The Baldur’s Gate: Dark Alliance console games are one of my guilty pleasures. Truly, there is nothing more satisfying than beating up monsters and taking their treasure. When I discovered that the original Dark Alliance had made a quiet debut on the GBA, I knew that I had to rectify the situation and take my hacking and slashing to a portable level.
Unfortunately, my good feeling about Dark Alliance GBA did not last very long. While Dark Alliance 2 was a good game with some fairly noticeable flaws, Dark Alliance GBA appears to accomplish exactly the opposite: it is a noticeably flawed game with only a few redeeming qualities.
The storyline is quite fascinating. The player assumes the role of a traveler (either a warrior, archer or wizard) who enters the town of Baldur’s Gate and is immediately robbed. He initially embarks on relatively minor quests such as clearing rats out of a cellar in exchange for the key to the sewers where the thieves congregate, but right away, the seeds of an even greater conspiracy than a mere gang of thieves begins to develop, and the player will find himself visiting strange lands (including the quintessential snow level) as the story unfolds. Along the way, the player must hack-and-slash his way through various dungeons. As with the console version of Dark Alliance, the player’s character gains experience by killing monsters; when the character levels up, he is given an allotment of points to spend on improving various skills that improve the character’s statistics or fighting ability. The number of points the player receives increases with each level, and the skills are varied enough to provide each player with a unique experience.
Of course, one cannot possibly expect Dark Alliance GBA to provide an identical experience as the console version, but all of the portable version’s flaws stem from poor design and execution. For example, the save system has some serious problems. In the console versions of this game, there were save points scattered across each dungeon, and if the character died in the dungeon, the game would re-start where the player last saved. Unfortunately, this system did not make the transition to the small screen. To begin with, the player cannot actually save his position in the game; it appears that the only purpose of saving is for the player to save his belongings. It does not matter how far the player is into the dungeon or how many times he saves; if his character dies, he must restart the level. Oh, and just to make matters worse, the monsters re-spawn. This makes for a very frustrating gaming experience; I definitely felt like throwing my GBA against the wall when I kept having to traverse a maze level over and over again because my character kept dying.
To top things off, there are no recall potions to teleport the character back to town to restock. If the player finds that his character needs more healing potions, he must turn around, walk all the way back to the beginning of the dungeon, exit back to town, buy potions at the shop, and then re-enter the dungeon and fight the monsters all over again because they have re-spawned. In case it is not obvious enough, here’s a caveat - the player should always purchase more potions than he thinks his character is going to need. Feel free to purchase a ridiculous number of potions; it’s better than fighting through the same dungeon multiple times.
However, the most egregious error occurs early in the game when the player encounters an evil orb raising the dead from the town’s graveyard. Apparently, if the player destroys the orb before schlepping back to the tavern to speak to the bartender, then the game will enter an endless loop and the player will be unable to progress. This makes absolutely no sense, especially if the player has played the console version of the game. It is fairly obvious that the orb needs to be destroyed; I don’t think anyone needs the bartender to tell them that the dead roaming the streets is a bad thing. Furthermore, the tavern and the graveyard are located in two separate parts of town that can only be accessed by a secret underground tunnel, so the player really has to go out of his way to inform the tavern residents. This game stopping glitch is absolutely unacceptable.
For the most part, gameplay is very similar to its console counterpart, with a few modifications for the small screen. While the new quests helped make replaying an old game a new experience, I was saddened to see that the game places limits on how many identical items a character can have in his inventory. A good part of what makes Dark Alliance fun is treasure collecting; since monsters appear to be on the lower end of the socio-economic spectrum and rarely drop more than 20 coins, a resourceful player will pick up items to sell if he wants to purchase high-end weapons and armor for his character. This item limit has nothing to do with the weight limit; if a character is carrying more than two or three of the same item, a message reading “too many identical items” message will pop up and the player will not be allowed to pick up that item. I suppose that this is because the items one finds in barrels are always identical, but if the game is going to inconvenience players and make them start the level from the beginning, they should at least let them grab as much swag as they can carry. Speaking of weight limits, the character is unable to carry the capacity he is supposed to be able to handle. At one point, my character was carrying 188.0 lbs of gear and I found an item that was 2.0 lbs. Even though my carrying capacity was 190.0 lbs, I was unable to pick up the item.
The graphics are by far the best aspect of Dark Alliance GBA. For the most part, the environments are crisp and clear and quite pleasant to look at. From the eerily silent town of Baldur’s Gate to the wood paneled Thieves Guild to the ominous marshes of Chelimber, everything appears stunning on the “small screen”, so to speak.
Unfortunately, sound is not nearly as impressive. When the background music is playing, it is very beautiful and not at all tinny, especially the haunting melody of the ghost singing in the tavern. However, the music is not always playing and the player is often left with just the sound effects which range from the mundane sound of footsteps in a corridor to the annoying squawk of vanquished enemies.
Overall, Baldur’s Gate is a fairly average remake of the original that suffers from problems so severe that they affect one’s enjoyment of the game. While I really liked the new missions, the graphics and the music (when it was there), I think that I can now confidentially state that I understand how PC gamers felt when their beloved Baldur’s Gate games made the transition from PC to consoles. It would appear that the transition from consoles to the GBA has sucked quite a bit of the fun out of the game; ironically, the GBA game seems dumbed-down when compared to its console counterparts.
