... and now i love this game and am currently going through the full trilogy with a sorta headcanonish eekeeper-modified party: berserker/cleric dual class mc, shadowdancer viconia for doing crime and backstabs, sorceress imoen, illusionist aerie, jaheira sticking with her natural summoning druid tank style, mazzy on gesen bow (since she comes with shortbow grandmastery despite being a halfling fighter who yearns to be a paladin) and the last spot or two being filled by a rotating cast for guest quests until [redacted] joins for the final stretch in throne of bhaal. playing on core rules difficulty. my current user pic here is a drawing of viconia by ryoko kui (dungeon meshi mangaka), recolored and slightly redrawn by me. so, uh, one could say that i have come around on this game.

Perhaps your BG1 adventure had some interesting organic party moments like characters X and Y finally getting fed up of bickering with characters A and B and ruthlessly slaughtering them and you exacting vengeance upon them, alas your memories are but fanfiction and canon is king. A is alive and well, grieving over B who died in an unrelated way and X and Y are... alive as well to get fucked over royally. A time before Shepard's spacevaganza when continuity wasn't deemed as important, so a grievance we can forgive. It's all good after all because A can now slobber over our chosen cocks in this fantasy isekai adventure: pick your elf waifu edition. Awwwyeah finally a mature game for mature gMers (with segs and all), so what do the male romance options look like? Ha ha ha being a female dnd nerd at the time must've been fun.

Look I'm not mad, the quests are pretty damn fun. And luckily there's no urgency to complete them all, not like we're on a mission to save a family member like that casul tripe there fallout 4. So will get to that main quest eventually but you see, my wife Aerie needs a new pair of shoes (gave her boots of speed and damn the girl's l i t e r a l l y faster than Chiktikka Fastpaws).

Baldur's Gate II is a strong improvement over it's predecessor. The game starts you off in a fairly interesting situation which allows for the characters to immediately display more characterization and depth in the opening segment than any of them did in the entirety of the first entry. It also immediately throws you into some large cities, which was saved for the last 10% of the first game. I still played this basically entirely on story mode given how complex the combat is, far too much for me to engage with honestly. Regardless, moving through the game's excellent main story and sidequests was an absolute joy. 4/6

What’s striking about Baldur’s Gate 2 is just how modern of an RPG it feels like, even when it’s over twenty years old. The narrative focus isn’t on the main plot, but in the ways the diverse cast of characters grow over the course of their adventure. Doing side quests is encouraged with all the contextual dialog from your companions, so players explore the world and build relationships with the party naturally. Then, when you start focusing on the main storyline, their reactions to events are contextualized with the details they've confided in you over time. However, there’s a pretty big catch to all this, in that the game’s appeal relies on this cast of characters you may not actually like. This is where the veneer of objectivity in this review breaks down entirely, because I found all the companions' personalities to be way too outlandish. There's no way I could advocate for a blander, more homogenous set of characters, but stating that the characters got on my nerves is true to my experience. This particularly hurts the enjoyment of a CRPG, where the combat serves mostly as an expression of the team's growth, rather than a mechanical challenge in itself. So, if you’re the type of RPG player who loves chatting up and customizing companions in New Vegas or Mass Effect, you’ll be able to see why this game inspired two decades of RPG’s, but if you expect satisfying gameplay or a compelling central plot, it won't live up to the decades of hype.

This is easily Bioware's best game that I've played. There's jank, it's old, it is paced in an insane way, but this game is also some of the best cRPG style gameplay I've experienced. Every sidequest in Chapter 2 (which is 60% of the game minimum) was as good as the best quests in games like New Vegas or KOTOR 2. Absolutely killing it to release a game with this level of quality by 2000.

The biggest negatives are you can feel the cut-for-time edges, pre-fight party buffing becomes a huge chore, and that 2nd Edition D&D is an insane person system.

Note: I used the Tweaks Anthology to speed up out-of-combat movement and casting by 50%, but if I had known how much time I'd spend buffing before walking into the next room I'd have done 100%.

i have to be real with you, this was my entire life for like a year, give or take. there's just very little in the game i haven't done, and then i got into modding and oh, the shit you would see back in the day when you were into bg2 modding

well! anyway!

the early section of this is incredibly strong. straight out of the gate, if you're importing your character from bg1, you're stripped of all your d&d toys and directly transported from the fun swashbuckling adventure to the horror nightmare zone.

even if irenicus ends up being kind of a whatever villain when all's said and done, the game does a really great job of building him up as a huge, threatening adversary -- and his VA job is out of this world. there's a relatively massive amount of exceptional voice acting here in general, and it adds a lot of life and charm to characters that... aren't otherwise always written all that well.

you start at around level 9 or so, which means being decisively out of low level d&d hell and in the stretch where you actually get to use a good array of spells and abilities. this also makes many of this game's combat encounters fairly interesting and challenging until you figure out some of the many ways to completely break the mechanics, which is its own kind of fun.

athkatla is big, cool, beautifully rendered and fun to explore, and you really get swamped with sidequests since early on, creating the impression of a bustling metropolis. it kind of isn't all that bustling once you're used to it, and it can end up feeling like the world exists for the convenience of you, the main character -- but that's something that can happen in a tabletop campaign as well, and if you're sufficiently engrossed you may not even notice.

it doesn't really have big ideas or very deep characters, and these days i don't have a lot of patience for that. but it's definitely more atmospheric and interesting than bg1 and icewind dale, and it's a huge nostalgia game for me.

A massive step up from its predecessor. The gameplay still suffers slightly at times due to AD&D jank, general complexity that doesn't translate well to a real time video game, and the growing pains of the very subgenre BG2 helped codify, but in spite of this, Baldur's Gate 2 is a masterpiece.

Its massively innovative in-depth companion dialogue still holds up to this day, even if the characters and their lines feel a bit tropey and straightforward nowadays. It also retains a certain sense of wonder and mystery, plus an absolutely stunning tone that the archaic mechanics and presentation only seem to help bring out, like reading historical literature from an ancient tome.

The combat grows into its shoes much more than the dragging, plodding Baldur's Gate 1. Here it frequently manages to be fun and satisfying, occasionally tense and exciting. However, there are still moments when the mobs it throws at you are more filler than killer. Sometimes, it even has the opposite problem, throwing you against tough enemies that are more easily defeated with the wand of Google and a quick load than the game's more satisfying conventional problem solving.

It doesn't help that there are what feels like several dozen different immunities enemies can have and just as many different ways of dispelling each one, with the game offering little in the way of warning or teaching beforehand. Trying to follow along in the combat log is an exercise in futility--the real-time combat means that, realistically, too much happens to sift through it and understand everything that's going on. The better encounters in this game will throw enemies at you that are threatening and meaningful, keeping you on your toes, but will show restraint when drawing from the well of non-interactive "gotcha" spells and abilities. Finding out that an enemy can only be effectively countered by reloading a save and preparing a new spell list isn't nearly as rewarding as it is time-consuming.

Still, some stinker encounters should be expected in a game full of so many setpieces--this game is a sprawling and gigantic crash course in Forgotten Realms lore and D&D traditions. Fans of the setting will find their jaws dropping at the love and care with which the world is presented, and those who don't especially care for this world might start to understand why some do.

The sheer engrossment I felt playing this game (even despite a year-long break I took from playing it midway through--I do that with most long games) is astonishing. It's one of the few RPGs of its size class that I didn't find myself eventually repulsed by long before the end. If you're not as patient as I occasionally was, turning the game down to easy (or even the easiest) mode when it gets frustrating is a totally acceptable way to keep yourself barrelling through the game's myriad adventures at a more reasonable pace.
Though the combat works, the characters, narrative, and exploration are the real selling points. Don't keep yourself from getting more of them because of any devotion to the game's mechanics. This game is the blueprint for memorable companions, intra-party dynamics, and iconic worlds that Bioware has spent the rest of their history looking to replicate.

However you might end up consuming it, if you're at all interested in the history of gaming, story-heavy RPGs, Dungeons & Dragons, or all-time gaming classics, Baldur's Gate II: Shadows of Amn is worth a try. If you find yourself hooked, as I did, it's worth seeing all the way through, warts and all. Somehow, it manages to be much greater than the sum of its parts.

Irenicus is great fun, and so are a good number of your motley crew. Athkatla's side quests, whose frontloaded glut immediately convinces you of the scope of your daunting task is a clever structural conceit. But it is not enough. Baldur's Gate 2, though a remarkable and necessary evolution from its hobbled predecessor, not so much represents the glory BioWare left behind but rather inaugurates the tendency that would spell their doom: a serviceable narrative that does not even attempt to wrangle with the semblance of ideas, populated by a mysteriously celebrated cast of characters whose friendships, though earned in a few easy steps, never seem to manifest outside of a few comments at the end of their quests (not to mention the complete absence of a group dynamic, something BioWare would not even attempt until the Whedonesque Mass Effect 3: Citadel, a hangout that aged like a hangover, not least for being Whedonesque).

I cannot for the life of me consider this a replayable game: the characters remain steadfast in their trajectories and so does the plot aside from a few touches here and there. Baldur's Gate 2 pivoted the home ground of WRPGs from tabletop to computers. But the most important distinction between the two is presence and illusion of choice. Yet this game, and all the games, criticism, and discourse flowing forth simplemindedly valorizes intricate networks of choice and consequence. Might as well celebrate the prose of silent film intertitles. It may be a tad unfair to pin the blame on BG2, otherwise a pleasant game. But the spotlight cast upon this game has cast a distended shade as long as the history of the these games from then on. And with the industry seemingly fed up with the difficult beauty of the genre, there is increasingly less and less funding to escape the shadows of Amn, and the unfolding story of the genre in the West has come to a long pause.

A cult classic cRPG, and one of the best sequels ever made, Worldbuilding and Lore has depth. So many storylines and sidequests! Amazing voice acting, its an incredible game, especially when you consider the story from start to finish as an epic complete trilogy. The story and dialog are fantastic. Combat is deep and fun. The lore of each and every item you find really adds a lot of depth to the world. The quantity and quality of characters make each replay a different experience. It goes on and on. There's so much in this game that is done so well. Another big plus for this game is the dedicated modding community.
Baldur's Gate 2 is by far one of the most memorable RPGs I have ever played.

9.2/10