As you might have guessed while reading yesterday’s post, I’ve finished Dragon Age 2. I had a decent time with it. I genuinely enjoyed the storytelling within it, working my way through the tragedies that befell the Hawke family, and it felt fun to shift Hawke’s personality a bit as more and more stuff happened to them. I went from an aggressive, confident Hawke in Act One to a somewhat aggressive but mostly confident and diplomatic Hawk in Act Two and then an aggressive and quick to strike Hawke in Act 3, all reflecting what had been going on in their life over the total of seven years that the game covers. After all, Hawke learned the lesson that sometimes you need to strike first and ask questions never when someone rouses your suspicions. It’s not like you can see your mother turned into some unholy abomination and perversion of the magic you value so much in your own life without learning that maybe some people just don’t need to be alive anymore. The only time I really felt like the game failed me–or at least fell short of allowing me to take the actions I wanted to as part of roleplaying my character–was at the start of Act 3 when Meredith implies that Hawke’s mother’s death was Hawke’s fault. If I could have pointed out that she was explicitly charged with handling rogue mages or just, you know, struck her down for suggesting Hawke was at fault for what happened to Hawke’s mother, I’d have been much happier. Other than that, I felt like the game did a pretty good job of letting me direct my Hawke freely while still steering the game toward the tragic. I mean, I was definitely leaning into it most of the time, so take my satisfaction with a grain of salt, but I still think the game did a pretty good job of allowing for player choice within a much more contained narrative than we’ve seen in in Dragon Age: Origins or Dragon Age: Inquisition.

As a much more mature storyteller and human playing through Dragon Age 2 this time around, I could definitely appreciate the storytelling a bit more, along with the depiction of mixed tragedy and grief that flowed through Kirkwall almost constantly. One of my favorite parts of Dragon Age 2 is the easy-to-miss set of codex entries all about the Enigma of Kirkwall, which eventually implies that something cursed and awful must be going on in Kirkwall because of the way it was built, why the Tevinter Imperium kept it for so long, and how frequently the city is swept up in in chaos and death. Given how often that happens in the seven years covered by Dragon Age 2, it feels entirely believable that there is something fucked up about the place from the very beginning, a thing that I made sure reflected itself in Hawke. I shifted my character to match the energy that the city and its people directed at my character, going from a dismissed and ill-treated “dog lord” to local noble of great wealth and respected status to in-demand Champion who was lauded for their decisive action. It really reflected the world in an interesting way, to give back what Hawke received, and while Hawke and Kirkwall are very different characters in this story, the parallels are there for you to find if you want to. While the moment to moment bits of the narrative were stretched pretty thin by the need for side quests, I still felt like pretty much everything wrapped back around to what was going on in the main plot of the game, sometimes thematically and sometimes more literally. It was really rewarding to see how much effort had gone into streamlining the themes of the whole game even when that often wound up feeling very out-of-step with the framing narrative’s work to set up Dragon Age: Inquisition.

Outside of the narrative elements I mentioned above, it was a fine game. There was a lot of walking around the same places over and over again, back and forth from one place to another, but I don’t really mind that. Sure, it was kind of a pain in the butt to have to go into, out of, and then back into most areas at night to find the various gangs roaming the moonlit streets so I could kill enough to find their hideouts and bring an end to their pointless machinations, but that’s still better than the endless, aimless, and frustrating wandering I did when I was playing Final Fantasy 7: Rebirth. I don’t even particularly mind that they reused maps as often as they did. There was enough variety to the routes that I never really felt like I was visiting the same place twice and, for a game that came out two years after its prequel did, it had quite a lot of other work put into it. I guess that, if you had to go back to places a lot because you missed a bunch of stuff or don’t play video games like this one by collecting as many quests as possible before doing any of them (other than the ones that you coincidentally do while hunting down new quests to pick up), you might think the areas are boring and repetitive, but that’s what the Tab button is for. Highlight all those interactable objects so you don’t miss anything except in the places where you forgot to press the tab button. I mean, you can turn on the option to ALWAYS highlight interactable objects, but that feels like a bit much. I wouldn’t want to see those highlights constantly. The important thing is that it was pretty easy to only repeat maps a few times and even then most of them opened up in new places or followed different routes through these shared maps, so it rarely felt like I was repeating a place beyond me acknowledging that these stairs are the same ones I’m seeing for the third or fourth time…

Overall, this is still my favorite entry in the franchise. I’ve still gotta replay DA:I and then there’s Veilguard coming out in less than a month, but I can say that, as of right now, DA2 is my favorite. To be honest, it might stand out as much as it does because I can directly compare it to Origins. DA2 has snappier combat that FEELS better than Origin’s and roars past the stripped-down quality that seems to run through what I remember of DA:I (and what I’ve played so far, in the few hours I’ve already invested). DA2 certainly looks better than Origins, perhaps so markedly so because I can actually run it in its highest settings without the game crashing constantly, and it has far fewer bugs overall. Sure, it still crashed about once or twice in every two or three hours of gaming I did, but at least then it would only crash when I was loading between map locations so I could taper my quick saving to only when I was going to a new location or into a cutscene (I still finished the game with over 1500 saves and felt very called-out by the game counting the number of times I saved). Plus, the romanceable characters were more interesting and nuanced. Sure, the romances themselves were much more tame than those in Origins, but a good romance scene or smooching animation does not an interesting in-game romance make.

Finally, unlike Origins, which had only pieces of the overall story saying anything about the world or people or much at all beyond the opposition of good and evil, DA2 actually talked about the way that power corrupts, the agony of desperate action, and the occasional need for action regardless of the consequences. It does a very good job of presenting ideas and situations and, narratively, making no claims about what is good or bad. It simply presents you with choices and consequences, allowing you to judge for yourself what is good or bad or worthy or foul. Sure, your companions have voices and often use them to speak their thoughts aloud, but few will actually leave you if you’ve put in the work to befriend them. They will tell you what they think and that they would have made a different decision in your stead, but they will ultimately stick with you–with one possible exception in the form of the DLC companion, Sebastion, who I did not care about at all and put in no effort to befriend because he seemed like an odious prat.

Now that I’m finished with DA2, I’ve got to write down a few more notes for when my book club eventually meets and start making some real progress in DA:I. I’m feeling pretty burned out on Dragon Age as a whole, though, but I’m hoping that a week of playing other games, like Palia, Unicorn Overlord, and Legend of Zelda: Echoes of Wisdom, will help me eventually get back into the swing of things. I need to wrap up the longest of the Dragon Age games in less than a month now, hopefully with enough space to take a break from the Dragon Age franchise so I can go into Veilguard properly rested and with as little lingering burnout as possible. I’d, you know, like to enjoy the game as much as possible. I’m sure I’ll enjoy it regardless, but it sure would help to be able to go in fresh.