For a "you don't need to fight, INT/WIS/CHA builds", I wonder how the fuck you're supposed to fight the final boss? When I got to him all my spells were used up from the Ingus fight and being a mage all my physical weapons were shit and nothing could hit him, Morte couldn't hit him and did 0 damage and I brought back Annah and she could do like 2 damage with magical punch daggers if she happened to hit him. So basically I couldn't even do damage and he just rolled my team.
After I realized I couldn't hit him at all and even do 1 damage, I just console command instakill on him. Thank god for that or I'd have to youtube the ending.
I've always talked it out with him. Every single time.
You can talk him into reviving your companions before the fight (or do it yourself, I forget), but I never actually fought him in all my playthroughs.
On Ingus I had the same thing when I ran out of spells and ended up just using that 99 use black barb wand over and over for like 5 damage at a time until he died after 5-10 mins.
The insect swarm spell screws him over. There's a charm of it, too. I'm usually out of spells by that fight (knowing that I'll talk my way to the credits), so I just wail on him. With high enough CON (and the regen tattoo, and maybe greater balm if you've saved one), you can just outlast him, but mainlining healing charms is easier. Using them in the inventory heals you instantaneously and only plays the animation once when you close the inventory. It's not an exploit, it's clever use of game mechanics.
Also in terms of character questlines I don't think I ever figured out how to activate Fall from Grace or Annah's personal quest. In the EE version you get achievements for finishing the personal questlines. I did all their dialogue trees, but nothing. I got the achievement for Dakkon/Morte/Ingus.
Hm, they don't have personal quests, just some personal details you must have read already.
There's a FAQ for the PS4 version on GameFAQs which has a trophies section. I assume the achievements are the same. The only one related to Annah it lists is the one for recruiting her.
https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/pc/187975-planescape-torment/faqs/78258/trophiesOk, so there was a better ending available that didn't require that fight. Hmm. I had the blade of the immortal but the dialogue choices I did didn't lead me to that conversation where you threaten the boss with it.
Watching the "good" ending, it's definitely better, though it's still kind of brief. I guess it's ok.
I looove how simple it is. I like to think that it was a deliberate choice not dictated by a scant CG budget, because it works so well. TNO accepting responsibility for whatever it was the original incarnation did and just getting on with things... Mh.
Grab a weapon and make the best of it.
The setting was interesting but I thought the Lady of Pain and releasing Sigil from its cage was where the story was going...
I mean Coaxmetal says when he gives you the cage for the dream machine near the end that "I was told that soon before this cage broke open and I was free again I'd give this cage to you" which sorta implied that the cage breaking open was where it was going...which would've involved a storyline with Lady of Pain who is kind of a mysterious entity that the game doesn't really go into.
You ate the flavour packet in the ramen bag, I think. Or the devs fell for a creative trap set by the property, to give everything a surreal twist. Or they felt compelled to add yet another representative of chaos into the hub of the planar D&D cosmos. A siege tower
inside the walls, that's striking, right?
I was never keen on looking the curtain of this game, so I don't actually know, but I have heard that Wizards of the Coast were hard to work with. It is ironic that a setting where belief can shape reality would hem creative choices, but it is a licenced property after all and Sigil is a fixture of the setting.
Maybe Coaxmetal's quest for entropy and Ravel's desires to crack the donut open are sly references to their creative constraints.
It occurs to me that I never interrogated this at all. To this day, I just sop up the atmosphere and lore, by which I mean I skip most dialogue that I recognize as not being too pivotal for the story. Seeing fresh takes on this game is pretty cool. :3
So basically Planescape Torment is a pretty small scope focused story of a dude, whose not really significant in any universal sense, dealing with his own shit in an interesting setting that is mostly just backdrop and is never explored in a game again afterwards.
Not sure how satisfying I find this :|
TNO could be a major force, even as flawed as his immortality is, but he's too pre-occupied with his own shit, i.e. busy getting murdered over and over by his own mortality.
It's a shame we never got another Planescape game. Baldur's Gate 3 looks like it could deliver a taste of planehopping.
Anyway, may I recommend the Mask of The Betrayer expansion for Neverwinter Nights 2? That is a personal story, but it also happens to deal with the D&D pantheon. It's set in Rashemen, which is also not a typical fantasy setting. And you don't play a pre-defined character. (I'd say skip NW2, but a lot of people actually seem to like it.)
