On My Shelves: Dragon Age: Inquisition

As my prior reviews of Dragon Age and Dragon Age II made clear, those were impressively good games with excellent characterization, good gameplay, and a deep and engaging plot. A third game had an incredibly high standard to live up to.

Instead, the first and second games now have a problem of living up to the third.

The game starts with a column of warriors – presumably Templars – marching on one side, a column of mages on the other, heading for a massive keep in the distance. Starting the game… causes the tower to explode.

You begin in media res, your character – not even fully defined – stumbling through a terrifying dream – or is it real? – pursued by hideous creatures. As you flee, a light shines out, a figure of pure illuminance reaching out and sending you past them…

… to awaken in a dungeon. There you are confronted, immediately, by two characters familiar to players of the prior games: Cassandra, the soldier who interrogated Varric in the framing story of Dragon Age II, and Leliana, the bard-assassin who plays a significant part in the original Dragon Age and may show up (depending on circumstances) in Dragon Age II. You are accused of some terrible crime you don't even understand, based on a strange brand or sigil on your hand that spits green light, and then dragged out to see…

A bleeding green wound in the sky. And as you will soon discover, only you can close this Rift… and somewhere in you, is the answer to what has happened, and how you can save, or damn, the world of Thedas.

Dragon Age: Inquisition is one of the best video roleplaying games made. It builds upon the world, and the characters, created in both prior games, takes lessons from both in storytelling and drama, and then – astonishingly – takes lessons from the more open-world games like Skyrim or Fallout and applies them as well.

The latter is perhaps the most startling single change. The prior games had extremely limited player mobility and choice. Sidequests were relatively small in number and took place in a highly constrained set of locations which were not very complex.

In Dragon Age: Inquisition, by contrast, the different sections of the world you are sent to are huge, and often have dozens of sidequests, some of which are germane to your main quest, others utterly irrelevant but fun. Your character is somewhat more constrained in design than prior games, but only in order to fit into the basic part of the plot that you are in.

And what a plot it is. Naturally it's a world-threatening one – few epic games aren't going to do that in one way or another – but the nature of that threat, when you find it out, is both jawdropping and, I found, extremely satisfying, because it fits with the world – and at the same time gives a player of all three games and key DLCs the "oh, CRAP" reaction that you really want when facing something that badass. It seems, at first, that you've got a fairly simple (ha!) job to gather reinforcements, negotiate some kind of peace between the factions that have been sundered by recent events, and then eventually seal the great wound in the sky.

But that is actually only the beginning of your quest, and it will be many, many hours before you start to even see the likely end. Your adversary is extremely smart, terrifyingly powerful, and their goals are not as clear as they might seem at first.

Still, you are not alone in your quest. You will gather a lot of people to assist you on your quest, and each of them will have their own particular interests and sidequests to bring you closer to them in one fashion or another.

 

Warning: Many Spoilers Ahead!!!

 

 

 

Once more, the wisecracking, sharpshooting, pulp-fiction-writing dwarf Varric is one of the major stars. Varric's presence not only provides continuity with the prior games but also leads to various key plot threads because of his knowledge and connections.

Cassandra – previously seen only in framing sequences – becomes one of your first companions, and potentially one of your closest. She, too, has secrets that will help you on your quest, but they come with prices that you'll have to assist her in paying.

Others include Iron Bull, a Qunari mercenary who is far more than he seems; Solas, an apostate mage with deep, deep knowledge of the Fade that is crucial for your quest; Vivienne, a noble mage of Orlais, one of the most fashion and manipulation conscious characters in the game; Sera, an elven rogue with a Cockney accent and terrible manners hiding a hopeful, perhaps even innocent, soul; and several more.

There are also several characters from other games seen at various points in the game, not the least of them being the Champion of Kirkwall – and if you made sure to prepare the background of your campaign correctly, based on your playthroughs of the prior games, it will be YOUR Champion of Kirkwall, the main Player Character from Dragon Age II! Another – again, dependent on exactly how you told the game events played out in the original Dragon Age – is none other than Teyrn Loghain himself, now a Gray Warden. There are more than a few other surprises of this nature in the game.

The presence of these two characters does lead up to the one disappointing, or at least frustrating, part of the game for me. There is a point where you are cornered in the Fade and have to make a choice about how to escape – and in essence you're given the choice to leave the Champion behind, or leave Loghain behind.

Given the way you can, and perhaps likely will, play the main character, this leaves out two obvious OTHER choices which really, really should have been options. The first is "both of you go on, *I* will deal with this Fade monster and keep him off your asses!"; given that at that point your character is the only person with the known capability to rip holes into or out of the Fade physically, that makes considerable sense. They go through the available rift, and you just might be able to escape yourself by opening your own doorway, so to speak. Sure, that's going to set you up for a HELLISH battle on your own, but that's the risk you take, right?

The other obvious option is "We leave no one behind. We have the Chosen of Andraste (the current PC), the Champion of Kirkwall, and one of the greatest of the Gray Wardens here, assembled together. We're going to take this monster on, and make it flee from us!" (or, alternatively, you all charge it and dash past through the rift once you've shoved it back for a moment).

That is, however, the only really sour note in the entire game for me – and even it is not that bad, it's just a couple missed opportunities. The rest of the game is well planned, well paced, and provides the player a LOT of opportunity for sidequests large and small.

There is also an overarching subplot with building alliances and how you choose to perform this subplot will affect various resources made available to you throughout the game.

Oh. And make sure, as with modern movies like the Marvel Cinematic Universe entries, to stay through the credits. Because there is an after-credits scene that will absolutely drop your jaw to the ground if you have understood the history and mythology of Thedas as presented through the games.

This game gets a top ranking from me. If you like computer RPGs at all, this is truly a must-play!