YMMV / Baldur's Gate: Siege of Dragonspear

• Alas, Poor Scrappy: Skie, who usually ranks very high in lists of useless or annoying party members in BG I, gets Character Development and is so callously killed by Irenicus that one can't help feeling a little sorry for her.
• Best Boss Ever: The dwarven Lich, Gurn Coldhearth, is a Puzzle Boss where he has dramatically stronger magic and powers than your party should be able to beat (though some have figured out how using specific spells) in a "fair fight." Worse, if you kill him, he will come back within a minute to do it again. However, you can cripple him with holy dwarven magic and discover his Soul Jar before tossing it into the Plane of Elemental Fire to make sure he becomes Deader than Dead. All of this requires exploration, investigation, paying attention, and building alliances—perfect for Baldur's Gate.
• Broken Base:
  • The ending. Some consider it a good or at least decent ending that properly explains the "grim circumstances" Charname and the specific party they seemingly had at the start of the second game left Baldur's Gate under while also explaining how Irenicus captured them, while others hate it, claiming it contains blatant Rail Roading, completely ignores your past accomplishments in favor of one accusation of murder, and gives you barely any opportunity to defend yourself, and it doesn't even matter if you do, because anyone who believes you gets overwhelmed by Skie's father who is mad with grief over her death.
  • Some people have criticized the expanded experience cap, complaining it can severely upset the balance of Baldur's Gate II once the main character has been imported. Others are happy to walk into it at a higher level of power.
• Captain Obvious Reveal: When it's revealed Caelar Argent wants to open a portal to Avernus, it becomes painfully evident this is some sort of scheme orchestrated by devils. And, big shocker, it turns out to be the case.
• Complete Monster: Hephernaan is supposedly a cleric in service of the Shining Crusade, but is in truth the servant of powerful devils. Manipulating the Crusade's leader Caelar Argent, Hephernaan made her think she could save her uncle Aun from the Abyss, inspiring her to raise an army under the false belief of storming the Nine Hells to liberate the souls of the victims of the first Dragonspear War. Hephernaan oversaw the deaths of thousands and a near-catastrophic war on the Sword Coast as a member of Caelar's inner circle, but his ultimate plan was to lure Gorion's Ward to Castle Dragonspear. Gleefully gloating as he reveals his plans in the final chapters of the game, Hephernaan uses the player's divine blood to re-open a long-closed portal to the plane of Avernus, intent on opening Faerun and all Toril to a Baatezu invasion at the hands of his master Belhifet that would see every living thing killed or enslaved to devilish torment forevermore.
  • See here for Belhifet.
• Ensemble Dark Horse:
  • M'kiin the goblin shaman was a very well received addition to the companion roster, with an interesting backstory and a cool character kit.
  • Skie, despite being the opposite in the original title, also became this for some people after her Character Development. A common sentiment on the Beamdog forums after the game's release was that Skie would have made a much better party member than Safana.
• Hilarious in Hindsight: After the starting dungeon, Kivan's stated reason for leaving the party is because Tazok is dead, his lover avenged. Tazok actually turned out to be Not Quite Dead in the sequel.
• Moral Event Horizon: In case you don't hate Hephernaan by the time you finally lay siege to Dragonspear Castle, you will after discovering he manipulated Caelar, her Crusader followers and Charname to allow him to reopen the portal to Avernus and unleash The Legions of Hell upon Faerun once more.
• Overshadowed by Controversy: The game is mostly remembered for the obnoxious political arguments it brought to the fandom than for its actual merits or failures. On Steam, the game was review bombed for political reasons, crowding out reviews that addressed gameplay, technical issues, or the story. Specifically:
  • The inclusion of Mizhena, a minor cleric of Tempus who reveals that she is transgender depending on your dialogue choices. Supporters praised the representation and important message she delivers. Detractors considered her a Token Minority and claimed being trans wouldn't be noteworthy in a world with artefacts that can instantly change your sex. Ed Greenwood, the creator of the Forgotten Realms setting, even weighed in, arguing in the character's favor.
  • Beamdog gave Minsc a click-on quote taking a jab at the GamerGate controversy. The line was removed, but it fed the fire of the accusation that the devs were "politicising the franchise".
• Play the Game, Skip the Story: Even the game's detractors do enjoy some of the battles, like fighting the camp of Dragonspear soldiers, fighting the green half-dragon, fighting the monks and priests of Cyric, and the Final Boss of Belhifet. But the story and characters are more divisive.
• Salvaged Story: A common quibble of the original games is how nonsensical the reputation system is for evil companions; they will object and complain as if being well-liked in the eyes of the public is a negative thing, when really the most efficient and pragmatic evil PCs will be played as Villains With Good Publicity and enjoy all the benefits such a thing entails. SoD goes a way to justify this behaviour, as evil companions will actually explain why they each want to avoid a heroic reputation when the meter gets too high. Viconia, for instance, believes that drawing too much attention to the group will get her imprisoned or killed.
• The Scrappy:
  • Safana. Despite being pushed as a default party member (and the developers' stated intent to flesh the character out), she's actually irrelevant to the plot and rather than being given a little more depth or Character Development, if anything she comes across as much more of a bitch than she was in the first game, where she was merely considered a mediocre but harmless and tolerable party member. Her underwhelming and anticlimactic romance, which ends with her cheating on you with Voghiln regardless of how you treat her, is also seen as the worst in the game.
  • While her character throughout the campaign is merely divisive, Corwin's actions at the end of the game are so widely despised that she winds up in this territory. More specifically... She claims to have seen the player kill Skie, but this is not true in any version — a vision shows it was actually done by Irenicus, and she didn't show up until after the fact. She then tells the player that they should commit suicide to give Baldur's Gate peace because the city is in turmoil over the question of whether they're innocent, even though its her fault that's happening.^note The only way to avoid this is to romance her, and even that won't stop her from trying to prevent your escape during the final chapter if you can't convince the dukes to smuggle you out of the city instead. At the very least, the player character is able to throw her "suggestion" right back in her face.Or you can kill her too.
  Charname: I take it back, Schael. You're not a traitor. I can handle treason. You're worse. You're an idiot.
• That One Boss: The Final Boss is far and away the toughest enemy in the game. He hits like a truck and shrugs off damage from all but +3 weapons, which there are not that many of and which are rather difficult to track down without a guide. For some party combinations, taking him down on higher difficulties relies on Caelar doing most of the work. Assuming, of course, that she didn't join him before the battle started... The one-on-one duel with Ashatiel can also become this depending on the Bhaalspawn's class, and how much you're willing to cheese.
• They Wasted a Perfectly Good Character:
  • Skie, for some. With the young thief's upped level of confidence and competence between games, she could have been something of a Replacement Goldfish for Imoen, who doesn't feel strong enough to join Charname at Dragonspear. Sadly, Skie is not a recruitable character, and has her own arc independent of the party. Instead, Safana becomes the party's default thief, and her status as The Scrappy led many fans to strengthen their beliefs that Skie should have had that role instead.
  • Caelar and her lieutenants (other than Hephernaan) are generally considered to be underutilized and under-developed. Word of God is that there would have been an option for Charname to join Caelar that presumably would have fleshed them all out, but in the finished product the lingering hints to this path are instead an Aborted Arc, with Charname being Railroaded into conflict with Caelar regardless of which dialogue options they pick. There were also those who felt that Caelar's ultimate fate was not deserved, with several plans for mods for Baldur's Gate II that would bring her back, make her playable again, and potentially offer closure.
• What Do You Mean, It's Not Political?: One of the big sources of the Broken Base was the perception that the developers were inserting socio-political issues into the franchise, such as refugee crises, police corruption/brutality, gender identity, and other such things. Such issues are occasionally present in the Forgotten Realms setting, but whether these messages were intended or not, how well they were handled, and claims they didn't have a place in the game was all hotly debated, to the point that many people only remember the game through the controversies that surrounded it at release.