BG2 was considerably harder. Enemies were much harder and battles requiring more knowledge of what spells do what and what enemies are resistant to what.
Yeah, after you have played other games of the genre and think back, BG2 is actually really complex, with a lot of spells that do many different things, a high amount of status effects, weird enemies with weird resistances, immunities, and weird special attacks, and funky mechanics like contingency, sequencer, time stop, immunity to time stop, insta-kill effects, spell reflection, spell deflection, spell immunity against specific spell school, magical defenses against spells of up to a certain level, then anti-magic attacks that dispel magical defenses of up to a certain level, some anti-magic attacks only dispel one magical defense, but some others dispel all defenses, some dispel some things but don't dispel other things, etc. Then there are things like "how is Hold different from Stun?", or "how come my character is immune to Web but these illithids can still stun me?", or "Why is this Lich unaffected by all of my spells?" Memorizing what does what, who can do what and is immune to what, and then what you have in your toolbox that you can use for defense and offense purposes, may be a real hassle. It's super fun once you've got everything down though.
