Baldur's Gate/YMMV

"Alora: I'm so sweet, I've got rotting teeth and gums!"
 * Abandon Shipping - Not gonna stop everyone, but any amorous ideas you may have had about Imoen in the first game are likely to get shot down in the sequel.
 * Technically, it's possible you have no true genetic relation, as Bhaal seems to have used a lot of avatars to produce all his offspring (Otherwise there wouldn't be any pureblood races available besides human), so it's quite possible he had multiple human avatars.
 * 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.
 * Big Lipped Alligator Moment: 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 3 "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 3 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.
 * Breather Boss: 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.
 * Crazy Awesome: Minsc embodies this trope.
 * 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.
 * Others would never dream of thinking the moron in the novels is this Jaheira or that they can be thought to be in the same canon as the game.
 * Draco in Leather Pants
 * Edwin is the poster child for this trope in the BG 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.
 * Ensemble Darkhorse
 * Imoen, in sort of an inversion of a Creator's Pet. The writers never seemed particularly fond of her, and in fact, 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!
 * 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: Baldur's Gate II is far and away one of the most uncontested examples of this trope, improving upon almost every conceivable facet of what was already considered great.
 * Evil Is Sexy: Viconia. It's standard procedure for drow.
 * Fan Nickname: CHARNAME for the Bhaalspawn; kensage for a dual-classed kensai/mage; swashy for a swashbuckler.
 * "Abduh", for the novel protagonist Abdel Adrian. Emphasis on the "duh".
 * 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 aka "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.
 * 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.
 * 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.
 * Magnum Opus: Baldur's Gate II is still considered a milestone of the genre and BioWare's high point.
 * Memetic Mutation: "Go for the eyes, Boo!" And any other sufficiently Incoming Ham line.
 * 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...
 * "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.
 * 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."
 * Player Punch: In Baldur's Gate II, Irenicus lands a barrage of Player Punches before you even escape the first dungeon -- 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.
 * The Scrappy - Khalid, along with Quayle, probably the leading candidate for the "honor" in the first game. In the second game Anonmen and Aerie.
 * Tastes Like Diabetes: Aerie.
 * To an even greater extent, Alora.


 * Tear Jerker: Brage, former captain of the Amnish guard and an all around decent guy--until he obtains a cursed sword of berserking. The curse drives him to kill his entire family, a merchant caravan (both people and horses), and who knows how many other people in between by the time you catch up to him. If you choose to return him to the Temple of Helm, Brage will be horrified by what he's done (even though he couldn't control it) and say that he no longer wants to live. Nalin, the priest, instead insists he atone for it all.
 * Yoshimo's death.
 * Rescued From the Scrappy Heap - Say what folks will about Aerie in BG2, they tend to be much more forgiving about her in ToB.
 * Many people feel resolution of Anomen's Knighthood quest does this for him.
 * 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: Aerie, Quayle, Anomen
 * 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 and 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.
 * 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, and life in general.
 * 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.