Combat is real-time with the ability to pause the action to select commands. At times, this works well enough. A melee attack in Baldur’s Gate II will fail more often than it will succeed, so, rather than having two opponents selecting attacks that fail over and over again, this allows combat to flow quickly. That said, it gets annoying fast. Your party will not necessarily attack a new enemy as soon as they’ve finished off one, or they’ll attack an enemy that you don’t want them to. The best way to ensure your party does what you want it to do, is to pause after every enemy is killed, and select a new one. You will want to pause, because if your enemy moves, and you’ve clicked where they were instead of where they are, all your plans could be messed up. Now, to be fair, you could go into the options and tell the game to pause after a character kills an enemy, but, if you’ve got all six of your party members attacking the same guy (which is the quickest way to defeat a group of enemies), the game will pause six times, once for each party member. I much prefer a turn-based system, like the original Fallout games, and the more recent Shadowrun Returns (it seems that most fans do, as well: fans chose turn-based combat for the Kickstarter project Torment: Tides of Numeria). Also, the path-finding algorithm is atrocious. You’ll often have your party members travel in the farthest possible path to reach their destination, or travel in the opposite direction of where you want them to go. This is a source of constant frustration outside of combat. During combat, it’s a beyond horrendous. Having to micromanage a party member’s movement while you are in a fight is a common experience.
Much of the game is filled with these types of annoyances, and most of them stem from the Dungeons and Dragons license. For instance, rather than using an MP bar to draw from, magic users must decide on a number of spells that they “memorize”. You “memorize” spells when you rest. After a spell is used, it is forgotten, and can only be reused after a resting period. If you run out of spells, you are out of luck until you rest. If you want to change out the spells you have, you must rest, which is not possible in all situations. So, you may be in trouble if your set of spells is useless in a situation, and you can’t get to a place to rest. Let’s call a minor spoiler alert here, though I will say that if you know this ahead of time, you will have a much easier time. SPOILERS: There are vampires in the game who reveal themselves in the third chapter. If you chose not to join them, you will have to fight them. In D&D, a vampire bite will drain your level. That means that, after each attack, it becomes increasingly difficult to fight them and increasingly easy for them to kill you. There is a spell that can prevent this, though you will never use it before that, and the game gives you no indication that you will need it. Plus, the first place you encounter these bloodsuckers is in a city. You can’t rest on the city streets, or inside a safe building. In the city, you cannot rest anywhere but an inn, and getting to the inn is a hassle. END SPOILERS The point here is D&D license makes certain tasks more difficult and complex than they would be in other games.
Speaking of difficulty, there’s good and bad. This version’s base difficulty level is easier than the original. That’s a very good thing. That’s one reason I didn’t get into Baldur’s Gate (or really, any of the Infinity Engine games) when I first played it. My first RPG was Golden Sun, so that radically shapes my view of what an RPG should be. Now, I have come to understand that Western RPGs and JRPGs are, in fact, different genres, but I have been trained to think that you get through an RPG by taking out weaker foes to level up your characters to take on bigger threats. That’s more or less not an option here. Oh, you do level and increase your skills, don’t get me wrong. But, since there’s no set standard for how to complete the game, you may easily find yourself fighting enemies that you are not prepared to face. There’s very little point in going back to fight weaker enemies, since D&D’s permadeath rules apply. In short, once you kill all the enemies in a specific place, you’ll never see enemies in that place again, making grinding difficult. Without the ability to grind, if you get stuck on a tough boss, it becomes a game of “What systems can I exploit?” rather than “How much more power do I need?”
There was a time when Western RPG fans and JRPG fans would argue that the other’s genre “wasn’t an RPG.” This is an example of why. My introduction to role-playing games came in the form of JRPGs like Golden Sun, Magical Starsign and the Mario & Luigi games. All of them had simple, intuitive mechanics, and stories that drew me into their worlds, making me want to see them through to the end. Baldur’s Gate II Enhanced Edition has half of that. The story is compelling, filled with interesting characters and potentially full of replay value if you want to see everything. But it is couched in a set of obtuse mechanics that are extremely hard to get into. If you love classic Western RPGs, this is a great example of the genre. If you love classic JRPGs, expect a severe learning curve – one that you may not feel like climbing. If you would like to try to get into an Infinity Engine game, Planescape: Torment is a much better game, in my opinion, and a better starting point.
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Review copy provided by publisher.
