Pathfinder: Wrath of the Righteous is big. It is a massive, life-dominating endeavor likely to take weeks of playing before completion, dominating your thoughts and plans during that time. Sometimes that size means spending hours on frustrating time as an army manager, but the role-playing, exploring, and especially combat make it very much worth it. Wrath of the Righteous leaves a memorable mark on the throwback-style RPG genre, with strong companion personality and turn-based combat.The pedigree of Wrath of the Righteous is big as well, adapting another of the Pathfinder tabletop game’s epic “Adventure Paths” and honing the concepts of 2018’s similarly large Pathfinder: Kingmaker. Kingmaker's generic fantasy kingdom is replaced here by the specific story of a crusade against a demon army on the border of the world and the Abyss. Sometimes this is a little off-putting, in that it's easy to miss fighting ogres and goblins in a fantasy game when you’re neck-deep in nabasu and dretch (whatever those are). But the decision to give Wrath of the Righteous a specific focus like this mostly pays off, especially when it allows for the party's companions to have stronger personalities. I even found myself having strong enough feelings about my party members’ behaviors that I ended up killing or removing some of them from the group at multiple different points, which I've never done in an RPG before the endgame.
Wrath of the Righteous also improves on Kingmaker and other RPGs from the Baldur's Gate family in a few important technical ways. For instance, it's the first isometric game like this I've seen to allow the camera to be spun around the game world, while still looking great from any angle. Even better, the finicky rules-lawyering that made Kingmaker such a pain when it first came out is long-gone, making Wrath welcoming to new players. I've noticed almost no arbitrary punishments for not knowing all of Pathfinder's rules, which was my main problem by far with Kingmaker. It also adds dozens of new character classes and variants, with Cavaliers and Shamans joining the typical Fighters and Clerics.
Turn It Up
The biggest and best change for the Pathfinder series and for the genre as a whole, however, is that Wrath of the Righteous has a turn-based mode available from the start. The Baldur's Gate or Infinity Engine-style of isometric D&D-based RPG has always been built on a foundation of "real-time combat with pause," where either all your little dudes run at the monsters at once before a few corpses explode and you hope none of them are yours, or you spend half an hour pressing pause on and off trying to manipulate a system into a messy facsimile of turn-based combat in order to have some feeling of control over it. That manner of combat is one of my least favorite in gaming, and it's stood in the way of my enjoyment of a genre that's otherwise made for me. Kingmaker and Pillars of Eternity 2 both experimented with turn-based modes, but these were patched in well after release. Wrath of the Righteous is the first major Infinity Engine-stlye game to have a full turn-based mode from the start (and also, because of that, the first of these turn-based modes that I've personally played).
And it's amazing. The interface switches seamlessly between the two game modes at the press of the T-key, which you can do at any time. Even better, having a legitimately fun turn-based mode makes me care about the occasionally complex systems of the Pathfinder ruleset. Because of this mode, I can focus on actually learning how to break down enemies that have great saving throws or armor classes, for example, or care about the difference between the Searing Ray and Burning Arc spells. The only real downside is that combat encounters which might only take 10 to 30 seconds in real-time mode may take much longer in the slower-paced turn-based mode, which can make an already massive campaign feel even more drawn out – but that was a small price to pay for me to actually care about combat.
The specificity of Wrath of the Righteous’ setting also helps in that systemic development. As you play the Commander of a grand crusade to defeat the demonic invasion forever, your character isn't just a hero, but a Mythic Hero, who gets granted special powers over the course of the campaign. These can work to accent and dramatically improve existing skills; my barbarian Bloodrager, for example, gained the ability to use her Bloodrage skill as much as she wanted instead of having a cap on it. Meanwhile, I could give my Wizard extra first-level spells and a bonus to ice magic so she could throw dozens of high-damage snowballs at foes.
Angels, Demons, and Tricksters
The major plot differences between Wrath and other fantasy RPGs also show up in the story side of the Mythic Paths. Based on your ethical choices as the quest starts and your alignment overall, you'll have the option to pick one of several paths, from the somewhat generic good and evil of the Angel and Demon paths, to the freedom-loving Azata that my Chaotic Good character took, to darker paths like becoming a Lich and even resurrecting otherwise dead enemies as new party members. There's a lot of promise in this system and when it works it's great for keeping the plot flexible, but actually understanding how, why, and where you'll have access to those various Mythic Paths can be difficult to parse. As a Chaotic character it feels like I should have had access to the Trickster path, but apparently I'd missed a single dialogue option 10 hours before setting that decision in stone, and so was locked out.
Even with that, there's still a lot to recommend about the plot and writing. The overall plot can be fairly conventional with the mostly-good mortals finding off the demonic hordes, but it's given some extra spice when the legendary demonic witch, Areelu Vorlesh, shows up and starts raising complicated questions about free will and morality.