DRAGON AGE ORIGINS
Genre: RPG
Available Platforms: PC, Mac, PS3, 360
Platforms I played it on: PC, PS3
Developer(s): BioWare, Edge of Reality
Publisher: EA
Origins was one of the best RPG’s I’ve ever played in my life. Set on the continent of Thedas, it’s another dark fantasy game, in a similar vein to The Witcher. Topics such as racism, rape and religious persecution aren’t shied away from and you will be called upon to make some difficult moral decisions during your adventure. The world that was built for the game is just so intricate and detailed, and you are rewarded for exploring it and talking to everybody. Collecting Indexes in the world provides you with a look into the rich world history and mythology of Thedas and it is well worth it to take some time out to read through these and find out more about the world. It might seem like a pretty generic fantasy world setting at first glance, but I promise you that the further you delve in and the more you discover, the more unique and interesting the world becomes.
There are 6 separate “origin” stories for you to choose from that shape your experience. You choose your class (warrior, rogue or mage) and your race (human, elf or dwarf), as well as customize your appearance and gender, which decides your character origin (hence the name). The origin stories don’t change the way the story plays out, as each of these prologues eventually converge to the same point, but they do influence the way people in the world interact with you, which ties in with the racism and prejudice of the setting. For example, playing as an elf will cause some human NPCs to behave negatively towards you and inversely playing a human will cause elves and dwarves to view your character with suspicion so it takes more to convince them that you’re the hero. The game takes place in the kingdom of Ferelden during a period of civil unrest and an encroaching darkness. In this uncertain world, you are a Grey warden, a big dick hero tasked with saving and uniting the world against the threat of the darkspawn and a calamitous event they bring, called the Blight. It’s a weird mix of heroic and dark fantasy, fusing epic levels of world saving with equal measures of human darkness, death and politics – and it actually works out surprisingly well. The rich history of the world helps a lot in this regard.
The gameplay is common RPG stuff, with you controlling a party of characters, fighting either in real time or with the option to pause the game and line up commands for your party to do once play resumes. There’s the usual fantasy leveling and loot systems going on, as defeating enemies and completing quests reward you with XP, gold and items. Each class in the game has their own sets of abilities and/or spells, as well as specialization skills for you to invest in. Using these powers in combat require a cooldown period between uses. Anybody who has played an RPG before will be instantly familiar with the mechanics of the game since it’s sort of generic but highly polished, which is a good thing. You can customize each piece of your party’s equipment, down to weapons, armor and accessories, as well as your companion’s A.I tactics, which are insanely intricate. It’s useful to spend a little time tweaking your party tactics to your play style in order to make your party more capable in combat. The game isn’t open world, but instead offers a handful of big areas for you to explore at your leisure. These areas are diverse, ranging from dense, mystical elven forests, to an underground dwarven city and the Deep Roads that run underneath it and indeed the entire continent, to the kingdoms and cities of man. There is also a hub base camp you can go at any time to interact with your companions, take a breather or visit vendors who happen to set up shop there.
The characters in the game are the strongest point. Everybody from the villains to your own companions are just interesting and well thought out. Each of them have their place in the world and personalities (the companion interactions and banter with each other is the absolute best fucking thing in the world). As per usual with a BioWare game, each companion is relevant to the story and a large part of the enjoyment of the game is just getting to know them. You build up your companion’s approval by talking to them, making decisions they agree with and by giving them gifts. By getting your companions to like you, you unlock the ability to romance them as well as unlocking new personal, companion-specific quests. Another strong point of the game are the morally ambiguous choices you will be asked to make over the course of the story. Every option is viable and it’s up to your own discretion and moral compass when it comes to decision-making, with no hand-holding or clearly defined “good and bad” binary choices like most other games do. Of course, some choices have better outcomes than others, but often times this is not made immediately apparent. The consequences of your decisions will actually weigh heavily on you, especially when lives hang in the balance. The game uses a branching dialogue system to facilitate this, which will also be familiar to anyone whose played a BioWare game before.
In conclusion, you should play this if for some reason you haven’t already. It features an absolutely fantastic fantasy world, solid combat, an epic story, great characters and voice talent on display, and a stunning soundtrack. You can taste the budget that was thrown at this game and the developers didn’t waste a single dollar in making it. There is enough magic, religion, fantasy races, sex, drugs and blood to satisfy any mature gamer. I could go on for paragraphs going into just the politics and society of the world, but I won’t because there’s other games to do, so onward!
Conclusion: 5 companions out of a possible 5
DRAGON AGE II
Genre: Action RPG
Available Platforms: PC, Mac, PS3, 360
Platform I played it on: PS3
Developer: BioWare
Publisher: EA
This game was supposed to be legendary. Coming off the high of the amazingness that was Origins, this was supposed to knock it out of the park and be the greatest shit in video gaming. Unfortunately, it wasn’t. It featured a much more reserved storyline and smaller setting than its predecessor, and took out a lot of the character customization of the previous game, casting you instead in the role of Hawke, a human who comes to the city of Kirkwall and whose story runs concurrently and after the events of Origins. You can customize Hawke’s gender, appearance and class to suit your preferences, but ultimately you’re playing the developer’s character, not your own, which is a major let down.
The story isn’t the greatest and it becomes harder to care about what’s going in this tiny city you’re confined in the further you go in, with the focus being more on the political and social conflicts in Kirkwall, which is lame after the taste of world-saving epicness that we got in Origins. Essentially the plot boils down to shit got fucked during the blight and you and your family try to make a new life for yourselves in the city of Kirkwall only to find that things in Kirkwall are fucked as well. The story does have potential and there are some good moments spread throughout, but the fact that the game takes place over the course of a decade and features numerous time jumps is just disconcerting. Choices you made in Origins also affect minor stuff in this game if you import your save data, which does help with investing you in the game as the story will feel more like a continuity of your own experience.
The supporting cast in the game, particularly your party members, are just not as good as the ones in Origins. There’s nothing inherently wrong with them and the majority of them do have good, well-thought out backstories, but the love and camaraderie that is actually palpable between your party members in Origins just doesn’t exist in this game. I lost 2 of my members to various plot points during the course of the game, but I didn’t give enough of a fuck about them to even attempt to save them, like I had done once or twice in Origins. All customization of your party’s equipment is taken away from you in the game as well and the intricate A.I tactic customization was dumbed down considerably. Party members still have an approval meter which goes both ways, into full approval or full rivalry, both of which can be good for you as it will unlock companion side quests and romance options, as well as give combat bonuses to your characters. Dialogue has also been simplified, introducing the Mass Effect dialogue wheel into the game and clearly labeling all of your character’s dialogue choices with good, bad or sarcastic responses. I didn’t like this change at all and much prefer having to use my own moral compass in making decisions instead of the game telling me which is good or bad.
The gameplay is similar to Origins, but more action-orientated. You can still pause the combat to line up commands for your party and you can freely switch between your party members during combat to give out commands, but the gameplay has been streamlined and polished to make it both more satisfying and simpler to use. The combat is good for the most part, but I get why it wasn’t liked by many players because of how much it was changed from Origin’s. You still level up and receive XP and gold for questing and each class still has their own set of weapons and abilities that they can use, leading to their own strength and weaknesses.
The biggest problem with this game is that it’s just hard to care about anything. It’s hard to care about Hawke because it’s not YOUR character and customization is so limited. It’s hard to care about the story because of its weird, unfocused approach and limited scope. It’s hard to care about your party because they’re just not as great as they could’ve been. Finally, it’s hard to care about the game at all because of the MOTHERFUCKING REUSED ENVIRONMENTS AND ASSETS! This pissed me off about the game so much because it just feels lazily designed. I get that the game takes place in the one small city (a problem in and of itself), but for the love of God can we not design ever single house and cave with the same fucking assets and can we move away from revisiting the same handful of areas every single quest?
In conclusion, this was just not as great a game as it should have been. It was just disappointing and sometimes that’s much worse than being a bad game. It’s a decent RPG romp and the story and characters have some strong moments, but there’s so much working against it that just bring it down. It feels like it’s trying too hard to get out of the shadow of its big brother Origins and in doing so too much was changed for the worse. I wouldn’t recommend playing it unless you really want to see the story, the conclusion of which directly leads into Inquisition.
Conclusion: 2.5 Hawke’s out of a possible 5
DRAGON AGE: INQUISITION
Genre: Action RPG
Available Platforms: PC, PS3, PS4, 360, Xbox One
Platform I played it on: PS3
Developer: BioWare
Publisher: EA
Alright, time for yet another unpopular opinion. As some of you might know, I had a LOT of issues with this game because I bought it for PS3 and on that system this game is a buggy, poorly optimized, barely playable mess that Bioware decided to push out anyway because fuck you (more details here for my rant and here for a full list of the problems on last gen consoles. I’m not going to go into detail about it all again). Fortunately for me, after months of fighting off uncountable hordes of crashes and glitches, I finally managed to make it through the game! So onward with the review, I guess…
Right from the word go, the game decided it was going to fuck me and possibly other players in the world as well, with the implementation of the Dragon Age Keep. Now what the Keep does is allow new players – like those on next gen platforms – to make the major choices from the previous games without having to replay those games and transfer the save files, like many other RPGs that feature consistent worlds do, including other BioWare titles. While in practice this is great, it is also infuriating for players like me who actually DO have save data from the previous games, requiring us to go to a separate platform to remake our choices and then import that new data into the new game. Unfortunately, despite me going through all that effort and the game claiming that this new data was successfully imported into my game, SOME OF THE CHOICES I MADE DIDN’T CARRY OVER! I was left with only my DA2 choices working and default Origins choices for some unknown fucking reason. I only realized this a few hours in however, but by that time I was already on a “fuck this game” buzz so I just left it and continued on. This episode deeply impacted my overall enjoyment of the game as well however, as it felt like I had been cheated out of my customized experience and any emotional stake I might’ve had in the world was just sucked straight out of me.
The one good thing that this game has going for it is the story. It follows almost immediately where 2 left off and offers a return to the epic levels of heroism that Origins had. You are the Inquisitor and you will save the world, whether it wants it or not. There is a breach in the sky that’s spewing demons into Thedas and you are the only one with the power to close it. From that setup the story consists mostly of going to different factions in the world to either enlist their help to fight the demon Corypheus – who instigated the whole demonic takeover thing – or sort out various conflicts that are plaguing the land due to the demonic presence (similar to Origins). It’s a relatively short main story in comparison to the rest of the game, but this is a good thing. It never feels drawn out or unnecessary and a lot of the game is spent learning new things about the history and world of Thedas instead of retreading ground that was covered in the previous 2 games. There is also a stronger focus on the religious and magical aspects of the world in addition to the politics and shit. *LIGHT SPOILER* There’s a level set in an ancient elven temple and as you progress through it you can learn the interesting mythology of the elven gods. This one mission alone almost made me forgot my hatred of the game because of how interesting and deep it was! Give me more elven gods Bioware! *LIGHT SPOILER*.
This game tries super hard to run back all the shortcomings of 2. Right off the bat, you have a deep character customization, with the player being able to choose your Inquisitor’s race (human, elf, dwarf and qunari), gender, appearance and class, with each class having multiple specializations that grant their own abilities and advantages. The gameplay is a hybrid of the previous 2 games. It’s more action-RPG focused, and works best when playing this way, but you have the option to use the strategic camera and pause the action to line up actions for your party. You have full control over party members and can customize them at will (as it goddamn should be), with armor adjusting automatically to whoever equips it in order to preserve the look of particular characters instead of them all being generic looking. Obviously, XP and gold are earned through exploration and questing, although Inquisition takes the old school RPG route in that it takes A LOT of XP to actually level up. For about 98 hours of game time, I only made it to level 24, and that was with completing every single side quest and collecting everything I could find in every single area in the game. Another important resource is Influence, which levels up your Inquisition and allows you access to a lot of different, useful perks to help your party inside and outside the battlefield. The Inquisition itself is a big part of the game as most of the game centers on recruiting new allies and resources to strengthen it. You can build up and customize your Inquisition’s base – which serves as your main hub area for the entirety of the game – to gain access to armor and weapon crafting, as well as unique merchants and resources. You can also deploy your Inquisition in various little missions on the War Room map in order to gain more influence, money or resources. Each mission has a time limit that it will be completed in and can be completed using one of the 3 advisers for different outcomes and repercussions.
Let’s touch on your party for the moment. There are 9 recruitable members, which is too much. You will probably find yourself gravitating towards a set crew and the fact that there are many characters who fulfill the same roles will cause the majority of them to be redundant. Each party member is generally hit or miss in terms of motivation and personality as well. There are a some really strong ones like Sera and Dorian who are just interesting and fun to talk to and be around, and some that are just generic or boring, like Cassandra and Varric who make returns from 2. Each member has a hidden approval bar that the game never shows you and their affection towards you will fluctuate depending on your in-game decisions. High approval unlocks extra companion side quests and romance options, which have been overhauled to be actual relationships that evolve naturally with the story and your actions instead of just being meaningless sex scenes. Some characters even have preferences for which gender and/or race they will fall in love with. In addition to your companions, the game also features a crew of advisers for the Inquisition and a slew of returning characters from previous games to make you feel more at home. Dialogue is still handled in the Mass Effect wheel, but the choices are less heavy-handed than 2 and have been changed to feel more natural and free. There are a few times the game will tell you the emotions associated with a response, but they are just that – emotions – not binary options. There are no real right or wrong choices in the game, and I like that a lot. Every option is viable and justified and choices you make will affect the world and story in various ways that might not be immediately apparent. It helps a game a lot when it treats players as actual mature human beings who can think for themselves. You even get the option to pass judgement on certain characters you encounter with a multitude of options for each!
The world that has been built is absolutely gigantic and spans two countries: Ferelden (setting of the first game) and Orlais (France). The game is split into multiple zones, each zone being an absolutely massive area that is rife with a metric fuck ton of side quests and collectibles, such as capturing forts and establishing camps, closing fade rifts, dragon-hunting, treasure-hunting, and undertaking various Inquisition operations that can unlock new areas and side quests. The main bulk of your time with this game will be spent ticking the boxes in these areas and clearing them out of stuff to do and collect. Every zone is diverse (to compensate for 2’s environment reuse), from snowy mountain ranges to green forests to undead marshlands to arid deserts. Each also have their own level ranges, with set enemy encounters, with a few exceptions. Every area is very daunting in size, so much so that mounts have been introduced to help you get around quicker (battle Nugs for life). Every time I went into a new area I was hit with a wave of dread of having to spend like 10 hours just running around for collectibles and the little scraps of XP you gain from exploration and questing. After the second or third area you go to, it unavoidably starts to feel like busy work and I would’ve preferred smaller or fewer game areas in order to have a more concise, focused experience instead of the 12 hours of story and 80 hours of aimless wandering that we got.
In conclusion, this is a good game, just not on PS3 or 360, and that will affect this arbitrary score that I’m handing out.Despite my absolutely horrible experience with the game and the lack of fucks for all things Dragon Age I have because of that, I can see the greatness in this game. I do suggest you play it (on PC or next-gen consoles) because it is a great RPG game and there is a ton of stuff for you to explore and get lost in, with a decent story to keep you going. The voice acting is top notch and the soundtrack is just amazing, including the collectible tavern songs you can stumble upon. There are obviously flaws such as poor characters and the technical issues and the Keep might fuck you over if you’re unlucky, but you should at least boot the game up and see if it keeps you as engaged as it did me, despite all the set-backs. There is also a multiplayer mode for those who enjoy that kind of thing, if you really feel like investing even MORE of your life to this game. Also, fuck you Bioware.
Conclusion: 2.5 fuck you last gen buyer’s out of a possible 5
RANDOM MUSINGS 