YMMV / Divinity: Original Sin

• Annoying Video Game Helper: If the Cyseal guards see you fighting the undead, the will gladly help you... by dropping a fireball right on top of the zombies currently engaged in melee by your fighters. And since zombies bleed ooze when struck by weapons and ooze explodes when it comes in contact with fire...
• Better Off Sold: Practically all the items in the game, no matter how mundane or useless, can be traded for cash or other items.
• Complacent Gaming Syndrome: A weird roleplaying example. Getting the "good" outcome of certain companion quests requires you to possess certain traits, which in turn demands making the same specific quest and dialogue choices in every playthrough to develop the right traits and avoid undesirable outcomes later on if you don't want to skip the quests completely.
• Complete Monster: Braccus Rex is a mighty, Evil Sourcerer known as the Source King. A mad genius, Braccus perfected his curses on live human subjects, harvesting the souls of entire villages and cities to empower himself while subjecting countless innocents, including children, to hideous and agonizing torments for his magic. Those who crossed Braccus were locked in horrific fates, condemned to burn alive forever or feel as if they were dying of thirst but unable to die. Braccus turned his lover into a thrall when she protested his evil and turned his own sister into a lich to abuse her without fear of killing her. Revived in modern times, and taking the identity of Master Vredeman, Braccus continues his evil actions, even allying with the Voidwoken to condemn most of the world to annihilation as long as Braccus himself was able to Ascend and seize divinity, with no care for anyone or anything that was not him.
• Demonic Spiders:
  • Carrying the Divinity tradition, zombies are potent threats. The way they function in this game makes them particularly grueling to fight - you have to use your first blow to make them bleed toxic ooze before you can damage them, and said ooze will heal them every turn. They're also durable and hit hard.
  • Death Knights live up to their name. Just making them killable is a major plot point in the game, and they're still incredibly lethal after you cast Death Knight Bane on them (which itself only lasts a few turns and has a cooldown).
• Faux Symbolism: The game's backstory is a weird mix of Book of Genesis and Classical Mythology motifs:
  • The Godbox, where the corrupted Source was sealed, is the archetypal Box of Pandora, except in the Divinity mythology, Pandora's role fell to Astarte—in Real Life, the Greek name of Ishtar, the ancient Semitic goddess of fertility, love, war, and sex—and was mixed with that of Biblical Eve (seduced by the Serpent/Strife to break the law). Unlike Eve and Pandora, however, Astarte took a proactive role in fixing her own mistake and immediately Sealed Evil in a Duel (she is a War Goddess, after all). While that was her "original sin", the game's subtitle actually refers to the Guardians of the Source—expies of Adam and Eve (except they were not the first humans and were, as far as we can tell, thoroughly Platonic Life-Partners)—failing in their duty to guard the Godbox. Also, while Adam and Eve were cast out of the Garden of Eden by God, the Guardians cast themselves from the First Garden as penance for their failure—while the gods are suspiciously absent and, as Astarte implies, may have been behind the whole mess from the start.
  • The two witches in the game, Icara and Leandra, are named after two male heroes of classical myth, Icarus and Leander, who both fell prey to their ambition and met tragic ends: Icarus flew too close to the sun and fell to his death when the wax that held his artificial wings together melted; while Leander lost his way while swimming to his lover across Hellespont at night and drowned.
• Game-Breaker:
  • Invisibility spells allow you to steal from shops and houses more reliably than stealth. Sell the stolen goods for tons of gold and buy all the equipment and skill books you need.
  • Charm abilities and arrows are great to turn the tide of battles. Steal an opponent from the enemy party and let him do all the fighting work for you. Before the effect expires, attack him and he won't retaliate against you.
  • Teleport spells are plain awesome. They can used for crowd control, positioning you party members or drop an unsuspecting monster with barrels of oil/water/ooze, perfect for setting deadly combos. No wonder it was subject to skill rebalanced in the Enhanced Edition.
• Genius Bonus: Talk to Thelyron, the healer of Cyseal. He mentions two of his past successes, curing the "unslakable thirst" of one Countess Arata by adding "a pinch of Atropa belladonna" to her morning tea, and discovering that "a single application of a tincture of Cicuta douglasii" can halt aging itself. Both plants are better known under their common names: Deadly Nightshade and Water Hemlock, respectively. And yes, they technically would cure thirst and stop aging...
• Goddamned Bats: Any small enemies, for the fact that the game will sometimes interpret an "attack" as a "Movement" command.
• Good Bad Bugs: It's possible, with good reflexes, to place a normally stationary "mobile kitchen" in a character's inventory immediately after crafting it, allowing them to cook food and boost leather armor through the inventory menu at any time.
• Heartwarming Moments: In Luculla Forest, you come across a guard-troll who takes his job very seriously - but he misses a human woman with red hair that used to tell him stories. You can then, in lieu of payment, go back to town and hire Ruby to come out and tell him stories. She quite enjoys the change, and hearing him responding to the story like a little kid is just warm and fuzzy.
  Ruby: But just as the wolf was about to eat Little Red Riding Hood, a brave troll entered the house!
  Fumble: It's me! It's me! I'm the troll! I'll save you Little Red Riding Hood!
• It's Hard, So It Sucks!: Larian doesn't pull punches with difficulty, but the notorious Early Game Hell and brutal bosses were especially common complaints among players. The endgame achievement has a notably low completion rate of just 11% on Steam.
• More Popular Spin Off: Perhaps unsurprisingly (Given the Soft Reboot nature of this game), this game has become more popular than the rest of the Divinity games. To the point where people actually said Divinity: Original Sin II was the Soft Reboot or treated it like it was the second game in the series!
• Nintendo Hard: The combat system for this game is very complex, combining multiple different kinds of magic, items, weapons, enemy types, summons, buffs and items. Not mastering all of these coupled with skilled manipulation of the environment can spell death in seconds in the hardest battles. Explorer Mode tries to avert this by giving player characters a significant HP boost and increasing the success rate of their attacks (while reducing the success rate for enemy attacks). Conversely, Tactician Mode of the Enhanced Edition fully embraces this trope by introducing new enemy types and attacks, while Honor Mode adds the challenge of a one save limit.
• Scrappy Mechanic:
  • There is a very good reason why some players choose to disable the rock-paper-scissors style "debate" mechanic.
    • Lampshaded in the Enhanced Edition, where a group in Hunter's Edge is trying to decide who goes into a heavily-mined building and the commander decides on Rock, Paper, Scissors. One of the others immediately questions what kind of idiot uses a child's game to decide matters of life and death (then promptly loses).
  • While it's very possible to play the game without ever having to recruit a friend to play the other half of the party, it's usually considered to be more of a "double-player game" because this game requires a lot of inventory management and micromanaging. If one is playing a rogue/thief character (highly recommended), it also becomes a pain to set up combat situations without forcing your rogue to attack head-on or end up tanking when they really shouldn't be.
    • And if one decides to forego a "thief" character to avoid needing to steal paintings (the primary source of your income), they will find themselves extremely poor because of how much money paintings bring.
  • The lack of a "stop" or "Undo" feature in battle without Save Scumming. While many do agree that it would make the game too easy, a player will have many a "No! Stop!" moment when they attempt to attack an enemy at melee range only for the game to instead think you clicked on the ground nearby them, causing many a slips or attack of opportunity.
  • When a conversation occurs that could result in gaining points towards a Trait, there's no indication which trait it is, several of them sound very similar, and sometimes the one you gain is the opposite of the one you'd logically expect. Since Traits give actual mechanical bonuses and there are limited chances to gain them, this leads to tons of Save Scumming to make sure you get the one you intended to.
    • If neither of your Source Hunters have the Independent trait, Bairdotr will turn against you at the conclusion of her personal quest. The game never warns you or even hints that this might happen, meaning you can lose a party member just through normal roleplaying. It doesn't help that many of the "Independent" dialogues are callous or violent (e.g. choosing to needlessly slaughter a pair of drunk Legionnaires at the beginning of the game instead of letting them escort you to town) while the "Obedient" ones are more diplomatic and reasonable.
• Slow-Paced Beginning: The first few hours of the game can be described as screwing around in Cyseal until you get high enough level to not get immediately annihilated by the story missions.
• Special Effect Failure: "Wet" attempts to replicate the feeling of people being slightly shiny when wet... the problem is, it covers everybody's hair and clothes, and provides this really weird "sheen" that makes them look like they're made out of polished rubber or are wrapped up in plastic-wrap.
• Squick:
  • The underwear you can wear for charisma bonus. It's unwashed and you can share it between party members.
  • Kill wandering rats, take their meat, cook it and eat it. And then there's undead meat you find on the ground...
• Tear Jerker: Norok/Spinebreaker, the orc who almost killed Madora during the first assault on Hunter's Edge, is in fact just a "scramble-headed" orc with the innocence and mental age of a young child. He sees the "victims" Grutilda gives him as toys and doesn't understand that he's hurting and killing them when he plays with them. If Madora refuses to forgive him (which is more than likely to happen due to the intensely specific requirements behind securing her forgiveness), she'll attack him; Norok's confusion and distress at being hurt by his "toys" can be gut-pulling to hear.
• That One Achievement: Sister of Mercy is one of the game's rarest achievements for good reason; it requires Madora to forgive Norok in Hunter's Edge. Having the "Forgiving" trait and high reputation with her is the easy part — to change Madora's heart, you must give her a specific answer to multiple dialogues scattered throughout the game. Generally this involves contradicting her and calling out her conspiratorial thinking and narrow-mindedness towards magic and orcs. Many of these dialogues are missable, and if you don't do enough of them she won't forgive the orc, voiding the achievement.
• That One Boss:
  • Jareth provides perhaps the nastiest Immaculate battle in the game. He's not too difficult on his own, being a support-oriented caster with an unusually large amount of vitality, but the five "bloodied" animals he summons can take and dish out immense damage. It's even worse if you bring Bairdotr along and don't have an Independent trait and high reputation with her — she'll promptly turn on the party.
  • Mangoth. He got immunity to some Status Effects, many action points and is skilled in fighting and magic. He's also backed-up with several demons.
  • Arhu's Sparkmaster 5000 can annihilate your whole party with its AoE attack. You can shut off its strongest attacks by flipping the three levers scattered across the arena, but doing this while also keeping the undead mages (who continuously charge the Sparkmaster's weapons with electricity spells) in check can be tricky. On top of this, the three civilians who accompany you are utter cannon fodder in the fight, and if all three of them die you lose out on the extra reward after the quest's completion. In theory, the player is supposed to use the Master Controller to weaken the automaton and disable its weapons, but in the Enhanced Edition the controller's commands don't seem to work consistently, if at all. Whether this is a glitch or a deliberate change is currently unclear (as the controller made the fight trivially easy in the Classic Edition).
  • King Boreas stretches even the veteran player's definition of "fair". On his own he's a fairly manageable, if annoyingly freeze-happy, Damage-Sponge Boss. But what really sends his fight over the edge is his continuous summons, which cycle between the four elements and are accompanied by matching terrain hazards covering the whole arena. Crucially, these summon waves aren't staggered, so he'll keep calling more summons even if you haven't defeated the ones already out on the field. Thus, it's very easy to get overwhelmed by the summons (all of which can freeze/burn/poison/petrify/stun you, on top of Boreas' regular freezing spells) as you're chipping away at the Winter King's health bar. You can destroy the four sentinels in the corners of the map to nullify his elemental resistances, but it might not help you much.
  • Braccus Rex probably takes the cake. He's the brutal Superboss of the Cyseal area, and completing him is entirely optional. There is a very good reason for this, as he is somewhat tough by himself, but is also flanked by the 3 minibosses of Cyseal that cooperate with him, including the lighthouse ghoul, the Baron of Bones and the Twins-By-Fire-Joined. It's entirely possible for an unprepared party to die before they even get a turn. Have fun!

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