Dragon Age: Origins, or Tooling Around Ferelden with Alistair
By aaronverber 7 Comments
Spoilers ahead! Not that you couldn't see it coming. I mean, it's called Dragon Age: Origins, right? I'm going to assume you know about the origins, so it stands to reason that...yeah. Anyway. This is your final warning. Also, know that this is just one short thought of about a million I could have about Dragon Age. This one just seemed most worthy of being shared.
I didn't start Dragon Age: Origins intending to play like a bro. In fact, I had decided to start my character with as few prejudices as possible. I just hoped that he would find his own way in the world, and that I would find something at all. This had the humorous side effect of making my character sound like a complete idiot at the beginning of the game. Not only did poor, confused Eckard ask a lot of awkward and abrupt questions, but he also didn't really care what happened during his origin story. As a city elf, he was supposed to hate the humans who teased and tormented his people. Eckard, however, was a bit spineless in the beginning. He never backed down from a fight, but he didn't have much passion. He was quiet and lost. He had nothing to believe in.
I don't (or didn't) feel the same way as my character, at least not consciously. But a part of me, a big part of me, must have identified with that. My character and I were, to some extent, searching for something. By the time the Grey Wardens had been betrayed at Ostagar, though, we had found it. Eckard and I shared a loathing for treacherous Loghain. What a prick.
But it wasn't Loghain's treachery against Eckard that had me so upset. When I discovered that Alistair had also survived, I was a little worried: he can, at times, be a bit of a whiny tool. And then he told me how he wanted to hold a proper funeral for Duncan and travel to Orlais and that he and Eckard were in it together. I was touched. Eckard, doubly so. It was at that point that I decided Eckard and Alistair would be good buddies. There would be no romance--that's not what we needed. We were, as it turned out, looking for a friend. Besides, Alistair seemed more like a ladies man, hangs-out-at-that-bar-you-hate-but-go-to-all-the-time-anyway sort of dude. It was quite the bromance.
I rolled around town with three warriors and a mage for most of the game, feeling like a tool most of the time, but a polite tool nonetheless. Alistair was always in the party. Eckard always had his back. At every twist and turn in the plot, he sided with Alistair. They liked the same things, hated the same bloodmages. But there was one thing I had to disagree with him on: he had to become king. And I always felt a little bad about that. I could tell he didn't want it, but hoped it would be a sort of character building exercise. Boy was he pissed when I chose him over that other bitch. I then felt even worse about using my maxed-out persuasion to talk him down. And when it came time to kill the Archdemon, which I hardly cared about after being so satisfied by Eckard's disemboweling of Loghain, I took one for the team, for Alistair, and sacrificed my character (without even realizing this would be completely retconned later, I might add).
Few video game characters stay with me after I've finished a game: Manny Calavera, Urdnot Wrex, and Joker (though only in Mass Effect 2, really) are a few of the standouts. To that, I add Alistair. As I get older and busier, I realize that video games might one day take a back seat in my life. But if there is one thing that can keep me coming back, it's characters like Alistair. He made me laugh. He made me care. He made me play. And yes, he made me cry.