In case the title wasn’t clue enough, this post is going to contain spoilers for the end of Dragon Age: The Veilguard pretty much throughout the entire thing. This little preamble paragraph won’t have any (nor will the full game review I’ll be posting next week), but you continuing to read this before bailing out to avoid spoilers is REALLY risking it. You’re playing with fire here. Just head out before I have enough words to make sure no preview of this post contains any kind of reference to the end of the game or my feelings relating to it. Which is pretty much now. You’ve been warned!

First off, I find it incredibly hilarious (by certain definitions of the word, anyway) that I wrote about how emotionally invested I was in the game and all of my companions in yesterday’s post about my pre-final-mission thoughts about the game. Mostly because the very first thing to happen to me as I played the game TWENTY MINUTES LATER was that Bellara, who I’d chosen to take down some blood magic wards, got kidnapped by Ghilan’nain. I was devastated, especially when I looked at my character selection screen to see that she was listed as a “Fallen Hero” right next to Davrin, who had explicitly died on screen because I’d chosen him to lead the distraction party and had the exact same listing that Bellara did. I feared something like that might happen when the game prompted me to pick someone to lead said distraction group, so I couldn’t risk my beloved Harding (who could go on to be the only character who stayed by my side through the entire finale outside of the parts that prevented me from having any companions), but I anxiously played out the mission until Davrin fell, hoping that I was wrong and that he’d make it through. He did not, he fell and Assan following him down. It was a little ham-fisted, I’ll admit, but it still hit me like a wrecking ball after losing Bellara and finding myself in a boss battle with none of my companions by my side. It wasn’t a super difficult fight, since I could pretty reliably dodge most of the attacks while I ran about and popped blight boils to free my allies, but there was enough chaos going on and I felt frantic enough that I made a bunch of stupid little timing mistakes anyway.

After that, something my friends and I’d been talking about for days showed up as Solas betrayed us, trying to anchor Rook by their regrets to the prison he’d been trapped in since his ritual went wrong. Why he had to swap places with someone rather than just escape outright, I don’t know, but he left me trapped in what was going to become one of the most emotional moments in the game for me. As someone who has been in a lot of therapy, who has processed a lot of trauma, and has struggled to not let regrets weigh me down as I’ve had to leave friends and family behind in my journey to living a healthy life without those who would mistreat me, it was great to be able to go through that process in-game, as the protagonist I’d been playing for some sixty or seventy hours at that point. I cried at each point along the road. First in frustration with the accusatory tone from the Bellara construct, since the only person to blame for her disappearance was Ghilan’nain. I wasn’t able to express that sentiment exactly, but Rook was able to acknowledge the fact that Bellara chose this path for herself. She volunteered. I might have confirmed it, but she made this choice. The same was true of Davrin, though that one was more heart-wrenching because it was really a chance to say farewell and to mourn the friendship and comradery that had grown between us. Then came Varric and every little theory my friends and I had been passing around crashed down on me. We’d noticed that no one but Rook spoke to Varric. I noticed that there were a lot of tricks in the group dialogue scenes that would make it seem like people were responding to him, but they might just be responding to the person who spoke before him. He didn’t have his own room in the lighthouse, not in the way the others did. No one mentioned him. No one else went to him for guidance. HE GOT STABBED IN THE CHEST REAL BAD AND YOU DON’T JUST WALK THAT OFF.

As much as I’d chosen to romance Harding, and as much as I have a bit of a crush on Neve, the two characters I genuinely loved the most are Bellara and Davrin. Two people just trying to figure out their place in the world. One trying to regain a confidence she lost after her brother died and the other trying to see himself as something more than just an expert killer. A woman trying to make sense out of life when so much of it seems to be spiraling outside of her control and a man learning to let go of his need for control so that the charge in his care has the ability to grow and develop under its own care. There’s a lot of myself to see in both of these elves, and the changes you see in them from the beginning of the game to the end are maybe the most stark amongst all your companions. And then Varric… The common thread between most of the Dragon Age games. A character I’ve seen a ton of in the last four months of my life, as I’ve played through the franchise. Heartbreak after heartbreak. All these characters I’ve grown to love, torn away from me. I wound up going to bathroom after that bit was done, in the lull between wrapping up things at the lighthouse and starting the assault on what was, in my game, Minrathous, and was surprised to see tear streaks all down my face. Since I was going to finish the game, I refilled my water bottle and soldiered on. Thankfully, since I’d done a lot of work to complete all of my companion’s quests and got every available faction up to Rank 4, that was the end of losing people. I even managed to recover Bellara and, though I feared the worst, she even lived into the epilogue. A small favor to repay the loss I still felt from Varric and Davrin.

Then, finally, after beating Elgar’nan in a battle that was kind of anti-climatic (I barely got hit by him and, when I did, barely took any damage: I didn’t use a single potion or revive and maybe only one companion’s healing ability), I got to see the fruits of all my labor come to bear. The constant theme of my game, of the choices I made, came around in the end: giving people second chances, trusting them to see reason with a little help from the people who care about them, worked on Solas. With combined might of the Inquisitor who still loved him, Morrigan as the vessel of Mythal, the essence of Mythal I’d recovered in the fade, and simply telling him that he didn’t need to do this, Solas made the right choice in the end. As it turns out, I was right. The thing I’d been text-screaming at my friends all these months was correct. All that dumb, egg-headed, prideful Elf had to do was stop and listen to the people who cared about him. I got to see him finally relieved of the burden of Mythal’s commands, charged with finally being able to do right by the people he’d accidentally hurt, and then bind his shitty soul to the veil so he could finally do something good for once. And, you know, got my stupid inquisitor who loved him the happy ending that she and the dumb egg-headed asshole wanted. And that I wanted for her. Watching that ending play out made me cry more than Varric’s death revelation did because the acting in those scenes was superb and you could see, as the games (Veilguard and Inquisition’s DLC) said over and over again, he just needed someone to show him that there’s another solution so he doesn’t have to do the only thing he can think of.

I still hate the guy. He caused so much harm because he couldn’t let go of his need to be right about everything. But he also got caught up in doing what people asked of him, of doing ruinous things because the people he cared about needed more than he was willing to give, and wrecked himself in the name of others. It’s difficult not to relate at least a little bit. To see a character taken so far out of their depth that they got all twisted up by it and warped into something they never imagined they could be in the name of doing what they thought was right because they never stopped to wonder if, maybe, it wasn’t. It’s difficult to see a hurt and traumatized person lashing out because that’s all they know to do (because that’s how they earned the love and support of the people around them) and not feel at least a little something when you can give them everything they really needed while also making them do what they can to atone for the wrongs they’ve done. I don’t care how on the nose it is. I don’t care that I got that ending because I chose all the right things and did the right quests so that I’d have the dialogue option to get the best possible ending. All I care about is that I got to say farewell to my inquisitor (who I’ve now spent 2 games with and some 140 hours between those games (130 of which was Inqusition, of course)) by giving her the best possible ending, that I got to save Bellara from the fate she’d resigned herself to in order to save the world, and that I got to finally win a game not by fighting but by talking it out with someone who had only known desperate violence.

Honestly, in the 24 hours since I wrapped up my game with a fun, mysterious post-credits scene that hints at something big coming next (I’ll leave the details of that unspoiled), I’ve thought of the game pretty much constantly and found myself tearing up about it pretty much every time [and got choked up multiple times while editing this]. I haven’t cared about characters this much in I don’t know how long. The last game I cried this much about was Soulfarer and that was just because the game was a long meditation on grief. I didn’t cry over the characters or the story in that, I cried about my grandfather who passed away in 2019 and my separation from my family that’s gone on since then. I can’t remember if I’ve ever cried about a video game’s characters and conclusion as much as I did about this one. And, like, the story was all a part of it! This game, unlike most of the other Dragon Age games, was about something! It was about second-changes, given or denied, and whether or not you believed people could change! Whether the possibility of change was the right of all people or if things should remain as they were, change denied, and maintained for all of eternity. Your choices in the game might not have amounted to much other than a dialogue option that wouldn’t otherwise be there, but talking to my still-living companions as we prepared ourselves for the final push to get to Elgar’nan showed me just how much the characters appreciated the choices I’d made and how they reflected the themes of second chances and change that threaded through every single beat of every single plot of this game. It was all masterfully done, even if some of the dialogue was ham-fisted at times and everyone wrapped up their stories a bit too neatly in their quests. I would have like a little more mess because that would have meant more conversations around the Lighthouse or maybe even more quests to spend time with Rook’s companions. There was tons of that stuff already, but I don’t know that I’d ever think there was enough. Still, getting to wrap it all up with one final chance for a character I was pretty sure I was going to need to kill or at least outsmart? Exceptionally well done. I’m going to be thinking about and mentally revisiting this for ages.

I mean, I’m also going to actually revisit it multiple times as I replay the game. I’m taking one night off (the night I’m writing this) since it has been at least a month, maybe almost two, since I took a day off from playing a Dragon Age game, but I’m probably going to at least START another character. Maybe reuse one of the ones I started up during my first day of having this game or maybe make someone entirely new this time around. I dunno. I’m sure I’ll figure it out pretty quickly, though. In the meantime, I’m going to continue to bask in this game and the emotion it stirred in me during its final hours. It’s nice to know that, even amidst everything going on in the world, I can make the time and space needed to invest myself in a good game. All that said, once I’ve had a bit more time to digest and thing about things, I’ll probably write a more formal review (this is a reaction post, not a review) of the game. You can look for that sometime next week, probably. A proper evaluation of a game I’ve struggled to describe even within my own head. I’m sure it’ll be fine.