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Scourge of Worlds here is not really a movie. It's an official D&D licensed choose your own adventure sorta thing. Which means it's QUITE POSSIBLY the cheesiest thing in existence. Let's find out! OK, we've got a blasted volcanic hill that looks worse than a background from season 1 of Beast Wars, and some dudes who look even worse than that hauling some magical hoobajoo around on a fantasy wheelbarrow. And some orcs are watching them. Seriously, this is as bad as I've ever seen computer graphics look. Why not go hand drawn? Like you did with that Dragonla... oh I see. Why not film some random LARPers. And... yeah, it is REALLY difficult for me to endure this. Can I just ramble about how much WotC sucks and how they should never ever ever try and branch out beyond making tabletop games like this again? Some guy is fighting an earth elemental here and... I could do better than this. I don't have any 3D rendering software, or animation software or anything. The best I'd really be able to handle would be some kind of hand drawn, MS Paint looking 10 frame animated gif. It'd still look better than this. It's just horrible. I mean, look at these screenshots. Really, I just cannot get over this. How much were people paid for producing this? It was entirely too much. Oh hey, here's a choice. Some adventurers want to take this guy back to town for some reason but he wants to keep giving bad exposition. SCREW YOU PLOT HOOK! To town with you! Oh and dear gods. None of these characters- what, again? Yeah fine, go to a totally unrelated town. Anyway yeah, these characters can't dress themselves. I mean, we have a criminal lack of detail, and any attempt at conveying textures is beyond what we're working with here, but we still manage to have TOTALLY IMPRACTICAL outfi- No. No I'm sorry. This is not the background you are going to use in this scene. This is a cube with a sphere sitting on it. I refuse to believe that's all the effort you're going to put into a background. Here's some wolves. Let's see if I can get everyone killed. Fight or run? RUN! We all know wolves are slow! And nobody's getting any EXP on my watch!
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OK, so the annoying thief ran away, the big dumb fighter and Mr. Plot Hook were uh... "killed" in that they laid down and the mouths of the wolves kinda made chewing motions in the general vicinity of their limbs... with their heads kinda passing through limbs bad clipping style. Yeah, seriously, NO EFFORT was put into making this anything approaching watchable. The good news though is, I got everyone killed! Yay! I suppose I need to backtrack though because this is way too short a consciousness stream. Oh hey, it bounced me right back to the last choice. That's nice, and not at all railroady. You'd think they'd give me the option to just double back to any past choice so I can properly gut the whole thing. Also, now here's some standard issue Choose Your Own Adventure TOTAL BS! When fighting, people still get totally mauled by wolves, but then there's some divine intervention to save them. So yeah. My choice here was completely meaningless, and one option just arbitrarily lead to a more favorable outcome. Also, the wolves are secretly elven druids. Which... we aren't actually going with. So anyway, yeah, now that we see stuff is up, will we follow Mr. Plot Hook? NO! #@$% PLOT!
So... the party is just giving up on playing bounty hunter, and everything that's happened so far is now totally meaningless. The party goes hey, wasn't there a bar outside? Let's go find a new plot hook there! Almost with that exact phrasing, but, you know, lame. They're all, Oh no! Now we're broke! Don't worry, something always comes along. Didn't we pass a tavern on the way in? So anyone who thought there might have been a writer putting effort into this, no, no there isn't. Now Fighter is giving his backstory. It's amazingly generic and lame. You know what? If you have ever officially written ANYTHING for WotC? I never want to play any RPG with you. Of any kind. Seriously, any official material, or tie-in stuff, is SO unbelievably terrible I can't even finish this sentence. I would rather have a 5 year old who doesn't know what D&D is run a game. Anyway though, since this choose your own adventure is totally railroading us, we don't ACTUALLY have the option to ignore Mr. Plot Hook and are forced to follow him. Here's evidence that he was attacked by orcs. Do we take the hint? Say it with me people, @#$% NO!
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Did I mention by the way how this actually has totally awesome looking box art? It's the most horribly misleading thing I've ever seen. Anyway, now we're wandering through the desert and... Fighter is saying stuff that seriously makes me think they accidentally left the microphone on and forgot to edit out the resulting chatter. I could swear I just heard him say something about wearing someone's ass as a hat at half volume, and that's... very much out of character and context here. Wow. OK, that's it. You. Yes you, whoever's reading this. Scroll down to the ad banner, click the blue text, set up a Project Wonderful account, and put a bid on that banner space. I deserve to be paid for enduring this one. Or go to the World Domination LLC site and buy Glistening Chests I suppose. This is WAY too awful for me to keep watching if I'm not getting anything for it. It's not even funny. Here's some more sloppiness though. Wandering aimlessly through the desert, for no real reason, we have a big ancient temple. It has a big glowing plot dump (seriously) written right on the wall inside. The party members make reference to something someone else said... but it's something I didn't actually have someone say because I'm avoiding plot as much as possible. See, the railroading forces this scene pretty much no matter what you do, and they forgot what else isn't mandatory.
We're also going forever without any actual choices here. I've pointed out every one that actually came up. Anyway though, turns out Mr. Plot Hook is secretly evil as is his happy angel here. Oh hey, here's a 3 way choice! Attack Angel Face, Reason with Angel Face, or "Cast Spell." That's all it says, just, "Cast Spell." There's no context suggesting what. So our choice is obvious. I WANNA CAST A SPELL! I WANNA CAST... MAGIC MISSILE! Oh. Apparently I actually cast magic this isn't an actual spell plot contrivancery... 2. Or maybe like, dispell magic or something. The angel is actually just some random evil gal in disguise as an angel to trick Mr. Plot Hook. She threatens to break the rogue's neck if the mage casts some other spell at her. Which, A- isn't really a thing that works with D&D mechanics, and B- REALLY seems like the sort of place there should have been, you know, a choice? Or how about now, when the party's trying to work out what they're going to do next? And... what the hell? This druid guy is suddenly in their party. I can totally see how that would have ended up happening if I was being less of a troll in evil elf wolf town, but... he literally just sprung up out of nowhere because I'm on a branch they forgot to make mesh with the others when they railroad everything together. This is such an awful piece of garbage.
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... and here's a hilariously cheap looking beholder. It doesn't have any actual eyes at the ends of its eyestalks because those would take effort to render. It's just a bit red head with pointy bits that shoot green lasers... which Mr. Plot Hook dodges. Oh and did I mention that the party is a mix of maximumly diverse races classes and skin colors with nothing to establish why they're hanging out and the most one-dimensional personalities possible? Anyway, here's another choice. Do I let the druids out of nowhere come along to kill Mr. Plot Hook instead of explaining how he was duped by some random girl into trying to end the world, or go alone? Well, every single party member clearly knows that taking them is a bad idea and says so, so, of course, I'll take them. Just to watch the plot break itself.
Did the fighter who JUST SAID he disagrees with them immediately say the exact opposite? He sure did. And why is the fighter calling all the shots anyway? I've never seen a party of a fighter mage and rogue where the fighter was the brains. Here though, it's because he's the only male party member, and we can't let the flighty women folk influence these things. Sadly I'm serious. The rogue is a complete ditz, and the mage is an elf so she has no initiative to do anything except be indignant. Anyway, this here beholder is totally killing those druids to railroad us into not having them, but now I have a choice again. I can prove that Magey is an overemotional lesser being who needs to get back in the kitchen by being smart and taking the hint, or I can stay and fight. Well. We totally had our butts handed to us by these druids wildshaped into wolves, but I'm sure we can TOTALLY take a beholder!
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OK, apparently we can. Because the thief just shot the beholder in the eye and blinded it. You heard me. As Morbo would say, BEHOLDERS DO NOT WORK THAT WAY! I was right about the railroading though. As punishment for wasting time trying to save the NPCs YOU GUYS WEREN'T SUPPOSED TO TRY AND SAVE DO WHAT I WANT YOU TO DO (this is me channeling the imaginary GM here), ROCKS FALL! EVERYONE DIES! And yeah I mean that. So now I hit enter to back up and say fine, let'em die.
So now all the party members have to pass through the gate of only good people can go through, which we didn't steal and misuse from the Neverending Story, and the rogue angsts about how it'll kill her because she's probably all evil, which is totally stupid both because there's 5 billion ways to double check that sort of thing, and because the thief is like, wanting to have tea parties with Mr. Bear and stuff. Anyway, no input on that, but here's a chance to either try and steal the MacGuffin or kill Mr. Plot Hook. Well, killing him is likely to result in less bad dialog I guess. Plus he's holding it and looking at it, so how would that even work? Attack though apparently means walk over to and loudly announce your presence. Nobody attempts, by the way, to explain how there is absolutely no reason whatsoever for them to be fighting. Just say "yeah, the angel that told you to destroy the world turns out to have secretly be a bad guy duping you." I mean... it really doesn't make any sense for him to have fallen for that in the first place. So yeah, stupid pointless totally railroaded fightscene, then on the way out, here's another one.
The two girls get dropped by... Mordenkaiden's Misogynistic Missiles I guess? Because they do this giggly shriek-giggle thing and fall down, but are fine when the fight is over. Fighter though swings his mighty penis sword around though and defeats badguy lady who just kinda teleported in from nowhere to be the final boss. And by defeat I mean it has no visible effect but then she goes all "This isn't over, I'll get you next time!" and flies away. Then everyone leaves the dungeon and the credits roll. Apparently there's 4 other endings I could have gotten. Or one other ending, where orcs kill everyone and then it says retry. Which... is actually way more likely. I'm not going to replay and find out though. Because I really don't care and I can't stomach any more of this. Really, that was ASTOUNDINGLY terrible on so very many levels.
