I finished Resonance of Fate some minutes ago and the ending did not answer any of my questions. Honestly, I don't even know what questions I should ask, because the game did not even bother to reveal its most basic overall story-arch to me.
Desperately looking for some kind of synopsis I found this Wikipedia article and... well, now I am wondering where the author got this massive amount of information from. All I knew was that [Spoilers obviously] Leanne was supposed to die at age 20 and that she was one of 20 children in some weird experiment. I didn't know anything about the antagonist, apart from his struggle to control Zenith, a kind of "god-machine". I didn't know who the girl with the horns was, I didn't know why at the end everyone seems to want to die or why on earth all of a sudden everyone wants to kill me (and to die). I could not make out the intentions of any major faction in this game, including my own party.
Basically I was doing what my "Mission Memo" said for over 74 hours and it kept me entertained. But the amount of relevant story information that was revealed to me in this game is at a personal all-time low. In the future JRPGs' regionalization process should focus more on enhancing the weak storytelling. Completing one undefined story after another is slowly getting on my nerves.
First of all, the game was a solid 4-star-RPG. An epic tale, which Dragon Age II should have been, with several bad design decisions and a few (very annoying) bugs. The story itself was the strongest part of the game. A journey through epic battles and interesting places. Many enjoyable things to tell about, but... seriously... the last mandatory boss is a major faux pas!
I am always there when people don't come up with something cool. A fucking dragon fight. That was the most boring and unoriginal thing they could have done. I hate dragon boss fights... seriously I hate them with passion. They are for an ending of a game what the "slay-six-rats-quest" is for the beginning: you expect it, you have seen it a dozen times before and you are ultimately just bored and completely sick of it. This one in particular was predictable since the ending of Chapter 2 so you could slowly adapt to the fact that (part of) the ending would be really really lame. Other games however are surprising in that respect and therefore even more annoying since you expected a great finale and all you get is a boring trash dragon. Two Worlds II anyone?
As far as the conclusion is concerned, I really liked the Letho part, since it filled many open plot holes. Nevertheless, this game has a story that is so complicated and often amateurishly told, that it comes close to your standard confusing and open-to-interpretation JRPG epic, but with more names... enough randomly thrown in names and even nicknames to mix them up continuously throughout the whole game. Never before in a western RPG did I have to read so many journal text entries about persons, locations and quests just to get a hold of what's going on. And many things remain unclear even after finally questioning Letho and reading everything the journal has to offer. Granted, it is charming not to be told everything at the end of a game, because that makes a potential sequel less predictable. On the other hand I am not sure if the plot holes are the result of a solid script or plain narrative errors. Often it seems like the latter.
Needless to say that a sequel should by all means not include any kind of dragon fights, because... yeah, they suck. And you know what else sucks? Geralt leaving his posse and climbing the mountain alone at the end... less drama would have been totally sufficient.
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This one has been bugging me for some years now. Starting with GTA IV, seen in Saints Row II and now again in Witcher II. Some games that have the official NVIDIA tralier in them will most likely be almost unplayable from a technical point of view on many ATI systems. And those games mentioned are only the ones I know from my personal experience.
I am starting to wonder if the developers intentionally make those games less compatible with ATI cards, because they get money from NVIDIA? Or is it just a coincidence that there are no known cases of a top-selling title that works better with ATI cards and has major screw-ups with NVIDIA?
I don't know what you think about it, but the way I see it, ATI cards become more and more unbuyable. If more games devote themselves to NVIDIA and ATI does not manage to prevent compatibility issues with upcoming top titles, there will be no other choice than buying NVIDIA cards exclusively.
And now I am back to not playing the Witcher II, because it is so damn unplayably slow that I like to punch my ATI card in the face... or the marketing guy from NVIDIA... or the guys that made the Witcher II.
So after my frustration with Dragon Age II, I wanted to write a huge blog about it. I wanted to describe in detail what about the main story and the rather important side quests annoys me the most . But then I thought, that this would be a very negative blog with no additional value to the community. Fanboys would simply deny the facts (as they do up till now) and fellow skeptics would only read what they already knew anyways.
Therefore I reinstalled my personal "RPG of the decade" and decided to play it for the fourth time. And... well... I made it to the character creation screen before I quit to write this blog entry, because...
...Dragon Age: Origins still blows my mind! The intro gave me the shivers and the atmosphere and "love" put into those small opening cinematics is amazing. I want to delve into that world again. I want to relive the story although I still exactly know what is going to happen and I cannot wait to go back to the one and only real combat system.
Well, it is time to go back to the game, but I really wanted to let you guys know that Dragon Age: Origins is still out there. If you finished it at release, there have been quite a few DLCs and a big expansion pack you might have not played yet. So if a certain recently released sequel was breaking your balls, you know what you could do...
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