Tyranny Review

If Eb tells me about her thoughts regarding "Nipples on men" one more time...

Wait no, hold on. I'm not reviewing the concept of 'tyranny', that seems... well I was going to say 'redundant', but given the etymology of the word and it's ancient Grecian heritage perhaps there does lie some merit in a detailed dive into the intricacies of- no. Nope. This is a gaming blog, thus I will talk about the game. And that's final. (Yeah, me.) Rather I'm referring to the 2016 isometric RPG created by Obsidian and published by Paradox Interactive. Something of a one-off for the team considering that their other series' appear to be the Fallout-inspirer 'Wasteland' and the Fantasy-series 'Pillars of Eternity'. (And the space-age machinations of 'The Outer Worlds') I've pretty much been a huge fan of Obsidian's work ever since Fallout New Vegas came along and redefined what a great Fallout game should be, so I sort of knew I was going to like this game going in, but did I fall for it as hard as some of their other properties? Let's find out.

So Tyranny launched as a successor, but not sequel, to 2015's Pillars of Eternity and was met with modest, but ultimately disappointing, sales. Figures weren't hit and the chances of a direct sequel to this story are pretty much non-existent, but what could have been the reason for this apparent failure? Well, just as with any story, there are innumerable sides and angles to look at the game from, including some who argue the entire isometric genre is just past it's prime. (Although I'd say the success of POE, D:OS2 and BG3 would certainly call that into question.) All I can say for certain is that it wasn't down to the reception because this game seems to have swept up the review circuit. Though there was one theory on the game which I actually resonate with, and it's because it relates to an feeling I developed on the game back when I first started looking into it. (Which was about 5 hours into actually playing the thing.) And, handily enough for the structure of this blog, it actually relates to the way the game was marketed.

"Evil has already won" is something you'll see plastered to a lot of their material, and it really is the prevailing point that is slammed in the face of everyone with a passing interest in the game. Taking place in the world of Terratus, Tyranny tells the story of the last territories, known as The Tiers, to be conquered by the ruling dictator, Kyros. (In which the entirety of the game is set.) But rather than take the side of the resistance holding off against global domination (the marketing loves to emphasise this point with sadistic glee) you are on the side of the invading party, working directly for Kyros. (Or rather, working for a direct underling of Kyros.) In this way you are essentially 'playing the badguy', to be reductively blunt, and whilst that makes an interesting point which should certainly be flaunted, the manner in which marketing handled it is questionable. I touched upon this in my other blog, but all the official material in the game seemed to revel in all the ways that Tyranny differed from your proto-typical RPG set-up, despite the fact that fantasy games have been walking away from that 'traditional' set-up for the better part of the last 15 years, so there's no great accolade to me made out of avoiding it.

Yes, taking the side of the ostensible 'villains' is an incredibly bold direction which inherently forces players to confront the specifics of what they assume to be 'evil' and the extents to which they are willing to bend to or against it. But for some reason we saw less of that in the marketing and more emphasis on what the game was not. Now I can't say for certain whether or not that proved determinantal to the interest of the game to a general audience, but I do know it inherently put me off. If I hadn't already put 5 hours into the game and was already invested in it, I might not have been interested in diving in, all because I wasn't shown the many reasons why I should. And having now completed an entire playthrough from start to finish, I can say rather definitively; this is a game that I'm glad I didn't miss out on. So I'm going to throw a little shade at marketing. (Nothing they can't handle I'm sure.)

From the very start it's clear that Tyranny is the sort of game that's going to require some investment from the player, which is shown in the way that the game hits you with several walls of text if you decide to manually write your protagonist's history. The first few years of the campaign in The Tiers is summed up before you're even given control of the character, and the decisions you're asked to make here will have effects on the entire story going forward. So you'll know if this is the game for you right away based on whether you're repelled by this very concept or impressed at the amount of worldbuilding that you've been subjected to off the bat. (I was somewhere in-between; it was a long intro sequence) What I find fascinating about this whole intro was the way that I was expected to make rather nuanced rulings on situations that I had next to no context on. I didn't know who the Scarlet Chorus and the Disfavoured were! It was only after the fact that I realised a lot of things I had done were really rather cruel, and that works incredibly well to the theme of the narrative. (So, oddly, I think that was well done on their part.)

Interestingly, the character is given a position of some consequence right from the start of the game, as they serve the war effort as a Fatebinder. Fatebinders are the agents of the Archon Tunon, who's job it is to govern the laws of Kyros' empire and keep order, so you can imagine that your job of imposing law on this, to-be-conquered, region is of the utmost import. It's this framing device which allows the player to rub shoulders with the main players in the region off the bat and delve into political intrigue, which I think the entirety of Tyranny handles exceedingly well. 'Actions have consequences' is a bit of a played out sentiment, but in Tyranny it really felt like every time I made a choice, spoke out of turn or simply leaned a particular direction there would be significant political ramifications; all of which sold the story of living in this world of perpetual turmoil very well.

As for the meat of the story, I was pretty much hooked the whole way through. Tyranny does this wonderful job of showing the darkest elements of this brutal world in a sardonic light that doesn't completely obscure the harshness but doesn't make you uncomfortable playing it all either. And considering you're navigating an world rife with pillaging, enslavement and regular massacring, that's quite the neat balance to strike. I also commended the way that, true to the concept, there are no wholly good or wholly evil sides to the war, either by the two invading armies or several factions of locales who defend The Tiers. Everyone is nuanced with things that make them good and evil in their own ways. Although that being said, I think we can agree that if we were to come down to the wire; the Scarlet Chorus are probably the closet to being fully evil. Their leader literally eats people's souls, for goodness sake!

Speaking of, I found the many important characters and personalities of Tyranny wonderfully unique both in design and personality to the point where I loved interacting with them. Chief among all characters, however, I have to commend the various Archons of Kyros. 'Archons' are beings of immense magical potential who all hold weighty positions in society, and thus in Kyros' regime. They are all these larger than life beings who are linked to a particular attribute which represents their purpose, such as the Archon of Secrets and the Archon of War. Ingame this is realised in this scintillating mix of ostensibly singular entities who inspire awe, like the ultimate objectivity of Tunon Archon of Justice, offset by the slightest hints of complexity that manages to not undermine what they represent but colour them in beautifully. I found myself particularly enamoured with the Archon of Secrets, The Voices of Nerat, and the way that it always seemed to have this warring personality where you didn't know if it wanted to help you or stick a knife in your back. (Extra points for the way that it's Staff, which appeared to have an agenda of it's own, would communicate with you only through optional text boxes, to infer some form of clandestine telepathy. Very clever.)

Kyros his or herself is probably the most interesting figure of note in Tyranny, however, due to the way that you never get the chance to meet this eponymous Overlord and yet their presence is everywhere. Kyros has entered this position of reputational godhood to the point where people argue over the very nature of her being,  (or indeed, their gender) which makes for a very unique vantage point for the player to learn about him. Literally one of the first things you discover about Kyros is the way in which one of your duties, as Fatebinder, is to occasionally declare one of her 'Edicts'. Essentially magical contracts in which the very words that he has written down will cause a great calamity upon the world, such as a neverending rain of storms or a complete annihilation of all Antelope in the world. (Yeah, canonically Kyros made Antelope extinct with the Edict of Dust. I don't know why.) But even as undeniable dictator of this world, the distance you forever maintain to her allows the player to really speculate on who he is and build this image through second hand accounts, creating this 'villain' really unlike anything I've seen in a story before; one of complete rumour and legend. It's almost preferable then, that this story will never get a sequel, because not meeting Kyros is perhaps one of the most powerful bits of intrigue in this story.

Companions, too, are of significant import to the world of Tyranny, but it's here where I think a little bit of the limited range of the game starts to show itself. In character, pretty much every single one of the companions is unique and memorable, with none of them ending up as the archetypal cut-and-paste characters that you find at least one of in every Bioware game. And even those that are close to being similar riffs on other companion characters, are at least built with enough nuance and/or context to differentiate themselves. I particularly liked Barik and Verse, who's stories and personalities so clashed with one another and yet in a manner which suited them together perfectly. I was also a fan of Sirin and her interestingly tragic backstory, as well as they way in which she's the only character in the game who openly acknowledges (and has fun with) the fact that no one, save for possibly her, knows Kyros' gender. Unfortunately, it's clear that there's some shortcomings to this side of the game, not least in that only three of these characters have companion quests and those ones were added in DLC. The rest don't really have arcs to their character beyond the evolution of the way they feel about the main character, and that leads to endings wherein it doesn't feel like any of them really went off and became anything unique due to their journeys. Pretty much everyone you meet, save for Verse, Barik and Landry, leave the party exactly as they would have if they'd never seen you in their lives.

In terms of gameplay, Tyranny plays as a full action isometric party-based RPG that runs exactly as you would imagine it to. It's pretty much click on the enemy and go to town, with the strategy coming from who you target with which party members and the abilities you utilise. Some of the more eccentricities come in the abilities themselves and the sheer number of them, by the end of the game you'll have so many abilities at your disposal that you'll be picking through submenus in pause mode just to make sense of everything. This comes from the way that you earn abilities from levelling, as well as through building relationships (both negatively and positively) and even special 2-way moves from getting closer to, or scaring the heck out of, companions. Now, narratively this makes absolute sense for reasons I hesitate to touch on for fear of getting a little to deep into spoilers, but in practise it does get a bit much. I had powers I never even used because I couldn't find them through all the menus they were hid in. Then add on top of that the way that special 'artefact' weapons and armour grant abilities when equipped (which is a brilliant idea for making each tool feel unique, by the way) and there's absolutely no way of keeping on top of things. The endgame comparison certainly made me feel unparalleled by the end, but I wonder if perhaps this could have been toned down a bit, in favour of less, but more powerful stand-out abilities.

A spellcrafting system is also available in the game, although I find that due to a requirement in the 'Lore' skill that grew exponentially when I started to really get into the system, most spells I made, even by the endgame, were basically straightforward. I'm not sure if this was intentional and I was just trying to get a bit over the top with the systems, or if perhaps they intended this system to really come into play for newgame plus, but as a result I didn't find myself relying on selfcrafted spells really at all. Also, I'm still unsure as to how greatly items affected gameplay, outside of your standard healing vials. Bonuses to armour class could also be achieved through gear and leadership skills, and more often than not I just ended up forgetting my pack full of items in the big fights anyway. Although I won't put the full blame of that on Tyranny because I believe the fault was both my own and partially the genre. (RPG's have never really figured out how to make every consumable item matter)

Tyranny is a game that boldly steps in many directions that RPGs haven't even thought to go in before, and where I feared this 'trailblazing' approach might result in a half-hearted execution through sheer merit of "Well we got here, which is good enough", Obsidian proved me wrong with a startlingly strong realisation of the concept. I adored every which way that the story was told and was swallowed by the immersion totally. My only gripes from a narrative standpoint is that there wasn't enough in certain regards, (such as with companions) and that I thought we'd learn a little bit more about Kyros by the end of the game than we ultimately did. (By the credits all we really had were suppositions and a 'maybe' confirmation on the source of his/her most impressive power) But whilst I might understand if this was made with a sequel in mind, I never really felt as though Tyranny was. Even as the story left itself open, I feel as though that was because the point of the game has been realised, and the proceeding events would have stretched beyond the pathos and thus become a tad redundant. (At least that was the impression I came away with.)

In terms of gameplay I found my time with the game fun and rarely too challenging to the point where I felt as though I had no options going forward. Now whilst that may sound perfect for some, I'll admit that personally I get a thrill out of hitting that brick wall and forcing a way through it, and since Tyranny gave me no moments like that I never felt completely satisfied with my time. (Dark Souls has ruined me, I guess) By Act 3 I was pretty much invincible (thanks to my thirty-odd abilities) and though that was a somewhat fun state to be in, it was also a little jarring. I hadn't really gone out of my way to be this overpowered and yet I never died once in the finale Act, I hardly even broke a sweat. And I was playing on the second to hardest difficulty! Maybe my playthrough was just a fluke and I accidentally perfectly min-maxed. Or, more likely, the game was just a tad too easy near the end and could have used a few more new tricks to throw at the player.

That being said, I wasn't devoid of my moments of mouth-agape wonder, because that was earnt from the strength of the story alone. Truly, I loved my time playing Tyranny and will absolutely be willing to play the game and delve into it's weighty choice-consequence systems again. Some part of me is saddened that we'll never see a sequel as the world of Terratus seems brimming with stories to tell, but another part tells me that this sleight tease was perfect and we're better off left wanting more. I would absolutely recommend this game to isometric RPG fans everywhere and I hope other developers look upon titles of this quality to inform how they make their own RPGs in the future. (Including Obsidian themselves. But I needn't worry there, those guys always know how to improve upon themselves.) Were this a Visual Novel I might be given a perfect rank, but with some sleight misbalances to the gameplay I'm forced to deduct a little. But even then, with an A Grade rating, I'm hardly dissatisfied with my play experience. Pick up Tyranny for yourselves and experience a RPG tale quite unlike any of the ones we're used to.