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Dragon Age II is really awful.

If you’ve heard anything about this game, I don’t need to tell you how insane it is that there are like 6 maps total in the entire game. You are constantly retreading the same ground, over and over again, with the game calling it a different place. It’s pretty insane. The fact that the game even highlights this with an achievement, rewarding you for walking through the same cave map 10 times, adds an extra level of crazy to the mix.

That’s really just the beginning, though.

The loot in this game is completely fucked up. You get “vendor trash” items that just flood your inventory and you sell for cash, which is fine, I guess, but most of the gear you pick up is similarly useless. Most members of your party have armor or weapons they won’t part with. You can’t change their equipment, besides maybe their accessories. The only character you can completely customize is your own and, well, since you’re only one of three different classes, the gear for 2 of those classes becomes completely useless. If you’re a mage, and find some bitching warrior armor, you might as well just sell that shit immediately, because it is a useless piece of junk. Even most of the gear you pick up that you could use is a waste of space. There’s no strategic trade-offs of buffs. It is either clearly worse or clearly insanely better than what you have equipped. Add to this the fact that you get so much money in the game and have absolutely nothing to spend it on, and you have a gear system that’s really useless.

The story just decides to fall into tiny pieces at the end of the game, too. Nothing that happens makes any sense at all, because they’re trying to desperately to only have to design one series of end game bosses. No matter what you do, or what decisions you make, you have to fight the same two end game bosses, and that makes what decisions you make in the story feel completely useless. It’s a really stupid end to a fairly decent story.

What’s worse, that stupid end reflects extremely badly on Varric, the character, because of the pointless wrapper narrative of the game. Varric is supposed to be a great storyteller, but he couldn’t spin the ending into something more interesting? I guess he’s not as great a storyteller as the game makes him out to be. It’s jarring when the wrapper narrative jumps into the game, because you will play for hours and hours without it having anything to do with anything, and in the end, it makes absolutely no important contribution to the overall story. If you’re going to do something like that, go all out. This game doesn’t, and it hurts for it.

Yeah, Dragon Age II is a pretty fucking terrible game in a lot of respects.