Baldur’s Gate II is still one of the best rpgs ever made. That didn’t change over the years. What seems to change is the amount of people playing games and their preferences. We got used to simpler, easy to get into games with lots of handholding and waypoints.

My video reviews of the game and its expansion:

https://youtu.be/YwaWzMJwHWk

https://youtu.be/uUXpUFqxYoE

My written review of the game:

The story is pretty good, filled with exciting moments and twists, but even that wouldn’t make me play the game if it was not for the great combat challenges it offers. There is a huge variety of enemies and if you’ve never played the game before, you won’t always be ready for every situation. Luckily with a bit of research of spells and potions, you should still be able to get out of most battles alive. And if some of your companions die, you can usually resurrect them during a fight or after.

I really enjoyed the game’s music and voice acting. Some of the soundtracks are still playing in my head even a few weeks after finishing the game and the same counts for some voice lines of the more famous companions like Minsc with his hamster Boo. "Go for the eyes, Boo. GO FOR THE EYES! RrraaaAAGHGHH!!!"

Baldur’s Gate II is not a perfect game. My biggest complaints would be companions getting stuck in each other at narrow places, because everytime the levels get many long and narrow places, it feels like a never ending struggle to get your team through it. Even worse when you get ambushed in that kind of environment. Your spellcasters won’t be able to fall back and with the little amount of health and protection they have, they will die in a second before you will even manage to unstuck them and send them to the backline.

Then there is the problem with the extreme amount of side quests in chapter 2. I am talking about around 70 hours of side questing if you want to finish everything available to you before making some moves in the main story. I get why they made it that way. There is not really much space for side quests in the next chapters because of how the story is structured compared to the first game where you could do them almost anytime. And they probably wanted to offer us a lot of side stories, companion missions and other special encounters.

The quest list is absolutely terrible. In aforementioned chapter 2 you have so many quests and you can’t even hide the finished ones. Then there are the quests which you can’t finish anymore, because of some decisions you made and when they are not even marked as finished and they don’t disappear, it gives you a false hope that you can still do something about them.. The quests list is so messy and chaotic. The only thing which can make it better is to move to the next chapter where you start with a clear quest list for that chapter. You can still look back at older quests and you can still work on them, but at least you don’t have to watch the mess every time you open your journal.

The game still has bugs. If your companions leave and never come back, don’t wait around for them too long, look it up and try to find a solution. In my situation I was supposed to be approached by someone but it didn’t happen because the person got stuck on some roof. Another time I got stuck in a dungeon where a door should unlock after a fight and it didn’t happen. Luckily I saved the game right before the fight so I didn’t have to replay too much of the game.

I enjoyed Baldur’s Gate II a lot, even more than the first Baldur’s Gate. I enjoy playing older games once in a while. It can be a valuable experience to play games like Baldur’s Gate. To see how roleplaying games were back then compared to how the new ones are now. I recommend Baldur’s Gate II to everyone who is interested in playing an older rpg with a lot of attention to detail, deep stories and a fair amount of complexity. It can be a bit hard to get into especially if you are not familiar with D&D rules at all. Because of that but not only for that reason I recommend starting with Baldur’s Gate I. That game has a bit slower start and it has a tutorial where you can learn the basics. It’s also where the story begins. You can even import your character to the second game then together with a few specific items.

“You must gather your party before venturing forth.”