The Blogtastic Blogfest That Is Getmeoutofthis.net!

Dragon Age: Origins was on sale for cheap from Gamefly, and I had a coupon I needed to use before I lost it. I had always been meaning to get to it, but I never had. Now, for like $12, it seemed like a good idea. I’ve now finished it, and I must say, I’m glad I played through it. It’s not a perfect game by any means, but it did a ton of things right, and was enjoyable overall.

What really got me about this game was the characters. I expected fairly bland fantasy characters from this game, but I wasn’t given that at all. Every character that joined my party was actually a fairly deep, complete individual, which stopped the generic fantasy setting from feeling as generic and fantasy. I really appreciated that. I’m glad Bioware has their shit together on character writing.
In addition, the conversations your party has with each other as you walk around are really great, and basically made me go, “Why the fuck isn’t that in Mass Effect 2?” It really brought the characters to life, and there were a ton of them: I used the same party for the entire game, and they were STILL having new conversations right up until the very end. It was a great way to show that, hey, the entire world doesn’t revolve JUST around your character, while also building up their character arcs even more.

I was especially impressed with Alistair. I went into the game figuring he would be the most generic dude, in order to sort of… be the guy to compare the rest of the party to, a la Ashley and Kaiden from Mass Effect. Instead, I found a very funny, very charismatic dude who was trying to hide his own insecurity and fear behind wit. He was a really complete character, and instead of immediately tossing him to the side, like I assumed I would, I kept him in the party the whole game, and romanced the shit out of him, marking one of the rare moments when an in-game character in one of these games turned out not to be a lesbian. Crazy! (Okay, I was hitting on Leliana too, so I suppose she was bi.)
His character was totally realistic, too. Part of that was the amazing performance on the part of his voice actor. I savescummed to get the “Recruit everyone” achievement, and I felt horrible about doing it. Alistair was really, genuinely hurt that I’d choose to do such a thing. Similarly, when the decision came to make the final sacrifice, because I didn’t lay down the law and allowed romantic talk, Alistair didn’t let me do the noble sacrifice, instead doing it himself without my permission, which also spurred an emotional reaction in me. The way he went about it was just so realistic. It worked. It was fantastic. Great characters.

The gameplay was… obviously not designed for the 360, but it was way more functional than I had expected. Granted, I also attempted to make it as controller-friendly as possible with my build. Instead of picking a class and skills with many activated abilities I’d have to juggle with limited hotkey space, I instead built a Rogue Bowazon Bard Ranger, which meant that I was firing arrows from afar, able to have a good view of the battlefield without jumping around, and that most of my powers were sustained buffs and animal summons, which meant I only had maybe one or two special attacks that needed to be hotkeyed. This worked really well, and actually fit my style in general pretty well too. However, during the short sequences where I had to control a mage, for example, it seemed pretty clear that the game was designed for a PC, as you just had too many powers to switch between.
I’d also have problems selecting things. Since I couldn’t just click on objects, I had problems destroying barriers, for example, or always talking to party members when I was trying to loot bodies. Granted, it worked most of the time, but it was just clunky enough to show that this wasn’t designed for consoles, and would work better on the PC.

Don’t let that stop you from playing it, though, if you don’t want to do the PC thing. It’s still a great game, and a lot of fun. I’m really glad I finally got around to it. Hopefully I won’t wait so long when Dragon Age 2 comes out. Also, hopefully I can borrow the Awakening Disc from someone and play through it. That would also be fun. But maybe I need a little RPG break first. Heh. That was a lot of RPG!