Crooked Bee
(no longer) a wide-wandering bee
RPS' John Walker shares his analysis of Bioware's latest masterpiece.
http://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2011/03/31/analysis-dragon-age-ii/
http://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2011/03/31/analysis-dragon-age-ii/
But the issue goes deeper than just mechanically. The game doesn’t seem to have the wherewithal to manage such a complex and nuanced story in its own narrative. At a certain point I had no idea which blood mage was which, as every single quest blurred into one. I’d deliberately defy orders to kill them/arrest them, and try to set them free (the angle I’d chosen to take for my character), and nearly every time they’d turn into a demon and I’d have to kill them anyway.
Which is, in fact, the model for most of the game. Where BioWare’s wonderful Knights Of The Old Republic offered the illusion of choice, changing the way you behaved in the fixed events, Dragon Age II offers not even an illusion. Do you want to open door A or door B? Both open up into a fight where you kill someone, but door A meant you wanted to. And this, tragically, even applies to the game’s floppy, hapless ending. ... In the end Dragon Age II has nothing to say about slavery, subjugation, or acculturation – themes that shone in Origins. It pretends it does, but it’s all flap and waffle to excuse some more fights. It has nowhere to go, nothing to reach for.
And sadly, by the end, I stopped caring altogether. I switched the combat down to “casual” because I was so bored of having the same fight sixty-three times an hour. Without the need for tactics, and with the mindlessly stupid decision to have repeated waves of enemies, once I’d unlocked enough abilities to spam through combat it became an incredibly frequent irritant. And boss fights didn’t ask for any skill whatsoever – they were just long, boring sequences where the only challenge was to see if I culd time my party’s heals such that they stayed alive long enough to watch the baddy finally keel over.
The game then betrayed me in two extraordinary ways. Firstly the biggest plot point in the game – one that changed everything that I’d been working for – happened in a cutscene, caused by one of my companions, and would have happened no matter what actions I’d taken before. It was such a strikingly bad decision, yet again making me feel irrelevant to the action. Sure, it’s great that an NPC can heavily impact the world. But surely I should get to be involved on some level?
And then the fudged ending forcing me to go down the same path whichever major choices I’d made, left me feeling cold. That it ends on a mother-sodding cliffhanger felt par for the course of the frenzy of middle fingers being stuck up at me, and when it didn’t bother to tell me what happened next to any of my companions, I realised I didn’t care.
So yes – I have a lot of negative things to say about the game. Things that meant that at the end, despite its genuinely being a solid RPG in many respects (I could talk about the improved crafting, entertainingly daft side stories, companion quests (although what the bloody hell was Merrill’s actually about?), refined skill system, amazing background conversations, excellent voice acting, interesting Qunari plot, and much more), I ended up not really liking it as a whole.
I think saying “II” was probably this game’s biggest mistake. When it feels more like a sister product to Awakenings than a full, unique game, surely it would have more sense to market it that way, even at full price? It’s not a sequel to the epic Dragon Age: Origins, in any meaningful sense. When I think about the breathtaking scale, the depth of history, the religious conflicts, the horrendous racism and classism, and moving, emotional narrative, it seems daft to have considered this the second incarnation of that. It’s a game set in a single city, with nowhere else to go, exploring six years of a group of people’s lives. It’s confined, which is fine, but it’s not the epic RPG we were reasonably expecting.