The Top Shelf: The Second Round 040: Champions: Return to Arms

by mento

Welcome to The Top Shelf, a weekly feature wherein I sort through my extensive PS2 collection for the diamonds in the rough. My goal here is to narrow down a library of 185 games to a svelte 44: the number of spaces on my bookshelf set aside for my PS2 collection. That means a whole lot of vetting and a whole lot of science that needs to be done - and here in the second round, that means narrow...

Extra Note: We've entered Shelftember! In this much-vaunted month, we will be processing one of the second round entries every day. I'll be spending one hour apiece with each game - inspired by DanielKempster's backlog-clearing series "An Hour With..." - and determining its fate from there.

In retrospect, rushing my way through Champions of Norrath so I could import my character into the sequel might not have been the best idea. My plan was to play through both games before I do their Battle Royale in round three, where I'll focus on comparing and contrasting the two, and I figured having the same character in both would give me a keener perspective on those differences. What I didn't anticipate is that Champions: Return to Arms starts over back at level 1. Thus, I had the decision of sticking with the entry-level difficulty and effortlessly blowing through the first 80% of the game's content with my beefy imported character, or switch up to a higher difficulty despite the fact that the level caps are slightly different due to the sequel's added content. Rather than ending a run at level 20, which is what I did for Champions of Norrath, the first playthrough of Return to Arms is likely to bring you up to level 25. Lemme tell ya, being five levels below all the starting enemies is one heck of a way to ease oneself into a game.

Fortunately, I am more than used to fighting my way across Norrath with my barbarian heroine, whose build is focused on passive boosts and dual-wielding swordplay. It's really jus a matter of never biting off more than I can chew where crowds are concerned, and using ranged attacks to wear down the mini-boss characters that can kill me in one or two hits. The first game imparted the importance of certain status effects - poison and disease damage is a great way to keep enemies distracted, while ice has a chance of slowing them down - and the best abilities to keep developing on my skill tree. Return to Arms even throws me a bone here, has it has reworked a lot of the skills I'd already invested in for better balance. For instance, in Champions of Norrath, you took a huge damage penalty to dual-wielding which the Dual-Wielding passive skill simply helped to mitigate: it went from 50% damage per weapon to closer to 75% as you invested in that node of the skill tree. Return to Arms, however, lets you dual-wield without malus from the offset, and so my dual-wield skill has boosted what was once a 70% penalty to a 130% boost to the damage output of both weapons. It's retroactively made my investment in dual-wielding and its attached skill far more valuable. Elsewhere, an active buff that increases critical hit damage temporarily has been nerfed to provide less chance to crit for a shorter duration, so it's not all peaches and cream. Still, given how powerful critical hits can be and how you're already penalized defensively when dual-wielding by the lack of a shield, I can understand the choices they've made here.

The refined skill trees and the new environments and story are pretty much the only significant differences however, besides a few new character classes for those starting over and a branching good/evil path. This branch occurs very early in the game and both routes appear to be completely distinct from one another, so I admire that the game essentially doubled its longevity - I'm not yet certain, but I imagine it would be possible to take the "good" route for your first playthrough, and then go "evil" for your subsequent new game plus run with the same character (or vice versa, of course). More reasons to want to jump back in on a higher starting difficulty is always welcome in these loot RPGs. The one thing I'm not quite sure is ever explained is the identity of the "evil path" NPC: Firiona Vie, very much the poster woman of the EverQuest franchise, is who you save at the end of Champions of Norrath and returns here to be the vendor and moral support for those who choose the good path. The evil equivalent is an NPC from the previous game named Natasla, who somehow manages to one-up Firiona in being underdressed. Oddly, she actually appeared in the previous game as a friendly vendor who exists in the good-aligned Plane of Air. I'm not sure whether the game eventually makes it clear why she turned to the dark side, or if they just couldn't be bothered creating a new character.

Ultimately, the game is a very slightly improved Champions of Norrath, at least of the hour plus that I've seen so far. There have been some skill balances, the UI's been improved with slightly bigger fonts, and there's some useful inventory changes like being able to equip/unequip gear in the shop interface. The plot is more focused on the many elemental planes of the EverQuest universe, as the player takes on various evil-aligned demigods (or good-aligned, I suppose if you're playing the evil route) while hunting for the scattered shards left behind by the final boss of the previous game to prevent his resurrection. There was a considerable degree of variation for the environments in the first Champions game, from gothic castles to forested battlefields to deserts to frozen tundra to extradimensional hellscapes to the bottom of the sea, and I'd hope that the dimension-hopping premise of Return to Arms allows it to continue that trend. I also have some misgivings about the first that I'm hoping the second addresses, in particular its weird difficulty spikes for certain boss fights. I'll see where I stand on the two games later this year, when they compete with each other for a slot on the shelf.

Result: Progresses to the Third Round.

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