If I had one toxic gaming trait, it’s that I have a bad habit of buying or downloading games that I know are going to be bad, then forcing myself to play through said games, no matter how much I might hate them. Okay, maybe hate is a strong word, since I will leave games behind if I truly hate them, but that doesn’t mean I legitimately enjoy everything I finish.

One case in point is The First Templar. This game is spectacularly mediocre. It’s astoundingly average. It’s the most enjoyably boring game I have played in a long time. If ever there was a game that evoked such a strong sense of apathy, this would be it.

There have been games that didn’t grab me. There have been games that have bored me to tears, so much so that I never put any notable time into them. But few games bore me so much that I have to finish them. Enter The First Templar.

If you haven’t been able to tell by now, The First Templar is about as vanilla as it gets. The story is completely forgettable nonsense, and the characters are about as wooden and lifeless as you would imagine. The graphics are alright, even for an Xbox 360 game. It was obviously a budget game.
But wow. It’s hard to tell just what the motivation for such a game was. What’s the purpose of the story it was trying to tell? Was there a Templar fad going on at the time?

Hold on, let me look this up….

Okay, it released in May of 2011, so… wait… 2011? Seriously? Six years into the Xbox 360’s lifespan?
Hold on a second. 2011 was the year that brought us Skyrim and Gears of War 3. So let me revise my previous statement: The First Templar look like ass. It’s hard to believe this is the same developer that brought us Victor Vran (which I will finish one of these days.)

But I digress…

The First Templar follows a knight on his holy quest for the… Holy.. Grail. Along the way he meets a woman who is accused of being a witch, or a heretic, or something; I honestly don’t remember. She tags along with him for reasons while he wanders rather aimlessly about the region in search for answers, which he gets, I assume.

The reason I am so unclear on the story is because it just doesn’t make any sense. The conversations are so dull and lifeless that I mentally checked out most of the time, and never really knew why I was doing what I was doing, other than “searching for the grail.” The motivations for the female to risk her life for this quest is never really made clear either, or if they were I just wasn’t paying attention.
The big twist in the story was so weirdly stupid that not only did it not make much sense, but they didn’t even really bother to explain it either. They gloss over the whole thing so quick that I can only assume they wanted me to not question it. Pay no attention to the stupid explanation behind the curtain, so to speak.

Okay fuck it, I’m gonna spoil it, because it’s not like you’re going to play this game for the story (or any other reason) anyway, so here you go:

The guy who hid the grail away from the world hundreds of years ago is the same guy who’s searching for it.

Yep, that’s right, YOU are the “First Templar.” Make sense? No? Well fuck you, you don’t get an explanation other than he has amnesia and he’s apparently really, really fucking old.

How is he still alive? Dunno. Why does he have amnesia? Also dunno. What was he doing in the hundreds of years since he hid the grail, and how did it not occur to him that “hey I’ve been alive a really long fucking time, something ain’t right? Don’t ask silly questions.

The game explains all of this with a shrug and a “eh, ya know.”

Essentially, you spent the majority of the game following a paper trail of clues left by the “first templar” only to realize that the guy is following clues left by himself and it turns out the grail is hidden in his own dungeon place. So he trotted all over the middle east just to end up back home, or something.
I don’t know. I said it was stupid, didn’t I?

The combat doesn’t help much, either. Honestly, if it wasn’t so mindlessly simple, I probably wouldn’t have bothered with the game. It basically consists of tapping the X button a few times and squeezing the right trigger every once in a while and watching stuff happen on the screen. I never really felt like I contributed much, and honestly it was all pretty easy. I died a few times, sure, but it was mainly because a few of the boss fights later in the game get really unfair. The final boss made so little sense (he’s just an old dude, how so strong?) and was so unbalanced that I basically had to cheese the fight by attacking and rolling away, attacking and rolling away, repeated a hundred times until I managed to chip away at his health bar enough to trigger the final cutscene, where he does some acrobatic bullshit that you cannot do yourself in normal gameplay to finally finish the guy off. I hate it when games do that. Talk about robbing the player of any satisfaction.

Then, to add insult to injury, the game gives the player a choice; take the Grail and use it for the “good” of humanity, or destroy it (which was the final boss’ motivation for finding it). The dumb thing is that I, because I prefer balance in the force, felt the Grail should be destroyed, so that’s what I chose. I chose to destroy the Grail, after fighting a guy to the death to prevent him from DESTROYING THE GRAIL.

Talk about a choice that makes the entire game a moot point. The player is in a race against the Inquisition for that very reason, and the final choice is to either destroy it, which is what the Inquisition wanted, or to use it to defeat the Inquisition (aka kill them, which is what I’m sure Christ would’ve wanted.) Yeah, yeah, I know the entire Crusades were about the converting or killing, but that was their own blind, misguided faith. Not mine. I’m not a psycho.

So I was like “nah, NOBODY should wield such power” and I destroyed it. And I was treated to a cutscene ending that told me the Inquisition tracked down and destroyed the remaining templar order, and stuff. So I guess that was the… bad… ending?

Honestly I’ll probably never know what the other ending will be unless I look it up on Youtube because I’m not playing that stupid boss battle again.

Nevermind, I looked it up. The ending, should you choose to save the grail, is almost EXACTLY THE SAME. The only difference is the very last line of the dialog, which vaguely mentions a guardian watching over humanity. Wow. That’s some bullshit. Why even give the player the option. If I would’ve played through the battle again to get the other ending I would’ve been so pissed.

So yeah. The First Templar. Only play this out of morbid curiosity. Or if you require pennance.