Soundset v. Personality
rdarken
Member Posts: 660
I've always felt like Imoen's soundset in BG2 doesn't fit her personality. In the first game, she's cheerful, carefree, adventurous. In BG2, her plot-dialogue is dark - and rightfully so. After being tortured by Irenicus (and having her soul stolen), she is fascinated with death and has a pretty grim outlook. And yet, her soundset is still pretty cheery.
When selecting her, she'll respond with the normal "Yep" or "What'cha want?" Not as bright as in BG1, but not very grim, either. Her idle banter, she'll even say something like how she missed adventuring with CHARNAME because she forgot how fun it was. After she had her soul stolen. Seems silly to me. She could have had two soundsets like Edwin. Not a big deal, of course. Just always jumped out at me.
Any others strike anyone?
When selecting her, she'll respond with the normal "Yep" or "What'cha want?" Not as bright as in BG1, but not very grim, either. Her idle banter, she'll even say something like how she missed adventuring with CHARNAME because she forgot how fun it was. After she had her soul stolen. Seems silly to me. She could have had two soundsets like Edwin. Not a big deal, of course. Just always jumped out at me.
Any others strike anyone?
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@Schneidend I dunno, I don't necessarily WANT her to be grim, but it's kind of weird when you get a banter with her and she's talking about death being pretty or groaning because her soul was taken, and then you tell her to do something and she says "Right as rain."
I think you've got a point. Unfortunately, they made Imoen into more of a plot device than a character in BG2. It's quite weird because there were obviously people working on the game who had an affection for the original character (the few banters she is given do sound like her http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Baldur's_Gate_series#Various_Quotes ) but as you say, these sound out of place coming out of the mouth of someone who has been tortured incessantly.
But then I do think that BG2 is like one of those Hollywood blockbusters that is written by a committee. It's big, it's flashy and it is very, very long. But it doesn't have the heart of the indie original they were cashing in on.
What were we...oh, yes. Who knows, maybe girlfriend got kicked off her hinges by Dweebie the Former Elf.
In BG2 Imoen is desperately trying to deny anything is wrong, clinging to her former self in a vain attempt to pretend everything is OK. You see this veneer crack a couple of times, and it ain't pretty, but she tries to take refuge in humor and (forced) cheerfulness. She's manic one moment, and broken the next.
In ToB, she begins to own her humor again, except this time it's got a bit of a darker tinge. She's matured, she's grown up, and she's not the naive girl she used to be--but she's still Imoen.
- What Irenicus does to Charname and Imoen isn't torture, it's experiments that (maybe always, maybe not) happen to be painful
- Imoen doesn't lose her soul until Asylum, and you lose yours soon after and remain rather unfazed by it
So yeh. Real answer? They didn't bother/care with changing her soundset. Explanation answer? While Irenicus' Lab is not exactly first on my vacation resorts list, you might be overestimating the effects.
For CHARNAME on the other hand... Being possibly the most powerful Bhaalspawn, he/she kept the powers, but he/she pretty much had absolutely no control over it, thus the whole Slayer change... If left alone, he/she would most likely just become an unstoppable insane killing machine.
Irenicus took Imoen and CHARNAME's (divine) souls in order to replace the souls that he and Bodhi had taken from them by the Seldarine. The Bhaal essence manifesting itself more powerfully in CHARNAME and Imoen is something of an unintended side-effect of their soullessness, as evidenced by Bodhi in the maze when she exclaims surprise at the Slayer.
It's explained that without their soul, a person begins to die (and, I believe it's implied in a few places, lose their sanity). Bodhi turned to vampirism in an attempt to stave this off, and it worked for a while, but not as effectively as she'd hoped. Irenicus turned to power, but that was also ineffective. He realised they required replacement souls, but not any soul would do: they needed divine souls.
I could be wrong, but from what I gather, Irenicus' experiments were about coaxing the divine essence to the surface, so that he could take it--but at the beginning of the game he has not perfected the method by which he can do this. By the time the PC gets to Spellhold, their divine essence has come forth, as Irenicus has brought Imoen's forth, and he is able to entrap their souls and contain them within his and Bodhi's bodies, thus effectively ending their death sentence.
The Bhaal essence only really begins to take charge after the PC has their soul removed, as evidenced by the Slayer in the maze. Although Irenicus took Imoen and the PC's souls, their Bhaal essence is still within them--and without their souls in the way, can manifest in more and more powerful and frightening ways.
EDIT to remove < > tags around CHARNAME, since they won't display here!
She's not totally broken, obviously, but sounds pretty worn down to me, and that makes me hear the chipper "right as rain " stuff as being more forced, kind of like @Kaeloree says the mod portrays her (though I'm not sure if "manic" is really how I'd see the character, but I might give the mod a look-see as it sounds promising nonetheless).
Not to say that's what the writers had in mind, though... a person can go way overboard trying to be an apologist for poorly planned writing, and I try to avoid that at all costs. At the very least, though, it's a convenient coincidence, so BG2 Imoen never really bothered me.
As a DM, it taught me a valuable lesson, you can't just arbitrarily decide what happens to player characters or their NPCs and if they feel they have got no control of the story they are going to be mightily pissed off.
Which is exactly how I felt when I woke up in Irenicus's dungeon.
I can understand if you feel the BG2 setup was too ham-fisted or unfair for your tastes, but the plot mechanic in itself still has to be there in some form. Otherwise you might as well oppose being forced to drink from the grey warden goblet in DAO, not being able to save the Normandy in ME2 (or Gorion in BG1 for that matter) or any number of other setups.
"For someone who supposedly has her soul tainted by the evil of a dead god, you remind me considerably of a chipmunk with a sugar high and a death wish."
Of course Baldur's Gate is story-driven but for me the start of BG2 seems like one of those games that is more fun for the GM than the players.
What I meant is, torture has much, much higher capacity for pain than medical experiments, simply because medical experiments don't always have to be painful and have varying levels of pain, while the only point of torture is to deliver maximum pain for as long as possible.