Piranha Bytes has just opted for virtually no information, which leaves way too many avenues to waste the player’s time. You can point the player in the right direction without giving away every detail or nuance of a game system. Its communication is archaic in the worst ways possible. Could the game do a better job at explaining this to you, making sure you understand the importance of your decisions in your character’s progression? Absolutely. It’s in this sense of agency and choice that Elex II feels at its best. It feels like there are actual consequences to your build choices, rather than just being an easy jack of all trades like in a lot of other modern RPG games. There are stat requirements for each perk, weapon, armour piece and other items, which all play a very vital role in how you build your character. The real importance of your stat allocation has to do with the skill tree and gear. With numbers as low as this, there is no real point to these attribute bonuses outside of giving the player a microsystem that they should ignore, but putting it in big bold letters that make the player think it is important. How much extra health, you ask? One point. For instance, you can invest five points into Vitality to gain extra health. These attributes only have bonuses tied to them for every 5 points invested. There is, of course, a level system which awards attribute points that you can invest in various stats.
Elex II tries to walk a fine line between all these different character building systems, and does so pretty poorly. Some games do a better job of this by allowing for the progression path to be skill or perk based, like in Skyrim. It’s hard to really revolutionise a stat system in a genre that has been so oversaturated by more contemporary design that focuses on gear score for stats rather than the specific attributes of your character. One of the biggest problems Elex II has is in its stat system. There were points where I would accidentally start another topic, see that topic through and then leave, only to be reminded that I had the wrong conversation and so I’d need to walk all the way back to that NPC to try and get the right string of dialogue choices to progress the quest. This game breaks that logic in the worst way, as you can be having one conversation with someone and then interrupt that conversation with an entirely different topic with the same person. There are a certain set of rules and flow that these dialogue trees must adhere to, and the games are better for it.
Look at The Witcher 3 or The Elder Scrolls. In most games, once you start a dialogue tree, a lot of it follows a pretty logical path of conversation and you get meaningful information from it. I’m not sure if it’s just bad translation/localisation, but a lot of it just misses the mark, both in terms of delivery and coherence. This isn’t a matter of bad lines forcing bad delivery, because even the worst lines can come out okay with decent voice actors (look at vanilla Destiny), but this is a matter of both things being bad. To make matters worse, the voice acting is just…bad. To attempt to help portray a story in which the presentation goes all over the place, there are dialogue trees that are also an absolute mess, filled with poorly written dialogue that you probably think would never come out of someone’s mouth. This very quickly pulls you out of it as it all feels disconnected from the events of the game itself. For instance, in one of the opening areas, there is a grassy, vegetated cliffside that you are running across and when the pre-rendered cutscene takes over, it’s all dry, craggy and devoid of vegetation. I’m not sure, I was thrown off by how the pre-rendered cutscenes have somehow been set in locations that are completely different to the ones you end up playing in. All I could tell you is that it follows Jax, the guy from the previous game, and the world is still in a terrible state where these weird alien things have shown up on the planet or something. It starts with an animated story dump which makes so many cuts that it ends up not setting much up at all. Hell, even if you have followed it, it’s very easy to get lost because the presentation is so inconsistent.
Elex II is a direct sequel to the original 2017 action RPG, so if you haven’t followed the story, it’s very easy to get lost.
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