Dragon Age II impressions: Dragon Ager

By bonbolapti March 16, 2011 2 Comments

 
There's a lot of things about Dragon Age II that I really want to talk about. Maybe I can't quite pinpoint it exactly or potentially just shouldn't, Because then I'd have to say “spoiler warning” and that's just such a fucking annoying thing to do in this day and age. (Seriously kids, you take the fun out of taking about things.) 
 

I can honestly though, come right out and say how it's kind of funny/strange that the game looks like it does. At a movie perspective the first one is the one that sets up the fiction, much like Origins did. Tremendous amount of lore rolling out, to give you an idea of their Post DnD imagination. So because of that, the look was never quite there, as if they didn't have quite all the assets, or placeholders for things just became final during that time because the game just had to come out. You know, the game generally didn't look like there was any production value at all.
 
So now Dragon Age II comes along and it is clearly the game with all the better stage make-up and costume design. Prettier environments, prettier people, but perhaps that makes it seem all too different from the first game. All the races look and feel drastically different, elves are tiny and frail, Qunari aren't big dudes in poorly done, 'black face' makeup. Dwarves, perhaps look a little more uncanny valley. Humans no longer [all] looking ugly as sin. One could make the argument that since it's a completely different continent things are allowed to look different. Perhaps, but Dalish elves and Qunari are far more alien then they originally looked. It's not a bothersome detail, but it'll be something to think about when the next Dragon Age comes along. Say, perhaps the next game will go back to taking place in Fereldan. Would you find that a little odd to look everything to be as different as it looks in this game?
 

No matter, there's also the comments to make about the voice acting, a lot more to it, in terms of additional voices, I mean. More accents flying around the city. I think it's for the better, as I said, it's probably a production value thing. (Or they really wanted to push things to sound more like they want them to.) There's also the matter of the main character. This is where people seem to get uppity. Sure, ok, yeah, Lady Hawke is probably the better voice actor. You can't, however, tell me that I will enjoy the game a lot more if I play through the game with the better voice actor, that's too much of an excuse. To be honest there's nothing wrong with Guy Hawke's voice, especially since they're the exact same character. Male Shepard is a terrible voice, he's still fucking awesome. People don't listen to Neil Young because he's a good singer. So I'm enjoying my play through as a Cary Elwes like dude.
 
There's actually, also another funny thing about the voice. It feels as though the look really has to match the words. Sure, in the beginning, you go all willy-nilly with the look, play around with how ever cool you think you're making him, then you hear Hawke speak. And it totally breaks your perfectly crafted character. I had that problem with the first bit of the game, but maybe I just shouldn't have edited him in the first place. I did after all, feel as though they wanted a very specific look to the main character. Someone so cool where you would look at him and go, “There's no need for me to edit this at all. I'd have to be stupid.” so maybe I feel as if I'm in the wrong a little bit for playing around with his face, I touched him up nicely in the Black Emporium though and am now satisfied with the look to voice ratio.
 
Then there's the little things, like how much some things feel adoptive from Mass Effect 2, menus specifically being the center of my comparisons. Only having to really worry/care about the inventory of Hawke. Mining materials instead of just collecting them feels really weird to me, especially if you just walk up to one Elfroot or something, that's alllll by itself and then it's treated like they're always going to go to that one small little plant to keep collecting them. It stranger to me how everything is a lot more action based than RPG feeling. I know it's a cosmetic thing for a console, but it does leave me a little impatient in battles, when I keep pressing buttons and enemies show up in waves at a time. I chose the warrior class because it's no different from being rogue save for lock picking and trap finding. I just like big swords and I cannot lie.
 

Lastly, Characters! I love the characters. They're all interesting enough to me where I would want to keep them all around equally. But I feel like this post is getting long enough and I don't want to get into them. I can say though, that the quality I loved about the first Dragon Age was the banter of your party members, So it definitely feels as though they worked on that a heck of a lot more in this game. Especially the way they interact to story as it unfolds, no static! You know what I mean? Nobodies standing around with their thumbs up their asses, and you're not waiting a little bit to hear what they have to say, only to have their dialogue make no real effect to the conversation at hand. So it's especially neat that this game even has specific moments in dialogue trees where you can let these other characters chime in to something that's happening.  

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