Dragon Age Part II

Or, as I like to call it, "Dwarf Politics, the Game".  As I mentioned in my last review, I was about to start recruiting dwarves into my medieval army of awesome, having already recruited humans, mages, and elves.  What I didn't know was that it would take about as long to recruit the dwarves as it took to recruit the other three classes combined.

You see, the dwarves' problem that caused them to be unhelpful in my quest to stop the army of demons was that they lacked a king, as two high-ranking dwarves were fighting for the crown.  Obviously, this meant I had to decide for them, by assisting one of the aforementioned douchebags and lifting him up over the other.  I chose the prince, because his representative was closer, and was immediately sent on multiple quests to improve the prince's good name, culminating with a demand request that I find a "Paragon", some sort of super-citizen, to help persuade the dwarf congress. 

About 6 hours later, I was through my 4th dungeon, having slaughtered ever kind dwarf, demon, monster and ugly that the game had throw at me, and was told, yet again, that the paragon I sought was in yet another dungeon, just past this one.  I don't think this explanation explains just how utterly soul-crushing this process was, but I finished up leaving a trail of blood through six soul-crushing dungeons, all of which looked no different from the one I had just finished, except for the fact that this dungeon's rocks were of a slightly different hue than the previous four.

The only shining grace for all of this torment was Oghren, the dwarf warrior you recruit midway through the mission.  Much like the characters had been the saving grace for the early part of the game, Oghren was the only this keeping me from killing both of the royal assholes and making my character the ruler of all dwarfkind.  He's highly entertaining, very powerful in combat, and exceedingly quotable.  Even after I left the dwarf's city, I kept using him in pretty much every battle, just for his amusing banter with the more uptight members of my party.

Once I had finally crowned a new king and gotten the hell out of that hole, I had entered the endgame, and the story started moving extremely quickly.  I set foot in one, maybe two dungeons for the rest of the game, and finished not that much later.  I crowned a human king in about a third of the time it took me to crown a dwarf one, the waged a final battle against all demon-kind, and it turned out to be very fulfilling.  Once I had gotten into the endgame, I didn't want to put the game down, as I barreled towards the end.  Unfortunately, this meant I missed out on a lot of the sidequests and downloadable content, so in order to do any of that, I had to start the game over again.

My final words on the game are that it's fun to a point.  Sure the story is well-written and all around good, and the characters are wonderful, but the sheer length of the game can drive one to madness.  I'm not sure how much longer a second campaign will keep me interested, as I already feel the annoyance of Dwarf Politics closing in, but it was worth it to finish once. It's not great, or at least not as great as, say, Mass Effect 2, but Dragon Age: Origins is certainly a lot better than most entries in the genre.