#we're also not gonna go into the legal controversies surrounding BugHuge and 38 Studios

[sarsaparillia]

you know what? fuck it. i’m gonna talk about this game because i love it and i want other people to give it a chance and hey maybe if other people give it a chance i will no longer have accidentally contributed quite literally thirty percent of the fandom’s fanfiction lmao

kingdoms of amalur is what dragon age inquisition wishes it was. there. i said it. it’s out there in the world, now, and you can fight me about it

here we go, friends:

everything that DAI does well? amalur does it better, with the sole exception of romance, because amalur is not about romance unless u count alyn shir whomst i love so much but honestly u cannot date her the way she DESERVES to be dated WHATEVER

but the thing is that amalur does not HAVE to be about romance. amalur is about hitting monsters very hard with a wildly fantastic array of weapons. amalur is about fate and choice and also, again, absolutely shredding shit into pieces. amalur is about treasure hunting and wars and sticking your nose into everyone else’s business in a way that i have only ever seen one (1) champion of kirkwall pull off in a way that works.

amalur has the best fucking take on Truly Weird Immortals that i’ve ever seen

like, listen, i cannot talk enough about how ABSOLUTELY BONKERS the fae are in this game. these writers REALLY LEANED IN to what a culture of creepy nature fuckers who do not die so much as regenerate would look like. interacting with the fae is fucking UNCOMFORTABLE in a lot of instances, because of how ABSOLUTELY GODDAMN ALIEN they are. amalur’s fae put literally every other immortal race in every other video i’ve ever played to fucking shame!!!!! i LOVE it!!!

yes, the human/elf NPC models can be a little weird-looking; they’re ugly in a way that real people are ugly, which i like, actually, but not everyone is like me. but honestly, it’s the backgrounds in this game that make it. it’s like walking through every single fairy dream you had as a child come to life. you want red-earth deserts? detyre. you want ancient forests with trees so wide they make you feel like an ant? dalentarth. you want a rotting jungle on the ocean? klurikon. you want greece? there’s DLC for that, and also a bunch of god-chosen stone giants who spout greek poetry. there’s a whole island of undead pirates. there’s the plains of erathell, which are still recovering from a magical fairy war a thousand years ago called the godstorm. there’s alabastra, cold and beautiful and burned to pieces, ripped to jagged parts by the people who ought to have loved it best. there is GRIEF, because this is a war-torn country where things used to be stunning. like, man, what i would not GIVE to see alabastra in its prime, just fucking LOOK at this shit:

and that doesn’t even begin to get into the fact that this game, playing as a woman, is.... gay. it’s gay, y’all!!! it’s so gay that i don’t always know how to handle it!!!

and like sure, that’s because it was definitely coded with a male-player-character in mind, but they just... never removed those lines, playing as a woman? so you wander around and you get hit on constantly, and given that i am personally gay as all hell, this delights me. but the inverse of this is that the one male character who DOES hit on you also hits on you as a dude. i love grim onwig, that’s all there is to it.

it’s a loneliner game, in some ways-- more like skyrim. you run around, you buy or are given houses, you die a bunch of times to the FUCKING ettins in ettinmere, god i hate those fucking ettins, two-headed giant blue bastards who definitely kill and eat you. they are so rude. you fall DEEPLY in love with adessa and wish you could play as a gnome; ysa is the most incredible city in the game, i’ve truly never seen anything like it.

and yeah, in some ways, it falls prey to exactly all of the problems early aughts’ RPG’s did. it can be repetitive, a lot of fetch-quests, a lot of “mother of god, THIS AGAIN”

and yet. AND YET.

i’ve poured four hundred hours into this game, and every single time i start a new play, i find quests and stories that i somehow managed to miss the other times i’ve played it. the NPCs all have very distinct personalities, which is a goddamn feat, given how many of them there are. pick any single character with speaking lines, and they’ll be distinct unto themselves. and i mean that-- even the random characters in taverns, every single shopkeep, anyone and everyone you speak to, all of them. they say things and you go “hold on what the FUCK”, even when there’s no quest behind them. the depth of worldbuilding that went into this game is INSANE; these writers really, really loved what they were creating, and that shines through in every single moment you play

please give it a chance. it’s really, really worth it. i leave you with the empty court of the winter king, because the first time i stepped into it, it felt like coming home.