Baldur's Gate Two : Shadows of Amn Book

I guess I could have some fun by trying to explain just how this is the worst book ever.

I absolutely adored the computer game. It gave me the chance to be the hero in the fantasy world I knew from R. A. Salvatore's novels, and it had a great deal of depth of character and story. I approached the novelisation with some trepidation. Of course it was not going to be epic like that. But I hoped it would at least be some trashy fun.

It started out seeming like that. While none of the changes from the original seemed good or to have much point, it went fast and kept me interested... until the point the main character contemplated killing yet another person for no reason and I realised I'd had it up to here with the idiot. It went downhill from there, and soon hit the absolute rock bottom and stayed there for hundreds of miserable pages. I hated how un-heroic the main character was and how everything else was bastardised into indifferent, nonsensical mush with the occasional atrocious scene standing out as a particular "want to kill yourself and everyone else and especially the author" moment. I kept on reading, not wanting to put it down - because then I would have to pick it up again.

The protagonist might be the worst thing in this thing, although goodness knows there's competition. Abdel Adrian is an impulsive, repulsive idiot who's completely unable to carry the mantle of the hero - in spite of the horrible Mary Sue admiration the story tries to give him. Why should anyone care what some bumbling, weak-willed, violent idiot does? He can't even fight that well, which makes the fight scenes even more the boring, bumbling gorefests that they are. It would have been more interesting if someone just wrote down the tactics they used in the fights in the game.

Given the nature of the original game, the protagonist's nature was up to the author. The rest is already there in the game, but of course needs adapting. Athans's method of doing that seems to be to make everything as bland and petty as possible, although quite a few things are stupid and infuriating as well. Every character and element seems to have been drained of just about everything - be it a huge flaw like the nonexistent characterisation of important characters like Irenicus, who goes from an awesome, chilling villain to someone so generic we aren't even told what he looks like; or downright comical minor details like Saemon Havarian being changed from a roguish, backstabbing captain to a drunk with a rowboat. Every step of the plot is simplified to the point of indifference too. And then there are the horribly stupid kill-yourself scenes like Bodhi falling totally in love and lust with Adrian's Marty-Stuness and Adrian falling for her having boobs...

The characters are paper-thin and/or horrible. The plot is thin and stupid. Every single change from the original is for the worse; even the necessary ones (eg. not having so many subplots) are done badly. The fights are boring, the relationships vomit-inducing, the dialogue plain bad. If you liked the original, you'll hate this even more than you would otherwise, in spite of that being impossible. It's like a complete opposite of the game with the specific emphasis of defiling what was good there.

I admit I had a lot of fun complaining about and mocking this book...