User blog:F0T4K4T05/Some thoughts on Ecstatica II

So, I finally beat Ecstatica II. I had of course played the game in the past but I had never gotten very far into it because of how frustratingly hard the combat and confusing the huge game world is. And the truth is that when I started this Wiki I did so because of my love for the original game while I had no special sentiments for its sequel aside from some mild nostalgia. But still, I always felt like I owed it to Ecstatica II to beat it one day and when I recently finally discovered a DirectDraw wrapper that actually makes the game work natively on modern Windows versions I finally decided to do it: I made a run through the entire game. Of course this has left me with some thoughts on the game.

First off: I think it's a good game. It has tons of rough edges but all in all I enjoyed it a lot, more than quite a few other slashers / action adventures released for PC before or after. Ironically that made some of the game's big flaws only hurt even more. And there's no denying it: Ecstatica II is a far more generic game than the original Ecstatica. Not only is the game far less gritty, here we're dealing with a prince who needs to defeat an evil wizard in order to save not only his kingdom but the entire world. Saving a princess included. Yes, Ecstatica, formerly quite an interesting character, namely a witch who had nothing but contempt for her fellow villagers and ultimately fell victim to her own megalomania and ended up becoming the traveller's love interest in-spite of that, has been degraded to the hero's bride and damsel in distress. What's worse: she is of literally no relevance to the plot. She literally disappears during the intro, is neither mentioned nor shown even once throughout the entire game, and then appears during a short and dull outro sequence. This becomes even stupider when taking into account that there's another female character with supernatural powers, the priestess, who supports the hero with advice via supernatural means and who is completely underdeveloped as well. How Ecstatica II could fail to do anything interesting with this despite starting out with a witch by the hero's side and as his love interest is beyond me.

Anyway, so Ecstatica II is certainly a bigger and in several ways far more professional game than the original. It has an extended combat system, a larger world, several boss fights, an actual comprehensible hierarchy in weapon strengths and even a kind of character progression. As a matter of fact it turns out that Ecstatica II clearly had aspirations to be a Metroidvania game, something I had not really noticed in the past. And the reason I had not noticed this is because the game does this very poorly.

A Metroidvania game expands the character's combat abilities and movement in a manner that allows him to reach new areas, usually by becoming able to interact with recognizable objects in a new way. In Ecstatica II the hero only becomes able to use more levers and open more doors. Curiously especially early on in the game this just doesn't seem right. There are switches placed all over the castle and hitting them too early results in an angry message from the priestess. When switches become active is most of the time an entirely arbitrary choice by the level designers, there is no logical connection between the story progress and what switches become active and the player can only really figure out which switches have become active via backtracking and trial and error. That sucks. It does get a little better later on as the hero actually acquires some of the eight main items which are even displayed on the "Icon Page" (basically a stats screen). Two of those directly allow the hero to open doors which are marked in a special manner and won't budge in the beginning. It's weird in that it's like the designers suddenly figured out how Metroidvania games work half-way through developing the game. What's bad is that these two items have no other purpose than just allowing the hero to open more doors. The hero hasn't become more powerful, the gameplay hasn't been expanded sensibly, the items are basically nothing more than keys. That's bad. And sadly the majority of the items obtained later on do not work this way. Some of them kinda allow gaining access to more areas but it's not connected to certain kinds of objects scattered throughout the world, the way they open up new areas is almost as arbitrary as with the switches early on.

Then there's the combat. First off: I do think that executing combat moves works pretty great. The animations are smooth and attacks cover different areas and even allow to turn in different directions while attacking. That's literally brilliant and especially early on the fighting works pretty great. My main complaint at that point is that the dodge rolls are almost useless. The problem is that they do not allow evading attacks, they just expand the tank controls a bit. In my experience trying to use the rolls to actually avoid attackers usually resulted in getting hit right in the face. What does suck epically, however, is that one can easily get stuck in a chain of enemy attacks without the slightest chance to recover. Whether you're surrounded by enemies or get attacked by a single quick enemy, it often boils down to sheer luck when you will be able to move again and thus how much damage you will receive for a single mistake during combat. That's just crazy considering that this problem was completely absent in the original game due to how the dodge / block worked there, a feature missing from the sequel.

When enemies with larger attack ranges get involved, that's when the combat really goes to shit. You can learn to time things a bit to become able to get close to an enemy and hit him before he hits you but ultimately it's quite random who ends up delivering the first blow. And once you've managed to land a single blow this usually means that you will lock the enemy in a series of attacks without giving him as much as a chance to defend himself, no matter how powerful he is. That's just sad. And sadly there is a specific combo that you will keep doing almost constantly: swing, thrust, swing, thrust, swing, thrust... it really wouldn't have taken much effort to demand a more varied use of moves and attacks from the player. The REALLY bad thing is that bosses do not differ at all from any other enemies in the game. Once you get close they are as good as dead and sometimes you can get close without giving them time to attack even once. The messed up bossfights were in my opinion by far Ecstatica II's biggest weakness.

I could go on about the game's wasted opportunities and flaws, the simplistic puzzle design, the lack of good storytelling etc. but the simple truth is that I was enjoying the game almost the entire time. I had fun exploring the castle and its surroundings, I had fun revisiting locations as I had gained the ability to pass through previously locked doors, I enjoyed the suspense whenever I entered new locations, I appreciated the diversity of the surroundings as well as enemy designs and even though the puzzles were incredibly simplistic, I always felt hugely rewarded as something happened after placing an item in the correct place or hitting a switch. Yes, the game was nowhere near as original as the original game, it literally sacrificed the things I appreciated most about the original but when judging it as an action adventure / slasher in the context of other late 90's PC games it holds up pretty well in my opinion. And I DO think that the elipsoid technology was pretty neat and considering how big an improvement Ecstatica II's tech was over the original's I'm saddened that we never got a chance to witness Urban Decay, Andrew Spencer's cancelled magnum opus.

And once again "some thoughts" have turned into something more. Anyway, I will certainly continue to work on this Wiki and hope that eventually this game will find some more late recognition. Who knows, maybe one day we will get that digital re-release that these two forgotten games absolutely deserve.