I am the one who witches

I should probably note that I tried playing The Witcher some years back, but quickly bounced off of it. The animation quality was distractingly bad - like that time I tried New Vegas after having finished Skyrim - and the controls were just a mess.

As for Witcher 2, well, the animations are a lot better.

...

I really want to like Witcher 2, and for the most part, I do! The writing lends weight to some darkly interesting characters, the environments are beautifully engrossing, the combat-preparation mechanics are unlike anything I've really seen before, and the basic swords-and-sorcery stuff more-or-less works.

So I'm putting up with the controls. The moments when I have to press a button twice before something happens; or when I have to struggle to point the camera at an item pickup; or when the camera moves itself in a way I really can't agree with; or when melee combat with multiple opponents is just a silly clusterfuck; or when I want to equip an item in my inventory, and the menu interface just, absolutely, goddamned, doesn't work at all. I put up with those moments.

(It's a good thing that the game automatically put me in Easy mode, because otherwise I'd be dead, like, all the time.)

And I should be a little discerning in my praise of the game's writing. It somewhat frequently betrays the franchise's literary roots, by telling events in an order that would be cool - in a book - but is maddening in the context of player choice. (Read: having to select Geralt's dialog without knowing who or what he's talking about, yet.) And it sometimes suffers from the same misleading-dialog-option problem that I keep pinning on Mass Effect, where Geralt and I have differing opinions on conversational etiquette.

But in spite of its flaws, Witcher 2 is compelling due to the strength of its characters and events. I'm genuinely interested in what Geralt has to say. I'm curious about his companions' motivations, and intrigued by the mystery he's stumbled into. I want to learn more about his gray-soaked fantasy world, and I want to see him deal with the relatable, human evils throughout it.

Since I'm playing on Easy, I'll also enjoy mashing the 'X' button to sloppily eviscerate my inept enemies. And maybe, given enough practice, I'll even figure out how to equip my off-hand sword.

Progress: Finished the prologue.