All good things must come to an end. Some ends are... More-climactic than others.
I definitely felt that Marwyn's end was awesome. Eile's choice of "You can leave the blade in and maybe live to watch your empire crumble, or pull it out and die a coward" was absolutely hardcore.
The other ends however... Could've been executed a bit better.
Fjall fighting the dragon was always destined to be a disappointment. Even in the mainline Witcher series, the fights against giant CGI monsters were always underwhelming. It's very hard to pull off having a real person fight a CGI monster and make it feel engaging. Even big-budget Hollywood movies have a hard time pulling it off. You could probably count on one hand the number of times its been done well. So I won't take too many points off for it.
The fight between Balor & Syndril however... Yeah, that was a bit disappointing too. Syndril's solution of "using his Chaos against him" could have been done well if they had gone the route of, say, forcing Balor to over-exhert himself and his newfound power by fighting defensively and baiting him into drawing on too much magic. It would have played into the themes well, as Balor's pride would be his downfall. Instead, Syndril is just like "I'm gonna shoot lightning at him and absorb his Chaos magic and use it to blow up the Monolith" and it just... Works. That's it. That's the whole fight. Very disappointing, and probably the lowest point in the series for me.
That aside, I still enjoyed this series as a whole. And like many D&D campaigns, an anticlimactic ending doesn't necessarily mean the whole campaign was bad. Most of my favorite memories from my Games were usually somewhere in the beginning or middle of the story. So despite the rough ending, I'm still rating this series favorably. Blood Origin is definitely worth checking out if you have 3ish hours to kill.
I definitely felt that Marwyn's end was awesome. Eile's choice of "You can leave the blade in and maybe live to watch your empire crumble, or pull it out and die a coward" was absolutely hardcore.
The other ends however... Could've been executed a bit better.
Fjall fighting the dragon was always destined to be a disappointment. Even in the mainline Witcher series, the fights against giant CGI monsters were always underwhelming. It's very hard to pull off having a real person fight a CGI monster and make it feel engaging. Even big-budget Hollywood movies have a hard time pulling it off. You could probably count on one hand the number of times its been done well. So I won't take too many points off for it.
The fight between Balor & Syndril however... Yeah, that was a bit disappointing too. Syndril's solution of "using his Chaos against him" could have been done well if they had gone the route of, say, forcing Balor to over-exhert himself and his newfound power by fighting defensively and baiting him into drawing on too much magic. It would have played into the themes well, as Balor's pride would be his downfall. Instead, Syndril is just like "I'm gonna shoot lightning at him and absorb his Chaos magic and use it to blow up the Monolith" and it just... Works. That's it. That's the whole fight. Very disappointing, and probably the lowest point in the series for me.
That aside, I still enjoyed this series as a whole. And like many D&D campaigns, an anticlimactic ending doesn't necessarily mean the whole campaign was bad. Most of my favorite memories from my Games were usually somewhere in the beginning or middle of the story. So despite the rough ending, I'm still rating this series favorably. Blood Origin is definitely worth checking out if you have 3ish hours to kill.