Baldur’s Gate and Baldur’s Gate II: Enhanced Editions

Genre: Compilation / RPG

Players: 1

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Review:

(Note: Included in Dungeons & Dragons Bundle along with Neverwinter Nights: Enhanced Edition and Planescape Torment and Icewind Dale: Enhanced Editions)

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Baldur’s Gate, originally released on the PC in 1998, is generally seen as one of the formative games of the Western RPG genre, with both it and its 2000 sequel considered legends today, games that put developer Bioware on the map, and translated the Dungeons and Dragons license into a videogame with a comparable depth and scope to the tabletop game. Then, in 2012 and 2013 respectively, both games received graphically-updated Enhanced Editions complete with all of those games’ expansion content and newly-created content as well, but these games still remained on PC and mobile devices – for a very long time, the only presence this series would have on consoles would be the spin-off Baldur’s Gate: Dark Alliance series, which plays closer to something like the Diablo games with its more action-focused gameplay. However, finally, after 20 years, Baldur’s Gate I and II have finally come to consoles, including the Nintendo Switch, in the form of ports of the Enhanced Editions… although whether the wait was worth it is a question that will truly depend on who you ask.

Here’s the thing: Baldur’s Gate is now a very, very old game, and wow does it feel like it.

The presentation alone here is enough to scare some people away, I’m sure. Even with the makeover the Enhanced Editions gave these games, the 2D graphics are a horrible eyesore, with tiny, pixellated characters and ugly environments (made worse by a “fog of war” that has a really messy, jittery look to it) that make it at times difficult to distinguish what you’re looking at. What’s worse, even zoomed in to maximum, the characters are still tiny on-screen, often making it difficult to make out who’s who unless you squint really hard. Thankfully the game includes options to change the text size, but the game itself is really difficult to look at. Baldur’s Gate II fares somewhat better, with somewhat better-looking environments and many of the same problems the first game had.

The story, however, still remains as epic as ever, with the first game focusing on an orphan living in a secluded monastery who suddenly finds herself hunted and her foster father killed, and the second game picking up right after the first one left off, with the first game’s characters rejoining you (if you choose) after your party is ambushed and kidnapped to be made the experiments of a wizard. The music here is good, but the real treasure is the voice acting, with these games touting a who’s who of some of the most respected voice actors in the industry – names like Jim Cummings, Cam Clarke, Jennifer Hale, and David Warner. While the game definitely shows its age, it is still nevertheless a class act in its storytelling, and the excellent voice cast is a large part of the reason why.

However, there’s another problem here beyond the age of these two games, and that problem is… these really were games built for the PC. The attempt to fit what was originally keyboard and mouse controls onto a gamepad has resulted in an awkward Frankenstein’s Monster of a control scheme that’s awkward and confusing, and even after a ridiculously long tutorial, I feel that most gamers will still be struggling with it long afterward. And despite that the Enhanced Editions have been on mobile devices since 2012, the Nintendo Switch version features no touchscreen controls, when it feels like this game really, really could have used them.

Even beyond the control issues though, the old-fashioned design of this game is just really inelegant and user-unfriendly by today’s standards. Simply telling a character to pick a lock is an ordeal of selecting that character, going into their menu, choosing the “Thief skills” icon (not “lock pic”, because that would be too straightforward), and selecting the target… and if the lock picking fails, they need to open up the menu and start the process all over again.

If you never played these games before, simply learning how to play them is a huge ordeal, and in the over two decades since they first came out, you’d think that at the very least they’d be a bit more polished than this – not just in the graphics, not just in modernizing the gameplay, but even just getting the games to not feel so buggy and shoddily put-together. I swear, in the first few hours alone I repeatedly walked through doors and then had to click on those doors again because they didn’t register my character walking into the building. Also I need to mention that the multiplayer features have been stripped out of the Nintendo Switch version of the game.

Maybe Baldur’s Gate and Baldur’s Gate II were just never going to work on a console. Maybe they’re a relic of their time, better left in the past as fond memories than dragged into the present where we can see all their glaring flaws. Maybe this was a lazy port that didn’t put in the effort to try to make it feel more natural on the Nintendo Switch (the lack of touchscreen support would seem to support this). Or maybe the game’s problems come from a combination of these issues. Whatever the culprit is, Baldur’s Gate and Baldur’s Gate II: Enhanced Editions is not a game that most players will find enjoyable on the Switch, and I feel like only the most diehard fans of the PC game will even find these games worthwhile today… and that’s if they don’t just decide to stick with the PC versions.

tl;dr – Baldur’s Gate and Baldur’s Gate II: Enhanced Editions are two classic Western RPGs from 1998 and 2000 that are finally playable on a console for the first time in this release. Unfortunately, the awkward controls in this release make it seem like the game was a poor fit for consoles in the first place, and this problem is made worse by horribly dated graphics that make the game an eyesore. On top of that, the basic game design here is very user-unfriendly, even for those who can get used to the odd controls. The story and voice acting in both of these games is still excellent, but only the most patient players will find it worth suffering through this archaic mess to enjoy that story.

Grade: C-

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