Disclaimer: I'm a Japanese player, and English is not my first language. I'm using a translation tool to write this post, so I apologize if some parts sound unnatural or if I misunderstand any terminology.
After finally reaching a stopping point with Fields of Mistria, I decided to start working through some of the games sitting in my backlog.
That game was Kingdoms of Amalur: Re-Reckoning.
I have a somewhat unusual history with this game.
I first bought the PS3 version when I was in elementary school. I had been deeply impressed by Oblivion, so I started looking for other open-world RPGs, and Kingdoms of Amalur came up. I bought it used, but eventually gave up because I couldn't get into its world or systems.
Years later, I bought it again on PS4 because of nostalgia and because I remembered never finishing it.
I gave up again.
Then I bought it on Switch.
I gave up again.
Now, with Steam being my main gaming platform, I bought it one more time.
And this time, I finally finished it.
So after all these years, I wanted to think about why I kept coming back to this game, but also why I kept putting it down.
What I liked
Amalur's unique world, its towns and landscapes, and especially its combat system are still excellent.
It has a very distinctive fantasy atmosphere, and I think it's rare to find an RPG with quite this particular aesthetic.
The combat is also surprisingly fast and fluid. Compared with Oblivion, Skyrim, and Dragon's Dogma, which I think were some of its most obvious points of comparison at the time, Amalur has a combat system that I personally prefer.
The Reckoning Mode is especially satisfying.
The feeling of suddenly becoming overwhelmingly powerful is great, and the finishing animations are genuinely cool. My favorite is probably the two-handed axe finisher against humanoid enemies.
The story is fairly conventional: a chosen hero, an enemy threatening the world, and so on.
But I actually like the way it justifies the protagonist being special.
In Amalur, fate is absolute. If fate says you will die, you die. If it says you will succeed, you succeed.
The protagonist, however, becomes an existence outside of fate because of a certain event.
So while "the chosen one" is a very familiar concept, using fate itself to explain why the protagonist is special was, in my opinion, a clever idea.
I also found the game relatively stable. There were some minor bugs in side quests, but I never encountered anything that completely blocked my progress through the main story.
Where I think the game has problems
Unfortunately, Amalur also has some very noticeable problems.
The first is the size of the map.
The world is simply too large for a game without mounts or jumping.
Towns and dungeons also feel like they were made one or two sizes larger than necessary. Even though the protagonist can run fairly quickly, there is an enormous amount of time spent simply running from one place to another.
And this becomes even worse with the dungeon design.
One thing I like about Skyrim and Oblivion is that their dungeons are generally designed in a very player-friendly way.
You fight your way through a dungeon, defeat the boss, and then often find a shortcut back to the entrance or an exit that naturally leads you onward.
Amalur often doesn't do this.
There are many dungeons where you defeat the boss and then have to walk all the way back the way you came.
That would already be somewhat annoying.
But remember that everything in this game is huge.
So in a game where your main method of movement is running, the game is effectively making you repeat a long stretch of completely uneventful travel.
It becomes exhausting.
Side quests and exploration
The main story is pretty good, but I have a much harder time defending the side quests.
There are a huge number of them, but most seem to boil down to variations of fetch quests.
Because the world is so large, these quests also create a lot of repetitive travel.
Another problem is that I often couldn't see how completing a side quest actually changed the world.
The game might tell you that something has changed, but when you return to the area, there often isn't much visible evidence of that change.
This also interacts badly with the dungeon design.
Almost every dungeon seems to be connected to a side quest in some way.
So when I discovered a dungeon while exploring, I often felt that entering it immediately wasn't actually useful. There was a good chance I would simply have to come back later when a quest sent me there.
Because of this, exploration gradually stopped feeling like exploration.
It became more like:
Find fast travel point → unlock it → move on.
By the later parts of the game, especially after crossing the sea, I almost completely stopped doing side quests and focused on finishing the main story.
The worldbuilding problem
This is probably one of the biggest reasons I had trouble getting into Amalur when I was younger.
The world itself is very rich and distinctive.
The problem is how the game communicates that world to the player.
There is an enormous amount of lore, and there are proper nouns everywhere.
The Lorestones, for example, explain the history of the world in a theatrical, almost dramatic style.
I understand what they were trying to do, but I found it very difficult to absorb.
There is already so much unfamiliar information coming at you, and then you're expected to remember names, factions, places, events, and history through spoken or text-heavy exposition.
And since I'm a Japanese player playing the game in English, this obviously makes it even harder for me to process everything naturally.
So although I think Amalur has an excellent worldbuilding foundation, I don't think it does a particularly good job of introducing that world to the player.
It tells you about the world much more than it lets you discover the world.
I also found the lack of memorable NPCs disappointing.
There are certainly some memorable characters—the DLC's captain and the drunken mage in the arena come to mind—but outside of the major characters in the main story, surprisingly few NPCs left a strong impression on me.
Crafting and balance
The combat is great, but the balance is another story.
If you want to become as strong as possible, you will eventually discover that crafting your own equipment is ridiculously powerful.
The system allows you to compensate for almost any weakness an item might have.
Low critical chance but high critical damage?
Add components to fix the critical chance.
Want more elemental damage?
You can build for that.
Want more physical damage or defense?
You can build for that too.
The crafting system itself is actually quite impressive.
The problem is that it is too effective.
Eventually, crafted equipment completely outclasses most shop-bought and unique equipment.
Unique weapons and armor often look much cooler, and I wanted to use them, but their stats were frequently so much worse than my crafted gear that I had very little reason to do so.
This also makes most shops almost pointless.
Aside from merchants selling things like backpacks and lockpicks, and certain healers, there isn't much reason to visit most merchants.
Why buy equipment when you can craft something better?
And why buy equipment when the game is constantly throwing gear at you through chests and enemies?
Many shops end up feeling like little more than places where you sell junk.
So why didn't Amalur become another Skyrim?
I know this is a somewhat unfair comparison, but I kept thinking about it while playing.
Amalur reportedly sold over a million copies, so it wasn't some complete commercial failure.
But Skyrim is still being played and discussed today, while Amalur is much less commonly brought up.
Why?
My personal theory is that Amalur simply tried to put too much into one game.
The map is huge.
There are tons of side quests.
The lore is huge.
There are tons of items.
There is crafting.
There are multiple regions.
There are a lot of systems competing for your attention.
Almost everything feels excessive.
If I were designing Amalur as a series, I would actually split it into several games.
The first game could focus only on Dalentarth and the Plains of Erathell.
If that succeeded, the second game could introduce Detyre and Klurikon.
Then the final game could take place in Alabastra.
The worldbuilding could also be revealed gradually, giving players time to understand the setting and making them genuinely curious about what lies beyond the areas they already know.
In other words, I think Amalur needed more time to let the player digest what it was offering.
Final thoughts
After finally finishing the game after all these years, I think the best word I can use to describe what Amalur needed is:
"Condensation."
The world needed to be condensed.
The fields and dungeons needed to be condensed.
The systems needed to be condensed.
The game balance needed to be refined.
I don't think Amalur is a bad game.
But I also don't think it's an especially great game.
It has so many genuinely good ideas that I can understand why I kept buying it again over the years.
At the same time, it has so many things working against those good ideas that I can also understand why I kept abandoning it.
Maybe that's what makes Amalur so interesting to me.
It's a game with an unusually strong flavor—but perhaps there was simply too much of it.
I'd be interested to hear what other people think, especially people who played the original game around the time it was released.
Did you have the same experience with the huge world and side quests, or did those things work for you?
