i reserved my excitement when i went to my friend's to play dragon age last night, although driving 15 minutes at 2am was probably pretty telling. i rubbed my hands together & got ready to have the world of fantasy impress me - imagine that, i'm still not jaded even after all these years!  but 3 fights & 3 HOURS later... DA had pretty much beat my hopes into the ground. 
 
sadly i found dragon age UTTERLY slow to the point of unplayable.  final fantasy tactics original is about as slow as i can plod through a game without going insane & quitting.  maybe it's my "generation" & the need for immediate satisfaction from any activity... maybe fast-paced games have brainwashed me... but watching & participating in this game was a painful crawl over razor-sharp seconds & soul-sucking minutes.   
 
if i could stay interested, there's a possibility that even i could play a slow game such as this, but unfortunately DA flounced on that delivery as well.  granted i missed the intro, so i don't have any emotional attachment to the [creepily rendered] character my friend made, but the filler between the nicely cg-ed cinemas tasted like a bunch of rehashed, stale fantasy.  i found myself exclaiming "oh, so now we have to go to ANOTHER castle?.... what a surprise!"  elves, dwarves, vaguely-described minions of darkness ["there's always an archdemon!"- me], it's all here... the same old shit that's in every fantasy story book, film or rpg.  & pretty much everything is BROWN [go figure].  but hey, if you can't get enough of redundancy, then DA is your game.  
 
i didn't play any of the combat personally, i mostly engaged conversation with other characters... sigh.  it's standardized [for this day/age] to have multiple dialog trees available to your character, but there was just something flat-out boring about pretty much every choice DA offered.  i guess i'm just used to extremes, where you have a hilariously puss option or satisfyingly dick option, & of course the casually sarcastic neutral answer.  i felt like DA was running around in CIRCLES with their half-assed responses [even though there is tons of voice acting.. quality not quantity, people!].  i really wish more games would start including the "slap the bitch" option [thank you mass effect!].  i find it off-putting that dialog would be structured to force the player to divine what the game makers want them to do... i just don't see the point of having options if there is only one right answer, or have dialog trees become multiple choice tests to see if i was paying attention?  

i only gave the game 3 hours trial, but those are three hours of my life i can never get back.... if you enjoy dying slowly, dragon age was made for you!  but me, well... DA helped me realize that FANTASY IS A DEAD GENRE.     
 
~gb♥g