Review falithes 3/5 · Apr 8, 2025
An abject lack of pants
I never got to play this back in the day because I didn't own a PS2 until much later. Not to mention this also required the multi-tap adapter to play with 3 friends. So this ended up being a game I always wanted to play but never had the opportunity in my youth. I had played Baldur's Gate Dark Alliance …
I never got to play this back in the day because I didn't own a PS2 until much later. Not to mention this also required the multi-tap adapter to play with 3 friends. So this ended up being a game I always wanted to play but never had the opportunity in my youth. I had played Baldur's Gate Dark Alliance and loved it (this was a follow-up game made by the same people) which made me want to play it all the more!
I did manage to final get to play this with friends and while it's deeply flawed and dated, we had a lot of fun! The gameplay is dated, which to be fair so was Dark Alliance. But hey if you want to run around in a high fantasy setting killing orcs and other monsters with your friends, this does scratch that itch. Most importantly with up to four players. It's a shame this never made it to the XBOX or Gamecube since both of those consoles supported 4 controllers by default. O well.
Like with Dark Alliance, while there is technically a plot, it's pretty unfocused and incoherent. Often times you are just fed a contrived bread crumb trail of where you need to go next for the next important McGuffin. I honestly couldn't summarize the plot to you. At some point there was a goon Orc, who turned out to be a demon, then there was a mermaid, a vampire, a giant, why not! The writing is very generic and cheesy, which did make it fun to laugh at. Not to mention how absurdly horny the devs were with every female character being voluptuous and scantily clad with PS2 era boob physics whenever the character moved slightly. Outrageous.
The hardest part of the game was figuring out what we needed to do next due to how long it was since our last play session. But we pushed on. With vague directions and often needing to hunt for X amount of some item. This did result in some very perplexing decisions by the enemies and NPCs of the game. For one quest, we needed to destroy multiple subterranean catapults. Not sure why the Orcs moved all these catapults into a cave (and deep in said cave mind you!). Honestly we probably should have just left the catapults alone. Let the Orcs think they had a master plan. Then some elves told us to pull a lever to open the gate to their own town. Which they had the brilliant idea to install a ways down a river and inside a random cave. Then there was the overwhelming ambivalence of the elves while their tree fort is being raided by orcs and goblins actively. And they just kind of stand there and complain about it. Telling us to do something about it!
The game does kind of throw in random new things at you. Such as a lava tank. You need to all get inside it and traverse a large lake of lava. All to find a lost girl. What was comical about this sequence was how my friend accidentally hit the button to exit said tank and he immediately died to the lava. This happened multiple times (and a few of my other friends allegedly did the same thing. Maybe I did too. Allegedly.). Then after traversing all of this, there was a wizard blocking our path. After getting past him we finally found the girl we were looking for. Somehow she managed to traverse a lava lake and get past a wizard by herself. Not sure she really needed us to rescue her considering we struggled to just stay inside the tank.
Then there's a weird sequence, involving the mermaid I mentioned earlier, where you get the ability to breath under water. You go through an "underwater" cave, where you walk normally, but slower and there's a water-like filter over the screen. The issue with this sequence is how it completely tanked the hardware of the PS2 causing its frame rate to slow to a crawl. This game really pushed the PS2 to its very limits. Even torches would cause the whole game to slow down into the single digit frames. Which was pretty funny, especially hearing the slowed sound affects. Making it sound like we were all on downers.
But hey we came to smash things and loot things. And that mostly happened except for pants. My friend who played a wizard was rocking the same pair of burlap sack pants for most of the game. It became a meme for us. My friend's Quixotical quest for pants. Do they even exist? Are pants actually a metaphor for a state of consciousness? Can they ever be obtained?