The Onset
A Farewell to Dragons, simply put, is a terrible game, no more, no less. Based off an extremely popular series of Russian fantasy novels (none of which have been released outside of Russia), it got lost in translation. You play as Victor, a doctor who attempts to rescue a (at first glance) normal girl, only to be knocked out and awaken in the Middle World - a land of fantasy, magic and steampunk. From there, he learns from the girl - Telle, a sorceress - that he must master the 4 schools of magic and either save (or destroy) the world - pretty cliched stuff. Unfortunately, after that, the story just falls apart in a heap of juxtaposed words and stilted dialogue. But this is a bog-standard isometric fantasy RPG, where story doesn't matter, right... right? So if we were to ignore that, what makes this game so bad anyways? Well, a multitude of things, really.
A Farewell to Quality
The story is practically the least of one's worries when they sit down and play this game. As I mentioned earlier, this game got lost in translation - and it shows. There's chunks of dialogue that are so poorly translated that I would re-read them 4 or 5 times and I still couldn't figure out what they were trying to say. This extends to quest objectives and skill descriptions (one of which is still in Cyrillic) which makes completing them and divining what certain skills do a major hassle. Of course, it doesn't help that some of the side quests in this game are outright broken and simply cannot be completed - but thankfully (or perhaps not) that was a very, very rare occurrence.
The side quests in this game were all Fedex or kill things quests - which dole out very little experience and loot - until you hit the 75% mark, then they start giving out such massive experience that caused me to start scratching my head. Especially whenever one quest that took all of 5 minutes to do gave out six times as much as I had been getting for the main quests at that point, and that was no small amount by any means.
As one can probably imagine by now, this isn't a very balanced game either - by pumping points into some of the most basic of character skills, a player can easily make their entire party nigh invincible without even touching any of the late game abilities. Not that any of them are really worth using. Most character's skill trees (save for Victor, who has access to three skill trees) are rather bare, some having at most 7-8 skills - with only 2 of them actually being useful. While the game stresses the importance of Victor becoming a master mage, I found the magic available to him (save for two of Telle's spells - hey, that rhymes!) to be too expensive, too weak, or both. Plus unlocking the top tier spells requires the player to completely ignore all his other skills, which makes him rather useless - especially in the final battle.
Another glaring example of being unbalanced is the character growth - which is exponential, to say the least. There was such a tremendous power gap between the enemy and I by the end of the game, I was starting to wonder why I was fighting them at all. While RPG number enthusiasts might be squealing with joy over this fact, I was very bored by it.
The graphics are absolutely nothing to write home about - they look outdated for 2009, or 2008, or 2007, or well... you get the drift. Clunky character models shuffle through uninspired landscapes fighting nondescript enemies is the best way to sum it up. The spell effects are weak, animations stiff, countrysides are bare save for a few landmarks. About the only good thing I can say about the graphics is that the character portraits are rather well done, but that's about all I can say.
Sound-wise... To be honest, I played this game muted - sound effects, voices, music, all off. Not that I really would expect anything great out of them - considering the voice acting in many of the other games 1C has published outside of Russia/Ukraine.
To top all of this off - the English version shipped out with a gamebreaking bug that doesn't kick in until 98% of the way through the game or so. One that's guaranteed to happen every single time. One that was never officially patched out. One that, after doing some digging and finding a fan patch that fixed it, was fixed by swapping a mere two bytes around.
In Conclusion
As much as I like Eastern European games for their quirkiness and charm, I would say avoid this game at all costs, unless you're absolutely desperate for a new RPG. Then wait to pick it up for $5, which actually happens on a very regular basis.