TOO LONG, DIDN'T READ: you're supposed to master supernatural divine "source" power that's stronger than magic, and as you become strong enough to fight evil alien creatures from the void, you fight your way through the "power is dangerous" establishment. Here's my review if you want it, I did not finish the game but I am halfway through it.
POSSIBLE SPOILER ALERT.
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I am disappointed with the main storyline, it can't get more stereotypical. The writer is talented, but in a lot of places they are being long winded and embellishing too much. That being said, there is still some quality writing. If you are the type of person that reads up all books of the shelves in the game, you will probably like it.
Great turn based dynamic combat system. Unexpectedly exciting and cool, 10/10 in that regard.
Interesting crafting system, with some cool ideas, you collect books as you go and slowly acquire recipes and I don't think nearly all is in books, some of it you figure out yourself (no losing ingredients, you can keep trying out whatever you like), but mostly it's not intuitive. If you don't want to miss things, you are best off looking things up online. Which is spoiler-ish.
They made dialogues harder if you don't have enough Persuasion and fail once, you can't try again when you boost it, and you often can't usually exit the conversation halfway. So that was frustrating, and after a while made me not care in the area that is normally highly interesting for me.
Since we've talking gaming and violence... In some aspects the game gets inane. They tried to counter the story cliches by a lot of NPCs being smarty-pants to you in conversation. This is refreshing when dosed properly. But when it came down to just even rats or squirrels (you can talk with animals) being smug and running their mouth, I just didn't care about reading dialogues any more. Like dude, what's up with all these smarty-pants animals? From that point on, I changed policy and whomever I disliked only slightly was going down, leaving only a few innocent people alive . I've never ever plunged through an RPG with this attitude.
People talk about violence and video games, but do we talk about opportunity for self inquiry. I've always had this internal struggle between being gentle and firm, meek and assertive, and I can never find a good balance, which frustrates me, and this is twice harder being a Christian. When I deal with real people, this can be stressful for me, I always worry about my conduct. I normally choose to err on the side of kind and meek in fear of stumbling in arrogance or impulsiveness. Then I stress about probably not being truthful or assertive enough. This has actually been on my mind a lot lately. Which is why I reacted like that, and it was a bit therapeutic to express what I don't like, instead of always shutting it in. So anyway. Back to the review.
You can't really reinvent the wheel when it comes to fantasy fiction, and obviously some people in every fantasy realm will be pagan and differ in beliefs, but this game really went overboard with how fanatic everyone is about their "gods" or even "sacred" people they almost worship, and how it's weaved deeply into the main story, which was also a big frustrating point for me. Dialogues are always limiting to a point, but this is forcing the player into some belief box they don't want to subscribe to. In fact, this happens in a lot of games and is exactly why I am building my own RPG gameworld. So I'm pretty much playing at this point for study purposes, and to make company to husband since we're playing multi.