I don’t care whether you’re a fan of The Witcher books or not – you have to get The Witcher game. It’s fabulous eyecandy. No, really. The game is superb and although I can see why it could be a blasphemy for you when you’re a die hard Witcher novel fan, there’s no excuse to not play it. (And yeah, I’m somewhere in the middle of the gameplay )

I found myself giggling through most of the story-wise elements in a stupid, fangirly way and you know what? I’m not ashamed of myself. For me it’s a kind of intricate alternate world fanfiction, good fanfiction to boot.

Because, make no mistake there, the action of The Witcher game takes place after all’s said and done and Geralt’s very very dead. On the other hand, most of the game’s characters are the ones you know from the books or short stories, introduced as new. Some storylines, mostly those from short stories, are reused in some fashion or other. But then, there’s so much ‘gold’ for one that knows books, like Triss saying, after you give her ring: “So you love me now. You’ve forgotten about her.” Every person that read through books or stories knows who she is talking about. And then there’s a story told by a barkeeper in the village of ‘Deeps’ about a princess called Cirilla – this story sums up the action of the whole The Witcher book saga.

Writing is good in The Witcher. Mostly because the dialogues are often a direct quote or a paraphrase of actual dialogues in the books. I don’t know how much was Sapkowski himself involved in the making of the game, but some of the speeches I can’t remember for my life from books reek of him. (I think Sapkowski’s a good author – not a great one, but good – and his short stories are the best. He has a certain penchant for writing dark fantasy social satire. One of the dialogues I remember the most is a satire of the first sentence written in the polish language, which sums up to the archaic saying: “Give me this, I’ll be beating the butter and you go get rest” which was paraphrased into a not so archaic: “Give me this, I’ll be beating the butter and you go to the cellar and bring us beer”.) There’s a lot of candies that will be only understood by Polish, like: “Where’s law and justice?”, random shout by the city dweller, or Hierophants’ “Two brothers (… ) they were changed into wild swans. Or was it wild ducks?”.

And I scored it with the Princess of Temeria! Go me! Adda’s card was the most lewd I’ve seen so far, even the town hall’s worker wasn’t so bad. But I like the idea of the cards, they’re much more tasteful than similar things in other games. Really.

Battle system. I love it. I friggin love it. Seriously, I love the ‘talents’ idea, and I love how the actual fights take place. A word of ADVICE for you, peeps, if you decide to play: invest into silver and steel group fighting. It’s going to bail your ass more often than not. I know it saved my ass more often than not.

Well, probably I’ll get creamed later on by Kościej/Koshchey (You know, The Road with No Return ‘Boss’, With the Question “What is Kościej” and Answer: “I Think it’s Death”:>. I’m not going to friggin try to translate this name into English because the first thing that pops into my mind is BONER. The name implies ‘made of bones’ and ‘bony’ together with connection to several names for Death that are bound to its/her/his image as a skeleton.) I mean, I’m doing strong and group styles. He will probably need fast :>.

All in all, if you aren’t offended by ‘fuck’, some lewdness and other slightly immature things, like a good story-wise, not exactly linear (should I kill the werewolf or not? What impact will it have on a later gameplay?) and not exactly cliché action rpg game,
BUY THE WITCHER!

(I know the game has some stability issues on Vista, but fuck-yeah, if the system restarts can’t stop ME – and I get highly annoyed very, very fast – they won’t stop YOU!)

You get to screw Merigold more than twice – and get two different cards so far :>~~ Will inform later on~~

PS. Happy New Year all around~~!

PPS. Anyone feeling generous enough to donate in some form the text of the English translation of The Witcher first book, The Last Wish ? I know it was already published in UK