Forgotten Realms: Baldur's Gate II - Shadows of Amn

Baldur's Gate II is a great computer game. One of the last great games to use "sprites" and "tile sets" instead of "3D objects" with bit-map surfaces. This is NOT a movie. It is a PC game. A very good PC game. It won many awards for computer games.

The voice acting by David Warner (as the main bad guy) was very good. The sound-effects were great. The visual art was stunning in many places (especially the underwater city, the underground city of the Drow, and the temple district of the main city).

This game rocks! I'm playing through it as we speak (first time). The graphics are "so-so", but 2D is far better than 3D in this case.

The gameplay is one of the game's really stronger points, they've made such an excellent exploration curve on the game. The voice acting is also brilliant in my opinion. Minsc' voice-actor has a really incredible voice, and also is probably one of the funniest characters in the game. With his squeaky companion Boo he fears nothing! :))

I'm also very happy IMDB has started registering games. Ratings would be awesome though. Then I could drop all the tedious game reviewing sites and just browse IMDB in stead. :)

PS: Actor Billy West (Futurama: Fry/Prof. Farnsworth/etc etc, impressive guy :) also has a small voice acting role in this game.

What to say about this game that hasn't been told already? It is one of the best RPG games ever made, if not simply the best of them all. Reasons? First of all, the story is just tremendous. You can't help yourself but to marvel the work that has gone in the writing of it. It has pretty much everything: evil, yet charismatic, villain Jon Irenicus(voiced brilliantly by David Warner), characters that give you feeling like they were alive, it has romances, it has betrayal, action... Pretty much everything you could want from a game. And it sucks you right into it. And once it catches you, there is no easy way out.

And the game itself has a great repeatable value. With so many classes and subclasses(usually three for each class) you can play the original game five times or more, and still discover something new every time you play again. Until now, I played the game with monk, inquisitor and bounty hunter, and each time it was different, yet every time I enjoyed it the same. Add to this the possibility that every class has a stronghold of its own, and you start to understand just how much you can look forward to. If you ever get bored of original game, there are many of mods, which allow you to add more content to the game. In one of them, you can actually add Irenicus to your party(in ToB portion of the game). Others just add new quests or NPCs, but there are lot of them. Believe me when I say, this is a game you will want to play more than one time. How many games are out there that can claim that for themselves? Music is great too. I beated many of the tougher enemies multiple times, just so I could listen to the music again. Speaking of enemies, you will be fighting demons, dragons, demon lords, liches and demi-liches... You will have to use your brains too, not just click around like maniac. Add to this some very good riddles, and you will have your work cut out for you.

Graphics aren't that great, measured by today standards, but I just love infinity engine games. They give me that nostalgic feeling, in a good way. And when you come to the underwater city, you will know what I mean. I wouldn't want to see or play this game in 3D graphics. I think that says enough.

I think this is a game that every RPG fan should play. So if you haven't already, do it now. You won't regret it, of that I am sure.

To any of the Dungeons and Dragons fans out there who haven't played this game, it is high time you did. This game does for RPG's what Star Wars did for Sci-fi. Cream of the crop. Hands down.

You are thrown into a dungeon at the beginning of the game with nothing but your bare skin. With the help of your longtime friend Imoen, you have to find a way out. Along the way, you find friends, armor, weapons, potions and magic spells. You fight enemies such as golems, goblins and mephits along with a sprinkling of other various D&D monsters. Various puzzles need to be solved, traps disarmed, creatures helped and the character of your tormentor begins to unravel. But what happens after you finally escape the dungeon of your foe is the magic of Shadows of Amn.

Enter into a huge world that is simply overwhelming at first. Inns, shops, quests and enemies lie everywhere in the main sections of the city. Not only that, but as you meet people in your travels, your quest log requires travel outside the city to numerous other sites and towns. Huge!

The characters of your chosen party of six reveal their personalities and specific quests through dialog initiated by them. The sheer number of simultaneous quests that can occur is mind boggling. Not only that, but the huge selection of spells, armor, weapons and items make it a micro manager's dream. Along with the leveling of characters of a wide assortment of classes and races, each with their own perks and drawbacks, you could easily spend up to two to three hundred hours of game-play.

The main quest involves the tracking down of your tormentor, Jon Irenicus, an evil yet charismatic mage of considerable power who has kidnapped your childhood friend, Imoen. However as the story progresses, the reason behind the kidnapping and your destiny unfolds. Along the ride, you will battle dragons, liches, beholders, dark elves, golems, trolls, mind flayers, vampires, mad wizards, demons, sahauguin, thieves, rakasta as well as many other classic monsters from the D&D game. Your travels will include settings such as graveyards, thief-ridden dives, fallen temples, detailed towns, a druid grove, an underwater city and an underdark city of the drow to name a few. The final battle in the beautiful, fallen elven city is just simply spectacular.

How much thought, effort and artistry went into this game is not only to be commended, but to be marveled. I sat there and just shook my head in awe at various points. No game, from the many I have played, from Doom 3 to Diablo had the effect this game had on me. Has to be played to be believed. 15 out of 10 stars.

Summary Writing in the closing days of 2007 one can only say that this game is still one of the best rpg's ever and still can be used to benchmark other games in this genre.

Main

The BG line was on rudely broken by the NWN series and in that period you had to find your party-rpg needs in games like KOTOR and Jade Empire. Not that NWN 1 was bad, mind you, but it was just not a BG kind of game. With the creation of NWN 2 the AD&D series is progressing back to the BG branch with notably a better storyline and the ability to control a party of individuals with their own stories to tell. 'Re-inventing the wheel' is the phrase the dutch use.

Of course modern hardware and software has enabled better graphics, camera handling and many more things and in this respect BG is dated. But modern hardware can't provide us with a well told story. Or to put it in another vein: it can't make up for the lack of it. There are many developers who use the better performance of modern system to make up for the lack of a good tale. Usually in time these games disappear after a while because newer game that perform even better surpass the. Stories however are of all times and in this they are timeless and it is a well told story which is the cornerstone of BG 2 which makes the game last so long.

A big contribution is made by David Warner as the voice of Jon Irenicus. While the lines are probably written by others, it is Warner who uses his voice to add that extra layer of evilness which make Irenicus one of the outstanding bad guys of all games, a quality he shares with Vlad Lem from Max Payne 2. It shows that Warner has played Evil in the movies time bandit's and it is that same acting he uses to portray Jon and it works very well. A good antagonist is very important, but Warner takes it one step further and this is one of the many factors which makes the game shine.

But many other factors contribute to the game. There is much in this game but in an incredible refined mix. Just not to much to bore and enough of it to keep things interesting. An example is the way in which a quadruple betrayal is used in the dark-elf(aka drow) city with one faction using the players to set up an other faction and a third drow requests to player to betray the first faction too and finally the player betraying them all(well so to speak). It's a well thought plot that sounds preposterous when written here, but actually very well illustrates how that dark-elf society is portrayed in fantasy writing.

The main plot is at thankfully different from those overused bad-guy-plotting-to-subject-the-world and has a note of sadness in it. I would like to add more, but the space is limited here and I can only point you to other reviews to see what is in this game.

Well written, well voiced and developed with much fun the game still overshadows many of it's successors. A must for anyone who loves the rpg genre and can live with the now dated graphics. My hopes is that new software and hardware will not put an end to this game.