14 DAY TRIAL // I put around 26 hours into Risen before putting an end to it. As a member of Don Esteban's little gathering of thugs, I completed most of the quests available and I was left with the one final, main quest in my journal when the stone gates opened and I was faced with the ultimate foe. I explored the entire map, learned all the professions, except for the Create Scrolls one, and gathered a nice collection of achievements. Besides the final gear that is main-quest-based, I had the best armor and weapons available. I had Don Esteban's Captain Armor and a Two-Handed Obsidian Sword that I forged with my own two hands. I had the best shield and rings and amulet to match the orientation I had chosen for my character.
I thought, when those gates opened and the greatest of evils would be revealed to me, that, like in anything, whether it might be a video game, a movie or a book, the climax would be here, at the end, that the battle that I would carry here would remain imprinted in my memory for years to come and become a standard for other games to top, that, in the bowels of the volcano, my battle cry should shake the island from its very foundation. Now, all I want to do is forget the whole thing as fast as I can. Risen focused a lot on the action part of the game. Piranha Bytes's RPG has a very dynamic melee combat system, made up of combos, quick, normal and charged attacks, evades, blocks, deflects, parries and counter-parries.
It takes a while to get used to it, especially since some of these things become available only as you improve your fighting talent with a particular weapon. It's challenging and exhilarating to use. Even near the end, with the best gear, if not careful and mindful of your foe, you can be killed in two or three swings of an enemy's sword. Always on your toes, the fights kept you drowned in the action. But the end is the total opposite. The entire combat system is discarded. You can't link attacks together, you can't mix things up with different types of attacks. You don't outmaneuver your opponent, you don't seek gaps in their defense or learn the pattern of their attacks. You don't evade, you don't dodge.
The entire fight is an immense joke, an arcade interpretation of everything the combat system was. Some floor tiles disappear and you have to stay on those that don't. Besides that, the entire fight is reduced to block, run and hit, retreat and repeat. Every now and then, you throw in a little jump-in-the-air action to avoid a blast wave and run in circles to avoid the beam-thingy. The simple idea that Piranha Bytes decided to incorporate the jump into the fight, considering how your character jumps as if he's a Mario character from 20 years ago, is ridiculous. Upon defeating him, you get a small cinematic of the Titan being sealed by the powers of the mountain. Some epilogue followed after that, that I just refused to listen to. That says everything that could have been said about the game's ending. Oh, how Risen has fallen.
The entire fight is depicted in a few screenshots below. Yes, not a movie, screenshots are more than enough for an accurate depiction.
