Baldur's Gate: Enhanced Edition

As an exception to the JRPG theming, I'm putting up a review of Baldur's Gate, being my first CRPG with combat (I played Disco Elysium).

I found it hard to get into at first, since I played on my steam deck and didn't use a mouse. But honestly, it's not that bad considering one of your face buttons is a shortcut for the pause button. Additionally, my only experience with D&D has been 3 oneshots across the duration of my entire life. I felt like I got tossed in the deep end of the pool. Most of this review will be speaking from the PoV of a person who's played JRPGs their entire life and might have some biases.

First of all, it's just fun! Exploration and finding secrets everywhere always feels really good. Exploring is actually worth doing in a world where there's so much to find. I highly recommend talking to every named NPC and doing sidequests, as it makes up the bulk of the game. I did at least 20 sidequests but I was not keeping count, I just did every single one I found convenient. It's also quite funny to find random people in the wild who give you new tasks.

However, the exploration of the world itself is lacking. The areas are ginormous and take a while to explore properly, but they are mostly empty. There are no paths to follow and it's generally aimlessly walking around a large square of areas. Not many walls to guide you or anything. Another problem is that despite the areas being huge, there's barely anything in most of it, it's a lot of empty space. This is most prominent when you get to the Baldur's Gate city itself which is 9 screens of a bunch of nothingness.

The NPC dialogue is also lacking, as they don't give much information on anything regarding the narrative. There is no point to a lot of NPCs cause they say meaningless things, accentuated even more by the flowery prose and dialogue which lengthens the amount of words saying something so simplistic.

I found the lore itself to be quite lacking too. There is nothing I found interesting about the world as it feels most of the worldbuilding exists to give a fantasy vibe and has no actual purpose outside of that. Some things just made no sense such as authorities attacking you for no reason and defending yourself instead of running away lowers your reputation.

I didn't do much associated with the reputation either, I find it was a bit unnecessary in this game outside of shop prices because there aren't enough changes depending on your reputation. Sure, a low reputation means you'll be hunted down by the authorities, but there's no real purpose to it as nothing comes of it. Feels like it was added more as a neat idea than a good implementation. I guess it also makes it so certain characters are more likely to join you but I didn't do that.

The plot itself was simplistic but I didn't find that to be a negative since the game is more about exploring the area and solving people's problems, or causing problems. I even found the narrative to be quite nice! It's a very good concept that gives enough information to the player to roleplay confidently.

The combat is fine I guess, I'm not sure what is considered good or bad in CRPGs yet (I plan to play more in the future) but I do enjoy that a lot of your status/effect spells are genuinely useful. I could not have beaten most of the bosses were it not for spells like haste and horror. I do think there are way too many spells to properly implement in a videogame but I understand it's part of converting D&D into a single-player experience.

A pet peeve is definitely the textbox width. It's very hard to properly read the dialogue and narrative when there's so many words per line. It made it very difficult for me to follow the story and dialogue. If there's a way to make it less wide please let me know, cause I plan to replay this game in the future with the game's party members.

Finally, I can't say much about the characters because I used a custom team of a couple of friends. I plan to play Baldur's Gate 2 with the other party members so I hope to like them. Looking forward to it! I really appreciate how ambitious of a game this is in mechanics and variety, even if I think it fails in some aspects.