As someone who has played through both Baldur’s Gate: Dark Alliance and the new Dark Alliance 2 on the consoles, I was looking forward to the chance to review the Game Boy Advance incarnation of the first installment of this great series.

The focus of the game rallies around the town of Baldur’s Gate. Baldur’s Gate is a town in the middle of the world that many adventurers make their way through. You are one of these adventurers, and at the start of the game you get conked on the head by some thieves and insist on going after them to get your stuff back. Through this process you learn of a much grander evil scheme that, of course, will eventually threaten the entire world. The Game Boy Advance version sticks very closely to the story of the console versions. Occasionally it is even word for word from the console game. A few of the quests had to be shortened to fit the smaller GBA’s smaller world, but there aren’t any story elements that are skipped over entirely. There are some (very) small side quests thrown in here and there to mix it up a little. In all, you get just as much of the story as if you were playing the game on one of the big machines.

Baldur’s Gate is an action RPG, and this surprised me the first time I played it. I was expecting a turn-based game, and when it was really more like Zelda with an EXP/leveling I was very impressed. The game is played from a ¾ perspective, attempting to keep the game feeling like the other versions. The A button is used for attacking, the B button is the action button, the L button is a modifier for using potions with A and B, and the R button cycles through your equipped weapon. You can equip one melee weapon, one ranged weapon, and one skill/spell. This is very handy, and keeps you from having to go into your inventory to change weapons all the time.

When you start a new game, you are allowed to select from the same three characters that were available in the console game. You have a Fighter, an Archer, and a Sorcerer. Knowledgeable readers might be saying, “Hey! It’s a Sorceress, not a Sorcerer!” As much as that should be the case, it is not here. Unfortunately, a human male has replaced all of the characters. The only difference, besides their stats, is the color of their clothes. I found this to be very disappointing.

You will notice right off that the game’s camera is set very close to your character, and there is nothing you can do about it. I do not really understand the thinking behind this decision, as the other games do not take this approach. Maybe they were trying to show off the details of what they could do with the GBA hardware, because the game does look very good. The characters and enemies are fairly well detailed for their size, and they move and animate very smoothly. The biggest problem I had with the way the game looks, is that I had trouble telling where I was in a dungeon. Quite often the room you are in does not take up the whole screen. You have to run along the walls in order to find some kind of landmarks to get an idea of where you are. You might be thinking, “Well then flip on the map!” I assure you I would love to check the map. Unfortunately that is another thing that is missing that I do not understand. The map is a vital organ of any dungeon crawler, so where did it go?