Pathfinder: Wrath of the Righteous – Enhanced Edition

After spending 1000+ hours in the game, I finally completed it.

Break down of how the time was spent:

~600 hours designing a character I want to play on a specific mythic path (E.g. a thematic wizard or sorcerer for Lich), only to be drawn down the Trickster route
~100 hours rage re-loading when the 'fun' build can't fight it's way out of a wet paper bag on Core difficulty before it reaches Act 3.
~200 hours on turn based combat where my full melee team can't hit the enemy on any roll but a 20 and vice versa
~100 hours again on rage loading because of failed perception checks

10/10 would waste my life again

I started this game back in 2022 on the hardest difficulty available, because my giga big baba bubu ego looked at it and said:
“Yeah, easy.”
Fast forward to December 2025.
After multiple rage quits, several month-long breaks, and my sanity being slowly peeled away layer by layer…
I finally finished it.
And honestly?
What a feeling.
This game destroyed me.
The difficulty, the encounters, the puzzles...everything constantly pushed back. Every fight felt earned, every mistake punished, every victory hard-won. There were moments where I genuinely had to stop playing because my brain was fried.
But here’s the thing:
I never stopped caring.
Because the world, the story, and the characters are pure love letters to D&D and fantasy nerds. The writing is deep, the choices matter, and the sheer scale of the narrative is insane. This isn’t just an RPG, it’s a full tabletop campaign condensed into digital form.
The mythic paths, the moral decisions, the companions, all of it made me want to keep going, even when the game actively tried to break me. The idea behind Wrath of the Righteous is ambitious as hell, and it commits to that ambition without compromise.
This is not a game you casually play.
It’s a game you endure, learn, and eventually conquer.
And when you finally reach the end after years, pauses, frustration and growth?
That victory hits different.
Ps: I cant recommend the hardest difficulty....it smashed me that much, i tought i lost virginity. Lol. Or maybe im just bad, idk. xD

At this point, I’m not sure if I played this game… or if I’ve been living in it.
And despite everything, I’m already planning another playthrough. Maybe this time I won’t roll the same class again. No promises.

Man, I loved this game. So much so that I can confidently say I’ll keep coming back to it and replaying it for years. I recently finished my second full playthrough, and at this point I can honestly say it’s my favorite game of all time, right alongside The Witcher 3. Owlcat Studios won me over with this one, I will play every game they release in the future.
This is easily one of the best RPGs I’ve ever played. The story, companions, soundtrack, and gameplay are all top-tier, but what truly sets Wrath of the Righteous apart from other RPGs is just how deep the character customization goes. The sheer number of different builds you can create is insane, and it makes every playthrough feel fresh and exciting.
Games like this don’t come around often. Wrath of the Righteous is special, and it will always be MY game.

This one was exhausting.
Wrath of the Righteous is a colossal and ridiculously ambitious project, delivering a high-fantasy epic on a scale and level of complexity that puts the competition to shame.
Even though it has plenty of rough edges and presents itself in a very restrictive way, it is a respectable and deservedly successful work, offering an experience with strengths far beyond what its minimal budget should have been able to support, and earning itself a place among the best representatives of the genre.
The presentation is probably the most consistent within this genre, and it doesn’t lag behind productions with much higher budgets. It features strong art direction, managing to retain that sharp clarity of pre-rendered backgrounds while presenting a distinct look with greater depth through richly detailed fully 3D environments and character models.
Even better is the framing of the interface, with flourishes everywhere and a feeling that you’re perusing a storybook and moving miniatures on a table. Pure charm.
Combat animations and effects are nothing special, but they do their job—especially when paired with good sound design and a killer soundtrack, with true epic anthems.

You won’t see anything elaborate like cinematics or dynamic environments, but they delivered the best possible result.
But it definitely has problems. And I wouldn’t recommend the game to just anyone without a long list of caveats.
I paid something like U$1 for it, and for that price I will never again find something with the same level of quality and replay value. But I would be lying if I said the time investment was proportional to the fun.
For something that demands so much dedication, the payoff is a bit disappointing, especially if you already have a decent set of references and are no longer impressed by empty power fantasies and uneven complexity.
The player takes on the role of a character who rises to prominence for mysterious reasons, and is given the supreme task by the local royalty of gathering and commanding armies in a brutal and grueling campaign against the forces of the Abyss, in a war known as the Fifth Crusade.
Along the way, our “hero" goes through various adventures, meets colorful figures, solves mysteries, builds a small political, military, and economic power base, issues decrees that change the course of the war and the lives of those under their command and protection, crushes enemy armies, conquers territories, and turns extraplanar entities into ground meat.
Your character also goes through a kind of super puberty.
The game consists of an interchange between two parts. The main one is a straightforward traditional CRPG adventure structured in the style of the classic Infinity Engine games, where you explore with your party a series of small maps, fighting enemies, solving puzzles, and consuming most of the narrative through an old-fashioned text interface. The other is the infamous “Crusade Mode,” which essentially works as a parallel game meant to simulate the abstraction of controlling troops, conquering territories, etc.
The game’s main appeal is being a highly customizable experience, with a multitude of adjustable difficulties and character creation options. It is meant to be an epic with seemingly endless potential.
Crusade Mode, although justified, works against the core of the experience, killing the game’s pace. It is limiting. Inefficient in its narrative function, it is simply a time sink with no sense of spectacle. It adds very little to your adventure and detracts enormously from it.
Contrary to the idea that the game is extremely intimidating and hard to learn, I’d say the problem is that, once you navigate through the immense number of archetypes, classes, skills, and spells variables, in a system that demands a lot of commitment to be learned properly, you eventually realize that it is nothing more than a more customizable revision of the same worn-out and limited system we had in 90s CRPGs — just with a lot of fluff getting in the way of what actually matters.
Nearly the entire design seems confined to limitations from the 90s. And thus, instead of elevating the genre with immersive dramatic or mechanical possibilities that go beyond simply slaughtering monsters in a ridiculously outdated system — inheriting several inconvenient mechanics that make no sense outside the tabletop—, they double down and throw a big glass of been there done that in your face.
You can hardly expect much more than what Baldur’s Gate 1 offered.

Imagine a version of that with modern QoL features, far more padding, and a terrible sense of structure.
Old but Gold, yeah?
If you’re expecting an amalgam of well-crafted narratives arcs that form an engrossing storyline, with memorable characters, interesting quests, fun interactions, and something meaningful to say, this game is not for you.
This is a min-maxer’s wet dream. Made especially for those who prefer stacking numbers rather than engaging in dynamic tactical challenges or fun conversations. If you enjoy crunching numbers and watching your sheet blossom into an illegible pile of descriptions, you’ll love this game.
If you don’t expect any fun use of the tools the game gives you, any narrative integration or deeper interactions beyond disarming traps, opening chests, and very, very occasionally interacting with the environment in a way more meaningful than just recognizing set dressing, then... well... good for you!
This arithmetic monstrosity that is your characters has little relevance beyond kicking some ass.
And the narrative component, which could have supported all this, leaves a lot to be desired.
The story suffer from a strong tonal discrepancy, showing all kinds of extreme and disturbing brutality, while at the same time presenting cartoonish characters that feel like parodies straight out of the rulebooks, with priorities and behavior that make no sense at all.
The text lacks awareness. Characters seem to completely ignore what is happening or has happened and appear to prioritize their generic roles over the situation they are in, which makes it very hard to see them as people who actually live in that world. Which in turn makes the world feel far less immersive.
Even your companions, are mostly one-note archetypes with a tragic background attached and little more than that. Most of the time it seems like they're not even there.
Quests in general are very basic and don't tell anything, offering little more than a setup that justifies entering a place and killing everything until you reach a “boss” without any sense of antagonism.
I’s hard to care about anything when there wasn't even a single memorable conversation.
The writing lacks wit and has almost no sense of objectivity. There is no tension.
The bloated word count, mountains of boring exposition, and lack of eloquence in the prose comes as a bonus.
The only thing that kinda works is the overarching narrative (the outlines of your military campaign and the progression of power), mainly because of the Mythic Paths, which add a lot of flavor to the game, but frankly, it's just not enough.
At its core, it's an inefficient and ineffective narrative that wastes a lot of time and doesn't build or delve into much, navigating a jumble of themes without a firm grasp on anything. It doesn't create interesting situations for the player to immerse themselves in, it doesn't present engaging problems, and worst of all, it simply forgets choices and stats whenever it's convenient.
Anyway...
This is a time-consuming beautiful mess that requires a lot of effort to sift through before you get to the fun. There's definitely a good RPG here, but you have to dig.
And in the end it might not be worth it.

Best mommy issues simulator since real life came out.


I have finally finished the full playthrough with all the dlcs, and that took me only sub 400 hours. It was long and at times extremely frustrating, but here we go.
I consider wotr to be the best rpg out of the recent ones, at least as the known ones go, there may be something indie i have no idea about, but far as it stands to me - this is the best one.
It, however, doesn't mean the game is perfect, in fact, in many areas it is a complete jank ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥, annoying slog or illogical storytelling nightmare. Think back to those great old games where there's something completely trashy and unengaging like the fighting system in morrowind, but overall experience tickles you the right way in the right places.. This is pretty much it in spirit and execution

Let’s start with the amusing fact that I consider the game unplayable without bubblebuffs. BB is a mod that lets you assign all your buffs to a couple of hotkeys and let me tell ya hwut son. Playing core and above you may have like 50 buffs at once. RPGs are divided on one factor: do you have to prebuff or do you want to have fun. This mod completely removes the need of rebuffing you ONCE A MINUTE AT TIMES by separately choosing every buff and applying on every character. Why that isn't a default feature in the game is beyond me. Second sort-of mandatory mod is toybox that enables you some QoL features and lets you do stuff like multiromancing and all that jazz. One playthrough is 100+ hours and the game is not AS replayable as people say, so you may want to maximize the content in one go (yeah yeah i played that game before, acquiring the copy through more CHAOTIC means). Lets continue to the fact that the game is still filled with obnoxious bugs like not letting you attack on your turn, completely hanging your turn during mounted combat, enemies going through walls, quests getting softlocked and all other delicious gamer moments that we know and love. (I KNOW there’s quest for Hilor in the game but he NEVER offers me to do it and i don’t know why to this day.)

So why do I still feel it's the best rpg of recent years?

-WOTR is a game where you go from random hobo with amnesia saved from the gutter on a town festival to a being of divine importance with measurable and well paced progression. Christ sakes, first time after GRUELING urban assault your mythic power awakens you get your own BOSS THEME for your character and you start moping the floor with enemies that were making you savescum your game for the last 6 hours. And this happens over and over again and never gets old.
Your every powerspike feels like fruits of your labor and dramatically changes the effectiveness of your group, which with how the story goes from you becoming a commander of completely inept conscript army to potentially becoming the top dog of heroes or villains alike makes it feel like you are again the kid who’s waving a stick on top of a trashpile imagining you just conquered all the world’s evils. The closest it reminds me of is DAO starting with one of those insane origins like city elf.

It is achieved by having two separate progressions: one is pathfinder rpg system with gazillion classes with ability of multiclassing however you want and the mythic path system, which through either plot progression or by finding some secret means nudges you into becoming one of many mythical creatures with their own stories, questlines, set of abilities and alignment choices. So you do sidecontent to get your regular levelups and get powerspikes for you and your team every odd level, and you progress main story and find secret stuff to lock in on your mythic path of choice and you get extra abilities that range from being meh to 40k orbital bombardment levels of insane.

So here you are being a cool judge dredd devil or scrolling reddit as azata/trickster at your camp and who do you see? Your rag tag team of curious characters in your party. While some of them are just okay, the core cast of everyone’s favorites are just insane.

While Wenduag and Camellia fans are competing in who’s the biggest evil hoe simp and how “they can fix her”, let me tell you: evil characters in the game are truly evil, only in some select cases you can make a dent in it. They’re no Minthara that just has a top 100 CEO mindset, they are psychotic and vile. When they start another ruckus you need to do severe mental gymnastics to even keep them in the party instead of killing them on the spot.
. But you also have everyone’s favorite pretty brat Daeran, being one of the most well written pompous nobility freaks out there. Or Regill, our favorite PMC warlord who gets so ruthless his own body develops gnome-related cancer. And Ember - let’s just say try your best not to miss her and do her quests, no matter good or evil she is an incredibly entertaining character, from her story and implications to tabletop lore to her interactions with Camellia and other evil characters, at least the first time you play. And that’s not to mention the rest of your crew, banter between them and their talks and sidequests.

As for the story itself - for the most part it’s great. Yes there’s bad parts like how you are sent to act 4, but besides that you have compelling villains (no areelu romance is annoying, and yes, yes, i know the implications, get off me, baddie’s hot), levels of conspiracy around you and your powers, good flow and natural progression of the story and well written characters. Except for queen garfield, she sucks, shagged her anyway tho.

Gameplay wise - fanboys of turn based and realtime with pause can finally chill - as you can do both and safe for occasional bugs - both work great. You see a trash fight before you - play real time and enjoy the show.. You hear boss music - turn that turn based button on and press your bubblebuffs hotkeys as you will be here for an hour.
The difficulty in this game above core (i played on hard) is obnoxious if you’re doing multiple things wrong at once. But if you know the system, know your spells, can read tooltips and aren’t shy of thinking about your build for ten extra minutes before starting the game - you’ll be fine on anything but unfair.

So, what are the bad parts of the game?

I don’t like level design, it's mostly just ROOMS. Rectangular rooms with some props in them. Some locations are better than others, but overall - locations themselves, save for act 4 and some dlc areas, are pretty boring.

I HATE PUZZLES. It’s an RPG, fairly difficult at that, every combat encounter is already a puzzle, and now i have to waste my time and play match 3 with hieroglyphics. Quests related to certain demon sphynx and certain furry babe are notoriously annoying.

And the part of the game nobody likes - city management and crusader mode. They aren’t horrible but they are very dull. Whenever people wanna make new heroes 3 clone they gotta realize that the only way to make it work is to rip off like 90% of it and make sure graphics are cozy. Age of wonders did it. Pathfinder didn’t.

There is an option to disable it but you will lose some essential items and content that way, so hire Setsuna Shy, level his magic level and suck it up. Still it is not a complete failure because it does make you feel more like a commander somewhat and is sort of a breather between your murder hobo shenanigans. You know how mass effect 1 felt vast and adventurous because you HAD to drive maco between buildings on feros, noveria and stuff, and in ME2 everything feels like it’s in the same room because all you see when you travel are loading screens? Crusade mode is kind of those mandatory maco rides, bad in itself but serves a purpose.

So in the end we get great game with deep mechanics and compelling story ridden with issues and lack of focus in design that still runs circles around other offers on the market.

Owlcat Games
I did kickstarter this game back in 2020 they gave me a beautiful game with an end user license agreement where I was in shock with installing to my PC, software like a spyware and also taking my geolocation and reviewing all my documents from my "C" drive and with the excuse will be anonymous. At that time I had one computer for everything (banking, business, gaming), and decided no to install this game. Now I have a PC just for games and still the same end user agreement. What a shame. I'll bite the bullet this time.
Here is a extract of your contract with Owlcat Games.
3.USE OF DATA
3.1
The user hereby agrees that Owlcat Games may collect, store for an indefinite term and otherwise process anonymous information on the software using by the User, information on hardware and software installed on the User's Device and any other anonymous technical and statistical information, which Owlcat needs in order to identify and eliminate problems with operation of the software, to improve the software, and for marketing purposes
Thereby, the user hereby agrees that Owlcat Games has the right to upload software program files to user's device that will record CPU, RAM, operating system, video card, sound card, software and application of the developer, peripherals, GEOLOCATION and any other anonymous technical and statistical information from User's Computer.
The User also agrees that Owlcat shall have the right to transfer the said anonymous information to subcontractors, performing game development, and vendors providing necessary for operation of the game.