The Witcher III: Wild Hunt review | Pale Polish Gigolo™ edition | Monster Hunter at Home

Ladies and gentlemen, folks and darlings. It’s me; Dr. M. Here to bring you the first of many potentially amusing rambling diatribes I’ll transcribe in the guise of a “somewhat” comprehensive review for a video game I happen to own. Today, I’m gonna be taking you on an expansive in-depth analysis of one man’s quest to blatantly rip off Michael Moorcock’s Elric Saga and create Poland’s largest leading cultural export on the market today. Welcome to the Witcher III: Wild Hunt; an action RPG released back in 2015 on all eighth-gen consoles, PC, and the Nintendo Switch, made by those folks who are currently suffering the long-term karmic punishment for announcing Cyberpunk 2077 too early. A triple-A gaming experience where you really feel like a handsome discount Christopher Lambert who goes around hunting fiendish monsters and definitely goes down on all the medieval strumpets that eastern European game devs could possibly render on your PlayStation 4. Anyway, let’s summarize the plot.

Plot - So what the bleeding hell is a Witcher anyhow?

You play as Geralt of Rivia, a mutated albino monster slayer for hire on a never-ending quest to save his overpowered surrogate daughter from a menagerie of off-brand hybrids of the Skull Knight from Berserk and Swedish death metal album cover art known as the Wild Hunt. With that goal in mind, you wander throughout the vast open continent of… The Continent, to search far and wide for some way to acquire some coin. Whether it be through slaying cursed spirits and various demons and generic fantasy zombies from Polish mythology, resolving geo-political tensions between the Nilfgaardian armies of the north and the remaining free city-states within the ailing kingdom of Vizima, or finding an old woman’s frying pan, no contract is too good for the acquisition of some filthy lucre to spend on food, weapon repair kits, and mostly just food, really. I mean most of the best weapons in the game are either found in chests or just handed over to you anyhow and the Swallow potions you can make to restore your health can unfortunately increase your toxicity levels and essentially poison you the more you imbibe them. By all accounts, buying new weapons and armor in this game, unlike other role-playing video games, is inherently a waste of your in-game currency. (Trust me: just use some of that money to stock up on repair kits and food items if anything. It’ll save your life in the long-run given how frustrating the weapon durability system can be in this game.)

So with your mind on your money and your money on your mind, and with the help of your trusty teleporting horse Roach, it’s up to Geralt to slay as many monsters and bandits that happened to be in front of his route, reignite lost romances and torn alliances, put up with a foul-mouthed gray gnome thing named Johnny going on about how much he enjoys peeing in the swamp, and professionally cuck the emperor out of bringing his daughter/your adoptive OP-as-all-hecking-frack Witcher pupil Ciri in exchange for a hefty sum of reward money due to Geralt just wanting to become a decent father figure and enjoying a wholesome albeit poorly controlled snowball fight sequence with Ciri. Although if you don’t want to choose that option like I ended up doing, you could be a total sell-out and hand Ciri over to her resting bitch faced father. Good times all around. You monster.

Of course, along the way Geralt will have to deal with everything from staging an elaborate undercover coup d’etat against a criminally insane king obsessed with killing every witch on the Continent, memorizing lines for a play in order to find a doppelganger, get drunk with his Witcher pals and dress in frilly lace to prank call some random witch, help a lovable yet abusive alcoholic baron with settling his familial disputes with both his estranged daughter (who decided to go through some emo phase and join the local witch hunters’ corps), and his elderly wife who’s been abducted into servitude by a trio of eldritch ornery crones, help his dwarf friend Zoltan and the token bard character Dandelion (who’s called Jaskier which for some reason means Buttercup [Cue related clip from The Princess Bride] in the Witcher novels and Netflix series in case you were confused) run a thriving tavern that functions less like anything that would provide you with a means of earning more crowns but instead just amounts to storage space for all the weapons and armor you’ll compulsively find throughout your journey. Okay, I’ve gone on about this game’s story long enough; let’s talk about what the game itself offers.

Gameplay - The Unexpected Value of Tedious Excessive Side-Questing

The world of the Witcher III is so massive and immersive, it’ll take you around 45 minutes of slaying random trash mobs and exploring to even go to the arbitrary edge of the map the developers set in place so you wouldn’t have too much fun. Granted, I didn’t bother going all medieval GTA on the collective asses of the armed guards patrolling the various cities you’ll venture through because given how the law enforcement AI turned out in a certain other game that was developed after this one, I have low expectations that CDPR actually had the hindsight to implement such a feature well enough in this game either. There’s about a gazillion and one different things you can do throughout the continent. Pick up various plants and herbs to use for crafting special damage buff oils along with those health potions you’ll hardly use due to those aforementioned toxicity mechanics? Check. Go to the apothecary in the game’s starting village and realize why Herbalist Tomira is the true best girl in The Witcher III? Check dat ass out, dawg! Come across a rock troll who was literally named after a meme associated with Russian singer Eduard Khil? Check-o-rama! Of course, what’s a good action RPG without some engaging, tactical combat and the overwhelmingly rewarding feeling of gaining butt-loads of XP to level up? I’ve got an answer: It’s called The Witcher III: Wild Cu-

Combat boils down to three basic elements: Mashing the Square and Triangle buttons to unleash a flurry of light and heavy attacks to your enemies while hocking down a grilled chicken sandwich and some swigs of water to recover your vitality, puncturing some daft yokel’s neck with a crossbow bolt whilst practicing your social distancing, and the utilization of runic Witcher’s Signs that serve as your arsenal of magic spells throughout the game. The problem is the fact that despite how your stamina gauge could recharge quickly outside of combat when you’re running, jumping, and practicing your sick parkour moves atop nearby village hamlets, that stamina gauge slows down by about three times as much in terms of recharging during combat. Furthermore, your stamina is also your mana meter. So don’t expect yourself to be spamming your Igni sign like a D&D mage spamming Magic Missile. Of course you do earn XP from combat as well as completing quests and Witcher contracts. However, there are no ability scores or attribute stats to raise when leveling up. All you receive upon leveling up is a character point to be used for acquiring various perks to equip that give necessary bonuses such as slowing down time when aiming with your crossbow, increasing the intensity of your preferred Witcher Sign, and health regeneration over time. To elaborate further on my personal gripes toward this game’s leveling mechanics, CD Projekt Red also committed the vile, heretical, sinful treachery against good role-playing game design: diminishing XP returns based on level scaling.

In other words, the more you level up, the less experience points you gain from low level enemies. Which do you think you’d prefer: a game where for example a level-eight rodent of unusual size consistently letting you earn about 50 XP a pop the entire game, or a game where that giant rat’s XP starts lowering to practically nil the huger your character’s level gets, thus depriving you of the rewarding RPG gamer tradition of using advantageous, optimal grinding tactics while rendering most combat save for whatever’s in the way and tougher enemies utterly pointless? At the very least CDPR had the foresight of not including other blasphemous leveling mechanics such as equipment based progression (which is for cowards who hate RPGs, math geeks, and boomer-shooter jocks), milestone XP (which is for cowards who hate tabletop RPGs), Final Fantasy II and Romancing Saga style stat grinding (which is for sadistic, cognitively impaired, self-prostrating cowards who think something as dumbed-down and horrendously visually dated as Skyrim is the pinnacle of gaming), and whatever the hell was going on with Chrono Cross. You might then be asking, “Hey Doc! How am I gonna be able to level up quick enough to finish this game that’s taking up too much storage space on my PS4’s hard-drive for me to download a new Guilty Gear Strive update patch?” Two words: Side-Quests.

There are dozens of side quests littered all over the map in this game. Everything from interesting and captivating subplots with characters you enjoy listening to and conversing with through various dialogue options, to climbing the brackets of local village fist fights where you spend most of your time punching increasingly angrier shirtless homeless people so that you’d one day become the world champion from Novigrad to the Skellige Isles, to about 30 or so Witcher Contracts that serve as your main source of income, slaying challenging monsters and claiming trophies made of their heads to mount on your horse for XP and money gain boosts. There are also other forms of lesser side-content that should be avoided as often as possible, such as horse racing (which you only need to do a few times to either get the best saddlebags in the game barring DLC, or to increase the likelihood of taming some mage strange.) and the most unnecessary tacked-on feature The Witcher III has to offer: Gwent. Here’s my advice: outside of the tutorial which is inherently designed to make you lose no matter how quickly you can grasp this bullshit digital card game’s obtuse mechanics, never under any circumstance EVER play Gwent. To anyone foolish enough to delve deeper into the meta of this crappy mobile game spin-off stapled to what’s supposed to be an action RPG about monster slaying and banging hot mage ladies as some gruff ashen haired badass to the point where you’re actually playing the mobile version of Gwent on your phone right now as you’re reading this; you ought to realize by now that Final Fantasy VIII was a terrible game, and ergo Triple Triad was a mistake that caused every RPG dev in the industry to irrationally shoved-in hastily programmed derivatives of that minigame in every facet of the genre for almost a decade and a half before people started remembering that RPGs can have intriguing stories and challenging combat with rewarding gameplay loops without shoving a mandatory high stakes Go Fish tournament in them. No matter what you can say about Gwent’s inclusion in The Witcher III, just note that it’s not even remotely important to either character progression, the plot, or even acquiring the best examples of phat loot made to ensure that Geralt’s on the fleek and ghost-riding his teleporting whippin’ neigh-neigh pimped-out ride. (Is that how the cool folks use that phrase? Ack, curse this contemporary layman’s jargon.)

Now that I’ve explained as much about gameplay as I can tolerate pontificating about, lemme tell you a couple of delightful anecdotes of my time playing through The Witcher III. One day, I was passing the time in between main story quests midway through the game, partaking in another kind of side-quest I neglected to mention until now: treasure hunting for weapon, armor and crafting recipes from various Witcher schools spread all across the map. When I came across one of these side-quests in this castle by a neighboring cliffside, the drawbridge leading to that castle was out of commission, there was also this dragon or griffon or whatever flying near that fortress, and the controls to bring the drawbridge back down was on the other side. I thought that merely running quick enough and jumping at the right moment to the other side along the cliff under that castle would be a capital idea. To put it bluntly, I was wrong. Trying to adjust my trajectory while jumping didn’t help much either. Then I realized, after some quick *cough* “research,” that there was an underwater alcove crawling with a few enemies and that there was such a thing as a Killer Whale potion that allows you to dive in and hold your breath underwater for longer periods of time which I had to acquire a few materials in order to craft it. There was also a time where I was following one of Geralt’s two main love interests (that aren’t minted pieces of metal used to facilitate the abstract concept of exchanging currency for goods and services) Yennifer into this underground library looking for something pertaining to some mage conspiracy or maybe some kind of alchemical recipe somewhere beneath the fortress of Kaer Trolde. Next thing you know, after some scavenger hunting via spamming Geralt’s Batman Arkham Asylum style Witcher senses, we came across this really tough golem boss that was made as a sentry for whoever was scheming with those armored pointy-headed skeleton jerks who’re chasing my adopted daughter, and then after defeating that golem the room became so full of toxic gas that once a cutscene triggered where Geralt and Yennifer has to teleport out of there, the game crashed and I decided not to play it again for about three months. No wonder Geralt doesn’t like portals. Before I slap this puppy with an arbitrary score to determine what I personally think of it, here’s my personal tidbits of advice about how to play The Witcher III the Dr. M way. Trust me: I’ve already reached Lv. 33 a while ago and I’ve apparently played this game for a total of 78 hours and completed 35% of the PS4 trophies for it. I know what I’m talking about here.

Filler - Doctor M.’s Helpful Gamer Strats regarding The Witcher III

Strategy 1 - Optimization - Given the fact that gradually min-maxing character stats isn’t an available option in this game, use your character points wisely whenever you level up. Here’s my personal layout for whatever perks you must acquire and max out as soon as possible. (I mean, they aren’t called perks in-game, but they function in the same general idea): Muscle Memory for increased light attack damage, Lightning Reflexes for slowing down the dilation of time when aiming your crossbow, Undying for further health regeneration requiring at least one Adrenaline point (oh crap, I forgot to explain what Adrenaline is in this game, didn’t I?). As for perks that boost Witcher Signs, I recommend Melt Armor for boosting how well your Igni sign weakens enemy armor, Delusion for increasing the effectiveness of how well the Axii sign (which is the best Sign in the game alongside Igni, which basically lets you spew fireballs and turning your hand into a flamethrower) can effectively brainwash people, and Fire Stream, which is the aforementioned hand-flamethrower ability for holding down your Igni spell casting. I’ve also chosen both the Acquired and Heightened Tolerance perks to basically increases my overdose threshold for using potions that, as stated before, make you feel toxicity the more you use them, as well as Poisoned Blades which grants a 15% chance for any oil I apply to my weapons to poison enemies each time I slice ‘em up, Sun and Stars for regenerating 10 Hit Points every second, Steady Shot for increasing crossbow damage by 25%, and finally Survival Instinct which increases my maximum Vitality by 500. If you can’t find any decent way to level up, finding a Place of Power gives you a free character point the first time you draw power from them along with a buff to the intensity of one of your Signs. Try this build out, study it, and use it for the rest of your playthrough. You’re welcome.

Strategy 2 - Bang all the ladies! - I’m not joking. For my playthrough, one of my stipulations for completing this game was to find every and all opportunities to turn Geralt into the biggest gigolo in The Continent. Although not exactly as explicit as Cyberpunk 2077’s revolutionary dick rendering character creator physics, there’ll still be plenty of titties to gawk at and plenty of romantic options to indulge in. My advice: bang both Triss Merigold and Yennifer, and you’ll bear witness to an amusing reward. I won’t spoil the hilarity. Just take my word for it. And yes, you can even pay at least three prostitutes in a brothel to take a gander at Geralt’s pale veiny man root. Somehow I personally think this wouldn’t be uncharacteristic for him either.

Strategy 3 - Use a walkthrough whenever you’re stuck. - There’s nothing wrong with using a guide or a wiki article to help expedite the process of completing CDPR’s golden goose of gruesome game mechanics™ so you can free up that storage space for games actually worth my time and money (Insert Guilty Gear Strive, DOOM 2016, and NieR Automata here). I wanna at least try out Final Fantasy XIV when the digital version becomes available again now that I’ve heard that even that version of the game’s being sold out. You’re gonna need some extra guidance to free you from this curse at some point, so it’s never too late to just pull up a GameFAQs guide when a certain side-quest is obstructing your goal to complete and then uninstall the game.

Strategy 4 - NEVER PLAY GWENT! EVER! - Once you’ve trudged through the unpleasant tutorial and inevitably lost, never play Gwent again. Sure, you can buy some of the cards as collectables from your nearby taverns, but it’s better to spend your money restocking on your food reserves and downing at least one pint of Temerian rye and vodka. Getting yourself into a drunken stupor is a much more entertaining prospect than wasting a single minute of your time playing the latest version of Triple Triad that has been brought onto this accursed land. Just don’t play Gwent. Also, never haggle beyond 25% above the asking price for a Witcher Contract reward.

Final Score - How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Both the Romance Options for the Sake of Comedy Gold

My final score for The Witcher III: Wild Hunt is a resounding Top Notch Swords out of Spot o’ cider for ye or a bit o’ dried curd. Look I’m not saying that it’s in any way a badly designed game. It actually looks astonishingly well made when you’re looking past the weird NPCs wandering around during dialogue cutscenes, the friendly dwarf in charge of the Bank of Novigrad having noticeably contracted a serious case of Rayman’s Phantom Limb Disorder, and some late game side characters seemingly showing lines around their necks where their polygons hadn’t finished rendering in place, but aside from some mild visual hiccups here or there it still looks pretty good for the most part. As tedious and janky as many of the game’s mechanics can be in between long breaks from playing it, it can have moments of awesomeness at times and the world you travel through provides plenty of sights to see and stories to unfold.

I especially praise the engaging and entertaining story and the cinematography of the cutscenes whenever it strays from merely spamming the same shot-reverse shot dialogue formula that modern Sony’s endless stream of vapid, bland, depressing third-person action games trying to be more like avant-garde movies with button prompts and UI elements have been rendering more of a cliche than it already was 16 years ago. Special shout-out to the amazingly composed accompanying musical score during pivotal plot moments and combat for also introducing me to the Polish folk band Percival’s vocal tracks “Lazare” and “Sargon” for their seamless implementations within this game’s OST. This music’s so good that I was astonished that none of these catchy and epic leitmotifs were even remotely used within the musical score of The Witcher Netflix series, which from what I’ve heard is getting a new season soon. Truly Percival is to The Witcher III as Naoki Hashimoto from Outrage is to modern Guilty Gear vocal tracks. 11/10: definitely music to slay monsters by. In conclusion, try it out, play it, finish the main story and as many side-quests as you can, then delete it. Enough said.

Oh well, I guess a stat screen at the end wouldn’t hurt either.

Final Score - The Witcher III: Wild Hunt

Pros

Epic catchy Polish folk band OST

Engaging well-written story and stellar voice acting

Plenty of choices to make

Looks mostly spectacular

Plenty of spicy romance scenes

There’s even ways to change Geralt’s hair and beard

Cons

Diminishing XP gains based on level scaling

You have to complete a ton of interesting but sometimes tedious side-quests to level up quicker

No ability scores or MP system; Signs use the same stamina as your ability to run

Occasional visual jank and rare crashes; hardly starts up when first inserting the disc

Why can’t I romance Tomira? She’s clearly got the best ass in the game. What gives?

I have no strong opinions on the DLCs one way or the other. I hear they’re decent.

Visuals - ⛤⛤⛤⛤

Story - ⛤⛤⛤⛤

Voice-Acting - ⛤⛤⛤⛤⛧

Music - ⛤⛤⛤⛤⛧

Gameplay - ⛤⛤⛤

Final Score - 21 /25

If there’s any way of reminiscing back to the days when people forgot there were two other Witcher games before this on while Poland’s largest AAA game developer experiences tremendous financial and legal repercussions at the moment, at the very least they can do what Valve does with Steam and rely more heavily on GOG stock. Also, someone’s gotta bring more erotic art of Tomira into this world, even if I have to do it myself. That bodacious behind needs more time in the limelight, dang it!

Up next: I’ll review a game I don’t even own, but I know enough about to review it anyhow. Yep. First review typed, and I’m already typing up a new one. Stay classy.