2 Corinthians 6:14, Be ye not unequally yoked together with unbelievers: for what fellowship hath righteousness with unrighteousness? And what communion hath light with darkness?

Divinity II: Ego Draconis is what happens when two unequally yoked ludic parents get drunk, throw their focus on factions to the ground like so much discarded clothing, and make a baby. From Morrowind we get compelling characters, an impetus toward unlocking the inner divine, and a strikingly vertical level design. And from Two Worlds come the tedious hacking-and-slashing, rambling trajectory through quests, and a bevy of technical issues. It’s a thirty hour-long game that hides its innovations behind fifteen hours of CRPG schlock and loading screens that tease you about the thrilling mechanics you don’t have access to yet, and when everything finally falls into place you may find yourself feeling that the best of the experience came too little, too late.

This game exists within the middle of an unfinished trilogy. Divine Divinity, the first entry in the series, holds a special place in the hearts of some, but I haven’t played it. This didn’t present a major obstruction to my ability to understand what was going on. The creators of this fictional universe were Dragons, and for centuries they enlisted human stewards of their goodwill by passing on a bit of their draconic essence. Somewhere along the line, a rogue organization called the Black Ring corrupted the son of a prominent Dragon Knight. Another organization, called the Dragon Slayers, rose in power to combat what they mistakenly identified as the evil impulse in the world: dragons. You begin the game as a Slayer, but I’m not spoiling anything by telling you that within a few hours you find yourself becoming the last living Dragon Knight.

Dragon Slayers have two unique powers that separate them from the other heroes living throughout the world of Rivellon: mindreading and the ability to see ghosts. The ghost thing is just a narrative conceit that sometimes provides a bit of off-beat necro-humor. Mindreading, on the other hand, is Divinity II’s version of a persuasion ability. Every NPC in the game can be scanned, but this requires a variable amount of spent experience that accrues into an “experience debt” pool. Within the first few hours of the game, players can accidentally place a severe crutch on their development by over-zealously mindreading in the first village they encounter.

There are four possible results to a mindread, but only two have a tangible use. Every shopkeeper will reduce the cost of their wares for the standard cost of around a thousand experience, but only a few of them sell anything that you need (heroic and legendary items). Quest-related characters will often provide easy or nonviolent outs to difficult situations after being read. Plot-related NPCs require a lot of experience to read, but doing so will net the player one extra skill or stat point. Seemingly every other NPC has a hidden stash or cellar somewhere in the game, and reading them will cause a chest to appear or provide a password to bypass un-pickable doors. The reason you don’t want to waste experience on these is that you’ll often only come across them far after you perform the mindreading, at which point the contents of the stash aren’t powerful enough for your current level.

The skill system is delightfully free of trees, so the player is free to stock up on skill points and wait to gain access to only the best abilities for as long as she wishes. Aside from the requisite warrior, mage, and archer specializations, there are “dragon knight” abilities relevant to all three and a priest subclass providing access to summoning skills for players who need a little help in larger-scale battles. Lockpicking is the only must-have ability for the obsessive compulsive among us (me), and Encumbrance is helpful for hoarders because Divinity II doesn’t link carrying ability to an endurance stat. Otherwise, the stats are fairly standard: strength, intelligence, agility, spirit (mana pool), and vitality (health pool).

Loading screens will tell you to be careful how you develop your character, claiming that such decisions are “irreversible.” What you should know is that halfway through the game you can reset your skill points. Your stats remain, but those are less difficult to plot out anyway. For 360 users, I’d recommend picking the mage or warrior class. If you want to know what the game feels like, think back to the first Max Payne. That’s basically how your character moves through the world. Archery is somewhat broken without a mouse to aim, and magic is obviously the power class (able to beat the final boss in less than ten seconds without breaking a sweat). The standard spam-one-button-to-murder warrior receives a major boost in fun factor from aura buffs and a ridiculously powerful jumping attack.

Once infused with a draconic spirit, but before you’ve progressed to the point where you can morph into a dragon, you’re able to jump really, really high. If you can remember how ridiculously entertaining it was to maximize Acrobatics in Morrowind, you’ve got a good idea of how Divinity II’s standard jump works. This means that environmental platforming and vertical puzzles become a distinct pleasure of the game. Many difficult encounters early on become solvent once the player realizes there’s a nearby ledge to escape onto. If the aiming on archery were a bit more sensitive and sticky, I imagine that sniping from outcroppings would become a viable primary modus.

Thrilling feats of derring-do aside, you’re going to spend the first fifteen hours of Divinity II wondering why you haven’t accessed your Battle Tower and become a dragon yet. The Overlord series is an obvious inspiration for the tower, a place of power where players can customize and upgrade their abilities and equipment with the help of a few dedicated servants. It’s as if this were actually two games sandwiched into one package, because the player’s reclamation of the tower from a somewhat tragic necromancer, who wants nothing more than to become a dragon himself, makes a much more fitting climax than the game’s actual ending. Everything changes once you become a dragon, a fact reflected in a shifting world design paradigm.

The first half of the game occurs in a vanilla Albion, goblins and skeletons running amok in verdant forests and dank caverns. After claiming the Battle Tower, players gain access to an area called the Orobas Fjords tailor-made for quick transitioning between human and dragon form. At first I wanted to complain that these two modes of being exist fundamentally separate from each other: you can’t kill tiny enemies on the ground while playing as a dragon, and you have no need to fear circling wyverns after diving back to the ground to become a human. It takes a few hours to see the charm of this design choice, but you’ll really grok what they were going for once you encounter areas filled with anti-dragon fields that must be disabled by foot in between flying.

On the other hand, one negative aspect of the game becomes even more painfully apparent once you enter the fjords: Divinity II gives you little to no direction. While this sometimes enhances the feeling of exploration, it’s kind of a pain not to know where exactly it is you’re supposed to be. Because enemies don’t scale to your level, you’re going to run into pockets of goblins and bandits that can instantly end you. When you’re running on foot through the Broken Vale early on, this isn’t so much of a problem. But when you’ve got to know where to fly to progress within the fjords, you’ll really wish for a map that showed you more than plot-related objective points and the doors that you’ve entered before.

Another annoying choice is the placement of keys to locked doors. Often, they’re sitting right next to the door they match or in a kettle ten feet away. You’ll wonder why, exactly, it has to be locked in the first place. But sometimes, you’ll pick up a key in one area to be used in another without any cue to guide you. They’ve used the same logic dictating a Zelda entry’s placement of keys without realizing that it only makes sense within the context of constrained spaces. The same thing happens with quest-related items, which you can actually pick up before you’ve got the quest they’re tied to. Sometimes quests will glitch on you, if you make a choice that ends in the death of an entire faction that you were in the process of aiding, resulting in an inventory filled with now-useless quest items you can’t get rid of.

Every other time you load a save, the game breaks and you’ve got to restart your 360. It took me awhile to figure out what was happening. Basically, the game loads the current game state from the save file you select while, for whatever insane reason, loading your character’s location from a previous save. If your current game state happens to coincide with a scripted event such as a “boss encounter,” which is when you will die or otherwise decide to reload the most, the game will get stuck in data hell. I’ve seen other complaints about enemies getting stuck in walls, but I didn’t encounter this problem. Sometimes, though, enemies in scripted events will go into “passive” mode if the player jumps around a lot and somehow disengages the encounter.

Divinity II: Ego Draconis is a competent CRPG, filled with humor, intrigue, and martial complexity, but if you’ve got a gaming rig you should probably steer clear of the 360 port. It may leave fans of Bioware and Bethesda games unsatisfied, because it avers meaningful decision-making despite featuring a narrative focused on an internal struggle between light and dark, Slayer and Dragon. While the game runs short for its genre, it may feel slow for that first half. And we can only hope that the dragon mechanics remain in the trilogy’s third entry, because they certainly feel underdeveloped here. With Mass Effect 2 right around the corner and a gaming fund deficit remaining from the holidays, you may pass right by Divinity II and never look back. But you’ll be missing out on something special, something with craft and a lot of potential, an experiment in the hybridization of unequally yoked playtypes.

Playthrough: Completed on normal in 34 hours, thought four of those hours were just me restarting my 360.

Disclosure: Retail disc provided for review by Larian/cdv.