Realms of Arkania: Blade of Destiny (PC) Review

Realms of Arkania: Blade of Destiny is a prime example of a game that should not exist. Not in the sense of a game that is little more than a rip-off of better titles in a market quickly becoming overly-saturated with Western RPGs, but a game in which the most basic of functions ended up mangled beyond belief, past the point of mere incompetence, to a level where it is suspect that the developers were actively attempting to mess with the player. The game is so horrifically flawed to the most fundamental of levels that even creating the characters is a task mired in confusion and problems.

In any sane game the player would be allowed certain liberties, such as basic information as to what on earth they were getting themselves in to. Not so in this game! Nope! Instead of detailed character classes or even a brief seven-word summary, like 'The elf shoots arrows that hurt a lot,' the player is thrown into a screen where they have to pick between a series of classes with absolutely no information about them! What's the difference between a witch, druidess, and sorceress? No clue! A Leaf, Ice, or Silvan elf? Not a hint! Sure, it can be extrapolated that a warrior wears armour and swings a sword, but even one-sentence summaries of these classes would go a long way into telling what a 'Thorwalian woman' actually does!

Then comes character design. No, not stat design; what the character looks like. While the player can pick through a number of portraits, the actual design of what the character will look like is determined entirely at random, so either get used to clicking the 'reroll' button a lot or rue whatever creator decided to not even include pre-set designs to be toggled through. The white-haired elf portrait can end up being a brunette on the field because the dice wills it. Not that it matters because, even on the highest graphical settings, the characters are such pasty smears of art that it can be hard to see their own mouths. Things only go downhill from here.

The character isn't even stat-ed yet and, already, a multitude of problems have presented itself, only continuing to pile on. When it comes to stat the character, instead of functioning on a stat-buy system, like Knights of the Old Republic, a system of pre-assigned numbers for the player to place, or even something as basic as letting the player see their own rolls, the game prefers to hide each roll until it comes to assign said roll. This can easily result in a character that, not only has outright horrific stats, but one with bizarre values that, had the player been informed beforehand, could have at least been compensated for.

This horrible design spills over into things such as combat. Once again, whereas a competent game would have showed values or at least let the player understand just how the various stats worked together, the game throws them to the literal wolves and lets the player discover that the fire-spell they invested a large amount of points into has a decent chance of misfiring and doing nothing. That's not to mention not giving even the slightest hint as to what skills may or may not be actually needed. The ability to play an instrument, for example, seems like it might be a useless skill, but can be used to drum up some extra coin and can easily end up being more valuable than a spell simply because the spell almost never succeeds without heavy point investment.

Some might say that this lack of information is a return to the older styles of role-play, where it wasn't clear what skills might be needed and a character might not come out as intended, encouraging role-play. Putting aside the questionability of such a statement, this might have been a potential target… if the characters did not end up having stories apparently assigned to them regardless. That cheating elf whom had a multitude of points invested into dance when the player decided to recreate the fantasy version of Charlie's Angels? She may end up being the granddaughter of some great elven hero simply because the game wills it and did not even bother telling the player until after the fact. It would have been far better to provide a simple list of characters, instead of encouraging users to create their own, only to have things randomly assigned, and then pile up hidden things like this on top of it.

The incompetence does not stop there. Even the most simplistic things, like keeping a character's gender correct, can, and are, screwed up as, on multiple occasions, 'she' has randomly flipped to 'he' for seemingly no reason at all. Either the world of Realms of Arkania: Blade of Destiny is in a constant state of gender flux, or its developers are lacking in cognitive power, as their own narrator did not notice that the innkeeper's daughter suddenly became the innkeeper's son.

However, ultimately, this pales in comparison to the greatest shortcoming of the game. It is simply frustrating beyond rational measure. It might be one thing to be assigned confusing skills and spells with little clue how they might work together, but so long as the character is viable it can be used… except it cannot, as, even on easy, the game is merciless in what it does, and even a starting fight can more than floor a beginner who doesn't understand the system because the game makes absolutely no effort to explain it.

In short, Realms of Arkania: Blade of Destiny is akin to trying to destroy a building with little more than one's head. Even after one wall gets broken down from mind-numbing problems, a new wall exists that needs to be bashed through and dealt with. In a proper game, even one of these shortcomings would have been bad, if not outright unacceptable. Realms of Arkania: Blade of Destiny has multitudes.