End of Torment: The Planescape: Torment Review
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In playing over 100 videogames, I have never played one with a story quite like Planescape: Torment. The entire story is about a man’s journey to remove a curse he accidentally placed on himself: to end an eternal torment, even if it means finding his own death. He isn’t trying to save the world. In the grand scheme of things, he is a relative unknown, even by the end of the game. he never meets the ruler of Sigil, the Lady of Pain, unless you count an event where she can show up and put you in a prison. He doesn’t put a stop to the Blood War. But what he does is so intensely personal that you can’t help but be fascinated by his adventure. It’s a game of regrets, sacrifices and torment.
There are so many options in Planescape: Torment that it’s impractical to see everything on one playthrough. A save save files here and there could take care of that, but it remains that you could play the game several different ways: you have alignment choices and class choices, which affect how your character can answer problems he is faced with. The dialogue trees are extensive and interesting. There is a natural flow of information and exchange in a game with dozens of NPCs with their own wants and needs. Some send you on quests, but there are plenty of characters who exist for no other reason than to be interesting. I met a zombie worker in the Mortuary: by using Speak-with-Bones, I summoned his spirit back into him. I learned he came from a different land, and had been the tutor and bodyguard of a princess. The princess had been kidnapped and he came to Sigil to find her. He killed one of her kidnappers, but the other slew him. This happened 80 years ago, and the culprit and the princess are both probably long-since dead. This has nothing to do with the main story, I get no experience for it, and it doesn’t unlock anything; it’s just an interesting bonus I got for speaking to a random zombie.
You also have to admire a game which is as much a mystery as it is an adventure. Everywhere you go, you pick up memories from your past selves, see the deeds and misdeeds they accomplished, and meet people who know you for better or worse. As the game progresses, you get an increasingly sharp image of the kind of people you have been in the past; an oft-times ugly image, unfortunately. See: What my practical incarnation did to Deionarra (“Hi, love me, follow me, let me use your powers, then kill you. Thanks.); what my paranoid incarnation did to me (Let’s see… destroy all records of my existence and set up traps with which to kill me. Genius…)
There’s also some mystery to some of your companions. Learning who Dak’kon is was a rather sad experience and Morte’s jovial nature hides a tormented past. You could beat the game without ever knowing who they really are deep down and why they actually travel with you, but you would be missing out on a lot.
Alignment is mostly an active thing in this game. I mean that usually you are choosing to act in a certain alignment and get the results, but that there are very few things in the game that actually change or depend on your alignment. I do wish there were more, as it would make alignment more meaningful, but it’s interesting just to know that in any relevant NPC dialogue, I might have half a dozen ways to deal with the situation: lying, truth-telling, bargaining, stealing, killing, bribery, and so on. It’s much more engaging than the standard JRPG where the correct answer to the mayor’s request is always, “Yes, I will do that because I am a hero”.
I rather like the fact that you can go through most of the game without fighting. In fact, the biggest rewards in Planescape come from dialogue choices, not beating on monsters. When (at the start of the game) you get 65 xp (at most) from a monster and 1,000 xp (at least) from interesting dialogue options, you are usually going to go with the latter. Of course, nothing stops you from going gung-ho and solving every problem with an axe to the face. In fact, if you boost your wisdom enough, you get an experience bonus for every monster you kill, and if you were really determined, you could get through the game avoiding a lot of dialogue too. Of course, the game’s strength IS in its dialogue, so if you want a hack-n-slash, this isn’t the best game.
Combat isn’t very simplistic or complicated. It operates in real-time. You have your standard hack-n-slash, your healing, party buffs and awesome (and I do mean awesome) magic spells. A word on magic: by end game, magic is much more powerful than weapons. I never got 9th level spells (the most powerful), but even 6th level spells are enough to obliterate almost anything that doesn’t have magic resistance. By the way, there are only two swords in the entire game, both are found at the end, and I don’t think the main character can ever equip either of them.
There are four classes in the game: Fighter, Mage, Thief, and Priest. TNO begins as a 3rd level fighter and can switch into being a Mage or a Thief early on. He can freely switch between the three, but he can’t be any of them simultaneously (although some other characters CAN dual-class). He can never be a priest, so if you want one, you need Fall-from-Grace in your party. For my money, mage is the best bet – its natural stat requirements make it good at dialogue trees and magic becomes very powerful by end-game. Fighter is also a good choice, since you can solve most problems with a powerful enough punch to the gut. Thief would be an interesting alternative. As a thief, you could go into sneak mode to avoid most of the fights in the game. Your combat and conversation options would start out a bit limited, but it could be done.
The game music is mostly ambiance. Walking by the market, the merchants call out to you. Going by the inn, people try to usher you inside. In Carceri, you hear the tumult as people fight in the street. It’s not especially awesome, but it adds to the sense of the game’s realism.
The world of Planescape: Torment is fully-realized, and the designers took many of the coolest things about the D&D universe and incorporated them into this game. By the time you beat the game, you will know a lot about it (although, relatively speaking, you’ll only know a small fraction).
There are actually two different endings to the game. It’s pretty hard to get the bad ending, though. It requires that, by the end of the game, you have a terrible intelligence, wisdom and charisma, haven’t kept the bronze orb or the blade of the immortal, and essentially just want to fight The Transcendent One without learning anything about him and your relationship with him. Basically, you can’t get the bad ending unless you just don’t try. It is a tad disappointing that the game has only two endings, and that, in the end, not very much IS going to change at the end point. However, still unlike (most) JRPGs, you can look back at the game and genuinely say that you made meaningful choices in how you GOT to this point.
My biggest frustration with the game is the massive slowdown. I suspect this is a problem only I am having, but the game ran slowly. I have all the patches and my system is at least eight years newer than the game itself, so I can only imagine it is some kind of compatibility issue. Regardless, the game was so good that I had to finish it despite that.
The game could also benefit from maximizing the amount of healing from resting, bringing everybody back to full, and a quicker system for casting spells and using items. A collective party inventory would also have been nice. There is a lot of time spent moving items between party members. Oft-times, I found myself putting all the unique items on TNO because if I didn’t, they would be lost when party members died if I didn’t have room to put them in my character’s inventory. On that note, items that drop on the ground are sometimes hard to see, so it’s a bit of a pain to click around trying to find out exactly where Dak’kon dropped dead and left his loot.
By today’s standards, the graphics are out-of-date, the game is buggy as hell, and it doesn’t naturally play in widescreen. You can fix a lot of these issues thanks to numerous fix-packs which have been released over the years, and which are still coming out. Applying these patches makes the game more playable by today’s standards, even prettying things up a bit.
Planescape showed me that you -can- make an RPG where the objective isn’t to save the world, where complicated motivations and a mysterious world can be all you need to make an interesting RPG story. It’s a game where death isn’t the end, and the irony is, your character wants it to be. It’s a game of regret, sacrifice and torment, touching on our darkest and most foolish desires and making us reflect that we are responsible for the decisions we make.
