I never finished the first Witcher game. I own it and have started it several times but give up before gaining entrance to Vizima. I have started TW2 and have gotten as far as Flotsam, but it will be at least 20 days before I can play ANY pc games again. My question is, should I go back and beat TW1 first? I prefer TW2 by a good margin so far, I really didn't like rhythm-based combat but it was USUALLY tolerable unless I clicked too soon and messed up my attacks. Thanks for any input on this.

I think this just depends on how much you care about having a full backstory. I haven't played the second game yet (I'm playing the first now and I'm almost done) but I have heard that playing the first game before the second is definitely optional. I believe that the events of the first game are referenced, but in such a way that you still understand what happened even if you hadn't played the first one.

Personally, I like having the full backstory so I'm playing the games in order, but if the first game doesn't really float your boat you're probably fine just playing the second.

So...don't click too soon?

He won't have the full backstory anyway until the remaining five books are translated to English.

you could always get the ebooks in polish and then translate them to english.
http://www.stars21.com/translator/polish_to_english.html seems to be a decent online translator for polish. I haven't tried other languages. sentence structure is off, but its definitely readable, unlike google translation/babelfish that have a lot of gibberish

Yes, but I'm guessing the events of the first game are more relevant than the events of the novels. I actually JUST finished the first game, incidentally. I'm looking forward to the second, but now I have to decide if I want to go for other endings in the first game and if I want to play the extra adventures first... decisions, decisions.

Machine translation for BOOKS? That sounds miserable, just trying to make sense of a few web pages is enough of a strain. A synopsis would be far better, I'd think, and not spoil every detail in case they are eventually human-translated. Assuming one exists in English.

Agreed. Honestly - the official translation that actually took professional translator quite some time is not that good from what I hear, and many details got lost in the process. I don't see how auto translation can be any good in this case.
Sapkowski has a very specific style of writing - one that unfortunately is very "translation unfriendly".

Only one short story book was skipped ("Sword of Destiny").

Haha. I have decent reflexes but with all the monotonous clicking in combat, yes, you can click too early and mess up your chain.

If it's monotonous, shouldn't you never mess up?
I don't think it is...and it's more about muscle memory than reflexes. It's supposed to punish you for when you don't remember correctly...get better.

Come on, guys.... many many players had problems with the combat system. Sometimes people don't want to "get better" at a game if they're not finding it to be any fun.

I liked The Witcher, even the combat, but I accept that some others might not. I think it might be worth it for the OP to play the first game through if he cares about having the full backstory for the second game, but if not, he shouldn't bother if he doesn't find it fun.

His" Something Ends, Something Begins" short story collection also contains 2 witcher stories. Though only one is canon. Even if they do go back and publish Sword of Destiny, this one won't make it, unless they start publishing his other works beside Witcher.

I'm open minded but I have a hard time understanding why anyone who's played even a few RPGs could find the combat tedious.