No matter how many times I tried to give this game a chance, it failed each time to grip me in any meaningful way.
On five separate occasions I sat down for at least an hour and tried my utmost to like this game, but I just couldn't. I wanted so badly to like this game, but try as I might it shot itself in the foot at every turn.
There was so much promise in this game, an almost unique collaboration with Blind Guardian, the perfect band for a fantasy RPG, various classes, a giant world and mounted combat. So much promise that it's sad in a way, that it only took one thing for me to instantly hate this game. The Camera.
At every single opportunity the camera sits exactly where I do not want it. It gives me a birds-eye view, when I want a wide view of the area, and it gives me an all too narrow view when I want to get close. The camera was simply too high and too close to the player for my liking and it ruined everything for me. I was always restricted to a very limited view of the terrain both around me and in-front of me. What's the use in creating a vast, lush environment for me to walk around in when I can't even see most of it? On top of that, I got lost quite often due to the camera and was forced to rely on the minimap, which was barely any help, and the world map to find my way. And what's with the lack of a first-person camera?
So, after the first few attempts to deal with the camera, I just tried to ignore it. And it worked for a while, until other things in the game annoyed me. Like the inane comments from the characters. I don't know whether the developers we're aiming for a self-effacing, "I know I'm a video-game character" style, but it certainly seemed that way to me. And I'm okay with that kind of thing. In fact that can really add to a game. But not when it's always shoved in your face. I mean, seriously, could anything be more annoying than the blonde/bimbo/valley-girl/insert other ditzy female stereotype Seraphim character saying "Another town that clearly needs my help"?
Okay, so you say that the camera isn't THAT bad, and I can learn to like the inane comments from the main characters. Then what about the completely mismatched dialogues of the NPCs...?
There were many instances where one NPC would say something inane, the other would reply that they were disinterested, offence would be expressed at their disinterest, then the inane NPC would, with full intent, say they were frightfully sorry to leave them, but they had to go, and the other would reply that would be left bereft without the other....? What kind of odd behaviour is that?
Also, I approached a bard in one of the cities, who said rather congenially, "I welcome you to our wonderful city" (or something to that effect", and two seconds later added "Shove off you nasty git" (again, something to that effect).
The beauty of fantasy RPGs is often in the small details, as Oblivion so clearly showed us, but the details in Sacred 2 show just how ugly this game is.
Okay, so, you say, the camera and the inane comments and the disjointed, and often jarring, niggly details are annoying but there's is still much to love about the game.
And then I say that there is not much left to like, when you consider that most of the quest are utterly repetitive and banal (a word the NPCs clearly can't pronounce) and offer very little incentive to take them on, forcing the player to find something more interesting like the Main Quest for instance.
Another aspect of Sacred 2 that could have held so much promise, the Main Quest benefits from the scale of the story and the various different back stories of the various classes, if they can be called back stories when they mainly consist of a 2-minute cut-scene where a dying tart (dying badly by the way) drones on melodramatically about some vague menace that needs to be neutralised, or some random unearthing of the player in an excavation site.
However, because these 'back stories' are so thin that they are very nearly transparent, and there is no real explanation given for anything in the game I really felt absolutely no motivation to play this game. There was no reason given as to why a camp of brigands had no problem with me, yet the second I stepped outside it and walked 5 feet I was suddenly beset by brigands. Likewise no reason is given as to why everything, and I mean everything, outside of a city or village that didn't have a quest for me, just randomly attacked me.
Also, as soon as you find a quest and talk to the relevant person, you are hit with a wall of text. Now, I know banal details help to fill out quests and diminish the appearance of repetition, but having to read a piece of text like it was written for a play with stage directions telling you that the speaker is in fact talking to you right now, and in a few lines he's actually talking to someone else, really ruins the charm that these banal details could potentially put on these quests.
So, as a final nail in the coffin, add to all of these issues, an interface which I frankly found confusing and lacking in real detail, and you have a recipe for one bad game that could have been oh-so good.
As an afterthought, however, two specific things that I did like were the quite interesting Temple Guardian class and the item pickup system.