Originally Posted by Surge90sf
And the Balduran "twist" is the biggest meh twist Ive seen for a long time. This "special mindflayer" just so happens to be this particular character from a 1000 years ago, what are the odds? And if he is himself why does he never seem to give a shit about BG? And what was the point of this quest exactly? It does nothing but ruin the flow of the narrative. You can not recruit Ansur, the fact the Emperor is Balduran has 0 impact on the story.
I feel like they wove the whole Balduran thing into the Emperor backstory exactly because the character got a late rewrite and they probably felt like they needed to give it a bit more weight, hence the inflated backstory to prop him up. It definitely felt weird though and made me roll my eyes and I'm not even invested in DnD/Baldur's Gate lore.