In the console version of Dark Alliance, there are a limited number of enemies to defeat. While this leads to an experience cap, and a limit of what level your character can achieve, it worked out well, and left you in good enough shape to make it past whatever obstacle the forces of darkness threw your way. In this version, the army of evil has a limitless number. At first, this seems like a good thing, because it allows you to spend some time leveling your character if you want. I would even say that it would be an improvement if not for one important detail. Once again, I do not understand why, but for some reason Recall Potions did not make it into this game. This means that you have no way of making it back to town to stock up on health or rejuvenation potions, or to unload the weapons and armor you have collected from your fallen foes once you run out of room, unless you want to fight your way back through all the enemies in the floors you have already cleared. I will admit that as long as you stock up well beforehand, you probably won’t need to head back to town except to sell equipment, and you can make it just fine without picking up every single dropped item. The missing Recall Potions were only an annoyance until I made it to the top of the mountain in chapter 2 and had to walk all the way back down the mountain, and did not want to fight all those monsters again. In chapter one, you always popped out of the sewers back in town after you completed a quest, so it wasn’t as big of a deal. I still wish they hadn’t taken them out of the game though.

Well after reading all that, the big question is “How does the game play?” The gameplay does not go as smoothly as I had hoped it would. The game moves along pretty slowly. I think most of that can be attributed to the giant character models. I think the game would have run much better if they would have brought the camera further out, and had smaller models. They could have kept the feel of the game, plus had more going on at the same time. With that being said, it really isn’t that bad, it is just definitely slower than it’s big brothers. The part that is pretty bad is the intelligence of the enemies. All of the enemies have “areas” that they will not leave. This makes them all very easy targets. All you have to do is walk into their area, and lead them to the edge of their area. Then they will stand there for a few seconds before they run back to where they were. For those few seconds, you can stand just outside their area and slash away at them. Even though are close enough for them to hit back, they won’t do anything about it because you are outside their area. Sometimes they even exhibit complete idiocy even when you are fighting with them inside their area. I had enemies standing still behind rocks, or just running back and forth not attacking me. I realize they do this when they are on the verge of being killed, but it sometimes happened before I did anything to them. With my chosen character the sorcerer, I had to make use of the idiotic enemies to even survive, and that really isn’t much fun.

Baldur’s Gate: Dark Alliance on the Game Boy Advance is an okay game, but that’s about it. For being such a great game on the consoles, I do not understand what the problem converting it into a great GBA game was. With the missing characters, map, and recall potions, it reduces this game from the status of great, to only decent. If you were looking to get into the story of Dark Alliance, I would suggest you invest $20 (or less) into this game for one of the consoles, and only pick this up if you really like Baldur’s Gate.