This whole post is going to be spoilers.

I just completed The Witcher which I'd gotten on sale of Steam. Since it's a recent edition it has all the James Bond-meets-Captain-Kirk sex with nudity and everything. The sex really reminded me of James Bond. Everyone wants to have sex with Geralt for the most retarded excuses. That is really the stuff of 1960s escapist fantasy IMO and almost detracted from the seriousness of the game.

On the whole it was a good RPG but not the best that I've ever played. I felt like the quality of the game in terms of the storyline and ideas was uneven.

In the beginning of the game they introduce the idea of the monsters as corresponding to a crime that occurred, and so all the monsters are corresponding to a crime. The echinops are there because the merchant murdered his brother. The ghouls are there because the guard raped his girlfriend and then she committed suicide. It was absolutely great storyline and I ran around everywhere trying to figure out who had committed what crime.

But later in the game there were too many monsters for no reason. You're running back and forth across the maps accomplishing mundane quest objectives and you end up killing hundreds of Drowners and Boedeziguerswhavers and Drowned Dead. I thought that in order for there to be a Drowned Dead there must have been a drowning suicide. If so there must have been a bunch of lemmings that jumped into the swamp because of how you're constantly mobbed with throwaway Drowned Dead. Again, it really destroyed the compelling premise established in the first part of the game.

Especially seeing as how most of the battles were really easy, and you don't even need to be at level 40 out of 50 or higher to comfortably complete the game and kill all the challenging boss monsters, they could have done with a lot less combat in order to make the monsters thematically meaningful whenever you encountered them.

I liked the game, thought it was worth my money, and don't feel bad about having spent a lot of time completing it. But basically a lot of the stuff that had been done extraordinarily well at the very beginning of the game kind of got detracted from by what seemed to be evolvingly careless or slipshod design of the levels and missions as the game neared its final chapters.

I did like how there were 6 styles of kung fu you could choose depending on what type of enemy you were fighting.

Finally, a question about the ending. I think that Alvin grows up to be Jaques de Aldesberg and then travels back in time to establish the Order of the Flaming Rose and try to recover the secrets of witcher mutations before they're lost forever. That would explain all the similarities between Alvin and Jaques de Aldesberg, the pendant, and so on. It would also correspond exactly with one of the conversations you have with Alvin where you have the ability to say that Alvin can't be a witcher because the ability to create the requisite mutations had been lost. I think it's significant that Triss explicitly states that Alvin theoretically has the ability to travel through time. The only problem with this, of course, is that any time you add time travel to a storyline you make it inherently contradictory and stupid. After all, if Kaer Morhein hadn't been attacked by Salamandra in the first place the entire story wouldn't have happened and you wouldn't have had Geralt meeting Alvin to begin with. Therefore, Geralt wouldn't have been able to tell Alvin that his visions are a gift and he must try to do good with them, and then you woudn't have the rest of the above premise. Thoughts?

Temporal Mechanics 101...
...If you go back in time to change something, you create a new timeline and are now heading towards a new future.

Did you play the version that has the sexy cards you can collect for banging every named female character you meet? Those were pretty cool.

While I thought The Witcher was pretty tight in a lot of areas, one part that annoyed mt to no ends was how every, uh, "chapter", was basically a rip-off from existing fiction. You had the story of the Grail, the Detective Noir bit, etc. There was barely any original mythology.

Overall though, it thought everything worked pretty well. I'm tempted to say it was a better game than Dragon Age.

Yes, my version had the softcore porn postcards.

I don't necessarily have a problem with a game being derivative if it is done well. The problem with originality is that often nobody thinks it's as interesting as the author does. Stuff that is already popular usually has wide appeal on the other hand. Sure, if an author came up with something that was not only totally original but also awesome, then he or she would be god-like. But that's less likely to happen than the original idea not really being that interesting to anyone else.

I agree that purely original stuff doesn't fly, but I'm not talking about that. Making an entire chapter that is so painfully obviously the tale of the Kingfisher and the Grail, one that is obviously Cthulu, one that is obviously Raymond Chandler Noir... that's just dumb. That not "inspired by", that's "rip off cause we don'T have any ideas of our own".

How they presented monsters as occuring because of people's evil deeds, the moral dilemma at the end of the day as to wether then monsters really are so bad and why you go around killing them, the conflict between hmans and elves and dwarves - that was "original" enough. If I had to guess, the stuff that came out of the books was the good stuff, and the developers that made the game just shrugged when it came to content and threw in whatever was simplest.

I guess you're right. When I think about it, treating monsters like individuals based on their deeds is fundamentally at odds with monsters being created by human evil/crimes. They kind of threw the kitchen sink in there.