Well, I did it. I beat Dragon Age: Inquisition’s final bit of DLC, thereby completing the franchise, before the official release time of Dragon Age: The Veilguard. As I’m writing this, there are still four hours left before I can start downloading the game, so the victory isn’t as clean or as neat as I’d like. No victory is clean or neat or entirely complete when you’ve stayed up until at least 2am every night prior and then just didn’t sleep during the final night. It’s not quite pyrrhic, but definitely not a victory I feel super great about getting. I mean, that doesn’t invalidate my win or anything, but this so-called win is just a silly little goal I set for myself after talking about it with my Dragon Age “Book” Club (which might even include actual Dragon Age books someday, who knows?). I feel proud of having done the thing, but I wish I also hadn’t filled my upcoming day (the day I’m writing this, October 31st, a week before you’re reading it on November 7th) with as much stuff as I did. I’ve got a blood test (which I’ve been fasting for, meaning I did all this on no sleep and no caffeine in the last 20-ish hours), breakfast out with myself after that (for caffeine and food following the fast), my Veilguard download to start, early voting to do, and then physical therapy in the early afternoon. I was originally planning to go to a Halloween party tonight, but I don’t think that’s going to work out [turns out it worked out. I went and had a nice time being around people for a couple hours. And, you know, doing literally anything that wasn’t a Dragon Age game]. Even if I still wanted to go despite being tired, I don’t think it’s terribly safe for me to drive across the city twelve hours from now [I rallied and had no problems], in the dark. Just feels like I might be tempting fate at that point, even if I can have as much caffeine as I’d like once I’ve gotten the blood test [I had a normal amount].
Continue readingBook Club
The Mightiest Creatures Wandering Dragon Age: Inquisition Were No Match For My Blade
In the almost-week since my last Dragon Age: Inquisition post, I’ve put in a significant number of hours, made exactly one step forward in plot, gotten swamped by the newly available huge maps, chosen a mage specialization, and killed six dragons, two of them almost single-handedly. It’s been a wild few days of gaming and I have to say that, while I’m definitely still struggling to feel like I’m having fun with the world exploration stuff, I am absolutely loving combat as I’ve locked into a fun build that, as it turns out, is VERY popular on the internet due to its huge damage and nigh-invincibility. Sure, there’s a necromancer build that CAN do more damage, according to the forums and posts I’ve looked at, but playing a Knight-Enchanter Mage with gear that grants my character, Echo, guard on each hit means that I’m pretty much always invincible. I can count on one hand the number of times I’ve taken actual HP damage (excluding the times I’ve jumped off of something I shouldn’t have because I was too impatient to walk around after fast-traveling) since I locked in my build on Sunday (nine days ago as you’re reading this), and I’ve beaten down two dragons that were three levels higher than my Inquisitor after the entire rest of my party stood in an AOE and instantly died. Sure, they were grueling and lengthy fights, especially the one against a dragon that had a huge amount of resistance to the damage type of Echo’s staff, but I was able to work my way through the entire dragon, including one that kept giving itself a full bar of guard, without ever one taking a hit to my Hit Points. It was exhilarating to discover that I could do this and then pretty boring to just keep up the same sequence of abilities for the next twenty minutes. The other four dragon fights, though, where most of my party survived or didn’t fall until the end of a grueling fight, were a lot more fun.
Continue readingDragon Age: Inquisition Is Stressing Out My Completionist Heart
Originally, I started this post complaining about how my completionist nature felt more like a curse while playing Dragon Age: Inquisition than while I was playing any other game, but then I started making comparisons to and excuses about Final Fantasy 7: Rebirth and I had to admit that that game, actually, was the one that made me feel the most cursed by my compulsion to do things completely and perfectly. That said, my experience with Dragon Age: Inquisition is no walk in the park, as much as it feels like a walk in the park in comparison to FF7: Rebirth. Sure, I don’t feel constantly stuck and like the only interesting or fun parts of the game are trapped behind horrible, long, and boring stretches of open-world exploration whose only benefit is to provide you with the crafting supplies you need to use a crafting system that feels like it was built solely to justify the expansive, open, and empty maps of the game, but I definitely feel like there’s way to much junk to do in this game. I’m about forty hours into the game as I writing this and I’ve only just finished the first major plot (the first face-off with Corypheus and the destruction of Haven). All because I’ve spent so much time trying to do side quests, collecting resources, gathering influence, and trying to make sure I’m well-enough supplied to make all my own armor and weapons because the stuff you find usually pales in comparison to what you can make, all of which requires a pretty significant investment of resources and time. Time you have to spend pretty regularly if you want to keep everyone wearing top-notch armor. Which feels funny to do, considering most of my party members are wearing accessories that I got in the first ten to twenty hours of the game.
Continue readingRomancing My Least Favorite Character in Dragon Age: Inquisition
I actually had a really difficult time deciding what kind of character to play when I started up Dragon Age: Inquisition. I knew I didn’t want to be a Human, since I’d played a human in both the previous games, and I knew I wanted to be a mage which meant I wasn’t going to play a Dwarf, but I couldn’t decide between playing a Qunari or an Elf. I’d been having a lot of fun learning more and more about the Qunari in my replays of the first two Dragon Age games and, since I’ve apparently never spent much time or energy trying to learn about them in previous play-throughs, thought it might be fun to play through this (currently) final game with a Qunari lens over the whole experience. I was interested to see how the general residents of Thedas responded to my character, to be a giant woman, and to see how those who knew about the Qun responded to my character, a mage who had grown up outside the Qun and absolutely not let herself be collared and leashed in the way that most other Qunari mages were. On the other hand, knowing what I know now about how Inquisition can end and how Veilguard starts, I thought it might be fun to play an Elf and finally go through the romance sequence for Solas. I’d started a playthrough as an Elf, once, and thought it was pretty interesting to see how everyone reacted to an Elven Inquisitor, but I’d never actually romanced Solas before. I tried to flirt with him a bunch once, but I was playing a Human woman and he was not interested. Plus, Elven women are pretty fun! They’ve got the most flirt options and, personally, I’m interested in flirting with as many companions as possible! That said, since I’d be playing an Elven woman and absolutely won’t be playing through Dragon Age: Inquisition again any time soon, I knew that this was my one shot to actually romance Solas and see what its all about before Veilguard made it clear to me.
Continue readingWrapping Up Dragon Age 2
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.
Continue readingCrashing Out Of Dragon Age: Origins
I’ve been trying to replay Dragon Age: Origins for my “book” club. Most of the time, I can play it. A lot of the time, it will crash sometime after I’ve launched the game. I’ve figured out some work-arounds, thanks to old forum posts, good old trial-and-error problem solving, and a bit of intuition from my years of testing and working in the software world, but they really only delay the inevitable crash. Sure, I can usually see it coming now and restart my game myself, picking a more opportune time to restart rather than just being randomly kicked out of the game by it crashing on me, but it still feels incredibly frustrating to be limping through this game rather than actually enjoying it. I mean, sure, I’ve figured out the reason for one crash and how to fix work around it, but I’m not sure that it works consistently and, as a result, am still spending all my time quicksaving to make sure that I don’t lose much if the game winds up crashing on me anyway. It’s exhausting to be on guard all the time against the game I’m playing in a way that is definitely negatively impacting my experience of the game, which doesn’t even mention how my gameplay experience is impacted by my workarounds and having to play on the lowest graphics settings just so my game doesn’t crash every fifteen minutes (or instantly in some places).
Continue readingReturning To Mistborn At Least A Decade Later
I don’t remember exactly when I did it, but I read the Mistborn trilogy sometime around my move to my current city back in late 2013. I had enough going on then that I don’t remember the exact date, but I do think it was after my move. I didn’t really have the money for things like books before my move and I didn’t know who Brandon Sanderson was until mid-2013 anyway, since I only encountered his name as part of reading through the whole Wheel of Time series to help a friend out with his Master’s thesis. I really enjoyed the end of the series, the parts handled by Sanderson, which felt remarkable given how much I struggled with Robert Jordan’s portions of that series. I had to force myself to read Jordan’s books and genuinely only finished because the first of Sanderson’s was so much more enjoyable and pleasant to read than any of Jordan’s books. I mean, I’ll give Jordan points for creativity and plenty of respect for the world he brewed up–hell, I’ll event admit that most of the interesting plot work started with him–but I just did not enjoy Jordan’s writing for most of the series once he’d finished his original trilogy of books and started expanding them into a limitless and sprawling monstrosity of a fantasy series. Which is probably why Sanderson’s work stood out to me as much as it did. He was just as long-winded and overly detailed as Jordan was, but I enjoyed it. Sanderson seemed to have a knack for picking the right details and putting his words together in a way that lent to a more pleasant reading experience. So, when time and opportunity allowed, I followed the recommendation of my friend (the same one I go to for editing and pretty much all my book recommendations since she has unimpeachable taste and who might have given me the books as a gift–I unfortunately can’t remember, though, since it has been so long and she’s given me so many great books) and started working my way through the Mistborn trilogy.
Continue readingReading The Animorphs For The First Time: Part 1
One day last December, while incredibly bored at work, I stirred up some drama in a discord server I’m in by admitting that I had no idea what a “warrior cat” was and, as that started to die down, that I’d never read any of the Animorphs books. Since most of us grew up in or after the 90s, I discovered that I was one of the few who had never been exposed to either sprawling franchise and, since I wanted something fun to do, I suggested we do a book club centered around reading all of the animorphs books in a single year. Someone drew up a schedule, another person shared a link to a freely available PDF of the books (which had been shared during the early days of the pandemic, when everyone desperately needed something to do and parents struggled to occupy their children), and I briefly tried to get everyone to figure out if we were going to do a proper full book club or just post our reactions to things. Since we landed on just posting reactions, as I was apparently the only person who explicitly said they wanted to discuss the books as we read them, I’ve felt a lot less motivated to keep up with this largely solo experience. Despite that, I’ve managed to mostly keep up with the schedule (we’re reading book 8 this week, after having read the first seven and then the first “Megamorphs” book) and I’ve had disappointingly few conversations about what we’ve read so far.
Continue readingEmett’s Villainous Plans
Daisy plopped onto Emett’s bed. “Now that I’ve explained the entire saga, what’ve you been doing lately?”
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