Customer Reviews

Baldur's Gate: A Novelization

5 star:		(18)
4 star:		(8)
3 star:		(10)
2 star:		(6)
1 star:		(43)

 

 

I will tell you up front, I went in knowing the book was bad so had low expectations. Those expectations were not met. I would not, could not believe how bad it was. The book fails as both a novelization of the computer game, and as a story.

First, I didn't expect the book to be all that close to my own adventures in the game. Obviously the game is too big. However the author kills the NPCs twice. First with character assasination, the characters in the book do not resemble the characters in the games one bit. Secondly literally killing them, it is almost a revolving door. Join the hero's party, die, next NPC please.

As a story it is truly, truly awful. Even given the level of gaming franchise fiction this is a low water mark. The most well developed character Abdel is barely two-dimensional if that. We see virtually no struggle with his legacy. It is magically overcome by the love of a woman. The plot is a mess as Abdel runs from location to location without reason. The background is almost totally left out. Our heroes run off to places because one line of explanation is given that there might be something in the next location.

At 250 pages this is not that short a novel. Some exposition could have been given rather than run from one fight to the next. Now Eddings in his Belgariad/Mallorean takes a lot of heat for the plot essentially being location to location to location. The way Edding's does it though appears masterful compared to Athans. After 250 pages what we have learned about most of the characters is they are dead, Jaheira lacks morals and Abdel is boring.

Even Robert Howard's Conan stories have more depth to them and they are pure hack and slash.

What we have here is a very poor novel which takes place in a world where the places have the same names as that in Baldur's Gate, and the characters do but nothing else is even the same.

Please ladies and gentlemen, even if you enjoyed this book as light-reading throwaway literature it is not a 5 star book. It is a 3 star book for those who enjoyed it, a one star book for those who didn't.

If only I had read these reviews before purchasing this book, I could get back those few hours of my life and spend them doing something more enjoyable, such as running naked through a field brambles.

This was bad, bad, bad. There were times when I honestly thought that the author was a fourteen-year-old boy for whom English was, at best, a second language. There were random words throughout the text that made no sense. I thought that perhaps they could be strung together to spell out some sort of hidden message, but I stopped after I reached three pages' worth.

I get the impression that the author was kept to a strict word count on this book. His treatment of characters, particularly the relationship between Abdel and Jaheira, is astoundingly juvenile. Abdel somehow manages to be simultaneously too evil to be a hero and yet not evil enough to be an antihero. By the end, I didn't care if he succeeded or was redeemed, I just wanted it to end. And when it did, it was as though he had reached the word limit and clicked "Send" without another thought. I think the game itself had more of an epilogue.

Why did I keep reading it? It was kind of like a bad car wreck or a fat person on a minibike--I just couldn't look away, but when it was over, I felt ashamed for having looked.

Don't make the same mistake I did. If you were trapped on a deserted island with only this book for entertainment, write your own book in the sand. You can always use the pages of this one for toilet paper.

After seeing several high-rated reviews, where the reviewer grilled the majority who gave the book a measly 1 star, I am here to grill the minority who thinks the book is awesome.

Someone said that it was trying to be 'original.' My retort, YOU DON'T TRY TO BE ORIGINAL WHEN YOU ARE MAKING A CONVERSION! You try to follow the original storyline. Might make a tiny change here and there, or fill in the blanks, but you DO NOT REWRITE THE STORY.

Only the basic skeleton of the plot of the game-story is left in the book. Practically everything else is changed. Character personalities are changed, the main character's level of experience is changed, etc. In the book, Jaheira acts pathetically, I only saw her 'true' personality (the one from the game) appear once in this book. At all other times she just acts the role of screaming chick.

First off, in the game she is more mature, and very strong-willed. Not so in the game, her husband gets killed by Abdel, and then after being a little weepy she decides to, effectively, become Abdel's girlfriend.

Pure balderdash! If her real personality were in effect, Abdel would have died a slow, painful death the instant he killed her husband.

And THAT is only ONE of the problems with the book... GRRRR!!!!

I can't beleive I bought this book. I'm an AD&D fan to the core, and I've played the game, and loved it. So when I saw the book, I snatched it up with glee. Now I wish I could return it. I didn't even get halfway through the book before I put it down for something more interesting. The only reason I read THAT much of the book was in hopes that it would get better, well, guess what kids, it doesn't. Don't bother.

I've been a fan of TSR's since the late 1970's and have read most of their books (Greyhawk, Forgotten Realms, Dragonlance) as well as played many of their games from time to time. This book by Athans is absolutely the worst item they have ever published and I wish I HAD listened to the reviews posted here. I too enjoyed the computer game and was looking forward to the novelization (fully knowing that most books based on games have strict guidelines to follow). However it was all I could do to finish this book without either getting a headache or losing my lunch. I read an average of 10 books a month and have for many, many years and I must say that this immature, testosterone-driven, poorly written fantasy is THE WORST book I have ever read! My only wonder is if the folks at TSR (or Wizards of the Coast) actually even read this before they put their name on it! Do yourself a favor if you're thinking of buying this book; go get a Forgotten Realms novel by Salvatore, Cunningham, Novak, or Greenwood and forget this abomination was ever written!

The book is written by Philip Athans, why am I telling you that? So that you never read anything by someone who cant write.

Maybe its not all his fault, some of the sentences seemed to be missing. As if the book was made cheaply as possible. There is only 240 pages in this thing, and trust me for the seven bucks on the cover its not worth it.

Now for you baldur gate fans, Khalid the husband of Jaheire is made to look like a selfish, cheating skirt chaser. Totally opposite of the righteous young shy guy in the game that he was. Why did Philip change Khalid? So that his one-dimensional character Abel can take Jaheria from Khalid and still let the readers like this Barbarian Abel.

Those who enjoyed Candlekeep, will be sad to see that Abel is already an experienced adventure who has seen it all and done it all. There is no discovery of the world around him, like the original story. He knows everything that's going on, except he never seems to recognize any monsters attacking. Strange for a guy that has been supposedly everywhere.

Basically is a short, short book with very little of the original story from the very big game of Baldurs gate. And like one guy said..... What happen to Minsc?

It neither works as good fantasy fiction for the casual fantasy enthusiast, nor does it utilize the pre-existing environments/story/characters in Bioware's BG game to large-enough degree to satisfy those that played the game (and yes I played, completed and enjoyed Baldur's Gate immensely).

My main criticism with the book is that the writer attempted to appeal to both general fantasy readers and players of BG and ended up watering down the story so that neither could appreciate it. In other words, I can't see non-BG players appreciating the sketchiness/flat/ vague/generallness of the way the story is laid out, yet BG players might feel alienated because the writer doesn't stick to the game's story/history enough. The writer tries to place Abdel in so many situations that you feel like the book is a collection of sketches rather than a cohesive whole... Which seque-ways into

The story seems more like a sketch/outline than a fully fleshed-out epic. It quickly jumps from one scene to the next with few transistions. It's almost like the author was saying "I had to keep the story within a specific number of pages, yet I assume you all played the game. Thus, I can skip a few chapters/story devices and you'll be able to follow along easily."

Some characters/plot-lines are developed and then quickly disposed of or never fleshed out. Why should we care that Sarevok was replacing his own men with Dopplegangers? We never get to see the ramifications of this either way. Why should we care that Xan took so long coming back from the Bandit camp? It builds up to Abdel and Jaheira having to raid the camp to see what happened to their friend when all of a sudden Xan appears and is okay. Whew! That's less fun and adventure for the reader to enjoy. Only 100 pages left to go.

I was left thinking/feeling that Baldur's Gate could have been much more. In the end, just about every character in the story dies (Gorion, Sarevok, Xan, Khalid, Montaron, Xzar, Tamoko, Scar, Eltan... makes me wonder how Yeslick got off so lucky) and I was not left caring one way or the other. Still I can respect/appreciate the attempt to bring a computer game into the novel format.

This book was the worst book i have ever read. The characters were unfinished - more like name and a short dialogue by that name between constant and mindless battles. There were no descriptions about anything - the city was just a city and differed from another city only by a name. The author has managed to ruin a good adventure and good theme by his unskilled and strongly boring writing. I truly hope, that this will be his last book.

I somehow doubt that the author of this book even bothered to play the game before he started writing. The storyline of the book is radically different than that of the game. Even calling it a storyline is kind of a stretch. The whole thing is just a long string of gory battle scenes that have been clumsily linked together. There's no flow--the author just jumps from event to event. It's like listening to a preschooler talking about his day ("Oh, and then this happened. Oh, and then after that, this happened, and then this and this happened.") There really is no ending; the book just cuts you off in the middle of a scene. A lot of important events from the game have been cut out, and many unimportant, dull new bits have been added in (i.e., ghouls eating Gorion's corpse).

The main character doesn't help matters any. In the game, the main character starts out as a sheltered kid who has spent his/her entire life in a library, and grows into a big hero (or villain, if you prefer). Not in the book. The novel's main character Abdel is an empty-headed, one-dimensional barbarian who has been living on his own for years and is an experienced adventurer by the beginning of the book. He's seven feet tall, and his hobbies include stabbing things and smashing things. I just couldn't make myself care what happened to the guy.

The NPC's are completely out of character, recognizable only by their names. The romance with Jaheira is especially poorly done. The main character murders Khalid, who has been written as a complete creep in order to make Abdel look better. Then Jaheira, notably less bossy and sarcastic in this book than she was in the game, proceeds to ignore the whole episode and fall into the arms of her husband's killer. The author left out most of the best characters; the amusingly stupid Minsc and his hamster companion Boo don't show up anywhere here, and even Imoen, who is so important to the storyline that the game and its sequel almost force her on you, was also absent. Sarevok, who has the potential to be a complex and intriguing villain, is just a cardboard bad-guy who goes around roaring and looking evil.

There are far better ways to spend your hard-earned cash than this. If you want the story of Baldur's Gate, playing the game would be your best shot. If you want to read a good fantasy novel, R.A. Salvatore's Forgotten Realms novels are ten times better than this one.

I am a dedicated fantasy reader, and I've devoured tons of good quality, medium quality and poor quality fantasy literature. However, I can say with clear conscience that this is by far the WORST fantasy book I have ever read.

I never played Baldur's Gate (I played the sequel only), so I didn't know the game's plotline. And I've had the feeling that, while the game probably had some plotline (it was acclaimed as one of the best CRPG of the time, so it had to), the book had none. It was a mix of chaotic scenes, with virtually no connection to each other.

As if that wasn't bad enough (after all, I know a couple of books that are a good read even though they come a bit short on coherency), the background level is... nonexistant. Athans does nothing more than describe what's happening, together with the absolutely minimal set of descriptions needed to tell you where's the action happening right now. The characters are totally flat, their motives are virtually nonexistant since you can't tell anything about their motivations from the vague descriptions that are included in the book. There's even not enough room for responsible guesswork.

Well, if the entire story is that bad, maybe the culmination at least offsets the bad impression? Not at all. The ending is probably the worst ending I've encountered not only in fantasy literature, but of all the books I have read. It's as the term "epilogue" didn't even exist in Athans' dictionary.

The Forgotten Realms books are commonly regarded as "mediocre fantasy". Since I started with the top-tier FR authors (Cunningham, Salvatore) I wouldn't understand what this opinion was based on. Now, after reading this book, I start to understand...