Baldur's Gate/YMMV

• Abandon Shipping: Any amorous ideas you may have had about Imoen in the first game are likely to get shot down in the sequel when it's revealed she is also a child of Bhaal. However, it is highly unlikely she and the player character are actually biologically related (the player character can be of a completely different species, after all), so it didn't stop everyone, and at least two Imoen romance mods were made.
• Alas, Poor Scrappy: As unpopular as Khalid was with many players, most found his death between games a bit of a Player Punch.
• Alternative Character Interpretation: Beyond merely finding Aerie annoyingly whiny, the most extreme opinion believes that she says all her apparently caring lines just to appear sweet, that her comments about how miserable it is to be stuck on the ground indicate she looks down on everyone else, that her real personality is only revealed the few times she loses her nerve and gets mad, and so on.
• Angst? What Angst?: Like most of the cast, Mazzy has quite a tragic backstory, but despite seeing her former adventuring companions turned into horrid undead monsters, and feeling responsible for their deaths, she's remarkably un-angsty about it.
• Anticlimax Boss: If you play directly from Baldur's Gate II to Throne of Bhaal, you go right from a fight against a mage-turned-demon in Hell to fighting Illasera.
• Breather Boss: Winski's Cambion in the first game. After a dungeon full of Demonic Spiders and deathtraps, facing a boss whose only tactic is simply to charge into melee combat is surprisingly refreshing.
• Canon Defilement: The novels. Dear god, the novels. It'd be easier to make a list of what they get right then what they got wrong.
• Complete Monster: Several of the villains, major and minor.
  • If there's anyone who proves that a villain can be both this and a Magnificent Bastard, Irenicus' the one.
  • Jon Irenicus gets some love from the fandom, but Bodhi doesn't. Actually, try installing the Romantic Encounters mod from Pocket Plane Group. Yep, you can get it on with little miss vampre...
• Crazy Awesome: Minsc embodies this trope.
• Creepy Awesome: Bodhi and her vampire/zombie guild.
• Demonic Spider:
  • Beholders and Mind Flayers. They're both extremely dangerous as Beholders can bombard you with highly destructive spells and Mind Flayers can stun you and eat your brain (if your INT score reaches 0, you instantly die). To make matters worse, they're often in groups.
  • Umber Hulks also fit into this category, as despite having an easily exploited Weaksauce Weakness they are exceedingly fast and their ability to stun targets at a distance can easily cripple a party if you're unlucky, low level or ill prepared.
• Die for Our Ship: Due to the novelizations, Jaheira is the canonical love interest of the hero, but lots of players prefer Aerie or Viconia, so she draws some hate for it. Jaheira fans usually prefer to differentiate between her novel version and her game version, and usually prefers the latter.
• Draco in Leather Pants:
  • Edwin is the poster child for this trope in the Baldur's Gate community. A very popular and high-quality mod exists that features a romance.
  • Viconia's fanboys tend to forget or handwave her evil actions and attitude.
  • Irenicus' treated like this by the fanfic community around half the time. The other half, he's a Complete Monster.
• Ensemble Darkhorse:
  • Some companions are more memorable than others, including:
    • Imoen, in sort of an inversion of a Creator's Pet. The writers never seemed particularly fond of her, and in fact wanted to kill her off in the second game, but she was so popular with fans, they reconsidered.
    • Minsc is probably the most popular character in the series, all things considered.
    • Quite a few people were disappointed Xan didn't make it into the sequel. He makes the most of his screen time in the tutorial, where—judging by his delivery—he seems to find teaching the basics of magic to CHARNAME incredibly tedious.
    • Paladins tend not to be particularly popular characters in these types of stories, being cartoonishly uptight, cardboard Knights In Shining Armor most of the time, but lots of players feel Keldorn's an extremely well-written character who retains the essence of the character type while subverting the flatter and more stereotypical aspects of it. Gods bless the Video Game Caring Potential. And now there are even mods making him a possible romance option!
    • Viconia because (1) Evil Is Sexy and (2) she's the game's best healer.
    • For many, Edwin, who is amusingly over-the-top in his grumpiness and who, two games, two expansions and a revamped edition on, still reigns as the king of arcane spellcasting.
    • Among the EE companions, Dorn seem to the most popular, because of his usefulness, largely averting half-orc stereotypes and having Evil Is Cool written all over him.
  • Lilarcor isn't even an NPC. He's a flavor weapon that gained so much popularity that the fans treated him as a core party member and created mods which let him interact with the world around him. There's even an Elder Scrolls mod out there which lets you use him in Morrowind.
• Even Better Sequel: For many, Baldur's Gate II is far and away one of the most uncontested examples of this trope. The game was not only smoother, but added features to make it easier to find things such as chests, centralized a lot of the character recruitment, and had a lot more interaction between characters.
• Evil Is Sexy:
  • Viconia. It's standard procedure for draw.
  • He might be the most evil of all the evil choices, but Dorn has a pretty sturdy female fanbase considering that he's not even human. Apart from the tusks and dark skin, he seems to get most of his looks from his human side, and having 19 strength just screams that there's a whole lot of muscle under the full plate he can wear.
• Fanon Discontinuity: It's pretty much universally agreed by fans of the series agree that the novels don't exist.
• Game Breaker:
  • Assassin's poisons if you use them in ways the developers probably didn't intend for you to.
  • Is your character a mage? With even halfway decent stats? Then you've got dozens of ways to break the game.
  • The Animate Dead spell once its caster reaches level 15. The large skeleton summoned at this level is very powerful, has a ton of hit points and is immune to almost any sort of magic cast at it. Additionally, it will willingly auto-navigate through fog of war to seek out and kill enemies you can't see and can take out packs of beholders on its own without putting your own neck out.
  • Inexperienced players sometimes underrate Aerie as a mage because she doesn't gain access to the most powerful arcane spells, but the ability to use divine as well as arcane spells with power-amplifying setups like Sequencers and Contingencies more than makes up for it if you know what you're doing. Although, being a multi-class, she won't actually level up enough to get Sequencers until very late in the game.
• Gateway Series: It was this to many people for western RPGs.
• Good Bad Bug:
  • The "talk-fight" bug. Keep trying to initiate dialogue with a non-hostile character without ever actually talking to them and they won't go hostile... even as the remaining five members of the party are tearing them a new one. Only works on some very specific characters, however. This bug can also be used on certain quest characters, allowing for multiple quest reward returns (mainly XP).
  • Another bug can have you have an absurd amount of gems. You can use this bug to sell the gems as early as Chapter 2, making you filthy rich.
  • Due to an oversight, multiclassed Ranger/Clerics receive all available priest spells instead of just the ones they're supposed to.
  • Striking enemies with the Rod of Terror a.k.a. "The Ugly Stick" has a chance to lower your charisma permanently by one and can kill you via charisma drain. However, if you don the Ring of Human Influence, which sets one's charisma to exactly 18, when your charisma is one and then lose another point it causes the charisma stat to wrap back around from 1 to 25. Upon removing the ring, you're suddenly the most likable person in Faerun.
  • Because of an error in the way Dual-Classing was coded, Yoshimo is able to set an infinite number of traps without resting. Since traps were already overpowered to begin with, this makes him, needless to say, ridiculously powerful.
  • More than any other character, Haer'Dalis benefits from equipping the Ring of Free Action. Since powerful abilities that root the user to the spot (such as his defensive spin) were coded in the same way movement-restricting status effects were, he can move around while in defensive spin if he's wearing it.
  • In at least the first game, the Protection from Evil spell stacks, severely reducing the attack rolls of evil characters so they'll only have a 5% chance of hitting you if you cast enough of them. The problem? Protection from Evil should only work on, ya know, EVIL-aligned characters, and even most freakin' Dungeons & Dragons newbs know that Drizzt is Chaotic Good.
• Ho Yay: Particularly in the second game, there's a certain... subtext.. to the things Xzar says about Montaron despite his stated dislike for him.
• Internet Backdraft: Try to defend, or in some case even mention, the novels on an Infinity Engine fansite and see how far that gets you. This can reach levels of The Scottish Trope for some of the most reactive communities.
  • And try saying you don't like this game or even like Bioware's other games better.
• Iron Woobie: Mazzy, who loses her entire adventuring party to a shade, including her true love Patrick, but pauses only for a few moments to build a memorial to them before she dries her eyes and sets forth with the player to further adventure and excitement.
• It Was His Sled: The fact that the Player Character is a child of the dead murder god Bhaal was a fairly major twist in the original game. In the sequel it is revealed right away in the intro, and since the sequel ended up being one of the most beloved games of all time it is now common knowledge even among people who haven't played the games.
• Magnificent Bastard: Irenicus commits absolutely unforgivable crimes, murders anyone without hesitation, ruthlessly sacrifices his sister, and yet he does it with such charisma and flair it's hard to not admire his skill, just a little. Being played by David Warner helps.
• Memetic Badass: Keldorn, or, more accurately, his Infinity+1 Sword, Carsomyr. According to quite some fans, Keldorn with Carsomyr can beat the rest of the cast by himself with his eyes closed.
• Memetic Mutation: "Go for the eyes, Boo!" And any other sufficiently Incoming Ham line.
• Moral Event Horizon:
  • Irenicus performing his "experiments" on Imoen, without a hint of compassion. Almost everything he does would count by itself.
  • Bodhi does plenty of evil acts throughout the game, but turning your love interest into a vampire right in front of you, then forcing you to kill him/her easily tops them all.
• Most Annoying Sound:
  • "You must gather your party before venturing forth. You must gather your party before venturing forth. You must..."
    • This was sufficiently annoying to repeat players that there's a hack to remove the "You must gather your party" noise, incorporated into the BG2 Tweak Pack.
    • Fridge Logic makes it worse when you realize it's the same guy who killed Gorion. Why are you taking orders from him again? Maybe it's because you've been waylaid by enemies and must defend yourself. You've been waylaid by enemies and must defend yourself. You've been waylaid by enemies and must...
    • Actually, being waylaid by enemies happens much less often and will never happen underground, so people found that message less annoying than the "You must gather your party…" message.
  • "So I kicked him in the head until he was dead! Nwa ha ha!" Bad enough on its own, it gets even worse when you run into half-a-dozen bandits at once, and EVERY SINGLE ONE OF THEM uses that as his Battle Cry.
  • The Sirines in the first game. Are they supposed to be based on the Greek sirens? Because if they are, then they should have a singing voice that is so beautiful that it charms sailors into drowning themselves at sea. But they don't; in fact, they sound like they can't sing at all.
  • Because party members' situational lines will usually be heard several times during a run, some specific NPCs have these too, such as Aerie complaining about how her legs hurt when she's tired or Nalia's voiced concern that the party's dungeon crawling isn't helping the "less fortunate". Nalia will say this when you're fighting the trolls at d'Arnise Keep. When she's the whole reason you're there and she has no reason to complain because you're trying to save her family.
• Most Wonderful Sound:
  • That sound when your reputation goes up by a point or two, followed by your good-aligned party members congratulating you in awe! Good Feels Good indeed!
  • The leveling up sound in the first game, which was also used when you gained new abilities from dreams.
  • "Vita! Mortis! Careo!"... unless a enemy spellcaster is casting a death spell on you.
• Non Sequitur Scene: When you manage to invade Abazigals lair, you have to retrieve a scroll of reversal in order to free the dragon who is guarding the entrance to the heart of the lair, who is trapped under a geas. The quest involves sending three "Adventurers" to retrieve a Gauth eye stalk for the mad wizard who possesses the scroll. Yet when they return they decide, for seemingly no reason at all, to attack the party, your character instantly transforms into the slayer and kills all three of them, which you have no control over as it is played as a cut scene. Then it fades out and shows them returning again, but this time they don't attack you and hand over the eye stalk, and the fact that they attacked you and you killed them is never mentioned or bought up again, and you have no opportunity to call them out on it.
• Non Sequitur Scene Episode: Despite having several interesting plot threads, Tales of the Sword Coast ultimately has no impact on the overall plot.
• Player Punch: In Baldur's Gate II, Irenicus lands a barrage of Player Punches before you even escape the first dungeon: torturing both the Player Character and Imoen, killing former playable characters Khalid and Dynaheir off-screen, and abducting Imoen when you escape. Several more follow at intervals throughout the game, from both Irenicus himself and his lieutenant Bodhi. By the time the player finally has an opportunity to kill them, it's very satisfying to do so.
• Rescued from the Scrappy Heap:
  • Say what folks will about Aerie in Shadows of Amm, but they tend to be much more forgiving about her in ToB.
  • Many people feel resolution of Anomen's Knighthood quest does this for him.
  • Nalia's dialogue was changed in Throne of Bhaal, making her much more bearable.
• Sacred Cow: It's a golden rule among the BioWare fandom to never criticize Baldur's Gate …ever! Unless we're talking about the (hypothetical) novels. In which case, it's the opposite.
• The Scrappy:
  • Khalid, along with Quayle, probably the leading candidate for the "honor" in the first game. In the second game, Anonmen and Aerie.
  • There's a mod that allows you to tell Queen Ellesime off. Okay, that's not the only thing that it does, but still...
• "Seinfeld" Is Unfunny: By modern standards, Baldur's Gate is a Nintendo Hard game with a rather steep learning curve and some very unforgiving elements, most notably, the 2nd edition Advanced Dungeons & Dragons ruleset. At the time, it was praised for how user-friendly and accessible it was, being called an "RPG for a wide audience", in contrast to how ridiculously difficult older western RPGs tended to be. The sequel was more forgiving, thankfully, though no doubt owing partly to starting off with a more experienced party (not to mention a much higher level cap).
• Tastes Like Diabetes:
  • Aerie.
  • To an even greater extent, Alora.

Alora: I'm so sweet, I've got rotting teeth and gums!

• That One Boss: Abazigal's 'doorguard' and son Draconis is an epic-level mage and can turn himself invisible at will while in dragon form, and tends to move around the stage and use hit-and-run attacks. He is consequently one of the most annoying bosses in the game. Abazigal himself, by comparison, stands still and lets you wail on him, and just has a lot of HP.
• That One Puzzle: The chessboard fight at the end of the third basement floor in Durlag's Tower seems to be trying to be some sort of forced tactical battle puzzle. Unfortunately it has several issues. Your party of one-to-six adventurers can only move like certain chess pieces lest they trip infinite, invisible deadly traps, but it's not clear who represents what piece, and the AI will stupidly run all over the board if given half a chance. The opposing AI force has a full compliment of 16 pieces, a deadly assortment of high-level melee fighters, spellcasters and archers, unrestricted movement, and will immediately charge as a giant mob the second one of your characters moves a step forward. The end result is being stuck with a party you can't move (unless you get 100% electricity resistance and know where to avoid the non-lightening trapped tiles) while a giant army of end-game enemies stampedes towards you.
  • That said, there is a very easy trick to defeat them, if you know that they are there. Just have your mages throw Fireballs or other area damage spells (or some of those Wands of Fire that you should have picked up in and around the tower) at the enemy's direction until they are all dead, and the AI won't react. The chessboard also happens to be one of very few places where you can rest your party without the risk of being attacked by something, so if you run out of spells, you can just go to sleep.
• Unfortunate Character Design: The golems' loinclothes look… disturbing if you don't know what they are.
• Unfortunate Implications: Perhaps the vaguely-Yiddish accent wasn't the best addition to so greedy a character as Kagain.
• Wangst: Aerie is the only-sometimes-disputed queen of it among major characters in this series.
• What an Idiot!:
  • Skie about Eldoth. What will it take to make her realize he's a gold-digging scumbag who's so slimy he could've slithered out of a reptile egg at birth?
    • Skie's biography states that she's hoping Eldoth will give her the life of adventure she wants. Too bad she can't see that she's neither suited for the adventuring life nor going to have a boyfriend once Eldoth gets what he wants. Thankfully, she realizes what Eldoth is and dumps him in Seige of Dragonspear, making something of herself without him in the process.
  • Ellesime makes Skie look like a freaking genius. Take away everything that makes Irenicus, a powerful and villainous mage, at all human, but leave him with everything that makes him evil and let him keep his vast power? And then hope that he'll learn from his mistakes? Nice going.
• The Woobie:
  • Not initially, but Imoen ends up being used this way in the story quite a bit.
  • It's hard to deny that the world hates Aerie.