Pathfinder: Wrath of the Righteous – Enhanced Edition

Back in 2019, I finished Pathfinder: Kingmaker with mixed feelings. It was an amazingly challenging, deep game with unique mechanics, but I find games with overall time limits to be very stressful, and I struggled to complete the final section without lowering the difficulty, both of which ultimately left a sour taste in my mouth. Therefore, I did not immediately jump on Wrath of the Righteous upon its release. However, I eventually heard that there was no time limit in the sequel, and as I am a big CRPG fan, I decided to give it a chance after all.

The first thing that I would emphasize is that this absolutely is not a game for everyone, even if you're a habitual CRPG player. Many of its strengths can also be seen as weaknesses or flaws, depending on your perspective or attitude going in. Wrath of the Righteous is challenging even on the default difficulty, and you will need to familiarize yourself with the mechanics to successfully complete it. Of course, it helps if you're already familiar with tabletop Pathfinder, which is mechanically also quite similar to various editions of D&D, so you do have an advantage if you are a CRPG veteran, considering how many of them are D&D-based.
The game has a habit of regularly throwing entirely new quests, characters, areas, and entire game modes at you, which can contribute to the player feeling overwhelmed, especially at the beginning. For example, you will be introduced to Crusade Mode fairly quickly, which is a sort of Heroes of Might and Magic-lite that you have to run parallel to your normal campaign. I personally did not mind this so much, but many players report that they dislike having to juggle the two game modes at once, which I understand. Fortunately, there is an option to have the computer run it.

All that said, if you do put in the time and effort to really get invested in Wrath of the Righteous, it rewards you many times over. The customization options are incredibly varied and versatile, once again almost to the point of feeling overwhelming at times. You will get that unique sense of power and satisfaction that can only be had from CRPGs, as you effortlessly crush what is supposed to be a tough encounter, thanks to your meticulously planned builds and tactics. All the way up until the end, I would regularly mouse over entries in the combat log, simply because I enjoyed seeing how even most high-AC enemies got ground into dust by my buffed, overpowered characters that I had spent so much time building up. This game is a power fantasy in the best possible way.

This power fantasy aspect extends to the narrative as well. As I understand it, the story is based on an existing Pathfinder tabletop module, which I've never played, so it's hard for me to gauge how much of it is specifically the result of Owlcat's writing. I will say that it is appropriately bombastic, and you will probably see most of the major story beats coming before they happen, at least if you are on the Angel path, which I suspect most first-time players will choose. However, this does not detract from the experience, as these literally epic events are usually handled quite well, and generally put a big grin on my face. The main story going so hard is also counterbalanced by the character interactions and side quests, where there is much more room for nuance and mundane concerns. No matter the alignment of your character, you will regularly be forced to make difficult, morally grey decisions.

Would I recommend Pathfinder: Wrath of the Righteous? More than almost any other title, this will depend on your own attitude and prior experience (with CRPGs in this case). This is not the sort of game you should be buying on a whim, just because it's on sale. Do your research. To get something out of WOTR, you have to be willing to put in the time and effort, and even then you will inevitably be frustrated at times. For me personally, however, the investment was well worth it, and I consider it to be one of the best games I've played in recent years.

This is a fantastic cRPG. If you enjoy other cRPGs, you are very likely to enjoy this one as well. However, some parts of the game are really lacking. I have a lot of criticism, but I still love the game and I really liked playing it.
OwlCat's game-designers do not value your time at all. The game is filled with tedious routine, but thankfully you can fix it with mods. Several times I tried to play this game unmodded, but each time I was getting frustrated and giving up. Last time I finally came to a conclusion that other people must've felt the same way, and thus there must be mods to fix these problems. So, mods are a necessity, with them game really begins to shine. Do not try to play unmodded, it's a pain.
Here's the list of mods that I consider must-have.
- Toybox. This brings some quality-of-life features, e.g. highlighting nicknames of important NPCs. Also it enables back achievements (that are normally disabled if you play with mods). Also Toybox basically gives you root-access to the game, which might be really important in some cases, In my case, in the 2nd act I forgot to speak with a certain NPC (because there was no entry in journal, or maybe I haven't waited for enough time for this quest to progress, who knows). Anyway, at the very end of the game I realized that a certain companion quest got locked in a bad-end-state because of that. And, like, sure, I could replay half of the campaign just to fix it, but was it worth it? 50 hours are quite a lot of time just to get a better ending for a certain character. So I edited a certain variable, and it fixed the companion quest for me. Too bad i had to cheat to achieve that. Another example is that for a certain event I would need to arrive in a specific location at a certain week, which required me to skip several months of in-game time. Game allows you to skip time day-by-day, but it is way slower. With this mod it was done in a matter of seconds.
- BubbleBuffs. Buffing before every battle is a necessity, but it is freaking boring. Who thought that it is fun? Why is it even a thing that pre-buffing is mandatory? This mod saves you a lot of time by providing a hotkey for buffing your characters with spells that you've picked.
- AutoMount. Every time you enter a new area, you need to manually mount all your animal companions. Imagine how tedious it becomes when half your party has animal companions. Click your character, then click "mount" ability, then find and click your animal. Repeat for every melee character that has animal companion. This mod, however, auto-mounts your animal companions every time you enter a new area, and provides hotkeys for mounting and dismounting the whole party.
- Respec Mod. Allows you to respec your allies from the 0-level, as if they were mercs. It is quite important, because most of the NPCs have retarded builds that you cannot redo or fix. So normally you either play a sub-optimal party of characters with backgrounds and personalities (and suffer in combat encounters), or you hire mercs (and get no interesting dialogs, missing a significant part of the game). With this mod, however, you get both dialogs and optimal team composition at the same time.

Wow. Just... wow. This game is definitely on par with BG3. It has way more options and content but loses out on multiplayer, which it clearly does not need.

I kinda understand why people wont enjoy it as much. The wall of texts.. lol. Most gamers today cannot slow down to smell the roses. It feels like I just read through a series of amazing books.. The Hobbit + LOTR + The Magician + Krondor + every D&D adventure..

198 hours for a first playthrough (with some dlc content). Really enjoyed the over map and my god the HOMM3 kinda battles.. such a nice side dish to cleanse the palate. Took wayyyyy too many hours for all the puzzles but it was all worth it. The ending felt much better than BG3's endings, maybe because I was more invested in everything.. or maybe it felt more real because there were more choices/outcomes? Hard to say.

Definitely a 9.5/10 game if you have the patience.
DO NOT purchase if you have never spent time reading books/novels before. Its nearly a torture x_x

Got surprise gifted this game by a friend - I'd never heard of it before her, and sixty hours later and less than halfway into the game, I'm feeling a little indignant about that fact. This game deserves way more popular acclaim than it has.

I understand what's holding it back. I've played the hell out of Baldur's Gate 3, and I'm familiar with 3.5 from some tabletop back in college. This was not enough to figure out how to play Wrath of the Righteous. This game really, really fights you, and I can't recommend it before I get that out of the way. Even if you don't use guides - which you'll have to, if you're playing a higher difficulty - you'll be googling things left and right. It took me an hour to figure out how to use turn-based mode, 10 hours before I figured out how to get my party to follow me when I moved, and 40 hours before I realized I had to manually fill spell slots and that all of my mages only had access to their starting spells even though they'd unlocked level 5 spells. There are tutorials and recommendations, but they don't cover nearly enough, and once you hit Act 2 you're given an entirely new game mode without any preparation.

So. If you're not comfortable with tabletop, do not approach this. This is a game by nerds for nerds and you've gotta work to figure out how to play it.

But when you do? It is so, so worth it. The story is captivating, its scope is truly impressive, the mechanical freedom you have to build your party is insane, the characters are absolutely delightful, and the game has been hammering me with both crowning moments of awesome and unexpected betrayals from me, my party, and a cast of recurring characters. I just completed the Act 2 climax in a city siege so in-depth that it took me five hours to complete and I leveled up twice from the battles alone. My strategy with my party changed not only the outcome but the battlefield itself, and the allies I'd gathered aided me as I fought through the streets. I discovered traitors and unexpected allies. The groups of enemies I had to hack through began to run from me in terror as the tides turned. At the cusp of my triumph, my character was given the choice to become something greater than mortal - an angel, a demon, a faerie, a lich, a trickster, or a time-travelling extraplanar paragon of law, all of which change how not just the story unfolds but how the game itself is played.

One of my party members bailed on me for that city siege and I just found him lost in the wilderness swindling some cultists. Another claims to be a pristine, reserved noblewoman, except she's got a red-flag alignment hiding amulet and screams the most unhinged voice acting I have ever heard in battle. A third (and my favorite so far) invited me to a party at his Tragic Backstory Murder Mansion and the entire quest was about annoying, baiting, or daring him around the party so I could snoop on his secrets. The paladin is an ex-thief and the witch is the sweetest girl alive. I have collected so many different flavors of evil bastard in my core party but I Can Fix Them, I swear. An unexplained severed head appears in my inventory every morning and I put it into storage before I go for breakfast.

That's the kind of game Wrath of the Righteous is, once you take on the learning curve to play it. And I've still got most of the map left to cover. I can't wait for what else it has in store!

I love CRPGs but held off on buying WotR due to how much I hated Kingmaker. Big mistake because WotR is a huge improvement and one of the best CRPGs I've ever played, comparable to other legendary games like BG2/BG3 or Neverwinter Nights.
The premise is simple. You are the chosen one and have to lead a crusade against a demon horde in a corrupted land. Despite the simple premise of the story, the characters, dialogue, companions and narrative are all fantastic. The story also has 10 different routes you can take through it, giving this game very high replayability. One playthrough you can be a righteous crusader on a quest to stop all evil, on another you can become a lich and lead your army of skeletons to conquer the demons land. The routes not only change the story, but they also give you access to crazy new skills and spells, making the gameplay different between each route as well. There is also a large amount of alignment and route based dialogue. The gameplay systems are also fantastic. There are around 25 classes with 161 subclasses, giving this some of the best character building systems to ever exist in a CRPG.
The kingdom management is back, but it's executed well unlike in Kingmaker. There's also a strategic element where you need to form armies and defeat enemy armies on your map. It plays a lot like HoMM3 which is a good thing, but it can be difficult to manage early on. You can disable it if you don't want to deal with it.
The only big issue I have with the game is the the balance. WotR is one of the most poorly balanced video games I've ever played. From the end of Act 2 onwards all enemies will have insanely high AC and they will attack twice as much as any party member. The only way to survive is to either cheese the encounters, load up on as many buffs as possible or metagame to the extreme. It reeks of artificial difficulty and it's the most common negative complaint people tend to have about WotR. There are also some oddly placed quests. For example, one of the first sidequests you get in act 3 is a quest to kill an ancient red dragon...at level 10.
Thankfully there are a large amount of difficulty options. Unless you enjoy suffering, metagaming and reloading quicksaves I'd recommend playing default settings with enemies set to "moderately weaker". Keeps the game challenging but fair.
Overall, Wrath of the Righteous is an amazing game. It's one of the most well made and replayable CRPGs of all time, despite it's serious balance issues, and is worth the money. Hopefully with the success of Baldurs Gate 3, games like this will get more attention.

Spend two weeks nonstop playing this game (R.I.P my study), my view is simple at the end of the game:
The Good:
+ You can beat this game if you love enjoy your story without worry about combat in-game if you bad at RPG gameplay which is good
+ You can try get trauma if you love challenge yourself or want to claim all Achievements if you are veteran RPG player which is good
+ The game name Pathfinder and you truly chose your path. Don't try to check guild or help online to find out what is the best option to chose. Just take a sip of water/soda/tea/coffee/hot chocolate and think about what will you do, what do you want when you are that main character?
+ There are no right option, there are no right route for you when that time come. Be a good guy, be bad guy or simply want to see the world burn for nothing is fine as long as you play as your will
+ Great story write, good game when you want try something else before/after playing Baldur gate game
+ Romance option is kinda good. Great develop character story specially my little spidey....(I am sorry for left you but i am feel more pain when she left her world...)
+ Base game is already good. Never try DLC but might try when have a chance
The Bad:
+ Bug... not ruin your gameplay like some dialog loss sound, crash when loading save sometime, delete useless items function don't work well,...ect but the game is good, don't worry much about those bug... Or that damm bug with scythe...
+ Need more NPC portrait
======> So should I play this game? The answer is Yes when:
- You have time to enjoy story like you try to finish a novel series but your free time is before bed time
- You good/suck at RPG game
- You want to romance somebody in not normal way (or simp someone)
- You want to see how bad your personal are
- You want t see how good your personal are
- You want to see your blade and arrow miss a lot of time even though you put all your point on DEX (hurt my eyes when try Turn-base battle)
- Want a cat and an imp follow you as pet (This is the best)

It took me more than a year, nearly 300 hours, and multiple attempts, but I’ve finally done it. I’ve beaten this game.
This game is monumental. It’s a true rags-to-riches story: You go from barely managing to kill rats (literally, you start the game in a sewer) to, if you play your cards right, fighting two gods at the same time and easily dispatching both.
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I’ve played a lot of RPGs. Few of them tell a full zero-to-god story. They hold back. Baldur’s Gate 3 is fantastic, but you only get to level 12. In this game, you not only reach the maximum level in the Pathfinder system, a pen-and-paper RPG system similar to D&D, you also get up to 10 levels in a special Mythic path. This represents your journey into something rivaling godhood, as an Angel, Demon, or similar trope.
The characters are wonderful. Daeran is a joy. Finally, a gay-coded character that isn’t boring. Many seemed to love Dorian’s mopey story in Dragon Age: Inquisition, but not this gaymer: He was just too sad to enjoy. Daeran, on the other hand, is fun, witty and delightfully taunts every one of the other characters in the game. He also has one of the better quests and story arcs: Dark, but hopeful, and with the right guidance (and note-finding) you can help turn him from evil.
Points are deducted, however, for the importance of finding needles in haystacks for Daeran and most other companions to avoid bad (and boring) outcomes. It’s a problem with all companions throughout the game - you’ll have to do some very specific thing, or find some very specific item, and sometimes that involves backtracking, going to places you already found, or other needle-finding, sometimes without knowing that there's a needle at all. It’s a shame. I get that they want to make some gameplay around companions, rewarding players who go the extra mile to figure out how to get the outcome they want with a puzzle of sorts, but I dislike it.
That issue aside, the companions are wonderful. Seelah is a joy, and her quests were probably my favorite. (Like Daeran’s, it includes a party gone wrong.) Regil is one of the most unique Lawful Evil characters in the genre; his cold calculus isn't evil per se, and provides a great foil to the traditional goodness found in the rest of the cast. Woljiff was fine, though I would’ve enjoyed more of a redemption for him. Lann had a very sad ending for me, but his end was voiced wonderfully, that I couldn’t bear to reload a save and rob the party of such a glorious finale. Great - and limited - voice acting is excellent in this game. If an actor is speaking, you know it's worth listening to.
Even the non-companion characters were surprisingly good. The romance between Irabeth and Anevia felt so genuine, and I felt emotionally committed to ensuring that both of them lived through the end. Queen Galfray is a wonderful character, though her feud with the player character never felt earned in the game.
And of course, there’s Areelu. Possibly the best villain in any RPG of all time. Areelu’s machinations are slowly revealed throughout the course of the game, deliciously unveiling the game's mystery one act at a time. The final revelation isn’t unsurprising, but it’s voiced so wonderfully, and feels so natural in the story, I felt like I finally understood in those final moments what this entire world and conflict was all about.
And now, the bad stuff. The game is too long. And it’s too long because so often you’re made to do b******t after you’ve sat down and decided to play. There’s a lot of clicking and waiting in this game. I would love to see the developers watch someone play and observe the time they spend doing less interesting things and in their next game, cut all that stuff out. Like, to take one example, Drezen should not be as huge as it is. It takes my slow mage PC literally minutes to walk from the Citadel (where you spawn) to the nearest vendor. That isn’t okay.
The puzzles suck. Not all of them - most, maybe 70% of them, are totally doable without hints. But some puzzles are so hard that the internet still debates why the known answer is correct. You have absolutely no shot of figuring out all the puzzles in the game on your own. It is not possible. (Well, you could brute force a solution, but if you’re going to do that, might as well just look it up, right?)
Another issue: Core difficulty. Respecs are not allowed in Core difficulty. Yes, you can totally turn on just respecs and keep everything else the same, but that turns off some achievements, and besides, I wanted to play the game as it was designed. The problem is Core is so challenging that you absolutely need meta specs. There are good feats, but there are many more bad feats, and it’s all but impossible to understand what's good without looking it up, or experimenting. The problem with experimenting is, feats are final, and they often build on top of eachother. You might not realize a feat is bad until 2 or 4 levels after you pick it. That’s dozens of hours of gameplay.
So, it leads to a situation where every time you level up, you could spend a whole hour, or even a whole evening, figuring out what to do with your characters. Eventually, I decided to restart and just use a guide. That felt like cheating, and I would love for Owlcat in the future to do a better job of balancing feats, classes, and removing bad ones. And just bake respecs into the core vision of the game, please.
Crusade Mode is fine. I see other reviews saying it sucks. It does. But it’s a small minority of the game time and I sort of enjoyed walking my armies around the map, exploring, building outposts and such. Sadly, again, the problem of no respecs rears its ugly head here too: Generals cannot be respecced. And you can’t even see what future options exist, so as to plan to build towards them. I just used a guide.
The difficulty is an issue, from the puzzles to the companion outcomes to the feat system. It feels like it's designed to be solved by the whole internet, not a single person. To use an analogy here, I recently played the remastered Demon Souls and found it to be impenetrable. I eventually used a guide just to complete the game. It, too, felt like it was designed to be solved by the entire internet. Elden Ring, by contrast, is absolutely beatable without any guides at all. It might be the most beatable game FromSoft has ever created -- and it's better for it. In Owlcat’s future games, I hope they make the game designed to be beatable by one person without help at Core difficulty. Figuring things out on your own is why games are fun.
As I re-read my review now, I'm realizing I haven't said much about combat itself. It's pretty good. Unlike BG3, there are no gimmicks allowed here. You can't just shove-off-cliff or explosive-barrel your way to victory here. You'll need to position your characters correctly, use your abilities at the right time, prioritize the right targets, and so on to win an encounter. It's fun.
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All in all, fantastic game. Great story. Great RPG experience. Excellent combat. Though the difficulty isn’t quite right, it’s still the third or fourth best RPG I’ve played, with some standout characters that rival even the best other games have to offer. Recommended.