittedly, it's sometimes beneficial to let them pick a new target on their because they tend to select someone attacking them and thus be less likely to turn their back on an enemy -- not that they can do anything about being flanked.

Some challenge included

The first really difficult part of the game for me was the quest A Plague of Rats. The quest is an amazingly tedious cave dive, during which you'll kill around 150 giant rats. The boss fight I found impossible at the character level 4 I was there. The boss summons 3 rats at every 25% of its health lost and the rats would always go for my character who wasn't yet strong enough to withstand such an attack. And she going down would cascade the gank to other characters. Fortunately you can finish the quest in a later chapter. At level 9 the boss was much easier.

After that there was no difficulty worth mentioning until the final part of the game: the ascent of the Drakensang Mountain. The map features respawning waves of enemies and the last bit proved to be quite problematic. You get a group of four dragonlings: one of them a high-health brute and three of them thunderbolts spamming casters. The casters would target one character at a time and that was just too much. Regrouping after a fight was not possible because the next group would already have spawned.

In the end I managed to get past the part by spamming health potions on the characters being targeted. The final boss after that was so much easier than the approach.

Drakensang was, as an experience, very hard average. It works, is bug-free, and has all necessary parts. But at the same time, it's a tedious trek that makes you do a lot of repetitive work for miniscule increments. Radon Labs went on to make a prequel, Drakensang: The River of Time, which is next on my backlog. Maybe it's better but I have doubts.