I just finished chapter 7. Once I got out of the tutorial dungeon, the writing got so hilariously bad, I can't take the game seriously anymore. It's almost as if this has been the official style guide during development:
- Every single female character talks with Amber Scott's vocabulary, uses her "snappy remarks" and her sarcasm. That's a clear sign of 14 y.o. fanfic level of writing. That she is amateurish is alright in itself - many people have been there, but only Amber Scott has been handed to write the first original content for the BG games since 2004, and that's not alright.
- Every female character is obligated to express her superiority to men at every opportunity, in general or in particular - whether that be her father, her boyfriend, her traveling companion (Dynaheir/Minsc), or a male PC. Examples range from Corwyn's daughter, to Skie and her father, to Viconia and some generic duergar friend of hers who serves no other purpose except for her to spite him, to the Safana and Coran exchange. You don't even have to look closely for those examples. Boy, you'd think this Scott woman must have been put down by men all her life to develop such blind hatred. It's really a fixation she has, apparently. It's curious to behold, it's like misogyny but backwards.
- Minsc has to act as if he's signed a contract with a hamster pets shop chain, by which he is bound to mention Boo in literally, and I mean literally, every other sentence that comes out of his mouth. The Boo jokes are so overdone, that as much of a fan as you could be, you could seriously grow to hate Minsc by the end.
I'm beginning to think the whole Caelar Argent crusade is a metaphor for Scott's own crusade against the patriarchy, where she sees herself as the torchbearer of freedom from the oppression of... "people who don't like that".
My conclusion - as many have already pointed out, the problem with the game's writing isn't the themes, sadly it's far more basic - it's the inability of the writer to create distinctive characters, even after such characters have been served to her on a silver platter with the BG license. This inability generally speaks of lack of good literary examples and culture around which a distinctive writer's style could develop, and lack of personal experience with and understanding of real-life people. This completely ties in with the worldviews she has recently expressed and with her insecure reactions to criticism. To put it simple, her head contains nothing which could produce good writing. All she has there (and it's flowing through each character's lines, because Scott is unable to speak through her characters' perspective) is SJW cliches about the world, and the library of snappy remarks she has gathered from hanging out on twitter and tumblr, supposedly in the years when she was a "self-employed writer". It's sad, but obviously, that's all her inner world.
What's left of the game is the railroaded succession of maps which you have to cover, completing stupid errand quests and going through combat. For plot and continuity reasons, you can't level up in this expansion (I checked it, depending on your class group Fighter/Priest/Mage/Thief, you can level up between 2 or 3 times, with a raised XP cap), so that's all there is. In this state, it's less than half a game for me. Right now I don't feel it's even worth playing through to the end. I think they would have done best to have kept this a DLC.
