[personal profile] locker_monster
Finally finished Dragon Age: Inquisition last night. So that took me what? A month? A month and a week I think. According to my save files, I sunk 82 hours into the game. New record for me I think. This was me compulsively playing from start to finish, with no weeks off, so this is definitely the longest it's taken me to finish a game.

But this game is huge! There are so many places to explore and so many side quests and so many people to talk to. If it takes you less than 80 hours, then you haven't fully explored this massively beautiful and detailed world. Or sure, you could just run through the plot points but you'd be missing out on all of the things the developers took years to craft and perfect. I played it on a next gen console and it is gorgeous. The landscapes are so rich and varied.

Going in, I was expecting something like Mass Effect 3: a big war across all the realm. You do have to gather forces and forge alliances but the pay-off isn't as cool. The forces you gather really don't make a difference in the end, which is a shame. It would have made the ending way better. Because it's just you and your party at the end, hacking and slashing. You don't get to position your forces or decide which party member should go where. You don't even get to defend your base. So the game loses some points there. Or maybe my level was too high; there's no level cap in the game so you keep gaining power.

So a third game means another new main character, the Inquisitor. I wish you could have the same character across all three games, but I guess BioWare couldn't figure out a way to make it work. So yet again, I wasted more time than I would like to admit creating my character's face. There's just so many damn options and little tweaks that you can do. The hairstyles are horrendous though. There are a handful that are weird and the rest are all variations on bald. With bald looking like the only good option, I decided that my character should look like bald Karen Gillan because, well, why not. Actually, my Inquisitor turned out okay, but I just wish you could adjust your features after you hit okay. They had a way in the second game, a magic mirror, and I don't see why they couldn't bring that element back. Oh well.

Oh, but there was one cool thing. At one point in the story, they bring back Hawke, the main character from the second game and it's a cool crossover moment. This is where Dragon Age has an advantage over Mass Effect. With a different main character for each game, you have the opportunity to have three strong heroes together in one place. Alas, your character from the first game never shows up, but having Hawke show up was still nice. And since my Hawke was female and my Inquisitor was female, I had two kick ass women working together.

As always, the best part of a BioWare game are the characters. Nine party members to banter with and a few advisers to talk to, too. The writers make a real effort to make all of them unique so you're always experimenting with combination of party members to see how the party banter plays out. There wasn't any particular character that I really fell for so I just romanced one of my cute advisers since I didn't have to worry about maintaining his approval level. I do appreciate that your romance options are fairly open, but at the same time, this game felt more restrictive than the last game. In the last game, your character, no matter your gender, could pretty much romance any party member no matter their gender. Here, there are some limitations and that was kind of annoying. As a fantasy world, with different races, you'd think everyone would be a bit more inclusive.

The story was okay. A lot travelling around to different areas trying to secure help for the war. You get a pretty sweet base of operations, which was, naturally, huge. I kept finding rooms I didn't know about. I thought you would have to defend the fortress, since you had opportunities to upgrade certain aspects of it, but it never came up. I think I was expecting Mass Effect 3, but in a fantasy setting, and I guess that was wrong of me. BioWare shouldn't have to replicate things from its other series to make things work. Oh, and unlike Mass Effect, which relies heavily on your attachment to Shepard, Dragon Age can keep going and going with new main characters, so the world is more open ended. Heck, the story ends on a bizarre cliffhanger, so BioWare is clearly set to make more games in this world.

And despite all of the time it took me to finish the game, I'm actually ready to do another playthrough. You make a ton of choices in the game, so I want to see what happens when I make some other decisions. I always tend to play a male character on my second playthrough, mostly because my second playthrough is a showcase for my "is a big jerk and makes all of the mean decisions" character, so it's always easier to do that if I'm a guy. ;-)

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locker_monster

May 2019

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