![]() Meanwhile, I was already at end-game, anyway, so even if I had gotten them leveled I would've had next to no opportunity to use them. Some weapons could only be used by characters I just didn't use, or else didn't match the weapon specializations I'd given that character. One required me to kill 15 beetles after I'd already cleared the entire base game of monsters, and cleared nearly half of the maps in the White March before I even got the thing. The new "soulbound" weapons are meant to add extra incentive to engage in combat, since they get stronger as you complete combat-related objectives with them, but I just couldn't get them leveled by the end of the content. I should also point out that they reused the voice actors of Kana and Sagani for Zahua and Devil of Carcoc, respectively, which takes even more away from their characters because they sound virtually identical to preexisting party members. I kept both of them in my party for the entire DLC because I was expecting them to have some kind of important role or contribution to the experience, but I felt like I gained nothing by having them with me. The Devil of Caroc at least has her own quest that expands on her personality, but it's over way too quickly, and then her character development just stops. Zahua seemed pretty boring to begin with, but he doesn't even have his own quest. Once the introductions are over, they kind of fade into the background. Both of them appear to have some kind of interesting personality trait when you first meet them (Zahua the masochistic monk believes in the virtue of pain and suffering, and that the world is perfect because of its flaws, and the Devil of Caroc, as the rogue is called, is the soul of a serial killer transplanted into the body of a robot) but the game doesn't do much with their personalities past their expository dialogue. The two new companions aren't much better. ![]() ![]() You basically always have some kind of role-playing option, but the "right" option is almost always completely obvious: do you side with or against the drug runner, the slaver, the thieves, the murderer? In the base game, there'd often be some kind of twist that made you consider the "bad" person's perspective and, sometimes, even sympathize with them, but here, they're just straightforward, one-dimensional "bad person" archetypes. Perhaps it's just because the DLC consists of just four main maps, but the quests often felt like a much simpler matter of "go here, fetch this, kill that" than the majority of quests in the base game because they didn't have me wrestling with moral or ethical conflict, practically at all. There are other good ones, of course, but sadly, a lot of them are just as bland and uninteresting as the main quest. There's one where you follow the soul memories of a meek adventurer trying to find his soul twin, which ends in an unexpected twist, and another one where you're hunting down pieces of an ancient warrior's helmet, reliving his memories and altering the helmet's stats based on the decisions you make in his flashbacks. Some of the side-quests are fairly interesting, at least. You have to make a few important decisions along the main quest line that seem like they'd have a lasting impact and possible branching outcomes in "part two," but they seemed to have little to no consequence within "part one." One can only wonder. Once I activated the forge, the main quest line just kind of ended, and I was left standing around town going "that's it?" as I talked to various NPCs trying to figure out what the actual consequences of the story were. For a game to sell the expansions in separate parts, they really do need to be self-contained so that you can justify buying only one and feel satisfied with the experience, but you'd think there'd be some kind of teaser about where the story's going to go in the next installment to entice to you to get the second one. As "part one" of a two-part expansion, the story is entirely self-contained it doesn't end in some dramatic cliffhanger that would force you to buy the next DLC just to finish the story, but at the same time it doesn't seem to set anything up for the sequel.
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