Divine Divinity

Divine Divinity is a little-known 2002 role-playing game for the PC, developed by Belgian developer Larian Studios.

The game follows a very similiar gameplay style and graphical style to the popular Diablo, but mixes in Baldur's Gate-style dialog tree conversations with humorous, sometimes lampshade-hanging dialog, almost like what you would find in a Black Isle Studios game. The game has a simple main plot, but exposes you to a well-sized Wide Open Sandbox full of little side-quests and secrets to find in the wilderness.

Divine Divinity was followed by two sequels, Beyond Divinity in 2004, and Divinity II: The Dragon Knight Saga, which was released in 2010 for the PC and Xbox 360.

Tropes used in Divine Divinity include:

• A God Am I: Duke Janus.
• An Economy Is You
• A Real Man Is a Killer: The Orcs don't consider their young ones mature, until their first kill.
• Awesome Yet Practical: The teleporter pyramid stones. Set one where you want, for example a bed, and carry the other around. You can teleport around whenever you want.
• Brick Joke: Near the beginning in Aleroth, you open the catacombs by magically launching a sealing statue into the sky. Later, on several instances in other places people will remark about the "mysterious flying man". Finally, in the ending cutscene, it drops out of the sky. At this point you'll probably have forgotten about it and it comes as a complete surprise.
• Contemptible Cover: The cover features a goddess that is seen ingame for all but 20 seconds in the intro. Intros often being skipped, many never see her.
• Critical Encumbrance Failure
• Department of Redundancy Department: Divine Divinity. Even mocked in this article about the 50 most ridiculous game titles ever.
• Gainax Ending: You kill Duke Janus (really an ancient resurrected demon) only moments after he has finished completing a ritual to embed the soul of an even more powerful ancient evil into a human baby. Rather than kill the baby, you're seen carrying the child out of the dungeon while some of your allies watch, and then a statue falls from the sky.
• Fighter, Mage, Thief: Warrior Mage Survivor (a rogue/ranger hybrid). Notably, this only determined a character's looks and voice, as well as their (rather insignificant) initial stats and skills. Every character class could learn every skill in the game.
• Hide Your Children / Infant Immortality: Both averted.
• Adventure Narrator Syndrome: Experimental alchemy doesn't always work.
• Nice Job Breaking It, Hero: At the end of the game, instead of killing the newly born Anti Christ while he's still a baby, the Hero instead adopts the kid and tries to raise him as a good guy. As the sequels show, that didn't exactly work out so well.
• No Hero Discount: Averted. Heroic deeds improve your reputation plus you can give shop keepers more money so they like you more and give you even higher discounts. You can ALSO kill them just fine (it's possible the guards will try to stab you then, however).
• Our Orcs Are Different: They lean more towards Blizzard Orcs.
• Point Build System
• Protagonist Without a Past: Your character just sort of woke up in village somewhere.
• Real Time with Pause
• Socketed Equipment: The Charm System is basically this. Also a Game Breaker when you only use the golden charms, wich boost your stats trough the stratosphere.
• Shout-Out: Several of these crop up in the game, including a tombstone in a graveyard that reads Polgara the Mage and a magic shop owner named Kistandatilus
• Standard Fantasy Setting: Wile on first glance it's a Cliché Storm, the game proves itself to be rather self aware on many occasions.
• The Chosen One: You are The Marked One, who is the only one who can stand up to the forces of evil. However, there are two other Marked Ones, and they are just as likely to be the ones to fight the battle. Until they're both killed off. Guess it's up to you after all. There is also The Divine One, an even more important title, which Duke Janus claims. No, that's you too.
• The Law of Conservation of Detail: Througoughly averted. The game is littered with realistic junk and books about all sorts of topics. Also many, many NPC characters can be asked, helped or killed without much plot-relevance.
• The Vamp: Josephina who is allso much more powerfull then the other members of the Quirky Miniboss Squad.
• Useless Useful Spell: Averted with the Freeze spell, which works at pretty much any enemy except two or three types, and the final boss is not immune to it, either.
• Warp Whistle: Two teleporter pyramid stones. You can drop one on the ground and carry another with you to enable instant recall to a location, or set down the second stone to make a two-way portal. Very, very useful.