LogFAQs > #963491457

Damn, crazy to see DA:I end up without enough votes for a ranking.

Planescape: Torment - 5/10

There are parts of this game's story that are really good - most of the Nameless One's storyline and the history of his past incarnations are interesting and sometimes emotional, the Ravel encounter is cool, and the better part of the companion dialog is solid. I grew to like all the party members. I think people forget how many weak parts there are though. It takes hours of shockingly mundane questing before this game becomes remotely interesting. The Planescape setting is fun, but most of this game's depiction of the "City of Portals" is just people from other planes showing up to lecture you about what their planes are like in incredibly over-long and dull monologues. Conceptually interesting characters like Many-As-One are generic RPG faction leaders or quest-givers in practice. The major other plane that you see, Curst, is just another dreary dungeon town full of busywork sidequests, and the hell plane Baator has no sense of threat. The side-plot about the deva is honestly kind of shallow.

When taken as a whole, I don't think I can honestly call this a good story, and especially not a good game story. The "video game" part of Planescape mostly gets in the way of its strengths. CRUCIAL lore is locked behind stat requirements that make most builds an objectively worse experience, a lot of the conversations are extremely stilted because you have to sift through a shitty dialog system to see all the lines, and the pacing gets eviscerated by absurd amounts of redundant text and the need to sort through dull NPCs and weak sidequests to find the important parts. Even though the companion dialog was one of my favorite parts of the game, there is a party member that I didn't bother recruiting because it requires going through several obscure sidequests followed by a combat-heavy area and Planescape has the worst battle system I have ever seen in an RPG. That might not sound like it should come up in a story-based discussion, but the game mechanics are part of the way the story is delivered to you, so them being so unbearable that I chose not to engage with a significant portion of the story is an example of the game failing as a means of conveying that story.