Dragon Age: Inquisition

I realized, when reviewing Witcher 3, that I had not reviewed DA:I and how unfair that was. As my first Dragon Age game and my first Bioware RPG, this game holds a rather important place to me. It showed me top-of-the-line character building that overwhelms any mistakes in world design or battle mechanics.

The world is fascinating politically and socially, with clear questions of religious vs. political power, honesty vs. deception, tradition vs. revolution, poverty, race, sexuality, gender--all of it. But the physical design of locations, while often gorgeous, feels like a weird hub system of tiny paths leading to open areas and exploration feels bogged down by impenetrable walls and circuitous routes. It feels like it's trying to capture a more natural world than the bumpy but mostly flat plane of Skyrim, but navigating it is not intuitive or even fun a lot of the time. Sidequests are often rote and uninteresting, without strong writing or scenarios.

Dragon Age's combat is fine. I like how I could play as any character in my party, making choosing a mage main character less constricting as I realized that Sera's roguish ways were more to my gameplay liking. It's not a revolution in RPG design, but I also like how this choice fits into the overall focus on character empathy in the game. My party became stronger when I invested literal time and words into growing relationships with party members. The fact that I can always swap in and play as different party members reflects this focus on character.

I also like the feeling of sending four major debilitating spells against a single enemy and watching them disintegrate under the pressure. It's easy to become overleveled and one can navigate many fights without much strategy on normal difficulty, but there's a visual grandeur and impactful feel to the hits coming down, especially from a stealthy dagger-wielding Sera. Yeah, she's supposed to be an archer, but for some reason I saw her as needing knives. Kinda cool that character weapons can be chosen.

There is strategy and challenge in the combat. Positioning and setting a healing character vs. a ranged vs. a melee character matter. Learning and being able to execute on combos and weaknesses matter. It's not entirely rote. The variety lessens as uber spells are learned and every four turns unleashes hell upon the poor monsters, but I found it engaging enough.

Those are the okay, often good, bits. The phenomenal part is the character-based storytelling. While the overarching plot of evil demon portals and prophesies is interesting (especially the question of whether you label yourself the messiah for people to believe in), it is the people, elves, dwarves, and crazy bull creatures I forgot the name of that matter here. The wars civil and domestic are backdrops in which to tell stories of street urchins looking for meaning, mercenaries trying to do what is right, political power houses angling for domination, gay estranged sons looking for affirmation, spiritual scholars searching for truth, and bawdy adventure writing dwarves who just want to help (and more). I like how learning, say, Vivienne's backstory is merely a matter of asking her, as she is proud to share her past power as a mage and current desire for more. However, learning who Sera is and what she believes takes many conversations and showing respect toward her rebellious yet cautious world view. There is a real diversity of openness and focus in characters that is reflected in conversation choices.

Indeed, while the game actively includes characters of different human skin colors, sexualities, and gender identification, no character is defined by any one trait. Dorian is not merely a gay man of color, but also a sardonic aristocrat who deeply wants acceptance under his veneer of suaveness. At the same time, him being gay matters and comes into the story, because it is part of his identity and should not merely exist in itself. The game seems to imply that racism between humans is uncommon while prejudice against non-humans like elves and dwarves is not, giving most prejudice focus to the serf-like elven race. Sera is a great, complicated take on this; she is highly suspect of elves who think they are superior to all other races, but she has also encountered lots of human prejudice. Meanwhile, Solas believes in Elven supremacy and is rather dismissive of the physical world in general.

The point is, Dragon Age: Inquisition is constantly reminding the player that there are no easy buckets to put people into. Diving into a character's story is uncovering depth upon depth, not archetypes. The writing employs humor and surprise as much as it does tragedy and gravitas, making for a balanced narrative experience.

Running around the world picking up mildly interesting baubles and finding cows is annoying, but the fact that the four people rolling with me (well, one person, my dark-skinned elven mage, Sera, and Iron Bull, a bull man) have had unique, diverse impacts upon my inquistors life and she upon theirs means that the grind doesn't hurt so much. A greater game is possible, but this game is special and powerful.