May 25 marks another anniversary for Game Central. It has been 13 years since the site debuted. To mark the occasion, I added a new page to the Role-Playing Games section. RPG Record Holders recognizes the all-time greatest player characters. They were the strongest, smartest, most skilled, and most powerful characters ever to appear in our various RPG campaigns. In order to compile the lists, I had to review hundreds of RPG character sheets. For Dungeons & Dragons specifically, I decided to only include characters of some renown (that is, characters above level 1). For skills, talents, and powers, there were far too many to list them all. Therefore, I only included ones that were at very high proficiency levels.

I added another bonus for this year’s anniversary. As long as I was scrutinizing all of these RPG characters, I decided to scan in all of the Top Secret character sheets. There were 26 total characters from these espionage RPGs (13 Top Secret and 13 Top Secret/S.I.).

I played some great computer role-playing games in 2018: Baldur’s Gate: Enhanced Edition, Planescape: Torment: Enhanced Edition, and Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic II - The Sith Lords. I could also include System Shock 2, which was a first-person shooter with RPG elements. Now, I can add Divine Divinity to the list for 2019. Released by Belgian developer Larian Studios in 2002, Divine Divinity was the first of a series that spawned several sequels. It blended action-RPG elements as seen in games such as Diablo and FATE with gameplay from story based RPGs, such as Baldur’s Gate. I’m not as much a fan of the former, so I wasn’t sure I was going to enjoy DD all that much. I prefer a more scripted RPG with less random elements. However, there was enough story in DD to keep me interested. I greatly preferred it over Diablo II. There was a lot to do with the main quests and plenty of side quests. Most of the quests were typical for the genre: retrieve an item for someone, defeat an enemy and report back, rescue a captive, etc. This caused a lot of roaming about from place to place. Thankfully, travel was aided by fixed teleporters and portable teleporter stones.

The game’s protagonist was a nameless “Hero,” later revealed to be the “Divine One.” There were three professions to choose from: survivor, wizard, and warrior. I opted for warrior. My Hero was a physical brute but dumb as a post. Going without a shield, he was a one man army dishing out punishing damage with a two-handed axe. Because I completed so many side quests, he reached level 46 by the end of the game.

I really enjoyed Divine Divinity far more than I expected I would. It was a lot of fun to play and had very nice music and good graphics for its time. I look forward to playing other games in the series, particularly the more recent Divinity: Original Sin - Enhanced Edition and Divinity Original Sin II.


My level 46 warrior Hero near the end of the game