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It’s just d’Artagnan and his idiosyncratic adventures. There are no bosses, few statistics, and no official party members. In fact, there are no dungeons most of the game involves exploring the towns and countryside of 17th century France while progressing the story through cutscenes and dialogue. Instead of traveling from town to dungeon and back again as per most RPGs, the player simply goes wherever the story takes him. The Three Musketeers: The Game eschews common RPG structure, and as a result creates a unique experience, undoubtedly one of its major strengths. Despite these issues, the game is written fairly well (with few errors and some period dialogue), and the story itself is one worth telling. Finally, many events feel rushed, with too little dialogue to fully explicate the situation. Character traits and motives are often explained awkwardly instead of shown to the player. Furthermore, the characters never form defined personalities, although they come quite close. I’ve never read The Three Musketeers and I knew nothing of the tension between King Louis and Cardinal Richelieu. First, the game leaves out important background information most likely found in the book. The actual telling of the story has significant flaws as well. A few more of them might have cleaned up the plot… At other points in the game, however, the developers did hasten the pace using comic strip scenes that worked very well. Thus, simply removing those scenes was not an option for the developers. Unfortunately, each scene, no matter how brief, plays some role in the player’s understanding of the story at large. Walking repeatedly from house to palace to house to inn, all in the same city, each location providing only a line or two of dialogue, and each cutscene only prodding d’Artagnan on to another transitive encounter is not entertaining to play. What is entertaining to read about is not necessarily entertaining to play out in an RPG. The result is a somewhat flawed narrative, although it attends loyally to the source material. While this allows the developers to break RPG conventions in many ways, the story doesn’t lend itself well to the structure of a video game. Even so, the classic Dumas novel about the world’s most famous swashbuckling heroes provides for the entirety of the game’s main quest, told from the perspective of d’Artagnan, the player character.
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If The Three Musketeers seems like a strange idea for an RPG, that’s because it is. Thanks to the developers’ palpable love for the source material, The Three Musketeers manages to charm and delight, despite its numerous flaws. Fortunately, with indie developers like Dingo Games and their classic-to-RPG title The Three Musketeers: The Game, we get something more than a commodity. The release of such a game thus comes as both a surprise and a commercial risk. Video game adaptations of classic novels aren’t exactly in high demand.