I realized over the weekend that I was about to start the final mission in Dragon Age 2 and immediately stopped what I was doing so I could do the final narrative DLC first. It was a close call, that, but it wouldn’t have been too bad since I am still compulsively quick saving every few minutes, so I could have easily gone back to do the DLC if I’d accidentally pushed past the point of no return in the main game. All of which feels like an appropriately hurried start to Dragon Age 2: Legacy since it’s a bit of an odd duck of a DLC. Not only was it the hardest thing I’ve done in Dragon Age 2, but it felt somehow both much more direct (mechanically) than most of Dragon Age 2 and much less direct (informationally) than the rest of the game. I know I’m not as clear on all the details since my sleep-deprived brain has been letting go of some of the short-term memory stuff that isn’t super important, but it really feels strange that the entire premise of this DLC was that my character’s father was press-ganged into maintaining a bunch of magical barriers for the Grey Wardens and that now she was needed by a couple factions because of her blood-relation to the guy who made the barriers. The primary faction was a group of darkspawn-tainted people who all wanted my character’s blood in order to disable those barriers so the guy trapped within them could be set free and my character chased them down into the prison such that she got trapped as well, all of which meant that this guy, Corypheus (the main villain of Dragon Age: Inquisition), had to get let free so I could leave as well. There’s no relevance to any other plot, no attachment to the broader world, nothing but some guys attacked me, Hawke, the Champion of Kirkwall, so I had to go on a little vacation to hunt them down and murder them, thereby unleashing an ancient horror on the world that was so great that it spawned an entire video game.

It feels like a really dumb sequence of events that only barely made since as a series of unfortunate mishaps. I mean, I killed all the people doing stuff to me, so why not just leave? Sure, I knew they had a boss, but people tried to kill Hawke constantly, with even less of a reason for it. It makes way more sense that a bunch of people who were being effectively mind-controlled by that guy in the prison might take some ridiculous risks, such as trying to take the life of the most powerful individual in Kirkwall, than that a bunch of back-alley pickpockets would constantly try to attack her when they saw her walking through the city at night. It’s not like Hawke ever tracked any other group of would-be assassins down to kill them all, from the lowest gang member to the upper tiers of the leadership that was pulling the strings. At least, not if it meant leaving Kirkwall, anyway. I know that this DLC exists specifically to lay the groundwork for the next game, but I still feel so frustrated that my ability to direct the plot of this DLC was so limited. I get wanting to tell a story, but it just doesn’t feel good for that story to be “your character, despite everything else they do, is a real dummy this time and doesn’t kill the person who has incredibly obviously been possessed by the ghost/spirit/soul/magic/darkspawn taint of the big bad evil guy that you just spent so much time and energy trying to kill because of how absolutely horrible it would be if he got out.” I mean, c’mon. That’s basic operational security! Why even have that potentially vulnerable person around if all they’re going to do is get possessed at the end? I know that this is a pretty normal storytelling trope and a common setup, but it just feels so frustrating to be caught up in a situation that seems so poorly put together. I wouldn’t mind it as much if it didn’t rely on my character being a dumbass, but it does and that just feels like unpleasant story writing.

That, on top of the whole framing narrative of DA2 being Varric relaying the story of what happened with Hawke to Cassandra, a Seeker of the Chantry and the person who is in charge of kicking off the upcoming Inquisition, kind of makes DA2 feel like it wasn’t supposed to be its own game so much as an interstitial thing to get the world from Dragon Age: Origins to Dragon Age: Inquisition. Sure, this game includes the particular match strike that lights off the entire Mage and Templar war and it also introduces the corrupting power of the Red Lyrium, introduces the Darkspawn taint as something that “sings” to more than just the Darkspawn, and helps flesh out the world a bit, but that all feels like background information when the entire story is about Hawke and all of that is framed in a narrative based around people looking for Hawke to, as we eventually learn, maybe lead the Inquisition. So much of the world’s lore is handled via text dumps and Inquisition introduces so much of this stuff again anyway that DA2 could have easily been skipped in favor of going directly to DA:I. Part of me wonders if DA2 was developed and released to capitalize on the popularity of DA:O rather than because the original roadmap for the world they were building called for it. It’s impossible to know, of course, and the inclusion of Anders in the DLC for DA:O makes it seem a bit more intentional, but it is hard to ignore the feeling that, in retrospect, DA2 exists solely to set up DA:I.

Aside from my narrative gripes, this was a fun little DLC. It felt kinda strange to go from the sort of wave-based brutal group fights that made up the majority of Dragon Age 2 to the weird environmental-hazards-and-poor-companion-navigation of the Corypheus battle. It was unendingly frustrating to see my companions get taken down so many times because the “correct” pathing for my companions took them through a round-about pathway that was only relevant during the final wave of statue clicking. They never even tried to avoid taking damage! I’d fault this part of the game as not properly setting up the weird environmental, rotating fire as being a proper “AOE” for them to avoid or leave, but then again, no amount of altering their default behavior in any part of the game actually made them get out of the way of AOEs. Varrick went down so many times in this fight, and every fight, because the guy just would not leave an AOE despite being set to do so. I had to control him, move him out, and then he’d invariably wind up back into the AOE again seconds after switching back to my mage Hawke. All of which is to say that the environment stuff in that final battle was interesting at first but quickly became micromanagement hell as I had to individually control each of my companions to get them out of the “instant death” zone and into the “take a bunch of damage but don’t die” zone. I honestly would have lost that fight super quickly if I hadn’t made my mage a spirit healer and stocked a dozen Mythal’s Favor bombs on a whim before the DLC. I used almost all of them because people just wouldn’t get out of the way!

Other than that one fight, the rest of the DLC was pretty fun if a little bland. Adding in some traps and environmental stuff to use in fights was an interesting factor that rarely paid off as well as I hoped it would. Still, using them against my enemies was better than letting them use those same things against me and my companions. I did better damage with most of my big spells. Navigating through a new map was interesting, as was learning about more about the Darkspawn taint, Hawke’s father, and what the Grey Wardens get up to other than fighting Blights, but it was still a little underwhelming compared to even Mark of the Assassin in terms of learning new and interesting things. Maybe that’s because I already knew about Corypheus and the corruption of the Grey Wardens from DA:I, but it wound up just feeling like a way to get some more gear, money, and XP before I embarked on the final mission of the base game, all of which felt so much more impactful than this little aside that exists only as a way to set up DA:I rather than to establish anything interesting about the game the DLC was connected to. Sure, finding one of the existing Magisters who supposedly corrupted the Golden Kingdom at the center of the Fade only to learn from his testimony that it was already dark and empty is definitely an interesting bit of information, but it’s difficult to be excited about that after having already played the game built around that idea. At least the DLCs for DA:O still stood on their own regardless of whether or not you’d played DA2 and DA:I (though Golems of Amgarrak is still the worst one I’ve played). I dunno. It wasn’t bad, I just felt very underwhelmed by it after getting through a mostly pleasant experience to then need to spend almost an hour doing a long, drawn out boss fight where my companions kept dying no matter what I did because they wouldn’t stop walking into the fire.