The short answer is yes. If you trust me and my reviews, feel free to bounce right now and go enjoy yourself. If you still need convincing, then I’m sure I can manage that. The game doesn’t do a great job of selling itself unless you’re already on the Dragon Age train and looking for your next destination. After all, most trailers for it showcase grand, sweeping events that are mostly exciting as references to past games and older characters (and sometimes things that were specifically avoided in these past games). If you don’t already know who Solas and Varric are, you might not care much about seeing them in opposition. If you haven’t followed the Dragon Age games for their decade and a half run, you might not have a reason to care about the arrival of what might be some Elven gods. Sure, it’s all tons of pretty typical fantasy and RPG type stuff, but most of it doesn’t really make an impact without history or greater context (which I can provide for you). Still, it’s a pretty good video game, taken on its own merits, and absolutely worth your time on that front alone. If you’ve played other Dragon Age games and just aren’t sure you want to continue? Then it is worth your time even more so.
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Dragon 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 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 readingDragon Age 2: Legacy Doesn’t Pass The Test Of Time
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.
Continue readingRunning Through The Dragon Age 2 DLC: Felicia Day’s Big Trip
You know, I’d heard at one point in my life that Felicia Day was somehow associated with the Dragon Age franchise. I’d never looked up how or why, since it made sense that she would be based on what I knew of her career up to that point, but I found the answers to those questions recently when I decided to launch myself into the first of two narrative DLCs for Dragon Age 2. All of the story-based DLCs for DA2 are in-game narrative asides rather than entirely separate campaigns like most of the DLC had been in Dragon Age: Origins, so I’d planned on waiting until I felt confident in my builds during the latter part of Act Two or early Act Three before I tried any of them out. So, with having reached Act 3 a couple weekends ago, I decided to spend a Sunday evening playing through one of the DLCs and was surprised to see Felicia Day’s Dragon-Age-ified face staring back at me from my monitor. It was unmistakably her from the very beginning and entirely surprising that they essentially stuck her face onto a character in the game. I know that’s a bit more common in modern video games, what with motion-capture technology and all, but I was surprised to see it from a game from the very early teens. I haven’t really looked up most of the other characters and their voice actors to see if any of them look similar, but I’d be kind of surprised if they did. It really wasn’t that common of a thing back in the day and, frankly, I found it rather distracting the entire time I spent playing the DLC since I’ve watched Felicia Day in a lot of other things and seeing her in rough animation was unsettling.
Continue readingWrapping Up Paper Mario: The Thousand-Year Door
Spoiler warning for the recently re-released twenty-year-old video game, Paper Mario: The Thousand Year Door. They’re casually sprinkled throughout, so best skip this post if you want to remain unspoiled for some reason.
Continue readingDragon Age: Origins – Awakening And It’s Messed Up Little Guys
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.
Continue readingDragon Age: Origins Was A Lot Longer Than I Remembered
I finally finished Dragon Age: Origins. Which isn’t to say that I didn’t enjoy my time, it was just a much longer game than I remembered. On top of having a decent time playing a game I once loved enough to play all the way through at least six separate times, I got everything in this run to come out the way I wanted it to. I got the girl, became a queen, outlived an archdemon, and sent my bestie off with the child of my political husband (which is what you get out of a political marriage meant to secure yourself a crown). All in all, I had a great time. Except for playing it all on minimum graphics and needing to develop a compulsive quick save habit (which has begun to rear its head in other games I’m playing) so I wouldn’t lose too much when my game inevitably crashed. Because it always crashed. It even crashed as it tried to load the post-final-boss bit of the game where I’d get to have one last chat with my companions. Luckily, it had already autosaved, so I didn’t need to re-do the boss fight, but it was certainly annoying to need to launch the game again for that tiny bit of play time considering how late at night it was by the time I got there. It was annoying and it colored my entire playthrough, though especially so in the later parts of the game when there was a lot going on and my attempts to maintain the tension of the story ran aground every time the game crashed and I needed to repeat my game-launch ritual. Still, it was a decent use of my time and wasn’t so frustrating that I was desperate to move on to Dragon Age 2. If it had gone on much longer, I expect I would have been, but I got out just in time.
Continue readingDecisions And Outcomes In Dragon Age: Origins
I’ve gotten most of the way through Dragon Age: Origins at this point. I finally cleared Orzammar (the Dwarven city and a REALLY long series of missions for how little happens there) and seated my chosen king upon the throne (Bhelen, for those who want to know, but there’ll be more on that later). It was a bit of a slog, but I’m finally on my way to wrap up my side quests, to launch into the final bit of plot [well, it turns out I forgot about a whole bunch of stuff in Denerim that means this was the penultimate bit of plot I launched myself into, not the final bit], and then to start working my way through the DLCs. It wasn’t a bad slog, but it did often feel like it was never going to end. Maybe that’s because there’s technically two separate decisions you need to make and each one has its own string of supporting and side quests, but some of the exploration stuff felt like it was just going on forever with little to no benefit. It also didn’t help that I missed an important piece of gear and had to go back for it, which involved walking from the end of an area to the start of the area and then back again. Between that and how much back-and-forth I did while working through the Dalish Elves quest line, I feel like these are two of the most video game-y parts of the game. Which is too bad! Both of these quest lines actually had something to say (even if I didn’t much care for what the Dalish quest line had to say for the particular ending I chose) and I really wanted to like them. I’m not sure I can get over my distaste for the whole “an eye for an eye makes the whole world blind” thing going on in the Elf versus Werewolf conflict, but I think I can feel pretty alright about the Orzammar plot sequence.
Continue readingDiving Into Dragon Age: Origins After At Least A Decade
As I’ve previously mentioned, my book club will be playing through the Dragon Age video game franchise as we collectively prepare for the release of Veilguard (I refuse to call it The Veilguard). Since I’ll be away from my computer for a week, I decided to set aside my Switch and Unicorn Overlord for a weekend and dive into Dragon Age: Origins. It took a while longer than I thought it would to settle back into the game, since I’d forgotten what most of the stats did and what my preferred builds were, but I mostly got that out of the way in the first day by reading build guides and remembering what parts I used to enjoy about the game. I’m still settling in after about fifteen hours of game run time (an unknown amount of which is me getting restless, walking away from my PC to fold laundry, do dishes, make food, and so on), but I’m mostly comfortable with the game again. Despite how much I played it on my old Xbox 360, coming back to it has me feeling out-of-synch with the way the game works. Maybe it’s because of the almost two hundred hours I put into Inquisition, which has a very distinct and different feel to it. Maybe it’s because it has been over a decade since I last played it. Maybe both. Regardless, trying to get back into this game has me feeling like I found an old beloved shirt that I’m trying to get to sit comfortably on my frame despite how different my frame is even from when I was in college (my shoulders are the broadest they’ve ever been). It’s fine, mostly, but it just feels a little weird and the comfort I remember is largely gone.
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