Dragon Age: Origins

I'm growing quite fond of Bioware's recent offerings to the gaming world.    Mass Effect is easily one of my favorite recent games, and the second game in that series is every bit as spectacular.  So, with my new-found love for their brand of Western RPG's growing, getting  Dragon Age: Origins was one of the easiest purchasing decisions I've made since I heard that two of my all-time favorites, Kirby Super Star (one of the most underrated games ever, possibly the best game one the SNES and my all-time favorite) and Punch-Out!! (an absolute classic in every way) were getting remade.

But was my decision justified?  Ehh...well, take a look after the jump.

First, I want to talk about the character creation system.  I like the general idea - design your heroes yourself, as opposed to having their design imposed on you.  But in practice - I dunno.  Around the time I had spent 3 hours playing with a slider bar trying to get my female city elf (Yes, I play the female hero in DA, as well as using FemShep in ME.  It's my opinion that Samus shouldn't have to bear the burden of being the only female game protagonist that I can tolerate.) I started losing interest in the game, so much as I was gaining interest in making sure that I had created the cutest little mass murderer possible.

This didn't annoy me, though - what caught my eye is that Bioware still refuses to allow the player to change the character's body type with the same level of intricacy as we change the body.  Not that I couldn't understand the sheer restrictions of game space and programming time, not to mention the inherent dangers of giving gaming nerds control over a female character's three sizes, but if we're going to call the process "Character creation", then Bioware has to make the whole character customizable.  I didn't spend all that time designing, nay, sculpting my character's divine cuteness, including closely editing her check bone depth, blush levels and the number of nose hairs in her left nostril, only to have that finished head plopped onto the same basic body as every other female elf in the game.

Moving on to the actual gameplay, I think it was about 4-5 hours of play time until i started getting the sneaking suspicion that I was merely playing a better written, single-player version of World Of Warcraft (the less said about my one foray into the hells of that game, the better.  Just know that I have condemned it to a very personal level of hell, where there is no escape and floggings are given on a rather generous schedule).  Not that this wasn't instantly an improvement of WoW, but around the time I was ordered on my fifth quest to track down three different people at different ends of the world and deliver important items/sweet death to them, the similarities started to get annoyingly noticeable.

The writing is mostly the saving grace of this game - just like with Mass Effect, Bioware has a talent for creating entertaining characters for the player to control.  Although I was a little annoyed that, unlike ME, the main character was unvoiced in conversations (I immediately chose FemShep once I learned that she would be accompanied by the fantastic Jennifer Hale), the other characters more than make up for this.  Alistair in particular is quite entertaining in conversations, especially since I have yet to piss him off through quest-related dickery (My roommate was unfortunate in this regard and received a bitching-out that will be told of in legends).

And it's good that the characters and writing are stellar, because Lord knows, I'm sure not playing this thing for the gameplay.  Combat in particular is frustrating to the point of murderous rage.  For an example of how Dragon Age is driving me to homicide, in order to attack an enemy, you have to right-click on them.  Sounds simple enough in theory, but since right-click is also the input for telling your character to move to a specific point, a missed click will cause your character to run around the enemy while doing nothing else, never stopping to notice that said monster is trying to chew out her throat.  Add the fact that the game delights in sending five-ten enemies at you in packs, and one errant click can lead to what could be adequately described as monster gang rape. 

This point also raises the game's difficulty, which tends to range on the hardness scale but usually favors demonic.  The game was nearly unplayable until I got a dedicated healer on the third major quest, and which point the game shifted from "actively malicious" to merely "agonizingly tedious".  Then there's the fact that your teammates rely on you for their every command.  Apparently Bioware skipped out on the whole "Ally AI" system, since they basically require you to walk your teammates through every single motion.  For instance, I once had my party wiped out in a long battle because Wynne, my healer, stopped healing as she had run out of magic, despite the fact that we had plenty of magic potions, because I hadn't explicitly told her to take a potion when her magic gets low.  Excuse me, Bioware, but she's supposedly an experienced mage with years of experience under her belt, so I had figured she could be trusted to ensure that her most basic functions could work without a problem.

I'm going to stop here, because, truth be told, I still haven't finished the game yet.  I'm somewhere between halfway and two-thirds done, not that I can tell, because the last quest (hunting a werewolf in the woods for the elves) was so agonizingly boring as to drain the life from me.  I searched through a ruined temple, which seemed suspiciously like the just-as-ruined temple that I had searched in the mission before that, which seemed suspiciously like the still-pretty-ruined temple that I had searched in the mission before that.  I think I'm trying to deal with dwarves or something, I honestly can't remember.  I'll finish up this review if I ever find the end-game, but until then, know that Dragon Age is easily a weaker game than Mass Effect, but can still be decently fun if you enjoy good writing and characters.