Irenicus is great fun, and so are a good number of your motley crew. Athkatla's side quests, whose frontloaded glut immediately convinces you of the scope of your daunting task is a clever structural conceit. But it is not enough. Baldur's Gate 2, though a remarkable and necessary evolution from its hobbled predecessor, not so much represents the glory BioWare left behind but rather inaugurates the tendency that would spell their doom: a serviceable narrative that does not even attempt to wrangle with the semblance of ideas, populated by a mysteriously celebrated cast of characters whose friendships, though earned in a few easy steps, never seem to manifest outside of a few comments at the end of their quests (not to mention the complete absence of a group dynamic, something BioWare would not even attempt until the Whedonesque Mass Effect 3: Citadel, a hangout that aged like a hangover, not least for being Whedonesque).

I cannot for the life of me consider this a replayable game: the characters remain steadfast in their trajectories and so does the plot aside from a few touches here and there. Baldur's Gate 2 pivoted the home ground of WRPGs from tabletop to computers. But the most important distinction between the two is presence and illusion of choice. Yet this game, and all the games, criticism, and discourse flowing forth simplemindedly valorizes intricate networks of choice and consequence. Might as well celebrate the prose of silent film intertitles. It may be a tad unfair to pin the blame on BG2, otherwise a pleasant game. But the spotlight cast upon this game has cast a distended shade as long as the history of the these games from then on. And with the industry seemingly fed up with the difficult beauty of the genre, there is increasingly less and less funding to escape the shadows of Amn, and the unfolding story of the genre in the West has come to a long pause.