YMMV / Icewind Dale

• Alt-itis: The vast number of Fantasy Character Classes and seven playable races and multiple ways to build your characters can cause this for some, particularly in the Enhanced Edition of the first game, which brought 2e class kits — including those exclusive to the EE and two cleric kits which didn't feature in Baldur's Gate — to the table.
• Awesome Ego: Yxunomei is a fan favourite precisely because of her astounding arrogance and memorable, insult-laden dialogue.
  Yxunomei: Your involvement in this matter is irrelevant in the grand scheme of things. A mote of dust floating for a small moment in a sea of time.
  PC: You're right, oh mighty one. But... aren't we all really just motes of dust, floating in a sea of time?
  Yxunomei: No. You are one of many fireflies dancing for a moment in the night, feeling at your brightest that you can illuminate the universe at will. *I* am a star. I came into existence when your world took form. I am as persistent as time. Where I move, infernal tides crush foreign shores and nations of thought are drowned in blood.
  PC: My oh my, don't we feel important?
  Yxunomei: Quite.
• Awesome Music: The music was composed by Jeremy Soule, the same man who composed Baldur's Gate and The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim. You can found the soundtrack on YouTube here.
  • The sequel had a score composed by Inon Zur, who would later become famous for composing music for Dragon Age: Origins and Dragon Age II.
• Badass Decay: In the original release, Malavon was considered one of the hardest fights in the game; he's a high-level spellcaster flanked by four Umber Hulks that can confuse the party and two Iron Golems that are Nigh-Invulnerable to most forms of damage. And once you beat him the first time, the second round is a "Get Back Here!" Boss who teleports around his lair casting spells like Web and Cloudkill to slow you down and sending summoned monsters against you. The Enhanced Edition release makes the fight a total joke by restoring a cut option to allow the player to take control of Malavon's Iron Golems via their manual in Marketh's keep. The Iron Golems are strong enough to win the entire fight on their own; they'll rip Malavon apart before he gets off a single spell, clean up the Umber Hulks after, and probably won't have much more trouble with Malavon the second time than they did the first.
• Cliché Storm: The dungeons of the game include a shadowy vale full of undead, a volcanic cave populated by lizard men and yuan-ti, an elven tower with great magic, and a dwarf mining city built into a mountain. Highlights of story include a fragile alliance between elves and dwarves that fell apart due to suspicion, chasing down a MacGuffin, and the villains are a demon and a devil who are archenemies.
• Complacent Gaming Syndrome: You can trivialize 2/3rds of the game by specing your starting party to handle undead. The Vale of Shadows, the Severed Hand, and large parts of Dragon's Eye and Dorn's Deep, are full of various kinds of undead enemies. A sufficiently high level Paladin or Cleric can just activate Turn Undead and walk through the areas watching their enemies either flee in terror or die on the spot. To a lesser extent, spellcasters can reliably stock up on fire-elemental spells; undead aside, this is set in the Spine of the World, so a lot of monsters are vulnerable to fire and resistant to cold.
• Complete Monster: The wicked devil Belhifet disguises himself as Brother Poquelin to steadily recruit people to his armies so he may conquer Ten Towns. Using evil beings to wipe out anyone who may get close to the truth, Belhifet intends on sweeping over Ten Towns to destroy it and reap the souls of all there for his infernal armies so he may unleash Baator upon the mortal plane. Even before being defeated, Belhifet rapes many women to father half-devil children to further his plans. After his defeat, Belhifet turns out to be the secret villain of the Siege of Dragonspear, having tried to kidnap and torture Caelar Argent as a child. The secret master of Hephernaan who manipulated all the evil of the Shining Crusade, Belhifet intends on the utter devastation of the Material Plane.
• Disappointing Last Level: The final area of the first game, the return to Easthaven, is quite short and simple compared to the long and complex Dorn's Deep. You run around doing a couple of simple quests talking to NPCs and fighting some normal enemies, enter the tower, face a mini-boss (who is barely foreshadowed and largely inconsequential to the story), then it's time for the Final Boss. You can be finished this final leg of the game in well under an hour.
• Demonic Spiders: You'll find many of these in both games:
  • Mummies. Unlike their Baldur's Gate counterparts, they can cast Flame Strike, and you face them as early as Chapter 1.
  • Bombardier Beetles. They can emit an acidic vapor when they attack, dealing some nasty splash damage to anyone in range. If you're unfortunate enough to aggro several of them (and you will, since they appear in groups), your melee fighters will likely loose a large chunk of HP in short order.
  • Salamanders. They have either cold or fire auras and always come in large groups. Their auras even damage you when they're not hostile toward you!
  • Umber Hulks. Looking straight in their eyes will confuse you if you fail your saves. That they're also backed up by Minotaurs is not helpful either.
  • Wailing Virgins. They inflict a lot of magic damage to all party members whenever they release a Super-Scream, and not just regular magic damage either — magic damage which bypasses magic resistance.
  • Harpies. Their songs can charm your party, leaving you vulnerable to other monsters. It pays to have an elf or two in your party when facing them.
  • Crypt Things. Whenever they touch you, you'll teleport to a random part of the dungeon.
  • Werejackals. Their gaze can inflict sleep on their victims. Again, it pays to have elves around when fighting them.
  • Driders. They web you while calling other Driders for help.
• Evil Is Cool: In the sequel, Dreadmasters of Bane are the most popular choice for a cleric because of their many Badass Boasts, opportunities to motivate people out of fear with a Rousing Speech or two and the fact that they can get a nice stat bonus from Bane himself if they play their cards right in a certain sidequest.
• Fan Nickname: The Enhanced Edition is commonly referred to as IWD-in-BG2 (Icewind Dale in Baldur's Gate 2). Mostly because Beamdog just used the Icewind Dale data in the Baldur's Gate 2:Enhanced Edition engine.
• Good Bad Bugs: So you think you need fire or acid to kill trolls? Wrong! If a troll get phased, stunned or paralysed while you deal the finishing blow, they will die, saving your precious fire/acid spells for other monsters.
• It's Short, So It Sucks!: When the Heart of Winter expansion was first released, people complained how short it was. This prompted Black Isle to release a second expansion, Trials of the Luremaster, free of charge.
• Magnificent Bitch: Icasaracht is a white dragon matriarch who made plans to cheat death by transferring her soul into a new body if she died. When her spirit is freed to be reborn, she instead takes the body of the recently deceased Wylfdene, seeing the circumstances of the barbarian tribes of the Spine of the World as a reflection of what the dragons went through years earlier. As Wylfdene she convinces the tribes to rally to her banner and go to war with the Ten Towns to drive out the humans and take back their homelands. After her deception is revealed, she retreats to her lair and takes host in one of her spare dragon bodies to be reborn as a white dragon again. She then faces the adventurers in a final confrontation and explains to them her motives and rationales, but refuses the idea of settling things peacefully, as she'd rather join her kind in death than give up her ambitions.
• Narm:
  • In the first installment, your characters will go into Idle Animation when waiting for the next round to attack.
  • A blatant case of Talking Is a Free Action which takes place during the Final Battle. In-story, Everard makes a Final Speech to the party and pulls a Heroic Sacrifice by throwing himself in the portal to close it. The way the scene plays out however, Everard briskly walks across the room toward the portal while Poquelin watches him pass him by and casts a single spell to try and stop him, and in the meantime not a single demon actually comes out of the portal. In the Enhanced Edition, two demons come out of the portal before Poquelin begins his speech, but this makes the subsequent scene even worse as the demons will attack Everard, who flinches and then keeps walking to the portal as Poquelin casts a single spell, and depending on the pathing of the AI, it's plausible for the participants to get hung up trying to move past each other and then instead walk around.
• Narm Charm: Yxunemei, a powerful maralith demon, makes a variety of scathing comments and verbose, pretentious speeches about her vast superiority over the party, whom she writes off as motes of dust. Even if the player insults her back, she isn't particularly incited to anger, but calmly conveys her very clear disdain for what you are, what you think, and what you stand for, alternating between Purple Prose and curt understatements the player can express bafflement at. Her dialogue is especially memorable thanks to her eerie choice of avatar, and the excellent voice work of Tara Strong.
• Nintendo Hard: Icewind Dale is much harder than the already tough Baldur's Gate games, and Icewind Dale 2 is harder still.
• One-Scene Wonder: Kresselack. He's only spoken to twice and is a relatively minor character forgotten early in the game. But he's voiced by Tony Jay, and his backstory and character are more well-developed and memorable than a lot of other major characters in either of the two games.
• Overshadowed by Awesome: When people talk about this era of CRPGs Icewind Dale tends to be treated as a bit of an afterthought behind the more popular Baldur's Gate and Planescape Torment.
• Scrappy Weapon:
  • Introduced with the Enhanced Edition are katanas. Aside from the mundane ones and plus X enchanted ones, there's only two unique magical katanas, making these weapons a poor choice for your characters.
  • Bastard swords in Icewind Dale II. You're required to take the exotic weapons feat before being able to use them, making them unpopular with players.
• That One Attack: In the sequel, a cleric of Xvim and Madae casts Blasphemy, a nasty spell that stuns everyone instantly. It's cast extremely quickly and there's no saving throw against it. The only way to counter it is to have an evil alignment or to raise your spell resistance very high.
• That One Boss: The optional fight with the four Iron Golems in the Black Raven Monastery basement is extremely difficult if you aren't very well equipped. The Golems will ignore almost all damage done by anything less than a +3 weapon, of which there are very few by that point in the game (most of which are otherwise weak short swords). They ignore all magic damage, are healed by fire, are very difficult to hit in melee and hit like freight trains. Oh, and they'll constantly spam poison gas clouds which will insta-kill many summons and rapidly drain your PC's health.
• That One Level: Icewind Dale II has quite a few:
  • Battle Arena. You have 1 minute to defeat a random monster with difficulty scaling up. The catch? The arena is a 3x3 grid. To win a single battle, you need to win 3 fights on 3 squares so they form a line, Tic-Tac-Toe style. There's a minimum of 250 battles to complete the quest. You're allowed only one combatant and the rest of your party is automatically locked-up. Battle Arena is completely optional, but if you skip it you'll be missing out some very good quest rewards.
    • For those who are truly sick of the Battle Arena, there is a mod that will allow you to bypass the fights but still get the items.
  • Felwood. Didn't put any skills points in Wildneness Lore skill? Good luck finding your way around this trap-filled maze, as the areas are all identical.
  • The Black Raven monastery. To reach the Underdark, you need to complete 8 trials. Don't have a monk in your party? Good luck fighting without your favorite armor and your best magic weapon. Which is probably why people prefer to slay all the monks rather than enduring the trials.
• They Wasted a Perfectly Good Plot: The item description of the Paladin-only sword, Light of Cera Sumat and the quest item to get it, Medallion of the Lost Followers, has a plot worthy of an entire new game. It documents how six evil followers of Bane, the Lost Followers, devastated an entire kingdom by slaughtering its king and reanimating him as a corpse, leaving him to rampage through the streets while placing his young daughter, the sole survivor of the kingdom, on the throne as mockery. A elderly warrior named Kholsa Ehld came to the young queen's rescue, and avenged her kingdom by individually tracking down and defeating the six Lost Followers. Your party can resurrect the Lost Followers for a tough fight to obtain the Infinity +1 Sword, but being a hidden side quest, it's nowhere as epic as Kholsa Ehld's original journey.
• Unintentionally Unsympathetic: In Icewind Dale II, it is hard to sympathise with the Ten-Towns when the whole conflict was literally started by the mayor responding to the Legion of the Chimera's overtures of peace by attempting to assassinate its leaders with cakes poisoned with holy water. And the player's only option is to massacre the entire Legion of the Chimera, simply because they had audacity to get angry due to being treated like crap. The attacks the Ten-Towns suffered as a result come across as something they had coming.

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