[Subtitles by danielsangeo] Welcome to the Game Dungeon. Today I've chosen "The Chosen:
Well of Souls" and what a choice it is. The Chosen is a hack-n-slash action RPG. This is a Polish game. Now sometimes I cut the intro short, but this time, I'll show you the full
thing so you can really soak it in. Plus, we have some WORLD-CLASS
voice acting coming up here. I've never heard acting quite
like this. Okay, here we go: ["The Emerald Tablet...
The secrets of Hermes... ["Power over life and death..."] Yeah! ["For a thousand years a Chosen
One was picked to stand vigil."] Ah. Like the title. I get it. ["A sacred duty."] That's not really a sentence. ["For the Tablet has the potential
to do great good or great evil."] Evil. Mhmhmhmhhm. Mhmhmheheh. Mnyeheheheh. ["The lure of such power can
corrupt even the strongest of men."] Even me. ["It can twist the mind and the soul."] ...okay. ["It can breed treachery."] Sure. Okay, something's happening. ["The Emerald Tablet is gone..."] Uh-oh. ["The Chosen One taken..."] He was just some old man in a
robe. What was he supposed to do? ["The powers of evil have arisen."] Muhuhuhuh! Myahahaha! Muhahahahaha! Okay, so that intro should let you know
what kind of game we're in for here. The narrator rambles on
about the Emerald Tablet and an old man gets
hacked up with a scimitar. I guess that's all we need to know. And that voice acting! Man! Let's get started. So we have our industry standard choices
between a warrior, an archer and a mage. Now I'll get into this later but I find
this game definitely favors the archer, so that's what I'm going to play as. Begin! ["The one evil has come on flaming wings!"]
"Flaming wings!" ["I shall fall... ["I, Callidus, Master Alchemist... Magus..."]
"Magus..." ["With the last of my magic, I
reach out to you, my apprentice. ["The balance of power between
good and evil has been upset."] Ah! ["The Emerald Tablet has been taken and
someone has opened the Wells of Souls - ["the hordes of Hell have
been erupted onto the earth."] Oh no! ["And perhaps worst of all... The
Chosen One has been captured..."] (gasps) ["The keeper of the Tablet."] Wait, if the Chosen One got captured,
then who was that old man that got killed? Just some guy? ["You must go to the city of Kamieniec.
The city is under siege by demons, ["but you must find the Laboratory
of the Society of Alchemists. ["They have secreted themselves
away... Look for the Eternal Serpent."] What does THAT mean? ["The alchemists will help you. They have
vast knowledge of the evil you will face... ["and you will need it, for the forces
aligned against you are formidable. ["You are our hope, Hunter."] Now I know what you're thinking. You're thinking, "Hey, is
that narrator going to return, "or is this game going to be like 'Oblivion' "where Patrick Stewart gave us five minutes
of voice acting, then got killed off?" ["Take that!"] Well, not to worry. He'll be back! So we finally start and I have to
say... I'm liking what I'm seeing. Now this may come as a surprise to you
but this game was actually a budget title so my expectations were a
little diminished at this point, but I'm liking these graphics. This has
good lighting for the engine, good color, and enough visual details to be interesting. We immediately have some
atmosphere to this place. To me, this is a perfect example of
dated graphics but good art design. That's all I need. I will take these visuals any day over
a modern game with a tinted screen, desaturated colors,
ugly lighting, and so on. So we move forward and
we're treated to a cutscene. ["Stop!! Identify yourself...
Or I'll shoot!" ["Kalinow, what is going on here?!" ["It's a spy! A demon from
hell! It must be killed!" ["Fredrick, stand down! Have
you gone mad? This is no spy." ["It could be a shape-shifter!
What if it transforms into a demon? ["Well, then you can start shooting."] Okay, there's no avoiding it.
Let's talk about this voice acting. That cutscene we just saw is exactly
what I would expect from two roleplayers with no acting experience whatsoever
conducting a "Dungeons & Dragons" session. (monotone) "Hello, traveler.
Welcome to our inn... "Wha-which-are you looking for information?" This is a budget title, but I think they
blew their budget on these graphics. Which was probably the right decision,
actually, but this is what we're left with. It's been a while since I've heard
voice acting this bad in a game. For me, my gold standard of bad voice
acting is the original "Resident Evil". ["JOSEPH!"] There were a lot of games with
bad voice acting in the 90s, but Resident Evil has a
fair number of cutscenes, and just keeps the bad
acting from beginning to end. ["Wow! What a mansion!" ["Stop it! Don't open that door!" ["But Chris is!"] [gunshot] ["What is it?" ["Maybe it's... Chris."] But the big difference is
this game came out in 2007. There were a lot more resources
for getting voice actors by then, so that there's less of an
excuse for this, but here we are. And if that's not enough, to really
add to that low budget feeling, we get plain text for most
of our dialog interactions. So in other words, we should be thankful
when we even GET the bad voice acting. But hey, this is an ACTION
RPG, so how's the gameplay? Well, it's looking competent. Enemies seem take the right
amount of punishment to kill, you have branching side paths, and this city actually feels like
there was some effort put into it. Now again, these graphics are more what I
would expect from 2002 rather than 2007, but hey, I'm not complaining. I will say there's maybe a little
too many crates and barrels you can break open looking for loot. Now I know "Diablo" clones
are all about collecting loot, but I think this one gets a little tedious. See, the thing is loot works
differently in some of those games. In "Dungeon Siege", you have the automatic
pickup button which makes life easier, in "Titan Quest", you can ignore most
of the loot that falls on the ground... this game has none of that. Again I'll come back to this, but you kind of want to be
collecting all the loot you can find. It's going to make a difference later. Oh, and the game seems to be
taking a page from "Diablo II", and having enemy shamans that
respawn the enemies you just killed. I hate this crap. I didn't find it fun
back then, I don't find it fun now. I like my enemies to STAY DEAD!
Why is this such a hard concept? There! You thinking about getting back up? Well don't! This game actually DOES keep most of the
enemies dead, but I don't like exceptions. It just runs counter to
all my life experience. Another mechanic lifted from
Diablo II is the stamina meter. It sucks. That's about all
there is to say about it. Whoops! Have to stop everything
so I can recharge my stamina. Yep. So after shooting and stopping, we
finally make it to our destination: A burning building hides
the secret laboratory. Yeah, I guess that works. Nobody's
going to think to go in there. We're then treated to another cutscene and honestly, this is one of the
better voice actors in the game. ["Welcome to the Society
of Alchemists, Hunter."] He's not amazing, but he doesn't
immediately rip me out of the game and make me envision some forced drama
exercise in a high school English class the way the other actors do. The same cannot be said for
our protagonist, however. ["You have magic here!
Weapons to equip an army! ["Can you not help these people!?"] I have to wonder what the story was here. My guess is they needed somebody
who could speak English, couldn't afford to pay any ACTUAL actors, so this might be the girlfriend
or cousin of one of the staff who did indeed speak English, so she automatically got the part
because there was no one else. And no, the other heroes aren't much better. ["Yes. Is there no way you can help them?
They may not survive another attack." ["What nonsense is this?
Callidus has fallen and..."] Anyway, I don't remember
exactly when I realized the story to this game doesn't matter at
all, but I think it must've been here. You're introduced to all your vendors and they all throw up walls of text at you with no voice acting that
aren't especially interesting. So that was already turning me off, but I think what finally did me in was when
I learned the name of our main villain. You want to take a guess? You might get it. The Evil One. ["The Evil One..."] That's the best we can come up
with, huh guys? The Evil One. ["...the Evil One."] I mean, this isn't meant to be a joke. I'm
pretty sure the writer was dead serious. If that's what we're starting with, I don't
think the story can recover from that. So I guess that just leaves the
gameplay and atmosphere at this point. Well unfortunately the
gameplay takes another hit. While talking to the vendors, I'm
introduced to a standard Diablo formula: you sell gear,
boost your stats, get money... this stuff has been seen in
dozens of other action RPGs. What they DON'T include, however,
is a hotkey to sell your items. I tried CTRL, ALT, SHIFT, right-click,
middle-click, double-click... every key on the keyboard
I could think of. Nothing. That means I have to drag over each item
individually to the shop in order to sell it. Now this may not sound like a big
deal, but this is a Diablo-clone. How often do you sell loot in Diablo-clones? I'm going to be selling hundreds,
maybe thousands of items. This gets old fast. It makes me
dread having to come back here, and puts me in this numb robotic state
every time I have to sell things. So yeah, that sucks. Let's keep moving. Our first real mission takes us
through these alpine woodlands, which, like the town, is pretty nice for
the graphics level we're dealing with here. The combat however, is starting
to show some cracks in the armor. If you've played MMOs before, you
may have heard of the term "kiting". What's kiting? Well, you're looking at it. You get close enough to
an enemy to attack them, then run back as they chase you until
you get enough distance to do it again. Well, this is Kiting: The Game. You can take down some weak
enemies before they get to you, but others are going to send
you backwards up the trail. The thing is, you kind of HAVE to do this, because some of these
enemies hit pretty hard. At one point, I got a mini-cutscene like
I'm supposed to rescue this NPC here, but surprise! A werewolf ambushes
me and gets one shot off. Did you see that? That's
what, a fifth of my life? That wasn't a critical hit or
anything; that's normal damage and I've barely started this
game so I HAVE to keep running. I DO find it kind of hilarious though that
the NPC doesn't get any special favors and doesn't hold up to the
werewolves much better than I do. Now you might be thinking, "Well of
course you get hurt easily, Ross. "You're playing the archer.
They're meant to be fragile." Well, you think the melee
character fares any better? Uh-uh! Uh uh! Take a look at this. This the beginning of the
first level past the town. My warrior is getting
brutalized by these werewolves. Now, sure, I can defeat them by
using a couple health potions, but now I'm down a couple health potions.
And this is the beginning of the level. Now health potions aren't super expensive,
but god, that's burning through them fast. That doesn't leave you much money left
over for weapons, armor and repairs, which you're going to need. This is why I say the game
favors the archer, because you're going to be bleeding
blood AND money as the warrior. The mage has issues, too. He does similar damage as the archer to
start off, but he burns through mana potions. That can eat into your economy again. Worse, his spells only scale up to a point, then you have to hope you
can find something better. Otherwise, you're stuck in
the Valley of Low Damage. The enemies are going to get tougher
faster than your spells can keep up. Like level 2 here isn't bad, but
level 3... oh my God! Level 3! We'll come to that in a minute. The point is the archer is the only
class where everything works for you. The other classes are just traps. Anyway, we continue onward and get
a mountain pass, ruins, waterfalls, an abrupt day and night cycle, 19th century
European village, and hey--what's this? ["Death does not frighten me. ["The spirits have spoken of the massacre
of Small Mountain. Horror in the night..." ["The bridge stones."] Look who's back! That's right! Our narrator returns to
give us riddles that state the obvious, or just completely pointless rambling
about random nouns and verbs. And not to worry-- he
does this the ENTIRE GAME! Now this particular one
isn't his best performance, but I'll show you some highlights as we go. So shortly after that, we
get our first boss fight. It's not that bad since you
have a lot of NPCs helping you, but don't worry--they'll
all bail on you after this. What's more important than the boss is this our first introduction to
Satanic Abscesses. The zits of Hell. You are NEVER going to stop seeing
these things from here on out. Remember how destroying crates in
the village was getting a little old? Well these are the new crates
and they're never going away. Sometimes they have loot, most of the
time they don't. It's just busy work. It's busy work from Hell. So we finally make it to
the end of the level, and it's time for level 3:
the swamp passage. And here is level 3. Huh, a broken bridge. I have
to take the long way around. Now, where have I seen that before? Okay, no problem. Same crap
I've been doing in level 2. Now I want to emphasize, at this point,
I've been optimizing my character-- getting stat upgrades,
better equipment and so on. So now I can drop a regular monster
in two hits, one if it's a critical, and a werewolf in three hits. Not too bad. So I keep going and,
what's this? A new enemy. He looks a tough version of
the smaller monsters. Vreds. Huh, he seems to not take much damage. Do I need to--? Boom! Dead! SHIT! ONE-HIT KILL! I AM damaging him, but VERY slowly! Good thing I've been kiting this whole
damned game, but JESUS CHRIST! LOOK AT THIS! This guy is fast, too! If I run out
of stamina, that's it, I'm dead. Now thankfully, like a lot of MMOs, the
enemies lose interest if you wander too far. Otherwise, this would be impossible. This goes on and on and ON! And
if I screw up just once, I'm dead. So how many hits does this bastard take? I went back and looked at the video because
I was too panicked to count while I played. ONE HUNDRED AND THREE!
This freak takes 103 hits! So let's review here. Minion Monster: 1-2 hits. Werewolf: 3 hits. Tough Mob Monster: 103 hits! It's a bit of a jump, isn't it? How about five hits? That's where
I would've gone next. Maybe seven? No! Screw that!
103 for an optimized character and I dunno, 120 for a weaker one? And let's give him insta-kill
damage just to round him out. Good thing I'm playing the archer.
This is why you don't play the warrior. How the hell do you melee a
monster with insta-kill damage? It's not like some giant
boss fight in other games where they take five seconds to wind up
the punch so you can get out of the way. No! This is the fastest
enemy in the game so far! I think playing as the
warrior might be impossible! I don't see how you would
get past something like this. Now if this was a popular game, somebody would point out a
mechanic I skipped over earlier, where you can have a big golem
minion you summon to fight for you. I don't like using these because they
need money and skill points to develop, and I saw it as a drain
on my main character. But hey, maybe you need
them if you play warrior. Now he's not fully leveled up, but let's see how long my big
minion lasts against this guy. BOOM! One-hit kill! You can
go to hell! That's how long! Is this a boss? I mean, that would be weird
because this is the beginning of the level, and there was no cutscene or anything, but
that would sort of make sense, I guess. No! He's not a boss! If you go ten seconds past him,
there's another one waiting for you! And if you run ten seconds past HIM,
there's another one! Ready to go! He's not even a mini-boss!
What's going on here?! Oh and the game covers its tracks, too. Just in case you were thinking
about running past him, they've padded things out
with some extra enemies to make sure you REALLY slog through it. This guy here takes "only"
seventeen hits to kill and takes away about a
third of your life per hit. There are several of him
sprinkled around this area. And hey, Mr. Big Zombie here takes 35 hits. Now he's slow, but don't let him catch you because he'll take about 80% of your
life per hit. Wouldn't want to melee him! Oh, and let's talk about
these bats. They suck! You know how in shooters, everybody hates
the small and fast annoying enemies, because they're hard to hit? Well the developers looked at that and said,
"You know what would make those better? "If instead of making them annoying,
we made them really dangerous? "Let's have the bats be fast, mobile,
and kill the player in two hits. "Oh, let's cluster twenty or
thirty of these things together "so it's REALLY a pain in the ass for
the player to draw them out." Good God! This game has turned into a corridor
of death with the flip of a switch. I would say I've never seen a
difficulty spike like this before, but that's not quite true. Some arcade games in the 90s
would have walls like this, plus "Battletoads" is a famous
example of a game starting easy, then turning into a death trap by level 3. Except Battletoads was a way
of combating game rentals, and arcade games are rigged this way in
order to choke more quarters out of you. What's this game's excuse?
To pad out the length? NO! This is a LONG game! They
don't need to stretch anything! I admit, I was kind of in shock seeing this, but I was also intrigued
because it made me wonder if finishing this game
was even possible now. So I thought, okay. This
is tedious as all hell, but I'll just keep playing until
I'm pretty sure it's impossible. After all, if I was the
warrior, I'd be done by now. Just TRY playing this as a
melee fighter. I dare you. It took me FOREVER to clear this area, but
once I did, guess what I was treated to. Just guess. That's right! A boss! After all, wouldn't want the player to
feel like he's not getting a challenge. Now you might think this game
is going to play a joke on me, and make "the boss" take ten hits
to kill after what I went through. No! He's the toughest bastard so far! He just sort of lumbers towards me
again and I have to keep kiting him. He's annoying, too,
because he keeps spouting the same stupid lines at me over and over. Now while he is a little slower
than the mega-monster from earlier, he doesn't let up. If you run farther away, he doesn't
give up. He always keeps coming. Have you ever seen that movie "It
Follows"? Well here it is. In this game. I mean, this game is what I would expect if I was trying to fight an MMO boss
designed for 20 people by myself. I actually panicked because I ran out of
stamina twice trying to grind this guy down. Fortunately I was able
to warp back to the lab just to have my character
literally catch her breath. So how many hits did this
guy take to bring down? It was a pain the ass but I had to know,
so I counted through the video footage. TWO HUNDRED AND SEVENTY-FOUR! Two hundred and seventy-four hits. I may have miscounted one
or two, but SWEET CHRIST! When's the last time you saw that
kind of jump in enemy difficulty? Even now, part of my brain still doesn't
believe this game is doing what it's doing. But it was all worth it because
after I defeat the boss, the payoff is hearing some more words
of wisdom from our favorite narrator. ["Ties of blood last for eternity... ["But when broken, the
bitterness lasts longer... ["Here lies a brother, damned by
greed and secrecy. Eaten by worms... ["Guardian! Sleep beneath
your treasure, ever vigilant. ["Shall the living ever visit thy towers?"] Man! That's so deep. So after all that tedious
fighting, most games-- MOST GAMES-- would give you a little bit of
a break after such an ordeal. Hah hah. Fuck you. You're the Chosen One. You immediately have
more of the 17-hit guys. Actually they take more like 13 to
14 hits now since I've leveled up, but hey, I can't complain
about THEM at this point. I take care of them, then
look at what happens next. There are more of these
13-hit guys on the hill, there's a glowing guy...
that can't be good... but just to add to the challenge, the
pond starts spewing green globs at me. This stuff won't kill you instantly.
It can take about three seconds. Yep. So now I have to go through this
gauntlet to kite the enemies then run back through it
and hope I don't die. Oh, and of course it
doesn't hurt the enemies. Look at this! There is no
good way to handle this! You're going to take a lot of
damage no matter what you do. It's like the game is saying, "Hey, you think you're a smartass by
attacking our bosses from a distance? "Well how about if we do this?" If I try to run through them,
odds are I'm going to die. And die. And die. But if I get a lucky break and make it,
then I'm greeted by another cluster of them! And if I manage to run past THEM, look
who is waiting for me in the next cluster as I run out of stamina: our old
friend, the tough monster. Sweet Christ! This game is out for blood. Oh and hey, when I wasn't dying
trying to kite the front row, Mr. Sparkly here is resurrecting
his buddies as fast as he can when he's not zapping the hell out of me. Now if I actually get a foothold here,
the game stops being a complete deathtrap and starts to become manageable. The thing is, though, that's almost worse. See, I've established that it's
possible to handle most enemies through this rigid system of
kiting. But that's ALL you're doing. Any deviation from the holy path
of kiting can result in death. Not always, but close enough. Like this mob monster from earlier
didn't actually have insta-kill damage. See? He just swiped me for 80%. He has VARIABLE damage that
SOMETIMES results in an insta-kill. So every time you let him hit you, it's
like playing one round of Russian Roulette. Maybe you'll live, maybe you'll die. ["Funny muffin! Funny muffin!" ["AAAH!"] This creates a paranoia of doing ANYTHING
except sanctioned tedious kiting combat. Don't hurry up, don't skip
enemies, don't change a thing. It makes the game so robotic and gives
a slow assembly-line feel to everything. Oh and look at this bridge. He's resurrecting them faster
than I can shoot them down. God, out of all the things to
steal from Diablo II, why this? And it doesn't stop! While I'm kiting the big guy, I noticed this shaman guy is not giving
up the way the other monsters do. That means if I kill the big guy after
pumping him full of a hundred arrows or so, the shaman guy will resurrect him
as soon as I do, like it's nothing. This game keeps testing and testing you! Oh hey, a cave I need to go into. It only has twenty bats, giant
zombies and excessive flame traps. [cries] ["Knowledge... the greatest treasure.
A priceless gift when shared... ["Too often hoarded for a
price, but here, freely given."] Oh joy. ["The elixir... ["Come the full moon, the bat flies whose
boiling blood shall stem the tide."] What? ["Steep early fenugreek into
the bubbling stuff of life..."] Yeah, that's helpful. Next, I make it to the graveyard. You can just TASTE how long it's
going to take to sweep this area out. And really, everything is turning to this. All your progress is slow,
grueling and dangerous. You're getting such an abridged version
by watching this video--you have no idea. Next we run into a few more werewolves... Oh, and another cave. Oh god! It's just as awful as the last one. "Only the penitent man shall
pass. Penitent. Penitent." Well I might make it because
this game is MAKING me penitent. ["Look to the Emerald
for your inspiration..."] I'm not feeling inspired. Look, I'm sorry. I didn't
mean for this episode to turn into a play-by-play of
everything that's horrible about level 3. But I have to go with the stuff I
remember and--by GOD--I remember level 3. Uh... Let's talk about the music. The music is just sort of
serviceable, nothing great, but it doesn't matter because they
reuse the same tracks way, WAY too much. You can't play through the game without
hearing them loop several hundred times. I just turned it off. Okay, back to level 3. Parts of this are actually pretty and I would like this if it
weren't for... everything. ["Eternal damnation awaits us all."] Don't tell me that, man. Now something nice for a change: around here I'm able to level
up and get a crude machine gun. It makes a big difference
in terms of damage. In fact, when-- No! Oh I'm sorry. I forgot. Around here, you have invisible tentacles
that appear with no warning at all that hit you really hard. The game has had just about
enough of my "running" bullshit. I need to take things step-by-step
like I'm clearing a minefield now. I want to say this is
the absolute worst part but that's an awfully big claim to
make for this game, so I don't know. This game has multiple valid
interpretations of what the worst part is. So you can say those tough
monsters are the worst, and I'd say, "Oh yeah, you're right." Or you could say, "No,
the bats are the worst." And I'd say, "Oh yeah, they're terrible." "No, Ross, the swamp boss
that spawns tentacles, shoots rapid-fire fireballs and
teleports around the map is the worst." "Oh." Oh... I guess you just have to be a
bad person to play this game. That's why the developers hate you.
A good person wouldn't play this. But can you believe, with
my gun at point blank range, it only takes me nineteen hits to
kill that same monster from earlier? What will they think of next? And, of course, to wrap things up,
we have another poison gauntlet. Oh... And that's it. That's the end of
level 3 and a piece of my soul. ["The fearful wait above, hidden,
wretched and praying for rescue. ["Woe to the lost should no hero come."] Yeah, yeah, yeah. So level 4 is more outdoors area
and a castle that you run though, and is a mix of insanely easy enemies, and ones that are a minor pain in the ass,
but will kill you fast if you get sloppy. It also likes its crates. As a whole though, this level
is VASTLY easier than level 3. In fact, the ENTIRE GAME is
vastly easier than level 3. It just sort of continues this pattern
of annoying slow grind that's playable but will kill you if you make a mistake. That's the entire rest of the game. I've never seen a difficulty curve
like this before in another game. I mean, Battletoads gets
hard and it STAYS hard. This is just bizarre. I will say, though, it's a
little cathartic to have enemies that you just blow away
repeatedly with a gun. Bam! Bam! Bam! I can get used to this. But then they'll constantly
throw ranged bastards at you that you have to dodge nonstop and burn
through health potions to take out. They're not fun to fight. That's all
there is to it. They are not fun. You do get NPCs to help you out in this
level but they don't last all that long. I do appreciate the game's
self-awareness here. ["Your bravery may cost you your life.
Most that join me fall quickly."] Anyone who isn't you is going to
die. That's just the way of things. Anyway, I'm skipping through
hours of tedious gameplay, but after this, you make
it to a long grindy dungeon then finally to the Well of Souls! WUAAHH! Okay remember how that
earlier boss was no joke? Well NOW the boss is a joke. He's FAR easier than most of the mob
encounters I've had up to this point. I beat him in about ten seconds. And that's it. I sealed
the FIRST Well of Souls to stop the evil from pouring out
or whatever the damned plot is. Then I'm sent to the desert.
It's all the same crap. It's enemies that are either way too
easy, or else annoyingly dangerous, insta-kill traps, and
just GRIND, GRIND, GRIND. Now I played this game before
I even started Game Dungeon, and here is where I originally quit. The game had shown me what it was all about and it was just more of the
same now, except in the desert. I admit, guys. I'm biased against
deserts. I typically don't like them. I'm not saying they can't be good
but a game has work extra hard and make it seem really mystical
or have ancient horrors, or else have a really good story
and context to it for me to like it. Well, The Chosen doesn't have any of that. It has steadily unpleasant
gameplay and mind numbing grind. But hey, this is the Game Dungeon. I should try to go through and
finish it for you guys, right? Now for some reason, back when
I thought about covering this, I thought nobody had recorded the ending. Hell, maybe nobody even made it to
the ending. Why would they want to? Well, either YouTube had poor
searching algorithms at the time, or else I'm just going crazy, but
somebody DID record the ending, so there was no reason for
me to play through this. But I didn't get the memo on that for some
reason, so I went through this entire game. After the desert, you go to a jungle
area, and then finally an arctic area with lots of visually unappealing
dungeons and buildings along the way, and it's all the same crap. They swap out the monsters but nothing
else about the game fundamentally changes. Some of the areas are neat to look at --yeah, nice shadow-- but it's about a 50/50 split between
nice areas and just mildly ugly ones. And with you every step of the way is our faithful narrator with his nonsense
dialog and awkwardly enigmatic delivery. ["They doubt your resolve.
The Fire of Death is here. ["The book is well hidden, but if you hope
to leave this place, find it you shall."] Yeah, thanks Yoda. Even though I think this story is garbage
and says almost nothing, it goes on and ON! I checked the files. There are over thirty
minutes of spoken dialog in this game and god knows how many walls
of text on top of that. WHY? The more your game is focused on combat, the less necessary it
is to have a good story. I mean a good story can be a welcome
addition to many action games, but this is not a good story. This is a
story about stopping the Evil One. The end. They don't need to put all this
effort into the story, but they do. It's like some bad fanfic writer at the helm with a license to go carte
blanche on this game. ["You must be Boguslav. Your
reputation precedes you."] I mean, let's not beat around
the bush. This is a bad game. It makes multiple bad gameplay decisions,
some of which I've never seen before, you can find better voice acting
from random people off the street-- ["It is time to cleanse your village."] --the writing is trash,
it's grindy in a bad way and just doesn't give you much of a
compelling reason to keep playing. But what may not be obvious to you is a
lot of effort went into this. I can tell. If this was a simple shovelware
title, it would be shorter, there would be more corners cut, they
wouldn't have as much variation as they do. No. Instead, this is the result of
someone or some people with a grand plan, whatever that was. A lot of people have
heard of director Ed Wood, also known as the worst
director in Hollywood because he produced so many bad movies. But what you may not know is he
was actually really passionate about making movies. He loved
doing it and put his heart into it. He just happened to be
absolutely terrible at it. Well I feel like The Chosen
carries on the spirit of Ed Wood. ["The Stone Spirits are restless. ["When they speak, they tremble
and stones may fall on your head."] It took me MONTHS to beat this game. I could've finished it a lot faster
but the game made me not want to. This is the perfect game to play when you
know you should be doing something else. Like hey, have a school paper to
work on or have some chores to do but you're stressed out and just want
a quick break? Well, play The Chosen. You'll find yourself thinking,
"Yeah... I should get back to work." After the beginning, I only played this
for about twenty minutes at a time. That's the only way I was
able to get through this. And now that I've beaten it, I'd rather go
dig ditches than have to play this game again. So let's see the ending. We catch up with the Evil One, and
apparently this is the REAL Chosen One. I'm just some disposable soldier. And hey, going with that overachiever
vibe again, this game has TWO endings. So let's take a look at the bad one first. I hope you're ready for the tour de
force cutscene you're going to get. ["NO! His soul has passed into your body.
Now only death can release you from him." ["You were a poor teacher indeed if
your apprentices do not heed you." ["Marcus! I will not let
you survive. You will die!"] Oh shit! ["I have never inhabited the body
of a woman... very interesting."] Yeah, classic writing. ["A gentleman such as you wouldn't
strike a woman, would he?"] I think he would! ["You will die!"] Oh! ["Accept your defeat, Callidus.
Your soul shall join the others. ["Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha!"] The power of Evil has corrupted me! NOOOOOOOOO! This is intense, guys. "The end game." And of course he attacks me on the fadeout. All right. Now let's set things
right and see the good ending. If you just wait, he'll
transform into a demon, you grind him down--which is still
MUCH easier than anything in Level 3-- and here is the epic conclusion: ["It was devilishly powerful." ["It was pure evil." ["Thankfully it was alone." ["Yes, luckily for us all."] Yes... So lucky... it was. For us... that is. We are... the lucky... ones. ["Look at all the souls that are now free. ["It is all thanks to
you. You are a true hero." ["It is a pity that we could
not rescue the Chosen One." ["I remember when he learned
that he was the Chosen One. ["He left to seclude himself
away from civilization. ["He had to leave and
sacrifice his life for us. ["Only a Chosen One is
capable of such sacrifice."] This writing is amazing. ["Then... evil has been defeated!
Shall it ever rise again?" ["Perhaps... People often
create it themselves."] That's so deep. ["That is why we, the Hunters,
must always be vigilant." ["The Emerald Tablet was destroyed
in the Hellfire Cauldron. ["It is a terrible loss for us." ["The Tablet would have come in useful... ["especially after your battle
with the Vehemens, Callidus."] I don't know what that is. ["I remembered too late
that they fly in pairs." ["Yes. Your brother Mirandus
mentioned something like that. ["He also said something about
it not being the first time...?" ["Ha, ha! My brother talks too much."] So... that was a joke. Ha. "It will take centuries for Evil
to recover from this setback." "The end game." And that's The Chosen. Before I end this, in making this video, I discovered that this
game has become freeware. If you want to... for some reason... you can download it under
the European name: "Frater". It's the same game although
I noticed it's a tad easier. Monsters go down a little faster
and you use less mana and so on. But my guess is it's still bad. Also, I guess this is my competition, but they advertise visibly that
they're accepting donations. I'd advise against giving them
anything based on their track record, but if you do, do it out of pity. Like, "Oh. You guys spent hundreds
of hours working on this. I'm sorry." Okay! Awards time. First award: Legendary voice acting-- You might think Japanese games from the
90s have a monopoly on bad voice acting, but The Chosen proves
that's just not the case. I've seen Top 10 lists before
of bad voice acting in games and, if anything, this video shows The
Chosen deserves a spot on that list. Second award: Somebody cared-- I can't say who, but there
are enough signs that somebody on the development team really cared
about The Chosen. And this was their baby. Someone here had a vision... and
we're paying the price for it. And the final award: On flaming wings-- ["On flaming wings."] Couldn't have said it better myself. ["You have done your part...
Now I must complete my destiny." ["Go, my young friend. Your name
shall live on should you fall." ["I shall not fall... I shall triumph!"] [music] Hm. Hm.
Man I love Ross's Game Dungeon. I actually have bought many of the games he's reviewed on it due to his reviews. Mainly got Puzzle Agent thanks to him. Even got the book Rendezvous with Rama as well.
Geez, I can see why it took him so long to make this video. Everything about this game looks like a slog to get through, even the cutscenes.
Wow. That is absolutely terrible: a game that looks promising at first glance, and then proceeds to curbstomp your expectations into the the core of the Earth, then through it, out the other end, and into the cold vacuum of space.
For all the effort Ross claims the devs put in, did they even play the game just one time? Just trying to play it would have highlighted all of the gameplay problems within minutes, even more if they suffered long enough to make it to level 3.
Man I thought this was about Well of Souls, didn't know there was another game of the same name basically.
...If I could ask Ross which game was more needlessly grindy, this or Revenant, I wonder which he'd pick.
Probably Revenant, because he actually finished this one, but I'd still like to put the question to him.
It runs on Space Hack's engine, another i believe polish hack and slash game. It has even the same soundeffects. It was released in 2005 so this just look like a re-skin of that game. Go and check it out, they are almost the same games apart from futuristic world of Space Hack.ο»Ώ
Wow, what an unbelievable effort in order to showcase some of the worse gameplay decisions I've seen. I don't even think he got any special attacks or anything to help with the killing.
That has to be one of the most unappealing games I've ever seen. Wow.
Though I bet when he ran into a brick wall vs super difficult enemies he could barely hurt, he was underleveled. Being able to only do tiny amounts of damage like that is a fairly common tactic. Hell, I remember running into it in Witcher 3.
Why does he yell through the entire video?