[Click here to start from the first progress log]

The good news is that Ash of Gods has an ending. The bad news is that its writing is so incoherent that things start to happen for no reason other than the plot demanding it; if there’s an explanation for the numerous things that occur at the very end, it’s barely touched upon and otherwise buried under a mountain of meaningless flavor text that ended up serving no purpose other than making the game lack focus. Not only that, but the choices become even more arbitrary than usual when you’re asked to choose between taking control of the strong group with an overpowered character in it or the weak group that’s truly aggravating to use. I went with the strong group, obviously, and the one character who was subsequently lost (killed off by the story, naturally) is the only character in any of my three parties who ever died. I don’t know if I got lucky or if it’s just that easy to keep everyone alive. Anyway, when I went back to choose the other party and see what changes that decision causes, things took a truly insulting turn. Not only you subjected to twice as many fights for some inexplicable reason, but the character who died in my previous attempt was killed anyway along with the entire “strong” party (among others) for a laughably contrived reason. How on earth is anyone supposed to see something like that coming? Giving you two buttons and no indication of which causes tons of characters to die isn’t even bad game design. It’s a slot machine of punishment.

Compare and contrast

The “bad” party is the one headed by Thorn Brenin, or at least that’s the case when his daughter Gleda isn’t a party member. She’s capable of wiping out tons of enemies, but is enough of a glass cannon that it’s usually best to use her with someone else. Still, she’s removed from the party during a particularly painful part of the game, and I was so sick of slowly grinding through combat encounter after combat encounter with this particular group that I went back to an older save and let Thorn get his head chopped off before restoring my previous save and continuing on. Every encounter with this party has a tendency to become an ordeal, though.

The second group is headed by the immortal Hopper, and he fights alone 100% of the time regardless of who’s with him. His fights are merely a nuisance in which enemies pose no actual threat to him. Then there’s Lo Pheng’s group, as seen in the video above. I use the word “group” lightly, of course, as I quickly started sending him out alone, but you can really see the difference a single strong character can make. Thorn and the others in his group are too weak to be fielded solo (barring some early parts that Gleda can clear alone), while the other two groups revolve around a single character and no one else. It has this weird yo-yo effect where two-thirds of combat encounters are a trivial waste of time, with one-third being frustrating and tedious in all the wrong ways. There’s no middle ground here.

The choices are awful

Everything about the way choices are implemented in this game is backwards. Setting aside how annoying it is to be faced with several choices and not enough information to even begin to guess at their consequences (which usually boil down to either “get thing/s” or “fight more enemies”) and the awfulness of the map where you sometimes have to choose a direction to get to a place not actually on it (I hope you like guessing randomly!), the writing can further complicate things. Take this riddle, for example, which I also have video of. A ghostly apparition appears and asks Hopper which of all the characters he’s met since the beginning of the game has “the most dangerous streak,” and your only clue is Hopper mentioning that it’s probably a trick question. Since he brought that up, I chose Thorn—the logic there is sound, since he’s technically the only character Hopper has met for the first time since the game began. That’s incorrect, however, and it’s not even remotely a trick. All you have to do is choose the obvious answer of “Coronzon” and you pass.

Why bring up the possibility of it being a trick question if it’s not one? Because the writing is really that bad, and for every hour of tedious combat, you should expect to spend twice as many trying to squeeze meaning out of confused metaphors, non sequiturs, and more names and places than you can be expected to remember.

Don’t ask me to explain this ending

I like to post the endings to bad games in order to save others the trouble of playing through them, so obviously watching the video above will spoil a whole bunch of things. Potentially. Or possibly not, because it barely makes sense. Just don’t ask me to explain what happens or why, because that’d require a pretty deep dive into my screenshots to cut through all of the awkward phrasing and find a glimmer of sense in it all. I’m sure that it all comes together somehow, even if certain powerful characters are woefully underdeveloped, but I simply don’t care that much. Also, I lost the final fight a couple times because of course it was Thorn’s group in charge. All of the retries ate up some time, but the attempt at 57:15 finally succeeded. The video is of my first finish where I lost only one character in the entire game, by the way. Choosing the strong group still sticks you with Thorn’s clowns at the end. Meh.

[Click here to go to Ash of Gods: Redemption log #2]

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