Simultaneously the best and worst CRPG I've ever played. The reactivity is Godlike: I made a Tiefling demon hunter, whose hatred of them made him get closer and closer to becoming one himself, going as far as working with one in order to defeat another. The ends justify the means, right? Well after an instance of literal divine intervention, he realized just how far he had fallen. The angels wouldn't take him, but under the leadership of a gold dragon, the commander became the first mortal to turn into a dragon and save the world! Part of me was just trying to see if I could break the story, and I just couldn't.

Pretty epic, huh? It's too bad literally everything else about this game sucks ass. There's a reason why so many people play with cheats. Let me lay it out for you:

1. Pathfinder is a clunky system, and unless you're going to no-life the game and understand every minutia of combat, it is an inferior experience to any other RPG system. ♥♥♥♥ DnD, I'll take GURPS over this ♥♥♥♥. I feel like playing this game on the tabletop would actually turn someone autistic if exposed for long enough. I'm no stranger to CRPGs or tabletop RPGs -- Hell, I played the first Owlcat game for like 30 hours, and I STILL had to restart my character after act 2 in Wrath. More on that later!

2. The game is too big. Too long. I'm not even counting the hours (like 150 with only SOME DLC), D20 systems break down at higher levels. It is known. Get used to enemies with AC 50, 60, AC ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ 70?! You HAVE TO pre-buff, meaning you HAVE TO start a fight and reload to see what's coming. Totally immersion-breaking, completely un-fun. "But all the fights are hand-made and exciting, right?" WRONG. You will face TRASH MOBS over and over with 40 or 50 AC at the end of the game. Squish this ♥♥♥♥ down, for ♥♥♥♥'s sake!

But the megalomania extends to every part of the game. The AC is high, so they have to inundate you with potions to make builds viable. There's a million weapon types: wouldn't want the one person using an orcish double-axe to feel left out in act 4! Toss a couple of otherwise useless magical items around! Wands and scrolls for EVERYBODY! The mythic and class abilities have the same problem: there's so much overlap. So many abilities. I just put the 10 I use the most on the first hotbar and forgot about the rest. I already did my taxes this year, I'm not digging through 100 pages of spells and abilities just to find the obnoxiously named CC stun that would work against Fays on Tuesday, but only if you haven't eaten today.

Speaking of quantity over quality: crusade mode. It's a waste of time. Literally turn it off. It never gets good, it only serves to gate off content that you want to see to pad this extremely long game out more. I played it first on normal mode, then on easy mode, then I turned it off. It's best off. How embarrassing.

3. The UI is unable to rise to the occasion. Like I mentioned: there's an incredible amount of filler here. That would be bad in itself, but the UI is ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ too. Have fun sorting through 30 wands, 100 scrolls, and a bunch of other vendor trash just to find something that gives you haste. But the real crime here is how bad it is during character creation.

Sure, it shows you your class tree - not even Baldur's Gate 3 does that. But it doesn't tell you mythic abilities. Like, for example, if you wanted to make an evil demon barbarian, and you didn't know that the barbarian rage and the demon rage are two different rages, making your class pick redundant after 30 ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ HOURS OF GAMEPLAY.

Ask me how I know about that.

Would it spoil the mythic choices available? Yeah, as-is it would. Make the choices more universally good, maybe. It would make them less exciting, but I wouldn't have wasted my first playthrough. Maybe make them passive abilities only, or make them have one or two really, really powerful moves that you can't get from other classes. Or make them story paths, and have no or limited mechanical involvement. Of course, you'd have to squish down the encounters (which should be done regardless).

So do I recommend the game? As you can tell, this is a tough question. If you are a veteran CRPG player, love reactive story telling, want to obsess over a system that frankly isn't worth it, or you want to cheat/lower the difficulty just to see the good parts of this game, then yes.

If you're new to CRPGs, don't play this game. If you don't want to spend hours reading online forum posts to figure out how a bad RPG system works, don't play this game. If you value your time, don't play this game. If you don't want to cheat or ignore large swaths of the game, don't play this game.

When it's good, it's perfect. When it's bad, I cannot make a worse game if I tried.