Bioware has Broken my Brain...Again

I have completed the Dragon Age II base game but could not wait to dig into Mass Effect 3 so I’ll return to the DLC later. Mass Effect’s performance issues are noticeable but it’s playable and I sprang for its DLC.

I decided to resurrect the smarty pants female character that I abandoned in Inquisition but as class mage this time and left the difficulty on normal. She was pretty useless for most of the first act. To survive battles, I kept putting together incompatible parties to complement her lack of skill. Ok all the bickering was pretty funny but Hawke had become an irritating goofball that only Varric could love. The prospect of an incompetent Hawke left alone on an Act III battleground was looming over me.

If I wanted to avoid that situation, I had to form parties that made narrative sense as well. Hawke also had to become a little more sensitive. Most companions were neutral enough that she could have gone the other way but working towards friendship seemed easier. I was also kind of fascinated by the weird elf. He’s simultaneously repulsive and appealing. He has a Final Fantasy over sized sword sort of thing going on.

At this point, I dug into the tactical system which I misunderstood completely. I thought the game read each condition sequentially in a loop. It works more like a looping case statement. The list is read until a condition is true, the action is fired and the loop starts over. This explained why every one died without consuming a single health potion. It also means that you need to pay close attention when you upgrade abilities. Shorten one cool down time and your whole tactical set up can go out of whack.

Dragon Age II gets criticized for a lot of things but its companion management menus are the worst. You can only view companions when they are in your party. There are quite a few safe places to gather your party but your player home is the only place that has storage. Want to know how that in person dialogue just impacted a relationship? Go gather your party. Stashed away some cool weapons and accessories for higher levels or specific companions?. Memorize your companions’ weapons stats, dig in your storage, gather your party, go outside and equip. Rinse and repeat. Upgrading skills and tactics? Gather party, go outside, look at skills menu, memorize cool down times, look at tactics menu, adjust if necessary, go find an easy fight, stand around and see if it actually works. Rinse and repeat.

The world building is not impressive but the characters are engaging enough to make up for it. I laughed out loud at dialogue quite a few times. I don’t remember Origin’s combat that well but I don’t remember flailing around as much as I did in this game. You can pause the action and order your companions around but I was consistently too worked up to remember that until sometime in Act II. I kind of admire Bioware developers for creating these complex systems and user unfriendly interfaces while optimistically assuming players will just figure it out but they might get better reviews if they helped us out a little. I did really like the reputation system and the pace of the game. I’d love to do a replay as a male rogue raging asshole Hawke who is obsessed with Isabella.

Warning: Spoilers Ahead

From Inquisition I knew something of what happened in Kirkwall but not exactly how it all went down and that was the most rewarding part of the game for me. At the beginning of Inquisition, I remember Cullen expressing regret for his biases. The whole Dragon Age II conflagration rests on Hawke not knowing some critical things and Cullen just being willfully blind. I did feel a little warmer to Cullen in Inquisition and my original Inquisitor even tried to have a romance with him. My Qunari Inquisitor despised him and perhaps rightly so.

Hawke only lost two companions. She wasn’t friendly enough with Isabella for her to return and she killed Anders. She didn’t really want to but he just couldn’t be trusted. All companions agreed except weak willed Merrill who was easy to win over. Despite being a mage, Hawke sided with the Templars. Kirkwall mages had caused her nothing but grief. As she said to Fenris just before the final battles, “Abominations and blood mages? It must be Tuesday.”

The ending was a little anticlimactic. Varric just finishes his story for Cassandra. Hawke did lead the city for a short time and then quietly disappeared. Knowing this whole story would have made picking sides in Inquisition a lot more interesting.