Took me about 31 hrs, including a couple restarts after several hours each, to accomplish all possible tasks in the status menu, ending with the best profession in retirement and 123 Fame.
One glitch that made it impossible for me to complete what would probably be considered the main quest, forcing a restart, knocks this down a couple points. In order to avenge your family, shown in the opening cutscene, you have to complete 15 tasks. One of them was to defeat one of the 9 notorious pirates. Since I got this task relatively late, I had already defeated 8 or them. The 9th one would never spawn, and since it doesn't credit you for tasks already performed, I was stuck. Because of this, I delayed a lot of the tasks when I restarted. While I was able to avenge my family this time, again the game would not spawn the final notorious pirate, so I was left with one missing task to consider it 100% complete. There are a couple other minor glitches with the game. When defeating a notorious pirate, at least one of their quests would remain in the quest log. After getting the various specialists, you will not need to find them again on any new game -- when you avenge your family, the Marquis vows to grant you the specialists going forward, which says to me that I should not have had access to them on my restarts. Ships, not yours, have no problem sailing across land. While this last one is mostly comical, it can affect a naval battle if the ship happens to be on/in land when you initiate the battle, as neither ship can attack each other, requiring you to very slowly sail away from it to where you're far enough away from each other to end the battle. There were several times after setting out with a new crew when I think I didn't have enough crew and my ship would immediately fall into such disrepair that I almost could not move. I don't think not having enough crew would mean that the hull and sails would, upon weighing anchor, instantly become 90% damaged. Considering that I had the same flagship for more than one of these situations and it didn't happen every time says to me that this is another glitch.
Technical issues aside, I found the game to be really repetitive. I'm not a fan of the sword fighting, which, unless you decide to do something like spend the entire game trading goods between ports for profit, you'll be doing a lot. For every difficulty below the highest, there is almost no skill needed -- just thrust every time your opponent starts to make a move. Your abilities do degrade as you age, which does make it challenging when your character gets into his mid-30s. You'll also likely find yourself playing the dancing minigame a lot, which got really old really fast. Unfortunately, outside of receiving map pieces from the four relatives you can rescue, dancing well appears to be the only way to get the map pieces for the lost cities. The port towns are all virtually identical with the same things to do. Same with the pirate towns (which are basically the same as the port towns, except for having a captain instead of a governor), native villages, and monasteries.
If you attack too many of one country's ships, its towns will start to attack you when you try to dock. This opens up a couple poorly done options. You can either try to sneak into the town and make it to the governor's mansion, which is a really bad stealth segment, or attack the town's guards in a really bad tactical battle. With either option, it has another glitch, as there is some message that appears, but only for an instant. If the town has less than 100 guards, which I think you can soften up by having the natives or pirate towns attack (assuming the town you want them to attack is among those listed), you'll only have to duel the captain. If you successfully attack, you have the option to install a new governor, and the town becomes friendly again. If you sneak in, the town remains hostile.
I'd always heard good things about this game, so I was a quite disappointed.
