The Obligatory Long-Ass Dragon Age: Inquistion Review

[queenlua]

Presented in bulleted form, because apparently I only think in bullet lists these days.

• I highly doubt I would've gotten very far at all, if I hadn't been primarily drinking and/or bantering with friends while playing the first twelve hours or so of the game. And I'm not entirely sure whether I would've gotten to up to, say, the What Pride Had Wrought mission if I hadn't been unemployed and thus in possession of an extreme abundance of time. It's a long, long game, and a lot of it is padding. There are swaths of missions that I thought of as soothing more than having properly fun, engaging gameplay, if that makes any sense. By the time I got to What Pride Had Wrought, I was pretty well hooked, and the quests were consistently exciting and fun—but that's a long way into the game. In principle I don't like recommending things that get "good" only after an insane upfront time investment, and yet, I didn't dislike the early parts, and I liked the later parts a whole awful lot. So I dunno. Definitely play this game if you have a huge swath of time on your hands that you don't mind spending on one game; all others, use their own judgment, I guess.
  
  I've never played an MMORPG, so I could be wrong, but there were a lot of elements that made me wonder if I was basically playing a single-player MMORPG. The part where the game only "begins" once you've gotten to some high level and thus can take on the more exciting quests (dragons, etc). The dozens of grindy fetch quests that feel more like a way to pass time and get "yay quest completed" endorphins rather than solid gameplay. But I could be talking out of my ass, here; I don't actually know if these are MMORPG things or not. But they feel like what I imagine MMORPGs are like.


• What surprised me the most about the gameplay was how very D&D it all was. Weapons are expensive, so loot is your primary source of equipment, but the loot is unpredictable and forces you to make weird equipment choices. Even the names of items lean heavily on D&D tradition—you really want masterwork as opposed to regular items, you've got Enhanced and Superior versions of items, and so on. It's all as familiar as the Fire/Fira/Firaga progression and Ribbons are to Final Fantasy players.
  
  I think it'd be interesting to really dig into the subleties of the gameplay differences between JRPGs and western RPGs (and the various subgenres thereof)—what earlier games are these games imitating, both of the video and pen & paper varieties? For instance, I strongly suspect it could be said, without exaggeration, that all modern western RPGs draw inspiration from Dungeons & Dragons. The influence is obvious in this game, of course, but you could probably find it in other western RPG video games as well. Certainly all western pen & paper RPGs are described in relation to D&D. And it's no coincidence that Full Sail, a university devoted primarily to producing video game developers, had D&D co-creator Dave Arneson on faculty to teach the intro class.
  
  So yeah, I'm curious if JRPG traditions started with D&D and then drifted into their own territories, or if there was a similarly influential pen & paper game in Japan, or something like that? I know very little about the pen & paper gaming scene in Japan, besides what I gleaned from the Tenra Bansho Zero kickstarter—but TBZ, while hugely popular, came out in 1997, which is far more recent than D&D's 1974. (Even with TBZ, though, you can draw some interesting parallels—for instance, TBZ has a much bigger emphasis on having small groups of characters split off for more contained "scenes" of character interaction, which makes D&D veterans start screaming "DON'T SPLIT THE PARTY" and panicking. Similarly, most JRPG games I know will split the party into groups at various points, and have smaller scenes, whereas DA:I is mostly Your Whole Party Is All Together and such.)


• I wish the game got you the hell out of the Hinterlands earlier. I feel a bit bad saying that, as I don't think the area is laid out badly, but it has a sort of inescapable Generic Fantasy feel that's hard to kick. And it doesn't help that so many Hinterlands quests are so dreadfully dull—herd Druffy the buffalo! find food for the villagers! I can suspend disbelief for a while, but when there's a giant hole in the sky threatening to undo everything and I'm the only one who can fix it, I dunno, I think I've probably got better shit to do with my time.
  
  Some reviewers claim you can focus on just the main quest line if you want to, and leave sidequests to the completionists, but that's not quite right. Tackling main plot missions as soon as they're available will put you on the low end of the level spectrum, and while you can go for it anyway, you'll have to invest substantially more time in combat (strategic view is interesting but time-consuming), in crafting weapons/armor/etc, in optimizing party makeups, and so on. That's tricky to do when you're just starting out and trying to blaze through as fast as possible, especially when the scattered, barely-coherent tutorials don't give you a great idea of how strategic view and crafting work, leaving you to flail around with trial-and-error.
  
  So you do a lot of sidequests seal a lot of rifts.


• Hinterland gripes aside, there's a tremendous amount of love put into some of these areas. The Hissing Wastes are vast and gorgeous and eerie in the moonlight. The Emerald Graves are lush as you'd expect a fantasy elf forestopia to be. And the places feel keenly alive—with signs of others passing through, wildlife twitching through the underbrush, and scattered ruins around every corner. Seeing something like a dragon perching on a cliffside and then swooping across the sky is truly delightful.
  
  I spent a lot of time wondering about the possibilities for some of these areas—if the game were less AAA, and a little more patient. One reviewer argues that the Hissing Wastes have a unique aesthetic sparseness, but I disagree. Things are more spread out there, certainly, but there's still quest markers to check, shards to collect, rifts to close. How about a game where we wander those Hissing Wastes, but without any quest markers to guide us, with only the stars to guide us, and maybe some passing hints from party members, or strangers at camps we encounter—that would be a whole new level of haunting and enchanting.
  
  And I think the game hits this at times, actually. I found some of the most effective storytelling moments were, not the main plot missions, but in some of the random, optional dungeon crawls. Such as: you break into a Ventatori fortress in the desert, and discover a bunch of mages and demons fighting—except, they're all frozen like status. Probably some creepy time magic stuff has been going on here. You try hitting some enemies to see if they start moving. No movement. Dorian says something snarky about the Ventatori. You rummage through some papers—and, unlike the random landmark plaques, you actually want to read these, because now there's a mystery, something to be solved. There's a note about Alexius's failure. You wonder what Dorian thinks of that, but he's silent. There's a creepy noise across a crumbled staircase. You investigate.
  
  It's all ambient, all existing well before you arrived; the fun is in piecing together what happened, and where to go from there. It's the kind of storytelling that the best D&D campaigns have in spades. I wonder if you could convey more of the game's primary plotline this way; it'd make for a fascinating experience.


• The romance element was fun and I was very pleased with my chosen house husband, i.e. Cullen. That being said, I started snarking about it and now I'm starting to sketch out ideas for a subversive dating sim where all the options have hidden complex shitty social pitfalls and the only winning move is not to play and someone stop me


• The Fade! Holy shit, the Fade mission on its own is worth the price of admission. Reminded me quite a bit of the Dead Sea in Chrono Cross, in terms of "wacky unsettling mad-intriguing aesthetics," and made me wonder a bit about "weird otherworldly intermission" as a trope in fantastic/mythological works in general. This goes all the way back to Gilgamesh crossing the Sea of Death to talk with Utnapishtim, y'all. And I love those when they happen. A+ would fall into the Fade again.


• Killing your first dragon is a truly awesome moment. Probably the most exciting boss battle I've played since MGS3's The End, which is the best boss battle in any video game I've ever played. So yeah, dragonslaying is as great as everyone says it is.
  
  This is probably an outdated observation, but—when I slew that first dragon and finished jumping for joy, running laps around my recliner, etc, I realized that I hadn't triggered a single quicktime event the whole battle. No "press X to not die" here; I was using the same basic gameplay and controls I'd been using all game. But now I'd used it to slay a dragon.
  
  Are quicktime events still in fashion? I know they were back when I played MGS: Peace Walker and God of War and all that, but yeah, if they're still around, here's a pretty good argument against them.


• It occurs to me now I have gotten all the way to the end of my review and I have not squeed about Dorian even once. What even. Dorian is clearly best character everyone else can go home. Actually, hell, probably I don't need to scream about him much because, if Tumblr/Reddit is any indication, he's basically everyone else's favorite too. How convenient.
  
  I like Cole's empath/mindreading antics quite a bit because that is Kind of My Thing, but also I liked the twist they provided on it here, where his confusion about how things work in the Fade vs IRL, and whose thoughts he's reading and all that, is a pretty profound source of distress/confusion for him. Calm understanding empath characters are boring; I've seen recalcitrant/bitter empaths and loved 'em; this is a new angle I hadn't seen before and I dig it.
  
  Most the other characters were somewhere between "pretty alright" and "meh." Hearing Solas talking about the Fade was pretty hot & his companion quest was interesting. Cassandra in theory could be cool, and she has her moments, but there's just something too Generic Knight of Valor-y for me to be excited about. Oh, and Leliana is great. I'm not just saying that because of the pet ravens. Probably.
  
  ("hey lua what's that you've got in the corner there" "definitely not elaborate outlines and notes for a potential dorian pavus backstory fic that would be too predictable" "..." "okay yeah it's definitely that" jfc i need to get this out of my system)

in conclusion dragon age inquistion is a game

*bows*

Comments

[amielleon]

Yeah, I bought this game and then never got more than 5ish hours in because it was just... a lot of wandering around... and my map got bugged and that was the second time EA had disappointed me that day (first was DRM completely preventing me from getting my game for 5 hours, requiring me to pirate a crack) and I put it down in a rage and never picked it back up.

So hearing that it takes like 12 hours to get to the good part kind of makes me not want to take another swing at it. :D;

Regarding JRPGs, I know imperialgazetteer on tumblr knows something of the D&D genealogy. I believe it trickled into the early Final Fantasy class systems?

[missxylia]

Yay, glad to hear you liked it! I'll keep this all in mind when I play it myself, ahaha... I will keep an eye on Dorian when I do.