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

Pathfinder: Wrath of the Righteous is a great game, easily one of the best cRPGs out there. I'm really happy I waited a few years for this Enhanced Edition release before giving it a try. If you happen to like these kinds of games, you should definitely consider buying it, especially when it's 80% off during Steam sales.
Now, that doesn't mean this game is perfect or that it doesn't have its fair share of issues (see the cons below). However, most, if not all of the problems this game has can easily be fixed with existing mods like ToyBox.
Pros:
- Packed with content: Expect 100–150+ hours on your first playthrough, and that's without the DLCs. (Though this could be seen as a con if you don't have that kind of time.)
- Insane character customization with 25 base classes and over 160 subclasses.
- The Mythic Path system, A mechanic that deeply alters the narrative of each playthrough (allowing you to play as an Angel, Demon, Lich, Swarm, Aeon, etc.).
- Evil playthroughs actually feel like high-scale evil for once, which is great.
- Immersive storytelling, excellent writing and compelling character development.
- Flexible combat, You can toggle seamlessly between turn-based and real-time with pause whenever you want.
- Beautiful OST's, always great to listen to, even when you aren't playing the game.
- Great performance overall, Pathfinder runs well in most acts.
- Mod support, most of the cons listed below can be fixed with the help of existing mods on Nexus Mods. I highly recommend installing a mod called ToyBox to debug your game if something happens to your save, or to make your life significantly easier if you want to replay the game without redoing all the time-consuming activities.
Cons:
- The Puzzles, while I didn't mind them during my first playthrough, there are too many of them especially in the late game. It breaks the tempo of the story and becomes a real issue if you plan to do multiple playthroughs (looking at you, Nenio's companion quest). Owlcat should have added an auto-complete puzzle option after the first playthrough, or a toggleable setting during difficulty selection.
- The Crusade Management, Don't get me wrong, it was great during my first playthrough, especially as a fan of the Heroes of Might and Magic franchise. It gave me a true sense of commanding a legion of soldiers against the forces of evil and was a welcome change of pace. But by my second playthrough, it felt like a chore to redo all the time-consuming crusade fights, random encounters, building placement in Drezen/forts, and decrees.
- Having to manually re-buff your party before each fight can become annoying really fast. Owlcat should have allowed us to set up an automated buff bot. It's not a dealbreaker at the end of the day since there are mods for this, but it is still a prominent issue in the vanilla game.
- Act 4, The Abyssal City of Alushinyrra is a really cool concept. However, moving the platforms by rotating the camera view was not a great idea and often ends up wasting the player's time. The city being a maze doesn't help. It gets a bit better once you unlock teleporters, but it still wasn't the brightest design choice.
- Unfixed bugs can still fail your quests or destroy your romance flags. That's why it is incredibly important to have the ToyBox mod installed just to be safe so you can manually fix things if they break.
- The default player movement is a tad on the slower side. You will likely end up addicted to the Haste spell just for the out of combat movement speed boost. Owlcat should have allowed more native options to boost animation speeds both in and out of combat.
- Some enemies have insanely inflated stats (very high AC and saving throws), which limits the viability of fun, non-meta builds on higher difficulties. There is also a lack of enemy variety, you will find yourself fighting the exact same types of demons throughout the game.
- While the Mythic Path system is one of the game's strongest points, a few paths are unfortunately not as well-developed as others. Thankfully, the vast majority of them are excellent.

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.

I played on the easiest difficulty because I wanted to focus entirely on the story.
I can't stand isometric games or turn-based combat, yet this is the second Owlcat game I've poured an insane number of hours into. That alone says a lot.
The story I experienced - and the path I forged through the game's incredible dialogue reactivity - felt truly unique. The lore is outstanding.
The dialogues are excellent, the story keeps growing in scope like a snowball, and the sense of scale is unforgettable.
Thank you for creating this masterpiece.