Knights of Pen and Paper 3

An interesting premise isn't enough to save this role-playing game from boredom. Knights of Pen and Paper 3 is a fairly standard turn-based RPG (role playing game), but you take on the role of virtual players interacting with a tabletop role-playing game themselves, where the visuals represent what their Game Master is describing. You build a team of five characters, fight turn-based battles, and upgrade their equipment and skills. Each character's class determines their abilities, and team composition is vital for success. As you progress, you can choose to engage in story missions, travel across the map to new locations, or take side quests to earn extra experience to level up your characters.

The idea of playing a game within a game is fun, but the execution fails at nearly every level. Encounters start out fairly tame, but as the game progresses, their health balloons much faster than your own characters' damage, making many fights lengthy slogs. This is, in part, because upgrading your skills is based on finding rare items, and each upgrade point is only a tiny improvement. Equipment is similarly hard to come by, so you spend long stretches only slightly upgrading the same gear. Another reason for the tedium is that effects and animations can be excruciatingly slow. Each status effect, for example, has a character visibly show a die roll to see if it will be removed that turn. This can stack on themselves, every turn, meaning this animation plays out dozens of times within a turn. That extra time adds up quickly and ruins the pacing. The game's humor is often lazy, and leans on references without context rather than original attempts at jokes. The story itself is paper-thin, so the constant attempts at humor are the only thing distracting from the slow gameplay. While there are good ideas in Knights of Pen and Paper 3, you are better off looking elsewhere for your RPG needs.