On My Shelves: Dragon Age II

 

While I had enjoyed Dragon Age: Origins (and its DLC add-ons) immensely (see my prior review), things I had heard about Dragon Age II made me somewhat reluctant to get it; the most weighty of these being that unlike the prior game, Dragon Age II limited you to a single character, not to the several different choices of character (classes of Rogue, Warrior, Mage and species of Elf, Dwarf, and Human, with Dwarves unable to become Mages, and other choices of social class creating multiple combinations of character type, each of which had a different lead-in sequence and some different side quests) found in Dragon Age: Origins.

I came to regret my hesitation.

Firstly, the character creation was not quite as restrictive as comments implied. You could still choose your character sex and class, but not species, and the basic background – part of a four-member family fleeing from Lothering during the Blight of the first Dragon Age game – remained unchanged.

But in exchange for these restrictions you gain a vast amount in the power of the story you see.

You are a refugee from the Blight in Ferelden, fleeing to the distant city of Kirkwall. Your family has noble connections in Kirkwall, and so at least you expect to find a good life, even if you have been uprooted from the place you called home since you were born.

But time has not been kind to your uncle in Kirkwall, and you find that, far from a life of luxury, you have to start from the bottom…

From there, the plotline has multiple threads and sidequests, even though the general outline of your characters progression is set in stone. The combination of careful character background design and various choices you get to make during play, however, reduces the feeling of a complete railroad; it is possible to have multiple different outcomes even in some pretty plot-significant events.

What really makes Dragon Age II stand out – even more than its predecessor – is the vividness of the characters that Hawke (last name of the main character) encounters throughout his/her adventures. Friends and enemies are detailed and often complex people whose closeness is affected, often drastically, by your choices.

Head and shoulders above all of them is Varric. Varric is not your first companion, or even your second; those slots belong to your still-living sibling (as far as I can tell one of them will die in the prologue regardless of choices) and to Aveline, the warrior you meet in the prologue. But Varric, a dwarven rogue with a uniquely powerful automatic crossbow, is the most central of the companion characters in more than one way. In a sense, really, he's even more a central character than Hawke her/himself, because a large part of the framing story is Varric being interrogated by a Seeker named Cassandra about exactly what happened in Kirkwall.

Varric is a complex man; cynical and snarky in conversation, he quickly shows that he's also a man of considerable honor, quick wit, skill, and hidden idealism. Despite his world-weary demeanor, if you play your character as a hero, he comes to admire Hawke as someone far more worthwhile than anyone else, and a fast and reliable friend. Despite this, he's also the one not-related-to-you companion who's not a potential love interest; this is actually a good thing, I think, even though I am left wondering why, exactly, it's okay to have humans and elves dating but not humans or elves dating dwarves.

Still, Varric is one of the major features that helps carry the game; his dialogue both in cutscenes and in random dialogue when you're walking from point to point simply sparkles with wit. He also turns out to be something of an artist in the literary sense; he writes novels of various genres, and has several separate sidequests that reinforce his character and connection to Hawke.

The other companion characters are also quite detailed, even if none of them (at least for me) quite achieved the … solidity of Varric. Aveline, widowed during the opening and reduced to mercenary or smuggling work (as is Hawke) just to get into the otherwised closed city, joins the City Guard and becomes one of your best contacts and one of the most important ways to help stabilize Kirkwall. Anders, a character returning from Dragon Age: Origins, is a man trying to work for the betterment of mages, while carrying a terrible secret within. Fenris, an escaped slave of the feared Tevinter Imperium, has a tormented past and an uncertain future – that Hawke can make heaven or hell.

Even some of the not-playable companion characters become distinct and important over the course of the game. The Arishok – leader of the stranded group of Qunari who are settled temporarily in Kirkwall – is perhaps the most interesting, as depending on how you encounter him and interact with him, he can seem like a total bastard or a noble, if somewhat alien, adversary placed in what is, for his people, an utterly impossible position; in the course of following Qunari-related plotlines you also get to learn a lot more about the Qun, their philosophy.

I admit that I play these games almost always on their lowest difficulty setting; I'm playing for the story and adventure, not to prove that I'm able to beat a machine at its own game or out-strategize other people on using mechanics and in-game tricks. Thus, it is the story that matters to me when playing, and Dragon Age II really delivered beautifully.

Even ignoring the very large number of sidequests which ranged from simple "fetch this item" to character-building encounters that helped define the people of the world and their relationship to you, the overall story of Dragon Age II was gripping, exciting, well-paced, and dramatic; I had quite a few moments of being truly immersed in the world of Thedas and the conflicts being played out in Kirkwall. (Interesting trivia note: the developers of Dragon Age had a difficult time deciding on the name of the world their adventures were taking place in, and during that time simply called it "the Dragon Age setting… abbreviated as "the DAS"…)

As mentioned earlier, Varric's interrogation as a framing story also worked well to maintain interest – and to allow you to skip various segments of time. In a way, I kind of regret that – it would've been nice to play through all those years – but the game might've ended up ridiculously long. The nice thing about the story design is that various details of even the final conflict do change, depending on your choices, so you can get some feeling that your choices matter.

And unlike Bethesda competitors Oblivion and Skyrim, it IS possible for your character to take the crown (although I, personally, would rather see you be able to do it much earlier than the game allows, when it might have changed things).

I very highly recommend Dragon Age II to any CRPG gamers!