I have to be the bad guy here and say that Planescape: Torment is absolute s*** as a *game*. What most (all?) people who revere PS:T praise is the story, and that's because the story and the characters are pretty good, for a video game at least. Games as art though? Hahahaha.

Anyway, PS:T is not even an RPG or a role-playing game, it's a point&click adventure with tacked on RPG mechanics. Now, there is nothing wrong with point&click games if you like those and if PS:T were a P&C adventure I wouldn't have written such a harsh statement as above. The point however is that PS:T is sold as an RPG and plays like an RPG, therefore it has to be judged as an RPG.

None of the mechanics or choices you make matter. It starts already with character creation; while you can *technically* play any character you want the only one that won't be a pain to play (at least less then others) is warrior with points pumped into intelligence, charisma and wisdom. The warrior class so you can wield the best weapons in the game and get the most HP, intelligence so you get access to the best dialogue options, charisma so you can make use of them and wisdom so you get the most experience, since in PS:T grinding experience is very important. With such a character I was able to talk my way out of any fight that was avoidable or outrun the enemy and when combat was unavoidable I just threw all i had at the enemy and made myself a cup of tea while the fight played out on its own. Never play an offensive character, like a warrior or a mage, because the rewards for fighting are worse then for avoiding conflict. Mages suck as well because to recharge your spells you need to rest and in this game there is only a handful of places where you can rwst. Rogues suck as well because there just isn't enough opportunity for them to use their skills.
Speaking of combat, it's in your best interest to avoid it whenever possible because combat is just awful and requires no thought or skill. I played the entire game with the above build and I never had problems defeating an enemy, it was just a tedious mini game.

Well, you might say that PS:T is not a game about stats, equipment, combat or experience, but a quest of self-reflection, a tragic story of a man seeking to save his very self and a tale of kindred spirits drawn to a source of torment like moths drawn to a fire, a lesson in inevitablity but still an inspiration for hope. And you would be right, but let me ask you a question: Why on earth do you then have all those RPG mechanics when they don't do anything but slow the game down to a crawl? For example at one point I needed a hammer because the plot said so. Of course i had several hammers in my inventory, but those were magic weapons, I needed an ordinary hammer instead, so I had to travel all across the hive to find *one* ordinary non-enchanted hammer. And before you tell me that there was a hammer conveniently lying nearby, the door to that house closed before i knew I needed the hammer and there was no way back in. See, in a P&C adventure there wouln't be five enchanted hammers, there would be just one and you would have it in your inventory at that time, nice and simple. You wouldn't spend half an hour looking for the one item you dumped somewhere five hours before because you thought it was just a low-level weapon. Oh, but the crowbar, which you think would be a very useful item and which you *did* use a tool before, was never used after the first floor of the mortuary.

Even the role-playing aspect of the game is not that good. Take for example the following situation, a man has made a deal whith a devil and he's regretting it. He wants you to go up to that devil and kill it. You could do the good thing or you could be evil and tell the devil what's going on. However, the reward for killing the devil is *much* better that the evil path, you get the experience for killing the devil and you get one point in charisma as a reward plus a bunch of experience points on top of it. if you tell the devil you just get some experience. Why on earth would you do the evil thing? In fact, even if you were role-playing evil it would still make more sense to kill the devil, since that would give you the better reward, which is what you want (not to mention that killing the devil will not actually destroy it, it will just send it back to hell, from where it can just come back; not sure how that guy thought that would get him out of the contract). You might think that I'm just cherry-picking one example, but I'm not, the writing is really not that good when you stop and think about it. One example that gets cited quite often is that you can sacrifice one of your companions to hell in excahnge for information, but again, there is a better way, you can just sacrifice permanently five or so HP, which you will not notice at all thanks to the fighter class, and keep the companion, which again can be seen as evil because you get the information *and* you keep the strength of your army (besides, if Grace was killed in hell she would just return to her home plane and if someon else died their souls would go to their respective afterlives).
I have the boxed version here, it says on the box stuff like "here you are truly powerful" or "in this world the mind can shape mountains" and you are truly that powerful, but only in a few select dialogues when the script tells you so. Even the game's mythology is inconsistent. The game keeps building up the whole blood war thing and how demons a chaotic while devils are lawful schemers that corrupt instead of destroying. Then you travel to hell and the devils are just mindless killing machines that attack on sight.

______________________________________________________________________

The TL;DR version boils down to PS:T being a pain to play and a Point&click adventure with a colossal amount of padding. I played through the entire thing desperately trying to understand what people see in it. When I ask them what they liked about it the answer is always "the story and the characters". You don't need to *play* the game for that, you can just *watch* it on YouTube instead and skip the tedious parts.

Anyway, I know I'm not going to change anyone's opinion here and that's not what I'm trying to do. I just want to give people another perspective on the game and go into more detail about my judgement than just saying "best RPG ever" or just calling it s*** whithout explanation, because neither is usefull at all. If you play games just for the story then chances are you'll like it, I just want people to know what they are getting themsevles into.