BG1 was a very important game, and it has some charm to it, but I personally don’t think it holds up all that well to be honest. The “exploration” involves a lot of just open empty forest zones. The companions are extremely bare bones, both in terms of dialogue/interjections/banter and in terms of quest content. The story is… fine. The whole iron crisis is kind of dry to me, not super compelling. Sarevok was awesome when I was 5, as an adult he’s not really all that compelling. The encounter design is pretty crap overall and yes, involves a lot of kiting or spamming Summon Monster.

Fortunately BG2 fixes almost all of that, and ended up delivering a benchmark CRPG that I think still is worthwhile to play and still (largely - it has some exceptions) holds up great.