Review – Dragon Age II

The difficult second album

Dragon Age II had a very difficult act to follow. Dragon Age: Origins was critically acclaimed and crazy popular and Bioware made the bold/foolish choice of making the follow up very, very different.

Unlike the Mass Effect series Dragon Age II establishes entirely new characters. The plot follows Hawke, a young man/woman living in Lothering, the town that gets obliterated early on in Dragon Age: Origins. Forced to flee with their family across the sea to Kirkwall where further adventures occur. Most of these adventures involve trying to be the middle ground between two opposing forces.

Interestingly the plot is based entirely in the same town, you go into the countryside a bit, but you basically stay in one area which changes over time. It’s a really interesting idea and quite different to many other RPGs. Your decisions really come back to bite you in the arse/cover your arse as you go on, and it really causes you to think about what impact your decisions will have. What’s really disappointing is that there are about 4 locations. Bioware recycles environments so you have 2 or 3 caves, 2 or 3 indoor locations and they will block off various parts of the map to change it up. It’s like they anticipated a problem (being in the same game place for the whole game might get stale) and then decided to amplify it.

Combat has drastically changed in the sequel. Skills have been enormously trimmed down. Previously a school of magic had 16 skills in it. Now it has four spells and a number of improvements and passive effects. The fighting animation too is far more dynamic, your characters run around hacking, leaping and slashing where you point and click. It makes combat a lot shallower with fewer variables and options for different strategies but it also makes it far more dynamic and speedy. I found this to be fun, while lots of folks found it infuriating.

This simplification has happened to inventories too. While Hawke has a full, customisable inventory, all of the party members your recruit choose their own armour and can only use one weapon style. This locks them into particular builds somewhat. When they all have their own personalities, it raises the problem that if you don’t like Aveline, you have no option for another tank. This does feel like a bit of a loss of freedom and sometimes forces you to choose characters based on their skills rather than their company.

The cast of characters is, as one would expect of Bioware, brilliantly written, engaging and wonderfully voice acted. However, relationships have been simplified significantly. The gift system now means you find gifts which set off quests. Also, your conversations with party members have been made into quests now. It feels a lot less organic than Origins, where you’d sit around the campfire and give someone something you’d found hoping they might like it and discovering more about them. That said, the relationships are deeply engaging and I cared for all of the characters by the end of the game. What’s also wonderful is that all of the supporting cast have a life outside of Hawke. Each character has a home base somewhere in the city where you can visit them when they’re not in the party. There’s nice banter between characters as you run about and it’s really nice when they visit each other’s home bases. An excellent development is the evolution of approval to friendship/rivalry. This works in a similar way to approval in Origins. If you’re nice to beggars, the nice characters will be happy with you and your friendship will increase. If you’re unkind to them rivalry will increase. And if you reach top friendship/rivalry it will give you a bonus. I think it’s a really neat idea and it allows you to use characters who you disagree with without a significant problem.

Unusually the best character in the game can actually be Hawke. DAII takes after Mass Effect and has a dialogue wheel. Responses are diplomatic, sarcastic or aggressive and the wonderful thing is that the game actually acknowledges your responses and the world reacts to you based on this. If you’re normally diplomatic, in party dialogue Hawke will be a kind, noble stuffed shirt. If you’re sarcy, then Hawke will be an hilarious snark machine (my Hawke once entered a fight remarking upon her amazing hair). It’s wonderful and unusual to control a character who has actually feels like a character, unlike the mute Warden in Origins.

Once again, Bioware does a good job of representing women with a number of powerful and varied women in the main plot. I really liked how the party has three very different ladies. There’s Isabella foxy lady pirate who sexed up to the nines and, unlike most video game ladies, it makes sense. She is the “sexy one” she’s flirty and sexy and naughty. It all makes sense. Then the other ladies in the party Aveline is an unfeminine tank character who is tough as hell and covered to the neck, and the shy, sweet Merill who also has a surprisingly dark side (she’s brilliant acted by Eve Myles too, it caused me all of the feelings).

Then we get to the main problem with Dragon Age II which involved the plot and so is spoilerific. The main departure Dragon Age II makes from Origins is ditching the traditional fantasy narrative. The amazingly wonderful chosen one learns their skills across the game and then fights a nemesis who wronged them at the beginning of the story. Dragon Age II lacks an overarching narrative like this. In each act Hawke faces a different challenge, and throughout Hawke isn’t a remarkable chosen one, not a messianic figure. Hawke is just a person who is in a situation and trying to survive. Choice is taken away from you repeatedly in the game. In Acts two and three you are in between two opposing forces. You can choose to favour one, or pick a middle ground but whatever you choose forces outside your control force violence and you have to react. This is a loss of choice that I think is excellent. You can’t save everyone, you can’t make peace, you’re not good enough and you just have to do the best you can. It’s depressing and upsetting but it’s good storytelling.

The bad lack of choice comes at the end of the game. Here you are forced to pick between two sides because of circumstances beyond your control. If you choose to side with the mages, the mages are all killed and the chief mage goes insane and turns to evil magic forcing you to kill him. Then you have to face the boss of the Templars who is also insane and you kill her. If you side with the Templars, the mages are all killed and the chief mage goes insane and turns to evil magic forcing you to kill him. Then you have to face the boss of the Templars who is also insane and you kill her. Apparently the chief mage fight was added in the mage storyline because there weren’t enough boss fights. I find that immensely frustrating. You have a clear cut choice which makes the end result exactly the same and that’s shitty storytelling. I understand it’s to set up the pieces for the next game, but it’s a really crummy way to end the game.

My other issue with the ending is the narrative of Meredith, the villain. She’s the “Big Bad” but she doesn’t actually make her appearance until the end of act two. She’s a fantastic villain, she’s making a perfectly valid point but taking it too far. The game decided to undermine this by giving her an entirely needless Chekhov’s gun that makes her go crazy and be villainous. She has a perfectly sensible narrative arc and then they add in this bit of nonsense that makes her an unashamed villain, to the extent that she’s almost twirling a moustache. It takes out a really nice, grown up angle from the game.

There was a tremendous fan backlash against DAII after its release and so I was a bit cautious about getting it. Now, I realise that it committed a number of major nerd sins. It goes against the nerd empowerment fantasy (insignificant person ends up being incredible and world saving) in favour of a more upsetting, more difficult story where you can’t change the world. It simplified the game to make it more accessible, infuriating the small, vocal cult who insist that things must be super hard and difficult to understand to be good.)

Now, there are legitimate issues with Dragon Age II, the recycled maps are probably the worst as it’s pure laziness that underminded the interesting idea of setting a story over a long period in one location. The changes from Origins are certainly not all for the better, but Dragon Age II is fun, engaging and actually a pretty grown up fantasy game.