Baldur's Gate: The Zero Reload Saga

Cutscene! And not a single one of those amateurish Shadow Thieves even attempts to backstab the unprotected spellcaster standing in plain sight. Tsk tsk, gentlemen.

“So, godchild, you have escaped. You are more resourceful than I had thought.”

Really? Is that a fact? You didn’t think I was going to escape when you left all manner of weapons, armour, potions, scrolls and magical trinkets just lying everywhere around your prison, free for the taking, and the most troublesome resistance I encountered consisted entirely of outside forces whose presence you had no personal hand in?

Exactly how unresourceful did you think I was?

You know, for the longest time, I didn’t realise that when the people in this game called you “godchild”, they meant it literally, as in “The child of a god.” Until this dawned on me I was seriously bewildered. Irenicus is my godfather? The solar in TOB is my godmother? Am I to assume that they were at the christening, or what?

Imoen and Irenicus have their little back-and-forth while I’m forced to stand there like an idiot, and then she goes and sets up a major plot point by blasting him with a Magic Missile. Yeah, Imoen. Cast a weak, level 1 spell at the all-powerful wizard that effortlessly captured us and has just blown a whole bunch of dudes to pieces right before our eyes. That’ll show him.

And now here come the Cowled Wizards the save the day.

And they do save the day, when you think about it. They may be a bunch of corrupt, arrogant jerks, but if they hadn’t intervened here then Irenicus would have just stomped you flat and thrown you straight back into your cage. When you look at it a certain way, you kind of owe them one.

But when you look at it another way, they proceed to capture your best friend and throw her into a magical prison to slowly go insane and die, just for casting a single, puny little spell in self-defence and therefore breaking a law that she wasn’t even aware of, so you also kind of don’t.

Seriously. You’ve got a megalomaniacal magical murderer here that resisted arrest and killed four of you in the process, as well a destroying a good chunk of the promenade and causing a big disturbance, and then you’ve got some kid who cast Magic Missile once, in the hopes of stopping the psycho mage, I might add…and they both get the same sentence. Nice justice system there, guys.

Anyway, Irenicus spends some more time demonstrating his unhealthy obsession with Power Word: Kill, and one brief conversation later, Yoshimo has levelled up and we are once again free to move about the world as we wish.

Or not, because we still have one more cutscene to endure before we can go anywhere but the slums.

Sigh.