I try to avoid swearing in my blog post titles, but this post was titled “DA:O-A and It’s Fucked Up Little Guys” while I was writing it. Which is to say that my overall impression of Awakening was that BioWare looked at the darkspawn they’d created and asked themselves “how can we absolutely fuck up these little guys?” They then went on to completely knock it out of the park, too. Sure, we’ve got our standard flavor Hurlocks and Genlocks (and their Alpha and Emissary subvariants), but we’ve also got some messy little guys who burst out of tubes, freaky little guys that are the messy little guys but with really long crab legs, some horrific little guys who are the freaky little guys but More, and then tons of flavors of normal Hurlock but with special paint and decorations so we know that this is one of the Darkspawn What Can Talk. All, of course, without mentioning the stars of this show, who are the most fucked up little guys of all: The Architect (who is a fusion of a Hurlock and a Normal Guy With Avant Garde Shades) and The Mother (who is what you’d get if an early 00s Manic Pixie Dream Girl replaced the “humanoid” half of a Broodmother). Absolutely wild choices that any big Triple-A game studio would be too much of a coward to make in a modern game. Video games as a whole are lesser for it.

To be clear, I’m not saying that modern game companies aren’t making tons of fucked up little guys and even more inductions into the halls of the Monster Fuckers (we need only look at some of the potential romance options available in Baldur’s Gate 3 to see something just as daring as, and multiple times more explicit than, DA:O-A), but there’s a certain photogenic quality to the modern Fucked Up Little Guy (or FULG, for short, so I can stop dropping F-bombs at least once per sentence) that is just absolutely lacking in the scrungly, befanged appearance of the FULGs of yore. Just look at modern horror compared to the horror of years ago. These days you’ve got your Slendermans (a tall figure in a sharp suit), your Five Nights At Freddy’s (which are definitely busted up animatronic-looking folks, but ones that could easily become Instagram influencers), and even your Pennywises (Bill Skarsgård absolutely introduced an entire generation into weird clown stuff). Back in the day, you have your Slendermans (tall figures in grainy footage), your Freddies (the guy with all the burns), your Jasons (the hulk in a hockey mask), and your Pennywises (absolutely no one thought Pennywise 1990 was hot). They’re just very different flavors of FULGs! Nowadays, they need to have a certain amount of visual appeal in hopes of generating a huge online following capable of breathing life into a dying franchise for at least a decade after the final sequel has stumbled through theaters on its way to whatever streaming platform is going to produce a six-episode spin-off TV show that gets canceled before the second episode has aired. Which brings me back to Dragon Age. After all, the fourth game in the franchise would have been out years ago if BioWare hadn’t realized the error of their ways after the disastrous and short life of Anthem, which is a lot like a show somehow miraculously surviving a weirdly paced eight episode run that was finally starting to show promise as it wrapped up (I’m bitterly looking at you, Disney+ and The Acolyte).

If the somewhat meandering and, for me at least, unhinged tenor of this blog post isn’t any indication, I actually had a lot of fun with the expansion. Dragon Age: Origins – Awakening was a ton of fun to play through, and not only because it incorporated two of my unlikely favorite things (titles with too much punctuation and some great FULGs). The story was fairly snappy and the whole thing probably could have been finished in about ten hours if I’d rushed through or even just ignored the various unnecessary side quests, character quests, and funny little collection missions. Hell, I could have sprinted for the exit from the get-go and probably finished it in about five or six hours. It isn’t a super involved story, after all. You’re mostly just speed running the original game. You’ve gotta deal with human nobles who have problems that include a decision about who is really in charge here, you’ve gotta deal with the deep roads in a way that is not as much about Dwarves as you would have initially thought, you’ve gotta deal with an asshole of an elf who might have once had good reasons for doing what they did but lost all right to sympathy when they continued to wreak havoc without examining the cost of their actions or why they felt justified in acting that way, and then grapple with a small secluded population held captive by a mage who used their powers for nefarious, self-serving reasons, all of which is wrapped up by fighting an invading army that isn’t where you thought it would be followed by a push into a fortified location where you eventually fight some kind of monstrosity to break the will of the amassed darkspawn horde. It’s basically the same thing all over again, compressed into a quarter to a third of the time and with maybe three times as much gold and at least ten levels worth of XP packed into that small time period.

I really did have fun. It was great to meet Anders and Justice, a duo that is going to return in Dragon Age 2 as Anders and Vengeance (a toxic relationship if I ever saw one). I got to learn a bit more about the larger order of Grey Wardens and what they’re doing now that the blight has passed (turns out that the Wardens actually do get involved in politics, but only geopolitics rather than local politics). I got to give Anders a pet cat, which was the source of much hilarity as my companions discussed it. I built a kick-ass base of operations, got some really cool weapons, made my powerful rogue build even more powerful thanks to the new specialties added to the game, and even got a few cinematic kills. A dragon, an ogre, and the final boss. Good times. Made even better by seeing the connection points between the first game and the rest of the Dragon Age series (or at least the connections between the first three games, since I understand that not even Dragon Age Keep will be a part of Veilguard…) clearly for the first time. I mean, there’s still a lot of questions left unanswered that I’m certain will be covered in the DLC for Dragon Age 2 and Inquisition, but I feel like I’m building off a pretty solid base this time around.

As far as the other DLCs go, I really enjoyed Witch Hunt. It was short and to-the-point. There was very little chaff mixed into this brief bit of storytelling. I was able to breeze through it pretty quickly, thanks to being level thirty-five when I launched this DLC, so it was nothing but a fun romp through the story as I learned a tiny little bit about what happened to Morrigan after she left with Alistair’s baby. I’m excited to see how that comes up in Inquisition now that I’ve set the stage appropriately. The other story DLC for your Warden, Golems of Amgarrak, kind of sucked. My party composition, with two rogues, a rhino, and a tanky golem, sucked. I never had enough healing or crowd control to deal with my enemies and they stomped me into the dirt repeatedly. It should not have been that hard. I mean, it doesn’t even come up again ever! I’ve looked! It means nothing in the grand scheme of the Dragon Age series, which means I struggled through it for nothing. It was more difficult than any other boss fight I’m done in the franchise! Just so pointlessly difficult… At least let me pick ONE of my companions to come with me on this stupid adventure.

Not that all of Dragon Age: Origins is done, I’ve moved on to Dragon Age 2. I’ll admit that some of my fervor for continuing my franchise replay has been damped by learning that none of the work I’m doing can be imported into Dragon Age: The Veilguard, but not enough to stop me. I’m kind of looking forward to the tragedy that is Dragon Age 2, even if I’m pretty sure that I’m not emotionally prepared for all of it. I remember a few parts of it being pretty rough, thought I’m sure it’s not as bad as I remember it. After all, I’ve dealt with my familial issues now, so I’m certain that Hawke’s family won’t hit a sore spot like it sorta did back in the early 10s when I was still largely in denial about/completely repressing what was going on in my own family. On the other hand, I’m also a bit more easily emotionally moved that I was back then, so maybe it’ll all wind up balancing out to me having a similar emotional reaction. Time will tell! I mean, I’m about to start playing the game once I finish writing this up, so it’s only going to take a relatively short amount of time to tell unlike when I normally use this as a “who knows what the future will bring” sort of statement.