I love the all out, balls-to-the-wall campiness of Raphael and Mizora. Andrew Wincott leans into it so hard he recalls Jeremy Irons' famously laughable Evil Wizard Profion in the D&D movie from 2000. And honestly the writing is fabulous. And I love that by the third or fourth time we meet him, even our characters are like "oh lord, that guy again."

I always click the "Exactly how long did you stand there practicing that?" line when we meet him by the Gauntlet in Act 2. It's just so perfectly sarcastic, and his response "until it was perfect!" is so earnest that you kind of pity the guy.

The rhymes. The fact that when we meet him, the first thing he has to do is impress us with his vogon level poetry, mansion and tasting menu. If he'd sent us a dick pic in the bag of letters we get at the reunion I would not be surprised in the least.

Sure, he has a scheme that he's working on, but he also desperately *needs* the PCs to be impressed by him and they just... aren't. And if the actor hadn't played into the campiness of his role so hard, and if the writers hadn't conscientiously made all the devils (except Yurgir) we meet as utterly ridiculous as they are the performances wouldn't work as well as they do. Even Commander Zhaik's few lines are so overwrought that I'm like "You worked hard on that, didn't you?" I mean, come on "Throwwwwww their corrrpses in the Styx! Avernus is OURRRRS!!"

I'm almost sad that Raphael is by lore perma-dead after you kill him in the hells, because being defeated in your own home in the domain where you're most powerful is just so damn *embarassing.*

Mizora sounds like she thinks she's in a production of Cabaret or a pretentiously goth teenager larping a game of Vampire The Masquerade. And again, like, it takes real skill to camp that hard and not lose it. Mizora is clearly better at being evil than Raphael is, but she still can't resist the theatrics of it. And then "one of Zariel's lieutenants" got captured by the Absolute. It's you, Mizora, *you* went and got yourself captured by the Absolute. Because you're a delightfully incompetent boob who isn't progressing her personal quest half as well as the camp full of tadpole-nerfed adventurers you hang around. And in the end when she hangs around at camp, she *tries* to act aloof and superior even if you break Wyll's pact, but she also clearly kind of really wants everyone to like her and to be mean-girl friends.

I love this game.