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This post contains no major spoilers, but I still talk around some stuff that might be best experienced blind if you're a real stickler about that. Be warned.

Baldur's Gate 3 finally got me dude. I finished my first playthrough yesterday at 191 hours (although a chunk of that was from me doubling back and replaying about 30 hours when I realized I had completely missed my opportunity to pick a love interest...) and all I can say is that they were right. I put off playing this game for sooo long because its popularity meant I was being blasted with it on every social media platform conceivable, and my excitement for it rapidly cooled as a result. But this was a good ass game. They weren't lying that baldurs CAN gate!!!

I truly appreciate how many options there are in BG3, and I'm also pretty happy it managed to revitalize my interest in my first-ever DND character :) I tend to have a tough time making up a character on the spot when I play a game with customization because I want to feel invested in them as a part of the story, and if the player is a self-insert or a blank slate it's not as fun (though ironically I quite like almost-silent protagonists. I think it's cute when you can kinda tell from their dialogue options that they've secretly got a bit of an attitude LOL). So a lot of the time I'll just remake my own OCs because their personalities are already established in my head. My guy's campaign was put on hiatus ages ago and probably won't ever come back, so it was nice to feel like he had a proper story again.

Antoine. He was very rich until his kind heart and weakness for beautiful men got him scammed out of all his money and subsequently disowned.

My guy is like the protagonist of a BL game to me, in that things that are equal parts hot/kind of scary just sort of happen to him. Typical blond boy behavior.

Honestly though, it wasn't even that surprising that Baldur's Gate 3 was good. What really surprised me was that I walked out of the game stanning GALE. Like no offense. It's not as if I ever had an especially bad impression of him, but when he first did his backstory reveal I thought it was a bit underwhelming (though this could have been partially due to the fact that he decided to sit us all down for it at the bridge to the Risen Road in the middle of fucking nowhere). But the more I read his other dialogue, the more I realized he was kind of arrogant in a way that endeared him to me SO fast. Playing as Antoine, who is by nature very polite and a bit of a doormat, meant that I was humoring Gale most of the time, so I didn't get a lot of the dialogue that makes it obvious he can be a bit patronizing when it comes to magic. Of course he is a prodigy and OF COURSE he is so annoying about it.

There is also the matter of his backstory--not the part about Mystra, but all the other stuff he talks about as the game progresses. I have always been incredibly fond of children's fantasy series in the same vein as Septimus Heap or The Tapestry, and learning that he was a bit of a troublemaker at magic school was honestly kind of what did me in. I really adore characters that could easily star in their own children's book and then reappear in the sequel all grown up as like, a mentor figure or something. So anyway Gale of Waterdeep is probably now the most well-adjusted guy in my scrapbook of faves. [begrudgingly] Save me white boy...

Now that you've read my two paragraphs about Gale, it's time for me to come clean and tell you my guy actually ended up romancing Astarion.

I dunno what else I can say about this game that hasn't already been said, but I had so much fun! Probably the most fun I've had with a video game in a while. I enjoyed it so much that I went right back in to start a Dark Urge run, and this time we WILL be cashing in on that wizard pussy. I went with default durge in part because I get a kick out of the mental image of Gale dating someone who can throw him over their shoulder like a sack of potatoes.

if anyone is interested in the play-by-play of Antoine's terrible horrible no good very bad loser blond boy adventure, I have an absolute beast of a livetweet thread on bluesky here. Just be aware that it contains untagged spoilers!