(Semi-spoilery below, though only for fairly early on in the game, and a little BG2 spoilerage as well.)
I keep reading these praise-filled reviews of Planescape: Torment. Supposedly it's the epitome of RPGs, an amazing piece of work. I love RPGs! I replay ones with not a hell of a lot of replay options (c.f. KotOR1) just because I loved the story.
I bought PST a few years back, finally caving in and deciding to see if it was as cool as the reviewers had said. I think this is now my third attempt at playing, and it's the farthest I've gotten - and I'm only at the part where I met the guy who I learned I
must go see for answers. Whatever the hell his name is - you see how uninteresting I'm finding this? Ph-something.
Out of sheer stubborness, I decided to try to finish it, at least to see if it gets better. I figure it must be me, right? How could it get that many rave reviews otherwise? Plus I was semi-inspired by JC's "Jasonscape: Torment" story in the fanfic forum, as well as a recent thread on great voice acting - the cast is amazing, frankly. (Side note: I find it vaguely appropriate that Morte would be harassing Jason - perhaps karmic payback for creating a character that took away a lot of Anomen's ladies?)
Maybe it's because the thing that frustrates me most about RPGs is when you run into the characters who pull the "I have all this information about you/your quest/whatever, but I'm not going to tell you that info
or explain why" stunt. I. Freaking. Hate. It. Hell, my first play-through of BG2, I booted Yoshimo out of the party after his second "oh, I'm not so sure about this" commentary after the latest quest from Aran Linvail. Put up or shut up. Imagine my surprise when a couple games later, I finally heard that you were kind of supposed to be taking him to Spellhold with you, and after doing so, I figured out how you could get out of there without telling Immy to find her own way, or - as I did it - leaving someone behind. (Sorry, Nalia. Not my fault you didn't just tag along behind the group, right? Stupid game limitations...) Back to PST: Even a woman who addresses you as her "love", after she gets past her bitterness at whatever the hell it was you did (she won't tell you
that, either), won't cough up any real info on what the fuck you are, why you're here, who she is, and so on. Even random people that you meet who have seen you before have little more to say. Yeah, yeah, it's part of the plot. Fine, so the purpose of the plot is to drive me into an insane rage and make me want to throttle all these people who have nothing better to do than tease an amnesiac with vague hints.
I've commented before that I've had trouble getting under the Nameless One's skin, so to speak. Admittedly I rarely play male characters in RPGs, but that's because these days I actually have an option to play a female, typically, so I take it. I also feel more comfortable interacting on a more personal level with other characters as a woman. Yes, yes, I'm really a human and have never been a drow/elf/robot/whatever, either - indulge me, here. The game creators aren't making this easy on me, though. Apparently he's got a thing for tattooing, self-mutilation, and so forth. I have a piercing in each earlobe that I wish would grow shut, and nothing else in the way of body modification; Mr. Nameless here has, in the course of exploring the main quad of the city, bitten off his own finger and replaced it with a bone (capping that off with a toothed ring that bit in and won't come off, and getting the bone and finger in exchange for letting someone else gnaw off hunks of his flesh), gouged out his own perfectly good eye and replaced it with a previous version of his eye, had his intestines ripped out - and not replaced - just to find a wimpy ring, and has now found a former arm of his, suggesting that perhaps some other major parts of his aren't exactly "factory originals" either.
And now, of course, I'm getting a
Memento association from this tattooed instructions on an amnesiac thing - yes, I know the game predates the movie by a year. I'm assuming full-length mirrors aren't all that common in Sigil - else I'd have checked things out for myself already - so I'm just going to believe there's a perfectly good reason that theoretical tattooed instructions
for myself would be on my back and not in backwards script (for mirrored viewing, of course) and slog through the game until I find it. This film connection isn't helped by getting a vague Joe Pantoliano vibe off Morte, in voice and in potential role.
Pray for me, because I think I'll need it.