Super Nerd Sundays Presents: Witcher 2: Assassin of Kings: Attack of the Colons!

I came to the Witcher 2 in a rare state. I was aware of the first Witcher only vaguely. I knew it was an RPG adapted from a series of Polish novels. I knew of its reception, that it had been hailed by many as a master stroke and dismissed by others as woefully generic. But I knew nothing specific about it. I had no desire to play through the first title when it came out, distracted as I was by many, many other releases. But the Witcher 2 received such positive buzz from people levied such harsh criticism of most RPGs that I was actually excited to see just what all the fuss was about. I saw it on sale on Steam and decided, what the hell? Let’s give it a shot.

And I have to say, for a game I thoroughly believed would be unpleasant, I’ve been quite pleasantly surprised. Sure, the Witcher 2 has a lot of proper fantasy names and high falutin’ fantasy politics based on a map I’ve never seen filled with numerous kings who all want each other dead, but it renders its in-medias-res story with such gusto and consistency that it’s actually not that difficult to follow. It’s one of the rare games that managed to tell a story by showing, rather than telling. Upon occasion there’s some forced exposition or some laughably bad dialogue, but for a game stuffed with so much there was very little dross, though the game’s epilogue did take the form of one long piece of expository dialogue. Power hungry wizards and warlords never stall to openly express their machinations for power, and deciphering the plot is part of the fun and part of making decisions in the game.

And what a group of decisions to make. The Witcher 2 is all about branching decision trees that have big, serious impact on the world. Sometimes this impact is vague at best, and sometimes it’s quite obvious, but it’s always interesting to see how the story develops. I’m tempted to play through the game again (I played through it in a trim 47 hours, a trifling amount of time to spend on an RPG in this day and age) just to see how the various decisions I can make will impact the world this time around, but I have a feeling that there are more than two permutations to each event, and that early events can have a domino effect on later events. It’s an achievement of storytelling which could only flourish in a game, and to see it so lovingly rendered and so well executed makes me feel encouraged for the entire medium.

Sure, the game has some serious documentation problems. Puzzling out how to use Quen was crucial to a number of the famously difficult boss fights for me, and no one ever made even the slightest effort to clue me in on how it was supposed to work. And there are some very serious mechanical issues where hit detection will fail, controls will lock up during extended fights and enemies will juggle you as you flail about on the ground. On one occasion I was juggled by a boss after missing him with several hits, having the game fail to detect my order to Geralt to dodge like a motherfucker and lost over half my health to a series of exaggerated, fiery punches. In a game where you cannot regenerate health in combat without prior preparation and action elements are so prominently featured it’s tough to justify design mistakes like these.

But by the end of the game I was left with a feeling that I’d overcome some great trial by merit of learning how to play the game properly. Despite all these issues I managed to beat some bosses who felt like they were cheating during most of the game. And I did it looking good and banging a different chick with each of my witchy, witchy dicks.

I assume that the Witcher, Geralt, has at least seven dicks, by the way, based on how often he’s using them. You can bang your way into a number of places in The Witcher 2, and there are big whorehouses with literal stables filled with women that you can visit. As far as I could tell there wasn’t any sort of achievement for fucking your way through the entire cast of hookers that the game provides, but I could’ve missed some.

It would’ve been easy for all this sex to make the Witcher 2 feel exploitative, but if anything it gave the game more color for me. The world of the Witcher 2 has a very lived in feel, and when I finally finished it I felt like the characters I’d spent so much time with were going to go on with their little lives in their little fantasy world between the end of the game and the beginning of the inevitable Witcher 3, artfully set up in the conclusion of the game’s plot. It’s normal to expect a sequel from a major retail release at this point, but it’s rare to actually see a well built game that both delivers a satisfying ending and finishes with a sequel in mind. I’m pleased that the Witcher is so content to tell smaller stories that combine into a larger narrative as well as it does.

It even gets major props from me for utilizing amnesia as a plot device without sucking at it. Most games, including the seminal Final Fantasy VII, use amnesia as a means of defining the world around the character through the character’s history. But The Witcher 2 actually uses it to establish the character after establishing the world. Before I was ever treated to flashbacks of how Geralt became so Witchy I learned of the elements that contributed to his madness and memory loss. The end result was a game that made me feel as if I was developing a character, granted a bit of a cipher, through my actions, and as I learned more about his past I didn’t learn about who he was, but who he had been. I was never instructed how Geralt should feel, except by the occasional passive-aggressive journal entry told in the third person by a bard, and even then it had some basis in the decisions I’d made.

The Witcher 2 gets high marks, despite having a number of problems, for the sheer ambition behind the game. It’s rare to see a game so willing to let you make choices, and a game so willing to let you specialize your character. It’s also rare to see a game with such a well realized and human world. The Witcher 2 is a work of interactive fiction, a story that could only be told through a game. And it’s a good one at that, an arrival well worth celebrating.