The first boss fight in the old-school RPG Pathfinder: Wrath of the Righteous' first boss fight is the character creation menu. It is as formidable as a demon with several limbs.

There are 25 classes to choose from, some subdivided into half a dozen archetypes. There is also a prestige class that cannot be selected until you level up and meet certain requirements, but this is indicated when you create your character so you can plan your build with that class. They also choose their race, racial heritage, background, religion, skills, feats, and animal companions.

At the end of this process, you may end up with a character that is totally inadequate for what you want to get out of Wrath of the Righteous, and you may want to restart or respec after a few hours. you may be too weak to challenge Core difficulty, or may feel like an afterthought, doubling up with your early friends. Compared to this, fighting a large water elemental or shadow demon seems like a piece of cake.

Whether your character is an enraged bloodrider with a pet smilodon, a halfling knight charging into battle on a dog, or a wizard elf, it's cool too. Those demons marched through the reality hole years ago and have been messing with this place ever since. Eventually you become the commander of a crusade, a mythical hero with incredible powers.

This happens in an isometric RPG, but it's so intensely reminiscent of "Baldur's Gate" that sometimes walking under the foliage will make you feel like you're back on the Sword Coast. if you've played Pathfinder if you've played The Kingmaker, you'll be familiar with the effect. Although you will be familiar with it, this title is not a sequel to "Kingmaker," but rather a better introduction to the "Pathfinder" rules. Developer Owlcat Games has learned that tutorial pop-ups are a good thing, and boxes of text warn you if you equip items whose bonuses don't stack, or if you make mistakes in the arcane rules of the tabletop RPG on which the game is based.

The tutorial has been improved to make the flow of combat numbers a little easier to grasp. (I will go to my grave not understanding why the dice roll shows the pre-modified result next to the difficulty to beat, instead of showing the modified number that is actually compared to the difficulty.) Another thing that makes combat smoother is the ability to switch between turn-based mode and real-time pause mode even in the middle of a battle. You can switch to turn-by-turn when taking on a boss or taking out a damn alchemist who is trying to burn down the local pub by throwing Molotov cocktails at it, or switch to RTWP when mopping up cultists and other mooks. (There are plenty of fillers.)

These pop-ups are eager to help with combat and leveling, but their numbers dwindle when you are handed an entire army to manage. In an under-explained side game, crusaders fight on the grid, while an oversized general watches from the left and occasionally casts spells.

This strategic layer is an important and demanding time sink. Units representing hundreds of troops must be whittled away, turn after turn, long after it is clear that they have won. It became less tedious once I figured out the tactic of ignoring the opportunity to gather useless specialists who would only litter the map in favor of doom-stacking high-damage troops by the hundreds and camping archers in the corners surrounded by knights. It was even a fun change of pace that mimicked Heroes of Might and Magic a bit. Perhaps the mediocrity of the last two Heroes of Might and Magic games has lowered my standards.

Not only will you be managing crusaders, but you will also be governing several regions of the map in a version of Kingmaker's Kingdom Management System. However, disasters don't strike as constantly as they did in that game, and the buildings you build in settlements are more convenient. In "Kingmaker," most of it felt like a trap for new players to squander their resources. Another improvement would be to make the consequences explicit when deciding which edicts to issue, whether it be a parade to boost morale or sacrificing a few hundred soldiers in a magical experiment. We will not fall into the game-over death spiral that the opacity of "The Kingmaker" has led us into.

These management systems are the bread in the sandwich between actual adventures, and those adventures are delicious. Side quests have surprising endings, and the main storyline takes you to besieged cities, blood-rain wastelands, and even the Abyss itself, like a heavy-metal-obsessed brother from hell. You may be a crusader, but you are also a spy infiltrating another dimension and a mayor who must attend a council meeting.

Each companion is either a stereotype-defying one (a paladin who loves to drink and chill, a realist victory-supremacist Hell Knight who is also a gnome) or an over-the-top one that seems to come straight from the central casting of a cartoon (a pure and innocent witch child who converts a cult of analytical wizard who treats people like science experiments), would be someone's favorite.

The dialogue frequently refers to the choices you made in character creation and even which god you follow, and your friends will give you their thoughts as you decide whose side to take and whether to be a jerk. But the content is varied, ranging from paragraphs that evoke the grotesqueness of demons and twee storybook-like sequences to NPCs telling lengthy backstories in a matter-of-fact manner, with occasional passages that seem garbled in Google Translate.

And the dynamic dialogue highlights moments that lack specificity. In a side quest involving elven politics, there are many bespoke references to my character also being an elf, and the inevitable dialogue options forced me to refer to NPCs as "elves." On the other hand, when I infiltrated the demon city, I was labeled a "mysterious knight," even though I was an extravagant bard in a domino mask and colorful hat. Such things happen distractingly often.

The mythical paths are also bumpy. These paths to demigodhood are scattered throughout Wrath of Justice, and choosing one bolts another layer of leveling up onto the complex character you have created. Choosing one of these will transform you into anything from a demon to an avatar of the law, essentially a timeless Judge Dredd, giving you the option to switch to another mythic path as you progress. Some, like the angelic path, are tightly integrated with the rest of the game, while others seem like an afterthought. The Trickster, a lame "ironic" punishment at the end of a quest, is atrocious in its barrage of unfunny jokes, and the Lich's core ability to bring back dead soldiers is underpowered, making Crusade mode even more difficult.

Then there are the bugs. While they didn't hit me too hard in the early chapters, they became more frequent in the later chapters. Characters would get stuck on the other side of a door at the start of a battle, the whole party would teleport to the ground or a wall, or I had to reload an old save because a movable bridge got stuck and stuck. Riding combat seems to be completely broken, and it's 50-50 if the assault works at all. I had to switch to windowed mode to get past the black screen that appeared every time I killed a particular character, but that still did not help with the consistent crashing at the end of the last dialog. (After replaying the ending four different ways to try to get around this problem, I have yet to see the outro.) However, it is frustrating to see the problems piling up, especially since the beginning was relatively smooth.

With a little more patching, however, Wrath of the Righteous would be well worth your time. It's a 100-hour-plus epic that throws meticulously crafted heroes into the meat grinder of war, politics, and interplanetary travel, and sees how they are changed by it. After the most complex character creation system I can think of, the entire game is contrived to make you think you're done, even though it's all about creating characters. This is because there is room for a half-baked storyline and a system that makes you feel as if you are lost in an unmapped wilderness. But when you find the right path and are jogging through the fields with your colorful friends, solving the world's problems, it feels as if "Baldur's Gate 2" never ended.